Purpose: Diagnosis of malignant mesothelioma is challenging. The first available diagnostic material is often an effusion and biochemical analysis of soluble markers may provide additional diagnostic information. This study aimed to establish a predictive model using biomarkers from pleural effusions, to allow early and accurate diagnosis. Patients and Methods: Effusions were collected prospectively from 190 consecutive patients at a regional referral centre. Hyaluronan, N-ERC/mesothelin, C-ERC/mesothelin, osteopontin, syndecan-1, syndecan-2, and thioredoxin were measured using ELISA and...

Recent findings have highlighted the role of the Old World alphavirus non-structural protein 3 (nsP3) as a host defence modulator that functions by disrupting stress granules, subcellular phase-dense RNA/protein structures formed upon environmental stress. This disruption mechanism was largely explained through nsP3-mediated recruitment of the host G3BP protein via two tandem FGDF motifs. Here, we present the 1.9 Å resolution crystal structure of the NTF2-like domain of G3BP-1 in complex with a 25-residue peptide derived...

Recent evidence suggests that interference competition between bacteria shapes the distribution of the opportunistic pathogen Staphylococcus aureus in the lower nasal airway of humans, either by preventing colonization or by driving displacement. This competition within the nasal microbial community would add to known host factors that affect colonization. We tested the role of toxin-mediated interference competition in both structured and unstructured environments, by culturing S. aureus with toxin-producing or nonproducing Staphylococcus epidermidis nasal isolates. Toxin-producing...

Osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) is a heterogeneous group of disorders of connective tissue, caused mainly by mutations in the collagen I genes (COL1A1 and COL1A2). Dentinogenesis imperfecta (DGI) and other dental aberrations are common features of OI. We investigated the association between collagen I mutations and DGI, taurodontism, and retention of permanent second molars in a retrospective cohort of 152 unrelated children and adolescents with OI. The clinical examination included radiographic evaluations. Teeth from 81 individuals...

Previous work demonstrates that working-memory (WM) updating training results in improved performance on a letter-memory criterion task, transfers to an untrained n-back task, and increases striatal dopamine (DA) activity during the criterion task. Here, we sought to replicate and extend these findings by also examining neurochemical correlates of transfer. Four positron emission tomography (PET) scans using the radioligand raclopride were performed. Two of these assessed DAD2 binding (letter memory; n-back) before 5 weeks of updating...

Several studies have shown associations between shorter telomere length in blood and weakened immune function, susceptibility to infections, and increased risk of morbidity and mortality. Recently, we have shown that malaria accelerates telomere attrition in blood cells and shortens lifespan in birds. However, the impact of infections on telomere attrition in different body tissues within an individual is unknown. Here, we tested whether malarial infection leads to parallel telomere shortening in blood and tissue samples...

Background: Sleep disturbances are common after traumatic events and have been hypothesized to be a risk factor in the development of psychopathology such as that associated with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Objective: To assess the association between intrusive memories, a core clinical feature of PTSD, and self-reported sleep disturbance shortly after experiencing or witnessing a motor vehicle accident, and whether a brief behavioural intervention (trauma reminder cue and Tetris gameplay) reduced sleep disturbance post-trauma. Method:...

Context: Little is known about how lifestyle changes can affect well-being in overweight women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). Objective: To study the effects of lifestyle intervention on psychological well-being, and the impact of well-being and personality traits on successful weight loss. Design: A four-month Randomized Controlled Trial with a 12-months follow-up. Setting: University Hospital. Patients: Sixty-eight women with PCOS, aged 18 to 40 years and BMI ≥ 27 kg/m2. Interventions: Participants were randomized (1:1)...

Spermatogenesis is an important physiological process associated with male infertility. As a kind of post-transcriptional regulation, RNA editings (REs) change the genetic information at the mRNA level. But whether there are REs and what’s the role of REs during the process are still unclear. In this study, we integrated published RNA-Seq datasets and established a landscape of RNA REs during the development of mouse spermatogenesis. Totally, 7530 editing sites occurred in 2012 genes among all...

In December 2019, Wuhan, China suffered a serious outbreak of a novel coronavirus infectious disease (COVID) caused by novel severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus (SARS-CoV 2). To quickly identify the pathogen, we designed and screened primer sets, and established a sensitive and specific qRT-PCR assay for SARS-CoV 2; the lower limit of detection (LOD) was 14.8 (95% CI: 9.8–21) copies per reaction. We combined this qRT-PCR assay with an automatic integration system for nucleic acid...

How severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections engage cellular host pathways and innate immunity in infected cells remains largely elusive. We performed an integrative proteo-transcriptomics analysis in SARS-CoV-2 infected Huh7 cells to map the cellular response to the invading virus over time. We identified four pathways, ErbB, HIF-1, mTOR and TNF signaling, among others that were markedly modulated during the course of the SARS-CoV-2 infection in vitro. Western blot validation of the downstream effector...

UXT (ubiquitously expressed prefoldin like chaperone), a small chaperone-like protein, is widely expressed in diverse human and mouse tissues and is more abundant in retina and kidney. However, the functional characterization of UXT at tissue level was largely unknown. Here, we reported that mice deficient in UXT exhibited salient features of retinal degenerative disease, similar to retinitis pigmentosa. Conditional knockout (CKO) of Uxt led to retinal degeneration and pigmentation in mice retina along with significant...

Objective: To determine whether children born to women who use anti-seizure medications (ASMs) during pregnancy have higher risk of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) independent of confounding factors. Methods: We used Swedish-register data (n=14,614 children born 1996-2011 and followed through 2013) to examine associations in children of women with epilepsy, using the largest sample to date and adjusting for a range of measured confounders. We examined maternal-reported first-trimester use of any ASM...

If and how obesity and elevated androgens in women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) affect their offspring’s psychiatric health is unclear. Using data from Swedish population health registers, we showed that daughters of mothers with PCOS have a 78% increased risk of being diagnosed with anxiety disorders. We next generated a PCOS-like mouse (F0) model induced by androgen exposure during late gestation, with or without diet-induced maternal obesity, and showed that the first generation (F1)...

Transient transfection of fluorescent fusion proteins is a key enabling technology in fluorescent microscopy to spatio-temporally map cellular protein distributions. Transient transfection of proteins may however bypass normal regulation of expression, leading to overexpression artefacts like misallocations and excess amounts. In this study we investigate the use of STORM and PALM microscopy to quantitatively monitor endogenous and exogenous protein expression. Through incorporation of an N-terminal hemagglutinin epitope to a mMaple3 fused Na,K-ATPase (α1 isoform), we...

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a common endocrine and metabolic disorder of unclear etiology in women and is characterized by androgen excess, insulin resistance, and mood disorders. The gut microbiome is known to influence conditions closely related with PCOS, and several recent studies have observed changes in the stool microbiome of women with PCOS. The mechanism by which the gut microbiome interacts with PCOS is still unknown. We used a mouse model to investigate if...

The dataset includes two tabular sets of concentration measurements of selected proteins in plasma samples from patients with soft tissue infections or sepsis. Patients with soft tissue infections are classified into three groups: Patients with necrotizing soft tissue infections (NSTI), suspected NSTI cases but where no necrotic tissue was found during surgical exploration (Non-NSTI) and cellulitis. The sepsis patient cohort has heterogeneous etiologies and location of infection. Additionally, we included a group of patients that...

As one of the most common forms of RNA modification, N6-methyladenosine (m6A) RNA modification has attracted increasing research interest in recent years. This reversible RNA modification added a new dimension to the post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. In colorectal cancer (CRC), the role of m6A modification has been extensively studied, not only on mRNAs but also on non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs). In the present review, we depicted the role of m6A modification in CRC, systematically elaborate...

Porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV) is emerging as a major threat to the global swine industry. Clinical PEDV infection is associated with severe intestinal lesions, resulting in absorptive dysfunction and high mortality rates in suckling piglets. The extracellular matrix (ECM) is an important component of intestinal tissue, providing a structural framework and conveying tissue-specific signals to nearby enterocytes. In this study, we investigated the extensive ECM remodeling observed in intestinal epithelial cells infected with PEDV...

Colorectal cancer (CRC) has negative long-term impacts on survivors’ health and work capacity. We aimed to investigate specialized healthcare use and sickness absence and disability pension among CRC survivors and matched references. In this longitudinal register-based cohort study, 6679 patients with a first primary CRC in 2008–2011 (when aged 18–62) and 26,716 CRC-free matched references were followed from 2 years before up to 5 years after diagnosis date. Mean numbers of hospital days and outpatient...

Abstract Background and aims Automated recording of laboratory animal’s home cage behavior is receiving increasing attention since such non-intruding surveillance will aid in the unbiased understanding of the normal animal cage behavior potentially improving animal experimental reproducibility. Material and methods Here we investigate activity of group held (5 mice/cage) female C57BL/6J mice (mus musculus) housed in standard Individually Ventilated Cages (IVC cages) across three test-sites: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Rome, Italy), The Jackson Laboratory (Bar...

Small non-coding RNAs (sRNAs) play important roles during the oocyte-to-embryo transition (OET), when the maternal phenotype is reprogrammed, and the embryo genome is gradually activated. The transcriptional program driving early human development has been studied with the focus mainly on protein-coding RNAs, and expression dynamics of sRNAs remains largely unexplored. We profiled sRNAs in human oocytes and early embryos using an RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) method suitable for low inputs of material. We show that OET in...

We describe a dataset obtained by applying our recently developed iFISH pipeline to simultaneously visualize 16 small (size range: 62–73 kilobases, kb) evenly spaced DNA loci on chromosome 2 in human cells, in a single round of hybridization. We show how, using combinatorial color coding, multiple loci can be precisely 3D localized in single cells, and how inter-loci distances scale inversely with chromosome contact frequencies determined by Hi-C, as expected. We provide raw images and...

Pumpkin is one of the region’s main cashcrops in northeast China cultivated for its edible seed and sarcocarp. Gummy stem blight (GSB), caused by the main pathogenic fungus of Stagonosporopsis cucurbitacearum (Sc.) which was identified in our previous study, has hampered pumpkin industry development with the affection of its reduced biological yield and edible quality. To clear the plant immune response mechanisms against Sc. infection, RNA-seq technology was employed to sequence pumpkin leaf transcriptome, the...