Transcriptional profiling identifies differential expression of long non-coding RNAs in Jo-1 associated and inclusion body myositis.

Myositis is characterised by muscle inflammation and weakness. Although generally thought to be driven by a systemic autoimmune response, increasing evidence suggests that intrinsic changes in the muscle might also contribute to the pathogenesis. Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are a family of novel genes that regulate gene transcription and translation. To determine the potential role of lncRNAs, we employed next generation sequencing to examine the transcriptome in muscle biopsies obtained from two histologically distinct patient populations, inclusion body myositis (IBM) and anti-Jo-1-associated myositis (Jo-1). 1287 mRNAs and 1068 mRNAs were differentially expressed in the muscle from Jo-1 and IBM patients, respectively. Pathway analysis showed the top canonical pathway in both Jo-1 and IBM was oxidative phosphorylation and mitochondrial dysfunction. We identified 731 known and 325 novel lncRNAs in the muscles biopsies. Comparison with controls showed 55 and 46 lncRNAs were differentially expressed in IBM and Jo-1 myositis, respectively. Of these, 16 lncRNAs were differentially expressed in both IBM and Jo-1 myositis and included upregulated H19, lncMyoD and MALAT1. Given that these are known to regulate muscle proliferation and differentiation, we speculate that changes in lncRNAs might contribute to the phenotypic changes in Jo-1 and IBM myositis

Chromosome conformation signatures define predictive markers of inadequate response to methotrexate in early rheumatoid arthritis

The authors would like to thank members of OBD Reference Facility Benjamin Foulkes, Chloe Bird, Emily Corfeld and Matthew Salter for expedient processing of clinical samples on the EpiSwitch™ platform and Magdalena Jeznach and Willem Westra for help with preparation of the manuscript. The study employed samples from the SERA Biobank used with permission and approval of the SERA Approval Group. We gratefully acknowledge the invaluable contribution of the clinicians and operating team in SERA. We would also like to thank Prof. Raju Kucherlapati (Harvard Medical School), and Prof. Jane Mellor (Oxford Univ.), Prof. John O’Shea (National Institute of Health) and Prof. John Isaacs (New Castle Univ.) for their independent and critical review of our study. A list of Scottish Early Rheumatoid Arthritis (SERA) inception cohort investigators is provided in Additional fle 1: Additional Note. Funding This work was funded by Oxford BioDynamics.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

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Packet Loss Resilient Internet Video Streaming

This paper describes a transmission scheme for Internet video streaming that provides an acceptable video quality over a wide range of connection qualities. The proposed system consists of a scalable video coder which uses a fully standard compatible H.263 coder in its base layer. The scalable video coder is combined with unequal error protection using Reed-Solomon codes applied across packets. We present and verify a two-state Markov model for packet losses over Internet connections. The relation between packet loss and picture quality at the decoder for an unequally protected layered video stream is derived. Experimental results show that, with our approach, the picture quality of a streamed video degrades gracefully as the packet loss probability of an Internet connection increases. Keywords: Scalable video coding, unequal error protection, erasure decoding, graceful degradation, Internet model SPIE Visual Communications and Image Processing 99, January 1999, San Jose, CA 1. INTRO..

Robust Internet Video Transmission Based on Scalable Coding and Unequal Error Protection

In this article we describe and investigate an Internet video streaming system based on a scalable video coder combined with unequal error protection that maintains an acceptable picture quality over a wide range of connection qualities. The proposed approach does not require any specific support from the network layer and is especially suited for Internet multicast applications where different users are perceiving different transmission conditions and no feedback channel can be employed. We derive a theoretical framework for the overall system by which the Internet packet loss behavior can be directly related to the picture quality perceived at the receiver. We demonstrate how this framework can be used to select appropriate parameter values for the overall system design. Experimental results show how that the presented system achieves a gracefully degrading picture quality for packet losses up to 30%