Keratin 19 marks poor differentiation and a more aggressive behaviour in canine and human hepatocellular tumours

Keratin 19 marks poor differentiation and a more aggressive behaviour in canine and human hepatocellular tumours Renee GHM van Sprundel1, Ted SGAM van den Ingh2, Valeer J Desmet3, Azeam Katoonizadeh3, Louis C Penning1, Jan Rothuizen1, Tania Roskams3 and Bart Spee13* * Corresponding author: Bart Spee [email protected] Author Affiliations 1 Department of Clinical Sciences of Companion Animals, Faculty of Veterinary medicine, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands 2 TCCI Consultancy BV, Utrecht, The Netherlands 3 Department of Morphology and Molecular Pathology, University Hospitals Leuven, Leuven, Belgium For all author emails, please log on. Comparative Hepatology 2010, 9:4 doi:10.1186/1476-5926-9-4 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.comparative-hepatology.com/content/9/1/4 Received: 23 November 2009 Accepted: 18 February 2010 Published: 18 February 2010 © 2010 van Sprundel et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Use of Serum MicroRNAs as Biomarker for Hepatobiliary Diseases in Dogs

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Locational memory of macrovessel vascular cells is transcriptionally imprinted

Vascular pathologies show locational predisposition throughout the body; further insights into the transcriptomics basis of this vascular heterogeneity are needed. We analyzed transcriptomes from cultured endothelial cells and vascular smooth muscle cells from nine adult canine macrovessels: the aorta, coronary artery, vena cava, portal vein, femoral artery, femoral vein, saphenous vein, pulmonary vein, and pulmonary artery. We observed that organ-specific expression patterns persist in vitro, indicating that these genes are not regulated by blood flow or surrounding cell types but are likely fixed in the epigenetic memory. We further demonstrated the preserved location-specific expression of GATA4 protein in cultured cells and in the primary adult vessel. On a functional level, arterial and venous endothelial cells differed in vascular network morphology as the arterial networks maintained a higher complexity. Our findings prompt the rethinking of the extrapolation of results from single-origin endothelial cell systems

Detection of Helicobacter pylori in bile of cats

Lymphocytic cholangitis (LC) in cats is a biliary disease of unknown etiology. Helicobacter spp. were recently implicated in human primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) and primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC). Because of the similarities between PSC/PBC with LC, we hypothesized that Helicobacter spp. are involved in feline LC. A PCR with Helicobacter genus-specific 16S rRNA primers was performed on DNA isolated from feline bile samples. Four of the 15 (26%) LC samples were positive, whereas only 8/51 (16%) of non-LC samples were PCR positive (p=0.44). Sequence analysis of the amplicons revealed a 100% identity with the Helicobacter pylori specific DNA fragments. Our data suggest an etiological role of H. pylori in feline LC and that cats are a potential zoonotic reservoir

Hepatitis e virus seroprevalence in pets in the Netherlands and the permissiveness of canine liver cells to the infection

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) as an emerging zoonotic pathogen causes a major public health issue. Transmission from domestic, wildlife and zoo animals to human has been widely reported. Whether pets also serve as reservoirs remains an intriguing question. In this study, we found the sero-positive rates of HEV-specific antibodies in pet dogs, cats and horses of 18.52% (30/162), 14.89% (7/47) and 18.18