Bericht vom 9. Missing Link eBook-Tag (Bremen, 30./31. März 2017)

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Bericht vom 9. Missing Link eBook-Tag (Bremen, 30./31. März 2017)

Report on the 9th Missing Link E-Books Day (Bremen, March 30-31, 2017

Central Mongolian lake sediments reveal new insights on climate change and equestrian empires in the Eastern Steppes

The repeated expansion of East Asian steppe cultures was a key driver of Eurasian history, forging new social, economic, and biological links across the continent. Climate has been suggested as important driver of these poorly understood cultural expansions, but paleoclimate records from the Mongolian Plateau often suffer from poor age control or ambiguous proxy interpretation. Here, we use a combination of geochemical analyses and comprehensive radiocarbon dating to establish the first robust and detailed record of paleohydrological conditions for Lake Telmen, Mongolia, covering the past ~ 4000 years. Our record shows that humid conditions coincided with solar minima, and hydrological modeling confirms the high sensitivity of the lake to paleoclimate changes. Careful comparisons with archaeological and historical records suggest that in the vast semi-arid grasslands of eastern Eurasia, solar minima led to reduced temperatures, less evaporation, and high biomass production, expanding the power base for pastoral economies and horse cavalry. Our findings suggest a crucial link between temperature dynamics in the Eastern Steppe and key social developments, such as the emergence of pastoral empires, and fuel concerns that global warming enhances water scarcity in the semi-arid regions of interior Eurasia

Gene expression analysis after receptor tyrosine kinase activation reveals new potential melanoma proteins

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Melanoma is an aggressive tumor with increasing incidence. To develop accurate prognostic markers and targeted therapies, changes leading to malignant transformation of melanocytes need to be understood. In the <it>Xiphophorus </it>melanoma model system, a mutated version of the EGF receptor Xmrk (<it>Xiphophorus </it>melanoma receptor kinase) triggers melanomagenesis. Cellular events downstream of Xmrk, such as the activation of Akt, Ras, B-Raf or Stat5, were also shown to play a role in human melanomagenesis. This makes the elucidation of Xmrk downstream targets a useful method for identifying processes involved in melanoma formation.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Here, we analyzed Xmrk-induced gene expression using a microarray approach. Several highly expressed genes were confirmed by realtime PCR, and pathways responsible for their induction were revealed using small molecule inhibitors. The expression of these genes was also monitored in human melanoma cell lines, and the target gene <it>FOSL1 </it>was knocked down by siRNA. Proliferation and migration of siRNA-treated melanoma cell lines were then investigated.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Genes with the strongest upregulation after receptor activation were FOS-like antigen 1 (<it>Fosl1</it>), early growth response 1 (<it>Egr1</it>), osteopontin (<it>Opn</it>), insulin-like growth factor binding protein 3 (<it>Igfbp3</it>), dual-specificity phosphatase 4 (<it>Dusp4</it>), and tumor-associated antigen L6 (<it>Taal6</it>). Interestingly, most genes were blocked in presence of a SRC kinase inhibitor. Importantly, we found that <it>FOSL1</it>, <it>OPN</it>, <it>IGFBP3</it>, <it>DUSP4</it>, and <it>TAAL6 </it>also exhibited increased expression levels in human melanoma cell lines compared to human melanocytes. Knockdown of <it>FOSL1 </it>in human melanoma cell lines reduced their proliferation and migration.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Altogether, the data show that the receptor tyrosine kinase Xmrk is a useful tool in the identification of target genes that are commonly expressed in Xmrk-transgenic melanocytes and melanoma cell lines. The identified molecules constitute new possible molecular players in melanoma development. Specifically, a role of FOSL1 in melanomagenic processes is demonstrated. These data are the basis for future detailed analyses of the investigated target genes.</p

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

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Peer Reviewe

Schullabels zur Verankerung von BNE am Beispiel „Umweltschule in Europa/Internationale Nachhaltigkeitsschule“

Helfen Schullabels bei der Verankerung von Bildung für nachhaltige Entwicklung? Inwieweit sie diesen Anspruch einlösen können, wird an einem konkreten Beispiel deutlic

Evolving techniques in the staging of lung cancer

An ideal staging system should describe the extent of a disease as precisely as possible, in order to give an optimal idea of prognosis and choice of treatment. Therefore, the most accurate techniques should be used in the best interest of the patient. In addition, a good staging system should also be based on techniques accessible to all. Current staging guidelines describe exactly the degree of tumour spread in each tumour, node, metastasis (TNM)-subset, but they do not detail how to obtain this information. Nonetheless, some differences in therapeutic outcomes between centres seem to be related to the thoroughness of pretreatment staging, e.g. the quality of the computed tomography (CT) scans, the use of positron emission tomography (PET) scans, the extent and locations of mediastinal lymph node sampling, and the accuracy of the pathological examination of resection specimens. It is not yet clear how much of the difference in outcome between centres is based on different staging strategies, resulting in stage migration (Will Rogers phenomenon), or on truly better therapeutic approaches. This report deals with these various modern techniques for lung cancer staging. The precise roles of imaging techniques such as ultrasound, CT, magnetic resonance imaging, or 18F-fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose PET in the assessment of the T-, N- and M-stage of the tumour are discussed in detail. Furthermore, the contribution and procedures of more invasive methods such as bronchoscopy, medical and surgical thoracoscopy, and mediastinoscopy are highlighted. A major challenge for the next revision of the lung cancer staging system will be the integration of minimal requirements for pretreatment and intra-operative staging. It will be a difficult exercise to find the best compromise between widespread applicability of the tumour, node, metastasis-system (allowing comparison between different centres and time periods) and the use of more advanced technology in the best interest of the patient

Reflections on the current staging system for lung cancer

SCOPUS: cp.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe