Immunocompetence and resource holding potential in the damselfly, Calopteryx virgo L

It is generally believed that resource holding potential reliablyreflects male quality, but empirical evidence showing this isscarce. Here we show that the outcome of male-male competitionmay predict male immunocompetence in the territorial damselfly,Calopteryx virgo (Odonata: Calopterygidae). We staged contestsbetween 27 pairs of males and found that winners of the contestsshowed higher immunocompetence, measured as encapsulation response,compared with that of losers. Furthermore, the winners had largerfat reserves. We also collected 29 males that had not been usedin staged contests, and found that in these males encapsulationresponse correlated positively with an individual's fat reserves.Both immunocompetence and resource holding potential seem todepend on energy reserves, suggesting a trade-off between parasiteresistance and energetically costly territorial behavior. Theresults suggest that the outcome of male-male contest can beused to predict male quality in terms of immune defense.     

Carnivore-livestock conflicts: determinants of wolf (Canis lupus) depredation on sheep farms in Finland

Wolves (Canis lupus) have recently expanded their distribution range into western and southern Finland, which has not hosted breeding wolves for over 100 years. This has raised concerns and public debate over wolf-livestock conflicts. Between 1998 and 2004 there were 45 wolf attacks on sheep on 34 farms. To assess the risk wolves may pose to sheep husbandry, we used data on depredation, sheep management, landscape structure and moose and wolf populations from continental Finland outside the area of reindeer husbandry to build models of the factors that may predispose sheep farms to wolf depredation. Our results provided evidence that sheep farms with the highest risk of wolf depredation were those located in regions where wolves were abundant. These farms were usually located close to the Russian border where the landscape is a mosaic of forest, wetlands and clear cut areas. These regions are sparsely populated by humans and farms are located far from each other. Finally, we generated probability maps based on generalised additive modelling to predict the risk of wolf predation on livestock in farms of southern Finland.     

Pathways affected by asbestos exposure in normal and tumour tissue of lung cancer patients

Background:

The early detection of prostate cancer has resulted in an increase in the number of patients with localized prostate cancer and has paralleled the reported reduction in prostate cancer mortality. The increased rate of detection of patients with localized prostate cancer may also increase the risk of potentially morbid therapy in a patient with indolent cancer. Defining the biomarker correlates of prostate cancer virulence will facilitate the appropriate application and development of therapy for patients with early disease.

Methods:

A 255 core prostate cancer tissue microarray (TMA) from 47 prostatectomy specimens with organ confined tumor was constructed. Prostate cancer foci of transition and peripheral zone origin were represented on the TMA. Further, replicate cores of the two Gleason grades comprising the Gleason score, representative of Gleason scores 5-9, were arrayed from each prostatectomy specimen. Standard immunohistochemical techniques were used to assess expression of nine, cell death and cell cycle regulatory proteins implicated in the pathogenesis of prostate cancer (bax, bcl-2, bcl-x_L, bin1, CD95, mdm2, p21, p53, and NFkB).

Results:

The Spearman correlation coefficient revealed a strong correlation of bax, bin1, FAS, p65 and p21 expression with Gleason grade. Spearman correlation coefficients showed that expression of, bax and bin1, bax and MDM2, Bax and p21, and bax and p65 NFkB was highly associated. Other significant associations were identified between bin1 and p21, bin1 and MDM2, bin1 and p65 NFkB and between p21 and p65 NFκB. A model for predicting the biological potential of Gleason score 7 prostate cancer using multivariable logistic regression methods was developed. The findings also indicate that the profile of specific markers for Gleason grade 3 prostate cancer correlates with the overall context of the Gleason score.

Conclusion:

These data support the view that important molecular differences exist among and between the Gleason scores. Furthermore, there is significant molecular heterogeneity among prostatectomy specimens containing Gleason grade 3 cancer. This observation may have broader implications regarding the determination of risk among patients with prostate cancer that is currently considered to be of either good prognosis or unclear prognosis, i.e. Gleason score 7 tumors.     

The driving force behind genomic diversity

Eukaryote genomes contain excessively introns, intergenic and other non-genic sequences that appear to have no vital functional role or phenotype manifestation. Their existence, a long-standing puzzle, is viewed from the principle of increasing entropy. According to thermodynamics of open systems, genomes evolve toward diversity by various mechanisms that increase, decrease and distribute genomic material in response to thermodynamic driving forces. Evolution results in an excessive genome, a high-entropy ecosystem of its own, where copious non-coding segments associate with low-level functions and conserved sequences code coordinated activities. The rate of entropy increase, equivalent to the rate of free energy decrease, is identified with the universal fitness criterion of natural selection that governs populations of genomic entities as well as other species.     

A CHEK2 genetic variant contributing to a substantial fraction of familial breast cancer

CHEK2 (previously known as "CHK2") is a cell-cycle-checkpoint kinase that phosphorylates p53 and BRCA1 in response to DNA damage. A protein-truncating mutation, 1100delC in exon 10, which abolishes the kinase function of CHEK2, has been found in families with Li-Fraumeni syndrome (LFS) and in those with a cancer phenotype that is suggestive of LFS, including breast cancer. In the present study, we found that the frequency of 1100delC was 2.0% among an unselected population-based cohort of 1,035 patients with breast cancer. This was slightly, but not significantly (P=.182), higher than the 1.4% frequency found among 1,885 population control subjects. However, a significantly elevated frequency was found among those 358 patients with a positive family history (11/358 [3.1%]; odds ratio [OR] 2.27; 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.11-4.63; P=.021, compared with population controls). Furthermore, patients with bilateral breast cancer were sixfold more likely to be 1100delC carriers than were patients with unilateral cancer (95% CI 1.87-20.32; P=.007). Analysis of the 1100delC variant in an independent set of 507 patients with familial breast cancer with no BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations confirmed a significantly elevated frequency of 1100delC (28/507 [5.5%]; OR 4.2; 95% CI 2.4-7.2; P=.0002), compared with controls, with a high frequency also seen in patients with only a single affected first-degree relative (18/291 [6.2%]). Finally, tissue microarray analysis indicated that breast tumors from patients with 1100delC mutations show reduced CHEK2 immunostaining. The results suggest that CHEK2 acts as a low-penetrance tumor-suppressor gene in breast cancer and that it makes a significant contribution to familial clustering of breast cancer-including families with only two affected relatives, which are more common than families that include larger numbers of affected women.     

Exploring the lipoprotein composition using Bayesian regression on serum lipidomic profiles

MOTIVATION: Serum lipids have been traditionally studied in the context of lipoprotein particles. Today's emerging lipidomics technologies afford sensitive detection of individual lipid molecular species, i.e. to a much greater detail than the scale of lipoproteins. However, such global serum lipidomic profiles do not inherently contain any information on where the detected lipid species are coming from. Since it is too laborious and time consuming to routinely perform serum fractionation and lipidomics analysis on each lipoprotein fraction separately, this presents a challenge for the interpretation of lipidomic profile data. An exciting and medically important new bioinformatics challenge today is therefore how to build on extensive knowledge of lipid metabolism at lipoprotein levels in order to develop better models and bioinformatics tools based on high-dimensional lipidomic data becoming available today. RESULTS: We developed a hierarchical Bayesian regression model to study lipidomic profiles in serum and in different lipoprotein classes. As a background data for the model building, we utilized lipidomic data for each of the lipoprotein fractions from 5 subjects with metabolic syndrome and 12 healthy controls. We clustered the lipid profiles and applied a regression model within each cluster separately. We found that the amount of a lipid in serum can be adequately described by the amounts of lipids in the lipoprotein classes. In addition to improved ability to interpret lipidomic data, we expect that our approach will also facilitate dynamic modelling of lipid metabolism at the individual molecular species level.     

Molecular cloning of human lysyl oxidase and assignment of the gene to chromosome 5q23.3-31.2.

Lysyl oxidase (EC 1.4.3.13) initiates the crosslinking of collagens and elastin by catalyzing oxidative deamination of the epsilon-amino group in certain lysine and hydroxylysine residues. We report here on the isolation and characterization of cDNA clones for the enzyme from human placenta and rat aorta lambda gt11 cDNA libraries. A cDNA clone for human lysyl oxidase covers all the coding sequences, 230 nucleotides of the 5' and 299 nucleotides, of the 3' untranslated sequences, including a poly(A) tail of 23 nucleotides. This cDNA encodes a polypeptide of 417 amino acid residues, including a signal peptide of 21 amino acids. Sequencing of two rat lysyl oxidase cDNA clones indicated six differences between the present and the previously published sequence for the rat enzyme [Trackman et al. (1990) Biochemistry 29: 4863-4870], resulting in frameshifts in the translated sequence. The human lysyl oxidase sequence was found to be 78% identical to the revised rat sequence at the nucleotide level and 84% identical at the amino acid level, with the degree of identity unevenly distributed between various regions of the coded polypeptide. Northern blot analysis of human skin fibroblasts RNA indicated that the human lysyl oxidase cDNA hybridizes to at least four mRNA species; their sizes are about 5.5, 4.3, 2.4, and 2.0 kb. Analysis of a panel of 25 human x hamster cell hybrids by Southern blotting mapped the human lysyl oxidase gene to chromosome 5, and in situ hybridization mapped it to 5q23.3-31.2.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)