Chemotherapy changes cytotoxic activity of NK-cells in cancer patients

In recent years, it has been shown that under certain conditions cytostatic agents (chemotherapy and radiotherapy) can restore the functioning of the immune system impaired by malignancy burden. The modifications of biological properties by cytostatics acting make cancer cells visible for the immune system recognition and elimination. Eighteen patients diagnosed with primary local breast (8) and gastric (10) cancer between 2014 and 2016 were enrolled in the investigation. The phenotypic features of NK were assessed by flow cytometry using mAb (BD Pharmingen) against CD45 (common leukocyte antigen) and CD56 (NK-marker) for surface staining, CD107a (LAMP-1), Perforin (PF) and Gransime B (GB) for intracellular staining. We examined NK populations in the peripheral blood of cancer patients before treatment and in 5 days after second course of NACT. We found that NK populations produced PF in cancer patents, which were absent before treatment, increased after NACT. Their emergence can be associated with the immunoactivating effects of chemotherapy, realized by the modification of tumor cells or elimination of immunosuppressive cells

Resistance of old winter bread wheat landraces to tan spot

Background. The most effective and environmentally safe way to combat wheat diseases is to produce cultivars resistant to their pathogens. For this purpose, old landraces are often used as genetically diverse sources of traits important for breeding. In the process of wheat breeding for resistance to tan spot caused by the fungus Pyrenophora tritici-repentis (Died.) Drechs. (abbr. Ptr), selection is carried out against the dominant allele of Tsn1, the gene of sensitivity to the toxin Ptr ToxA, which induces necrosis and represents the main pathogenicity factor of Ptr controlled by the ToxA gene. The aim of the study was to characterize a set of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) accessions from the VIR collection for resistance to various Ptr populations, genotype these accessions using Xfcp623 – a DNA marker of the Tsn1 gene, and identify sources of tan spot resistance.Materials and methods. Sixty-seven accessions of winter bread wheat landraces were studied. Seedling resistance to two Ptr populations was assessed using a 5-point scale adopted at VIZR. The allelic state of Tsn1 was identified by PCR.Results. Dominant alleles of Tsn1 were found for 55% of the studied accessions. Seventeen accessions were resistant or moderately resistant to two Ptr populations and an isolate from Krasnodar Territory previously used for their characterization. Nine of them had the tsn1tsn1 genotype, and 8 had Tsn1Tsn1. The accessions mainly belonged to three agroecological groups proposed by N. I. Vavilov: “steppe winter bread wheat (Banatka wheats)”, “North European forest awnless bread wheats (Sandomirka wheats)”, and “Caucasian mountain winter bread wheat”.Conclusion. The identified 17 accessions resistant to Ptr are potential breeding sources of resistance. In the studied set of accessions, no significant relationship was found between the allelic state of the Tsn1 gene in the accession and its response to the infection with pathogen populations, including isolates with the ToxA gene

PN G068.1+11.0: A young pre-cataclysmic variable with an extremely hot primary

© 2016, Pleiades Publishing, Ltd.An analysis of spectroscopic and photometric data for the young pre-cataclysmic variable (PCV) PN G068.1+11.0, which passed through its common-envelope stage relatively recently, is presented. The spectroscopic and photometric data were obtained with the 6-m telescope and Zeiss-1000 telescope of the Special Astrophysical Observatory. The light curves show sinusoidal brightness variations with the orbital-period time scale and brightness-variation amplitudes of Δm = 1.m41, 1.m62, and 1.m57 in the B, V, and R bands, respectively. The system’s spectrum exhibits weak HI (Hβ–Hδ) andHeII λλ4541, 4686, 5411 Å absorption lines during the phases of minimum brightness, as well as HI, HeII, CIII, CIV, NIII, and OII emission lines whose intensity variations are synchronized with variations of the integrated brightness of the system. The emission-line formation in the spectra can be fully explained by the effects of fluorescence of the ultraviolet light from the primary at the surface of the cool star. All the characteristics of the optical light of PN G068.1+11.0 confirm that it is a young PCV containing sdO subdwarf. The radial velocities were measured from a blend of lines of moderately light elements, CIII+NIII λ4640 Å, which is formed at the surface of the secondary due to reflection effects. The ephemeris of the system has been improved through a joint analysis of the radial-velocity curves and light curves of pre-cataclysmic variable, using modelling of the reflection effects. The fundamental parameters of PN G068.1+11.0 have been determined using two evolutionary tracks for planetary-nebula nuclei of different masses (0.7 M⊙and 0.78M⊙). The model spectra for the system and a comparison with the observations demonstrate the possibility of refining the components’ effective temperatures if the quality of the spectra used is improved

Haplotype structure and copy number polymorphism of the beta-defensin 7 genes in diverse chicken breeds

Beta-defensins is a family of avian peptides related to the innate immune system. Copy number variation was recently reported for the avian beta-defensin 7 gene (AvBD7) between the highly inbred Leghorn and Fayoumi lines. Here, we examined copy number variants in 35 different chicken breeds and found that 31 of them have at least the same representation of the duplicated AvBD7 allele. We also found haplotypes upstream of the AvBD6 regions that are strongly linked to the AvBD7 duplication. We observed a strong linkage disequilibrium spanning of the upstream region of the AvBD6 gene, with two SNPs being flanking markers to detect duplication of the AvBD7

Modern approaches to production of safe and effective genetically modified rabies vaccines for animals

Rabies is a dangerous zoonoticdisease that affects the central nervous system, causes encephalomyelitis and paralyses and Is almost invariably fatal. The disease causes significant economic losses associated with the death of animals, outbreak consequences, strict restrictions on domestic and international trade in livestock products, preventive and quarantine measures, laboratory tests. The World Organization for Animal Health recommends vaccination to control rabies. Taking into account that there is a lack of affordable high-quality vaccines to globally prevent and control the disease, stable, attenuated production strains of rabies virus with broad cross-activity against various variants of the pathogen shall be considered as ideal candidates to produce high-quality, safe and effective vaccines. Currently, someapproachesareappliedtoreducethevirusvirulenceandimprovesafetyof rabies vaccines. Reverse genetics is very popular now. It provides new approaches to study functions of a specific gene by analyzing phenotypic effects after direct manipulations with nucleotide sequences. The methods of reverse genetics have revolutionized molecular biology and have become apowerful tool to study genetics of RNA viruses. These methods are widely used to study rabies virus. The use of reverse genetics has made it possible to modify rabies virus production strains for manufacture of modern genetically modified rabies vaccines that induce a persistent and long-term immunity. The review briefly covers general approaches to development of viral vectors with the purpose to create genetically modified rabies vaccines

MCL-CAw: A refinement of MCL for detecting yeast complexes from weighted PPI networks by incorporating core-attachment structure

Abstract Background The reconstruction of protein complexes from the physical interactome of organisms serves as a building block towards understanding the higher level organization of the cell. Over the past few years, several independent high-throughput experiments have helped to catalogue enormous amount of physical protein interaction data from organisms such as yeast. However, these individual datasets show lack of correlation with each other and also contain substantial number of false positives (noise). Over these years, several affinity scoring schemes have also been devised to improve the qualities of these datasets. Therefore, the challenge now is to detect meaningful as well as novel complexes from protein interaction (PPI) networks derived by combining datasets from multiple sources and by making use of these affinity scoring schemes. In the attempt towards tackling this challenge, the Markov Clustering algorithm (MCL) has proved to be a popular and reasonably successful method, mainly due to its scalability, robustness, and ability to work on scored (weighted) networks. However, MCL produces many noisy clusters, which either do not match known complexes or have additional proteins that reduce the accuracies of correctly predicted complexes. Results Inspired by recent experimental observations by Gavin and colleagues on the modularity structure in yeast complexes and the distinctive properties of "core" and "attachment" proteins, we develop a core-attachment based refinement method coupled to MCL for reconstruction of yeast complexes from scored (weighted) PPI networks. We combine physical interactions from two recent "pull-down" experiments to generate an unscored PPI network. We then score this network using available affinity scoring schemes to generate multiple scored PPI networks. The evaluation of our method (called MCL-CAw) on these networks shows that: (i) MCL-CAw derives larger number of yeast complexes and with better accuracies than MCL, particularly in the presence of natural noise; (ii) Affinity scoring can effectively reduce the impact of noise on MCL-CAw and thereby improve the quality (precision and recall) of its predicted complexes; (iii) MCL-CAw responds well to most available scoring schemes. We discuss several instances where MCL-CAw was successful in deriving meaningful complexes, and where it missed a few proteins or whole complexes due to affinity scoring of the networks. We compare MCL-CAw with several recent complex detection algorithms on unscored and scored networks, and assess the relative performance of the algorithms on these networks. Further, we study the impact of augmenting physical datasets with computationally inferred interactions for complex detection. Finally, we analyse the essentiality of proteins within predicted complexes to understand a possible correlation between protein essentiality and their ability to form complexes. Conclusions We demonstrate that core-attachment based refinement in MCL-CAw improves the predictions of MCL on yeast PPI networks. We show that affinity scoring improves the performance of MCL-CAw.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78256/1/1471-2105-11-504.xmlhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78256/2/1471-2105-11-504-S1.PDFhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78256/3/1471-2105-11-504-S2.ZIPhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78256/4/1471-2105-11-504.pdfPeer Reviewe

ВНУТРИСОРТОВЫЕ СКРЕЩИВАНИЯ КАК МЕТОД ПОВЫШЕНИЯ АДАПТИВНОГО ПОТЕНЦИАЛА ИСХОДНОГО МАТЕРИАЛА

The important goal of breeding program is to achieve the heterosis effect and develop the appropriate breeding lines to be used for crossing. The cultivation of the variety or breeding line for a long time and selection process under the same environmental factors lead to decrease of livability and productivity of the variety or breeding line. The intra-varietal and intra-line crossing is the method that enables to improve the genetic basis of the existing breeding accessions, when increasing the recombination ability, particular-ly among valuable and rare characteristics. The accessions of sweet pepper of different ecological origin: local varieties ‘Aeneas’, ‘Ivanhoe’ (Ukraine), ‘Sladkiy’ (Italy), breeding line ‘n 138d’ (Russia) were taken to study the influence of intra-varietal crossing on recovery of combining ability in breeding lines. The progeny produced from intra-varietal crossing has been assessed for the fruit number, average fruit weight, yielding ability and marketability, and then consequently compared with control accession. As results showed the yielding ability had increased by 2.3-25.7%, depending on genotype, while the fruit weight had increased by 2-11%. Phenological observation showed that there is no significant difference at the phase of growing and development between control plants and plants produced through intra-varietal crossing. The detailed progeny assessment has revealed the different effect of adaptive ability among different plants when the plants crossing within the same accession. This enables to select the best accessions to be used in further heterosis breeding pro-gram.Создание родительских линий, способных при гибридизации обеспечить мощный гетерозис – является важной задачей при гетерозисной селекции. Длительное выращивание и отбор в однообразных условиях внешней среды ведут к уменьшению жизнеспособности и продуктивности сорта или линии. Одним из методов улучшения исходного материала, как показали исследования на других культурах, является внутрисортовая гибридизация. Внутрилинейные (внутрисортовые) скрещивания являются методом обогащения наследственной основы образца, так как способствуют увеличению ценных редких рекомбинантов в потомстве. Исследования по изучению влияния внутрисортового скрещивания на восстановление комбинационной способности родительских линий перца сладкого проводили на образцах различного экологического происхождения: местные сорта перца Эней, Айвенго (Украина), Сладкий (Италия), Линия 138 д (Россия). Потомство от внутрисортовых скрещиваний оценивали по сравнению с контролем по числу плодов на растении, средней массе плода, урожайности и товарности. Результаты полученных исследований показали, что урожайность от внутрисортовых обогащающих скрещиваний по сравнению с контролем возросла на 2,3-25,7% в зависимости от образца, а масса плода – на 2-11%. Фенологические наблюдения не показали какой-либо разницы в прохождении фаз развития между контрольными растениями и полученными от внутрисортовых скрещиваний. При детальном изучении потомства от скрещиваний между различными растениями в одном образце показан разный эффект их адаптивной способности, что будет способствовать выделению лучших из них для использования в селекции на гетерозис