Invasion and MMP expression profile in desmoid tumours

Desmoid tumours are locally invasive soft tissue tumours in which beta-catenin mediated TCF-dependent transcription is activated. The role of soluble factors secreted by the myofibroblastic desmoid tumour, which could stimulate tumour invasiveness, was investigated. Using collagen gel invasion assays, the presence of factors stimulating invasion in desmoid conditioned media (CM) could be established. Since matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) have been implicated in the process of tumoral invasion, the expression levels of the MMP family members were evaluated. Quantitative reverse transcription-PCR was used to determine the expression levels of MMP1, MMP2, MMP3, MMP7, MMP11, MMP12, MMP13, MMP14 and the inhibitors TIMP1, TIMP2 and TIMP3. Besides overexpression of MMP7, a known TCF-dependent target gene, a striking upregulation of the expression levels of MMP1, MMP3, MMP11, MMP12 and MMP13 in desmoid tumours, compared to unaffected fibroblasts from the same patients, was found. Treating the CM of desmoids with a synthetic and a physiologic MMP inhibitor reduced the invasion-stimulating capacity of the desmoid CM by approximately 50%. These results suggest the involvement of soluble factors, released by the desmoid cells, in stimulating invasion and implicate the MMPs as facilitators of invasion

A study on the state-of-the-art in automated map generalisation implemented in commercial out-of-the-box software

This paper describes the set up and the progress of the EuroSDR project that studies the state-of-the-art in automated map generalisation implemented in commercial out-of-thebox software. The project started in October 2006 with a project team consisting of National Mapping Agencies (NMAs) and research institutes. From October 2006 till May 2007 four test cases of four different NMAs were selected, consisting of a large scale source data set, requirements for the smaller scale output map as well as symbolisation information. Much effort has been put in specifying and harmonising requirements for the output maps. These requirements have been defined as a set of constraints to be respected in the output maps. From June 2007 the project team tested the four test cases with four commercial out-of-the-box software systems: ArcGIS, Genesys, Change/Push/Typify and Clarity. The vendors of these systems performed parallel tests on the four test cases in which they were allowed to customise their systems. An evaluation methodology has been designed and partly implemented. Results are expected by the end of 2008

Web service approaches for providing enriched data structures to generalisation operators

Web service technologies can be used to establish an interoperable framework between different generalisation systems. In a previous article three categories of generalisation web services were identified, including support services, operator services and processing services. This paper focuses on the category of support services. In a service-based generalisation system, the purpose of support services is to assist the generalisation process by providing auxiliary measures, procedures and data structures that allow the representation of structural cartographic knowledge. The structural knowledge of the spatial and semantic context and the modelling of structural and spatial relationships is critical for the understanding of the role of cartographic features and thus for automated generalisation. Support services should extract and model this knowledge from the raw data and make it available to other generalisation operators. On the one hand the structural knowledge can be expressed by enriching map features with additional geometries or attributes. On the other hand, there exist various hierarchical and nonhierarchical relationships between map features, many of which can be represented by graph data structures. After a brief introduction to the interoperable web service framework, this paper proposes a taxonomy of generalisation support services and discusses its elements. It is then shown how the complex output of such services can be represented for use with web services and stored in a reusable fashion. Finally, the utilisation of support services is illustrated on four implementation examples of support services that also highlight the interactions with the generalisation operators that use these auxiliary services

Molecular diversity of the adenylyl cyclase-coupled signaling in pancreatic islet cells

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe