Measuring hsCRP—An Important Part of a Comprehensive Risk Profile or a Clinically Redundant Practice?

James McCormack and Michael Allan discuss issues and questions surrounding hsCRP measurements in patients

Anaerobiosis revisited: growth of Saccharomyces cerevisiae under extremely low oxygen availability

The budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae plays an important role in biotechnological applications, ranging from fuel ethanol to recombinant protein production. It is also a model organism for studies on cell physiology and genetic regulation. Its ability to grow under anaerobic conditions is of interest in many industrial applications. Unlike industrial bioreactors with their low surface area relative to volume, ensuring a complete anaerobic atmosphere during microbial cultivations in the laboratory is rather difficult. Tiny amounts of O2 that enter the system can vastly influence product yields and microbial physiology. A common procedure in the laboratory is to sparge the culture vessel with ultrapure N2 gas; together with the use of butyl rubber stoppers and norprene tubing, O2 diffusion into the system can be strongly minimized. With insights from some studies conducted in our laboratory, we explore the question ‘how anaerobic is anaerobiosis?’. We briefly discuss the role of O2 in non-respiratory pathways in S. cerevisiae and provide a systematic survey of the attempts made thus far to cultivate yeast under anaerobic conditions. We conclude that very few data exist on the physiology of S. cerevisiae under anaerobiosis in the absence of the anaerobic growth factors ergosterol and unsaturated fatty acids. Anaerobicity should be treated as a relative condition since complete anaerobiosis is hardly achievable in the laboratory. Ideally, researchers should provide all the details of their anaerobic set-up, to ensure reproducibility of results among different laboratories. A correction to this article is available online at http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/131930/ https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-018-9036-

Expression of the KIT Protein (CD117) in Primary Cutaneous Mast Cell Tumors of the Dog

Thirty-one canine cutaneous nodules, diagnosed as mast cell tumors by histopathologic analysis on hematoxylin and eosin (HE) and toluidine blue stained sections, were used in this study to evaluate the immunohistochemical pattern of expression of KIT protein (CD117), a type III tyrosine kinase protein that is the receptor for stem cell factor (SCF), a cytokine that stimulates mast cell growth and differentiation also known as mast cell growth factor. Lesions were graded as I (well differentiated) II (intermediate differentiation) or III (poorly differentiated) according to the following morphologic features: invasiveness, cellularity and cellular morphology, mitotic index and stromal reaction. Immunohistochemical KIT expression was compared with histological grade and some histomorphologic features (cell differentiation and nuclear grade) singularly evaluated. A possible predictive role of biologic behaviour in mast cell tumors for KIT expression was also investigated. Immunohistochemical analysis revealed three different patterns of KIT expression: a cytoplasmic diffuse pattern, a membranous pattern with immunopositivity located in the cell membrane and a cytoplasmic perinuclear pattern where KIT expression was detected in the cytoplasm of the neoplastic mast cells, close to the nucleus. Statistical analysis performed by Pearson method and using the  test has showed a close relationship between different KIT immunohistochemical patterns and histological grade (P=0.00000), cell differentiation (P= 0.00000) and nuclear grade (0.0024). Kaplan & Meier estimated survival curves compared by the survival analysis revealed KIT expression significantly associated to survival time (P= 0.037) but not to cancer free interval (0.50). KIT expression may be considered a useful parameter of malignancy in cutaneous mast cell tumors just like other well known histomorphological features and showed also a predictive role of biologic behaviour of these tumors