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The Dental Pulp of permanent human teeth is home to stem cells with remarkable multilineage differentiation ability: human Dental Pulp Stem Cells (DPSCs). These cells display a very notorious expression of pluripotency core factors, and the ability to give rise to mature cell lineages belonging to the three embryonic layers. For these reasons, several researchers in the field have long considered human DPSCs as pluripotent-like cells. Notably, some signaling pathways such as Notch and Wnt contribute to maintaining the stemness of these cells through a complex network involving metabolic and epigenetic regulatory mechanisms. The use of recombinant proteins and selective pharmacological modulators of Notch and Wnt pathways, together with serum-free media and appropriate scaffolds that allow the maintenance of the non-differentiated state of hDPSC cultures could be an interesting approach to optimize the potency of these stem cells, without a need for genetic modification. In this review, we describe and integrate findings that shed light on the mechanisms responsible for stemness maintenance of hDPSCs, and how these are regulated by Notch/Wnt activation, drawing some interesting parallelisms with pluripotent stem cells. We summarize previous work on the stem cell field that includes interactions between epigenetics, metabolic regulations, and pluripotency core factor expression in hDPSCs and other stem cell types.

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Protein convertases (PCs) play a significant role in post-translational procedures by transforming inactive precursor proteins into their active forms. The role of PCs is crucial for cellular homeostasis because they are involved in cell signaling. They have also been described in many diseases such as Alzheimer's and cancer. Cancer cells are secretory cells that send signals to the tumor microenvironment (TME), remodeling the surrounding space for their own benefits. One of the most important components of the TME is the immune system of the tumor. In this review, we describe recent discoveries that link PCs to the immune escape of tumors. Among PCs, many findings have determined the role of Furin (PC3) as a paramount enzyme causing the TME to induce tumor immune evasion. The overexpression of various cytokines and proteins, for instance, IL10 and TGF-B, moves the TME towards the presence of Tregs and, consequently, immune tolerance. Furthermore, Furin is implicated in the regulation of macrophage activity that contributes to the increased impairment of DCs (dendritic cells) and T effector cells. Moreover, Furin interferes in the MHC Class_1 proteolytic cleavage in the trans-Golgi network. In tumors, the T cytotoxic lymphocytes (CTLs) response is impeded by the PD1 receptor (PD1-R) located on CTLs and its ligand, PDL1, located on cancer cells. The inhibition of Furin is a subtle means of enhancing the antitumor response by repressing PD-1 expression in tumors or macrophage cells. The impacts of other PCs in tumor immune escape have not yet been clarified to the extent that Furin has. Accordingly, the influence of other types of PCs in tumor immune escape is a promising topic for further consideration.

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Proprotein convertases or PCs are known to regulate the malignant phenotype of colon cancer cells by different mechanisms, but their effects on cancer stem cells (CSCs) have been less widely investigated. Here, we report that PCs expression is altered in colon CSCs, and the inhibition of their activity reduced colon CSCs growth, survival, and invasion in three-dimensional spheroid cultures. In vivo, repression of PCs activity by the general PC inhibitors α1-PDX, Spn4A, or decanoyl-RVKR-chloromethylketone (CMK) significantly reduced tumor expression levels of the stem cell markers LGR5 and NANOG that are associated with reduced tumor xenografts. Further analysis revealed that reduced tumor growth mediated by specific silencing of the convertase Furin in KRAS or BRAF mutated-induced colon tumors was associated with reduced expression of LGR5 and NANOG compared to wild-type KRAS and BRAF tumors. Analysis of various calcium regulator molecules revealed that while the calcium-transporting ATPase 4 (ATP2B4) is downregulated in all the Furin-silenced colon cancer cells, the Ca2+-mobilizing P2Y receptors, was specifically repressed in BRAF mutated cells and ORAI1 and CACNA1H in KRAS mutated cells. Taken together, our findings indicate that PCs play an important role in the malignant phenotype of colon CSCs and stem cell markers' expression and highlight PCs repression, particularly of Furin, to target colon tumors with KRAS or BRAF mutation.

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Cancer is a phenomenon broadly related to ageing in various ways such as cell cycle deregulation, metabolic defects or telomerases dysfunction as principal processes. Although the tumor cell is the main actor in cancer progression, it is not the only element of the disease. Cells and the matrix surrounding the tumor, called the tumor microenvironment (TME), play key roles in cancer progression. Phenotypic changes of the TME are indispensable for disease progression and a few of these transformations are produced by epigenetic changes including miRNA dysregulation. In this study, we found that a specific group of miRNAs in the liver TME produced by colon cancer called geromiRs, which are miRNAs related to the ageing process, are significantly downregulated. The three principal cell types involved in the liver TME, namely, liver sinusoidal endothelial cells, hepatic stellate (Ito) cells and Kupffer cells, were isolated from a murine hepatic metastasis model, and the miRNA and gene expression profiles were studied. From the 115 geromiRs and their associated hallmarks of aging, which we compiled from the literature, 75 were represented in the used microarrays, 26 out of them were downregulated in the TME cells during colon cancer colonization of the liver, and none of them were upregulated. The histone modification hallmark of the downregulated geromiRs is significantly enriched with the geromiRs miR-15a, miR-16, miR-26a, miR-29a, miR-29b and miR-29c. We built a network of all of the geromiRs downregulated in the TME cells and their gene targets from the MirTarBase database, and we analyzed the expression of these geromiR gene targets in the TME. We found that Cercam and Spsb4, identified as prognostic markers in a few cancer types, are associated with downregulated geromiRs and are upregulated in the TME cells.

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Despite continuous exertion made, colon cancer still represents a major health problem and its incidence continues being high worldwide. There is growing evidence in support of the cancer stem cells (CSCs) being central in the initiation of this cancer, and CSCs have been the focus of various studies for the identification of new ways of treatment. Lately, the proprotein convertases (PCs) were reported to regulate the maturation and expression of various molecules involved in the malignant phenotype of colon cancer cells, however, the identity of the molecules regulated by these serine proteases in CSCs is unknown. In this study, we used the general PCs inhibitor, the Decanoyl-RVKR-chloromethylketone (Decanoyl-RVKR-CMK) that inhibits all the PCs found in the secretory pathway, and analyzed its effect on CSCs using RNA-seq analysis. Remarkably, from the only 9 up-regulated genes in the human SW620-derived sphere-forming cells, we identified 7 of the 11 human metallothioneins, all of them localized on chromosome 16, and zinc related proteins as downstream effectors of the PCs. The importance of these molecules in the regulation of cell proliferation, differentiation and chemoresistance, and their reported potential tumor suppressor role and loss in colon cancer patients associated with worse prognosis, suggests that targeting PCs in the control of the malignant phenotype of CSCs is a new potential therapeutic strategy in colon cancer.

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(1) Background & Aims: The roles of different cells in the tumor microenvironment (TME) are critical to the metastatic process. The phenotypic transformation of the liver cells is one of the most important stages of the hepatic metastasis progression of colorectal cancer (CRC). Our aim was to identify the major molecules (i.e., genes, miRNAs and proteins) involved in this process. (2) Methods: We isolated and performed whole-genome analysis of gene, miRNA, and protein expression in three types of liver cells (Ito cells, Kupffer cells, and liver sinusoidal endothelial cells) from the TME of a murine model of CRC liver metastasis. We selected the statistically significant differentially expressed molecules using the Student's t-test with Benjamini-Hochberg correction and performed functional statistically-significant enrichment analysis of differentially expressed molecules with hypergeometric distribution using the curated collection of molecular signatures, MSigDB. To build a gene-miRNA-protein network centered in Brca1, we developed a software package (miRDiana) that collects miRNA targets from the union of the TargetScan, MicroCosm, mirTarBase, and miRWalk databases. This was used to search for miRNAs targeting Brca1. We validated the most relevant miRNAs with real-time quantitative PCR. To investigate BRCA1 protein expression, we built tissue microarrays (TMAs) from hepatic metastases of 34 CRC patients. (3) Results: Using integrated omics analyses, we observed that the Brca1 gene is among the twenty transcripts simultaneously up-regulated in all three types of TME liver cells during metastasis. Further analysis revealed that Brca1 is the last BRCA1-associated genome surveillance complex (BASC) gene activated in the TME. We confirmed this finding in human reanalyzing transcriptomics datasets from 184 patients from non-tumor colorectal tissue, primary colorectal tumor and colorectal liver metastasis of the GEO database. We found that the most probable sequence of cell activation during metastasis is Endothelial→Ito→Kupffer. Immunohistochemical analysis of human liver metastases showed the BRCA1 protein was co-localized in Ito, Kupffer, and endothelial cells in 81.8% of early or synchronous metastases. However, in the greater part of the metachronous liver metastases, this protein was not expressed in any of these TME cells. (4) Conclusions: These results suggest a possible role of the co-expression of BRCA1 in Ito, Kupffer, and sinusoidal endothelial cells in the early occurrence of CRC liver metastases, and point to BRCA1 as a potential TME biomarker.