Frizzled receptor 6 marks rare, highly tumourigenic stem-like cells in mouse and human neuroblastomas

Copyright © 2011 Cantilena et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The article was made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Wnt signalling is an important component of vertebrate development, required for specification of the neural crest. Ten Wnt receptors [Frizzled receptor 1-10 (Fzd1-10)] have been identified so far, some of which are expressed in the developing nervous system and the neural crest. Here we show that expression of one such receptors, Fzd6, predicts poor survival in neuroblastoma patients and marks rare, HIF1/2 α-positive cells in tumour hypoxic areas. Fzd6 positive neuroblastoma cells form neurospheres with high efficiency, are resistant to doxorubicin killing and express high levels of mesenchymal markers such as Twist1 and Notch1. Expression of Fzd6 is required for the expression of genes of the noncanonical Wnt pathway and the spheres forming activity. When transplanted into immunodeficient mice, neuroblastoma cells expressing the Fzd6 marker grow more aggressively than their Fzd6 negative counterparts. We conclude that Fzd6 is a new surface marker of aggressive neuroblastoma cells with stem cell-like features.This work was sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, the RICC cancer fund, SPARKS, the Italian Association for Cancer Research, Regione Liguria and the Italian Ministry of Health

Effetto di mineralogia e granulometria sul comportamento di transizione di miscele di sabbia.

Il comportamento di transizione è stato identificato per diverse tipologie di terreno, dai terreni con lacuna granulometrica a limi e sabbie ben gradate. Tale comportamento è caratterizzato dall’esistenza di percorsi di compressione non convergenti e dalla non unicità della linea di stato critico, con localizzazione fortemente dipendente dalla densità iniziale dei campioni. Sebbene in letteratura tale comportamento sia stato inizialmente attribuito a terreni di granulometria intermedia, è stato mostrato come questo sembrerebbe manifestarsi anche in presenza di terreni aventi granulometria mista, con lacuna granulometrica o ben gradati, e per miscele composte da particelle di diversa natura o diversa mineralogia. La diversa tipologia di terreni in cui tale comportamento è stato osservato evidenzia l’elevata difficoltà nell’individuazione dei fattori chiave che lo determinano. Uno studio recente ha mostrato la mancata convergenza dei percorsi di compressione per alcune miscele di sabbia create artificialmente utilizzando materiali di differente mineralogia: sabbia di quarzo e sabbia carbonatica. Con lo scopo di verificare l’effetto della composizione mineralogica, delle dimensioni e resistenza relative dei grani e natura delle particelle sul manifestarsi o meno del comportamento di transizione, la presente nota approfondisce i risultati del precedente studio utilizzando miscele di sabbia caratterizzate da proporzioni variabili delle componenti mineralogiche e granulometriche

Focusing in Multiwell Potentials: Applications to Ion Channels

We investigate out of equilibrium stationary distributions induced by a stochastic dichotomous noise on double and multi-well models for ion channels. Ion-channel dynamics is analyzed both through over-damped Langevin equations and master equations. As a consequence of the external stochastic noise, we prove a non trivial focusing effect, namely the probability distribution is concentrated only on one state of the multi-well model. We also show that this focusing effect, which occurs at physiological conditions, cannot be predicted by a simple master equation approach.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure

Discovering time-lagged rules from microarray data using gene profile classifiers

Background: Gene regulatory networks have an essential role in every process of life. In this regard, the amount of genome-wide time series data is becoming increasingly available, providing the opportunity to discover the time-delayed gene regulatory networks that govern the majority of these molecular processes.Results: This paper aims at reconstructing gene regulatory networks from multiple genome-wide microarray time series datasets. In this sense, a new model-free algorithm called GRNCOP2 (Gene Regulatory Network inference by Combinatorial OPtimization 2), which is a significant evolution of the GRNCOP algorithm, was developed using combinatorial optimization of gene profile classifiers. The method is capable of inferring potential time-delay relationships with any span of time between genes from various time series datasets given as input. The proposed algorithm was applied to time series data composed of twenty yeast genes that are highly relevant for the cell-cycle study, and the results were compared against several related approaches. The outcomes have shown that GRNCOP2 outperforms the contrasted methods in terms of the proposed metrics, and that the results are consistent with previous biological knowledge. Additionally, a genome-wide study on multiple publicly available time series data was performed. In this case, the experimentation has exhibited the soundness and scalability of the new method which inferred highly-related statistically-significant gene associations.Conclusions: A novel method for inferring time-delayed gene regulatory networks from genome-wide time series datasets is proposed in this paper. The method was carefully validated with several publicly available data sets. The results have demonstrated that the algorithm constitutes a usable model-free approach capable of predicting meaningful relationships between genes, revealing the time-trends of gene regulation. © 2011 Gallo et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.Fil: Gallo, Cristian Andrés. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación; ArgentinaFil: Carballido, Jessica Andrea. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación; ArgentinaFil: Ponzoni, Ignacio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Planta Piloto de Ingeniería Química. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Planta Piloto de Ingeniería Química; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación; Argentin

Response dynamics of metal oxide gas sensors working with temperature profile protocols

Abstract In this work we present the analysis of gas sensors working in modulated temperature mode with temperature varying according to exponential law. We integrate conductometric gas sensor based on semiconducting metal oxide layers and an ad-hoc developed electronics to present a sensing system based on a single sensor featuring a degree of selectivity arising from the exploitation of response dynamics features. In particular, a set of parameters is used to summarize the deviation of the response shape from the single exponential law

Detection of microbial contamination in potable water by Nanowire technology

It is well known that the lack of control and sanitation of water in developing countries has cause very significant epidemiological events. In the last decades the situation of water supplies and sanitation has improve all over the world. Despite of it, in the European Union there are a considerable number of confirmed cases of water-borne infections even though the restrictive law. Electronic Noses (ENs) has shown to be a very effective and fast tool for monitoring microbiological spoilage and quality control. The aim of this study was test the ability of a novel EN for the detection of bacterial presence in potable water in cooperation with analytical (pH) and optical (photometer) techniques. The achieved results notably advocate the use of EN in industry laboratories as a very important tool in water quality control

Graphene-zinc oxide based nanomaterials for gas sensing devices

Herein, we report the preparation of a hybrid material by combination of modified graphene and ZnO. The morphological and compositional analyses of the obtained material have been performed by means of scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive X-ray analysis. The functional properties of the prepared structures have been investigated for their application in gas sensor devices. The gas sensing performance of the hybrid material show that the structure can be used for fabrication of chemical sensors, as well as in electronic nose technology. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd