Katia Peñuelas-Urquides

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Researcher at Mexican Institute of Social Security

Drug-resistant tuberculosis is a pressing global health issue that requires the development of new drugs or the identification of new therapeutic targets. The ESX-3 secretion system is essential for the Mycobacterium tuberculosis growth and plays a role in iron/zinc homeostasis and virulence. The aim of this study was to evaluate the quaternary int...

Background/Objectives: Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is a predisposing factor for severe COVID-19. The effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines in patients with MetS has been poorly investigated. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination before (BO) and after the Omicron (AO) SARS-CoV-2 variant in patients with MetS. Met...

Aging is commonly accompanied by increased cardiovascular risk and diet plays a crucial role in health condition. The aim of this study was to determine cardiovascular risk factors as predictors of nutritional risk in Mexican older adults. A cross-sectional study on Mexican patients aged ≥60 years with cardiovascular risk factors affiliated with a...

Introduction The end of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has been declared by the World Health Organization on May 5, 2023. Several vaccines were developed, and new data is being published about their effectiveness. However, the clinical trials for the vaccines were performed before the Omicron variant appeared and there are populat...

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is among the main causes of death by cancer worldwide, representing about 80–90% of all liver cancers. Treatments available for advanced HCC include atezolizumab, bevacizumab, sorafenib, among others. Atezolizumab and bevacizumab are immunological options recently incorporated into first-line treatments, along with so...

La tuberculosis (TB) es una enfermedad infecciosa originada principalmente por una bacteria denominada Mycobacterium tuberculosis, aunque existen otras especies del mismo género que también pueden ocasionarla (Brosch et al., 2002) (figura 1). A lo largo de la historia ha generado incontables muertes en todo el mundo, incluso se ha encontrado eviden...

People with comorbidities and the male sex are at a higher risk of developing severe COVID-19. In the present study, we aim to investigate the associated factors for infection, severity, and death due to COVID-19 in a population from Nuevo León, México. Epidemiological COVID-19 data were collected from 65 hospitals from December 2020 to May 2022. A...

Background The generation of induced pluripotent stem cells has opened the field of study for stem cell research, disease modeling and drug development. However, the epigenetic signatures present in somatic cells make cell reprogramming still an inefficient process. This epigenetic memory constitutes an obstacle in cellular reprogramming. Here, we...

Variants of 8q24 locus have been associated with prostate cancer (PCa) susceptibility. This study aims to analyze the genetic basis of PCa susceptibility in Mexican men by analyzing SNPs in the 8q24 locus for the first time. A case-control study was performed in 875 men recruited from the Mexican Social Security Institute, 326 patients with PCa, an...

The emergence of multidrug-resistant (MDR) Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains threaten the control of tuberculosis. New antitubercular dihydrosphingosine analogs, named UCIs, have been evaluated in preclinical studies but their cellular and molecular mechanisms of action against M. tuberculosis are still unknown. The aim of this study was to evalua...

Background and aims To assess the relevance of the slow acetylator phenotype based on NAT2 genotypes, among patients with pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) that developed hepatotoxicity after first-line tuberculosis treatment in a Northeastern Mexican population. Methods Ninety one PTB patients were included, 7 of them developed hepatotoxicity. NAT2 SN...

Background: Mortality due to tuberculosis (TB) has increased due to the development of drug resistance, the mechanisms of which have not been fully elucidated. Our research group identified a low expression of lipF gene in Mycobacterium tuberculosis clinical isolates with drug resistance. The aim of this work was to evaluate the effect of lipase F...

Tuberculosis drug resistance (DR) is a global problem that is not fully elucidated. Previously, overexpression of esxG and esxH genes was reported in a multidrug-resistant (MDR) Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolate compared with a reference H37Rv strain. To evaluate the roles of esxG and esxH in DR, analysis of their regulatory and coding sequences i...

Background and aims The impact of host genetic variation in susceptibility of tuberculosis is well documented. The vitamin D receptor gene (VDR) is a transacting transcription factor which mediates innate immune response by enhancing the expression of several antimicrobial peptides, including cathelicidin. An association between VDR polymorphisms w...

Since genomic data are widely available, many strategies have been implemented to reveal the function of specific nucleotides or amino acids in promoter regions or proteins, respectively. One of the methods most commonly used to determine the impact of mutations is the site‐directed mutagenesis using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). There are d...

Dystrophin Dp71, the smallest product encoded by the Duchenne muscular dystrophy gene, is ubiquitously expressed in all nonmuscle cells. Although Dp71 is involved in various cellular processes, the mechanisms underlying its expression have been little studied. In hepatic cells, Dp71 expression is downregulated by the xenobiotic β-naphthoflavone. Ho...

Understanding drug resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis requires an integrated analysis of strain lineages, mutations, and gene expression. Previously, we reported the differential expression of esxG, esxH, infA, groES, rpmI, rpsA, and lipF genes in a sensitive M. tuberculosis strain and in a multidrug-resistant clinical isolate. Here, we have...

The characteristics of tuberculosis (TB) patients related to a chain of recent TB transmissions were investigated. Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) isolates (120) were genotyped using the restriction fragment length polymorphism-IS6110 (R), spacer oligotyping (S) and mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units-variable number of tandem repeats (M)...

The 2009 influenza A(H1N1) outbreak allowed the implementation of new epidemiologic surveillance tools in several countries around the world. A new molecular protocol with appropriate sensitivity and specificity using real-time RT-PCR was developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to identify the pandemic 2009 influenza A (H1...

The quantification of colony forming units (cfu), turbidity, and optical density at 600 nm (OD600) measurements were used to evaluate Mycobacterium tuberculosis growth. Turbidity and OD600 measurements displayed similar growth curves, while cfu quantification showed a continuous growth curve. We determined the cfu equivalents to McFarland and OD600...

Mycobacterium tuberculosis has developed resistance to anti-tuberculosis first-line drugs. Multidrug-resistant strains complicate the control of tuberculosis and have converted it into a worldwide public health problem. Mutational studies of target genes have tried to envisage the resistance in clinical isolates; however, detection of these mutatio...

En México, la tuberculosis (TB) es motivo de regionalización del país de acuerdo a la prevalencia, por tal motivo, la comercialización y/o exportación de bovinos, así como su movilización, es restringida. El diagnóstico oficial de la TB en bovinos en campo se realiza con la prueba de tuberculina, y posmorten con histopatología y/o por aislamiento d...

In Mexico, the bovine tuberculosis (TB) is associated with both regionalization of the country, considering the levels of prevalence of the disease and restrictions in commercialization and/or exportation of cattle. In Mexico, the diagnosis of the bovine tuberculosis is conducted by using the tuberculin test in live animals, bacteriologic isolation...

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