The effect of aflibercept and arsenic trioxide on the proliferation,migration and apoptosis of oral squamous cell carcinoma in vitro

Molecular Biology Reports - Aflibercept and arsenic trioxide drugs apply a cytotoxic effect on some human cancer cell lines. However, no more study has followed the effects of both drugs,...     

Tournament ABC analysis of the western Palaearctic population history of an oak gall wasp,Synergus umbraculus

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a powerful and widely used approach in inference of population history. However, the computational effort required to discriminate among alternative historical scenarios often limits the set that is compared to those considered more likely a priori. While often justifiable, this approach will fail to consider unexpected but well‐supported population histories. We used a hierarchical tournament approach, in which subsets of scenarios are compared in a first round of ABC analyses and the winners are compared in a second analysis, to reconstruct the population history of an oak gall wasp, Synergus umbraculus (Hymenoptera, Cynipidae) across the Western Palaearctic. We used 4,233 bp of sequence data across seven loci to explore the relationships between four putative Pleistocene refuge populations in Iberia, Italy, the Balkans and Western Asia. We compared support for 148 alternative scenarios in eight pools, each pool comprising all possible rearrangements of four populations over a given topology of relationships, with or without founding of one population by admixture and with or without an unsampled “ghost” population. We found very little support for the directional “out of the east” scenario previously inferred for other gall wasp community members. Instead, the best‐supported models identified Iberia as the first‐regional population to diverge from the others in the late Pleistocene, followed by divergence between the Balkans and Western Asia, and founding of the Italian population through late Pleistocene admixture from Iberia and the Balkans. We compare these results with what is known for other members of the oak gall community, and consider the strengths and weaknesses of using a tournament approach to explore phylogeographic model space.     

Greener,Nonhalogenated Solvent Systems for Highly Efficient Perovskite Solar Cells

All current highest efficiency perovskite solar cells (PSCs) use highly toxic, halogenated solvents, such as chlorobenzene (CB) or toluene (TLN), in an antisolvent step or as solvent for the hole transporter material (HTM). A more environmentally friendly antisolvent is highly desirable for decreasing chronic health risk. Here, the efficacy of anisole (ANS), as a greener antisolvent for highest efficiency PSCs, is investigated. The fabrication inside and outside of the glovebox showing high power conversion efficiencies of 19.9% and 15.5%, respectively. Importantly, a fully nonhalogenated solvent system is demonstrated where ANS is used as both the antisolvent and the solvent for the HTM. With this, state‐of‐the‐art efficiencies close to 20.5%, the highest to date without using toxic CB or TLN, are reached. Through scanning electron microscopy, UV–vis, photoluminescence, and X‐ray diffraction, it is shown that ANS results in similar mixed‐ion perovskite films under glovebox atmosphere as CB and TLN. This underlines that ANS is indeed a viable green solvent system for PSCs and should urgently be adopted by labs and companies to avoid systematic health risks for researchers and employees.     

Corneal Confocal Microscopy Detects Small Fibre Neuropathy in Patients with Upper Gastrointestinal Cancer and Nerve Regeneration in Chemotherapy Induced Peripheral Neuropathy

There are multiple neurological complications of cancer and its treatment. This study assessed the utility of the novel non-invasive ophthalmic technique of corneal confocal microscopy in identifying neuropathy in patients with upper gastrointestinal cancer before and after platinum based chemotherapy. In this study, 21 subjects with upper gastrointestinal (oesophageal or gastric) cancer and 21 healthy control subjects underwent assessment of neuropathy using the neuropathy disability score, quantitative sensory testing for vibration perception threshold, warm and cold sensation thresholds, cold and heat induced pain thresholds, nerve conduction studies and corneal confocal microscopy. Patients with gastro-oesophageal cancer had higher heat induced pain (P = 0.04) and warm sensation (P = 0.03) thresholds with a significantly reduced sural sensory (P<0.01) and peroneal motor (P<0.01) nerve conduction velocity, corneal nerve fibre density (CNFD), nerve branch density (CNBD) and nerve fibre length (CNFL) (P<0.0001). Furthermore, CNFD correlated significantly with the time from presentation with symptoms to commencing chemotherapy (r = -0.54, P = 0.02), and CNFL (r = -0.8, P<0.0001) and CNBD (r = 0.63, P = 0.003) were related to the severity of lymph node involvement. After the 3^rd cycle of chemotherapy, there was no change in any measure of neuropathy, except for a significant increase in CNFL (P = 0.003). Corneal confocal microscopy detects a small fibre neuropathy in this cohort of patients with upper gastrointestinal cancer, which was related to disease severity. Furthermore, the increase in CNFL after the chemotherapy may indicate nerve regeneration.     

Genetic evidence that GTP is required for transposition of IS903 and Tn552 in Escherichia coli

Surprisingly little is known about the role of host factors in regulating transposition, despite the potentially deleterious rearrangements caused by the movement of transposons. An extensive mutant screen was therefore conducted to identify Escherichia coli host factors that regulate transposition. An E. coli mutant library was screened using a papillation assay that allows detection of IS903 transposition events by the formation of blue papillae on a colony. Several host mutants were identified that exhibited a unique papillation pattern: a predominant ring of papillae just inside the edge of the colony, implying that transposition was triggered within these cells based on their spatial location within the colony. These mutants were found to be in pur genes, whose products are involved in the purine biosynthetic pathway. The transposition ring phenotype was also observed with Tn552, but not Tn10, establishing that this was not unique to IS903 and that it was not an artifact of the assay. Further genetic analyses of purine biosynthetic mutants indicated that the ring of transposition was consistent with a GTP requirement for IS903 and Tn552 transposition. Together, our observations suggest that transposition occurs during late stages of colony growth and that transposition occurs inside the colony edge in response to both a gradient of exogenous purines across the colony and the developmental stage of the cells.