Detectable clonal mosaicism and its relationship to aging and cancer

In an analysis of 31,717 cancer cases and 26,136 cancer-free controls from 13 genome-wide association studies, we observed large chromosomal abnormalities in a subset of clones in DNA obtained from blood or buccal samples. We observed mosaic abnormalities, either aneuploidy or copy-neutral loss of heterozygosity, of >2 Mb in size in autosomes of 517 individuals (0.89%), with abnormal cell proportions of between 7% and 95%. In cancer-free individuals, frequency increased with age, from 0.23% under 50 years to 1.91% between 75 and 79 years (P = 4.8 × 10(-8)). Mosaic abnormalities were more frequent in individuals with solid tumors (0.97% versus 0.74% in cancer-free individuals; odds ratio (OR) = 1.25; P = 0.016), with stronger association with cases who had DNA collected before diagnosis or treatment (OR = 1.45; P = 0.0005). Detectable mosaicism was also more common in individuals for whom DNA was collected at least 1 year before diagnosis with leukemia compared to cancer-free individuals (OR = 35.4; P = 3.8 × 10(-11)). These findings underscore the time-dependent nature of somatic events in the etiology of cancer and potentially other late-onset diseases

Simulation of gain and modulation bandwidths of 1300nm RWG InGaAsN lasers

The gain and dynamic behaviour of InGaAsN quantum well (QW) lasers is investigated. A comparison of simulated material gain of 1300 nm InGaAsN, AlGaInAs and InGaAsP quantum wells is made to gauge its gain performance. The small-signal modulation characteristics of a 250 µm MQW ridge waveguide (RWG) InGaAsN laser are presented and high-temperature characteristics are shown

Comparison of xylose fermentation by two high-performance engineered strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Economical biofuel production from plant biomass requires the conversion of both cellulose and hemicellulose in the plant cell wall. The best industrial fermentation organism, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, has been developed to utilize xylose by heterologously expressing either a xylose reductase/xylitol dehydrogenase (XR/XDH) pathway or a xylose isomerase (XI) pathway. Although it has been proposed that the optimal means for fermenting xylose into biofuels would use XI instead of the XR/XDH pathway, no clear comparison of the best publicly-available yeast strains engineered to use XR/XDH or XI has been published. We therefore compared two of the best-performing engineered yeast strains in the public domain—one using the XR/XDH pathway and another using XI—in anaerobic xylose fermentations. We find that, regardless of conditions, the strain using XR/XDH has substantially higher productivity compared to the XI strain. By contrast, the XI strain has better yields in nearly all conditions tested

Influence of nitrogen on the electronic structure of gaInNAs/GaAs multiquantum wells: a PLE investigation

This paper is about the influence of nitrogen on the electronic structure of gaInNAs/GaAs multiquantum wells. It was presented at the 26th International Conference on the Physics of Semiconductors in 2002

Optical transitions in GaInNAs/GaAs multi-quantum wells with varying N content investigated by photoluminescence excitation spectroscopy

We report on the nitrogen-concentration dependence of optical transitions between quantized states of electrons and holes in GaInNAs/GaAs multi-quantum wells. Using low-temperature photoluminescence excitation spectroscopy, systematic studies have been performed on a series of samples with nitrogen concentrations in the range 0%-1.14%. The observed data were compared with theoretical fitting based on the band anticrossing model in which the localized N states interact with the extended states in the conduction band, taking strain effects into account. Our results are consistent with the band anticrossing model, but with differing coupling strength between different quantum states of electrons in the quantum wells