Age validation in Octopus vulgaris beaks across full ontogenetic range. Beaks as recorders of live-events in octopuses

En prensa

Immunogenic evaluation of collagen and gelatin from marine origin envisioning tissue engineering-related applications

Workshop MicSeaOnMed (EEA GRANT) Blue Biotechnology: from the academy to the entrepreneur sector, Guimarães, Portugal, 24 May 2022N

Study of the immunologic response of marine-derived collagen and gelatin extracts for tissue engineering applications

9 pages, 3 figures, 2 tablesThe host immunologic response to a specific material is a critical aspect when considering it for clinical implementation. Collagen and gelatin extracted from marine sources have been proposed as biomaterials for tissue engineering applications, but there is a lack of information in the literature about their immunogenicity. In this work, we evaluated the immune response to collagen and/or gelatin from blue shark and codfish, previously extracted and characterized. After endotoxin evaluation, bone marrow-derived macrophages were exposed to the materials and a panel of pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines were evaluated both for protein quantification and gene expression. Then, the impact of those materials in the host was evaluated through peritoneal injection in C57BL/6 mice. The results suggested shark collagen as the less immunogenic material, inducing low expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines as well as inducible nitric oxide synthase (encoded by Nos2) and high expression of Arginase 1 (encoded by Arg1). Although shark gelatin appeared to be the material with higher pro-inflammatory expression, it also presents a high expression of IL-10 (anti-inflammatory cytokine) and Arginase (both markers for M2-like macrophages). When injected in the peritoneal cavity of mice, our materials demonstrated a transient recruitment of neutrophil, being almost non-existent after 24 hours of injection. Based on these findings, the studied collagenous materials can be considered interesting biomaterial candidates for regenerative medicine as they may induce an activation of the M2-like macrophage population, which is involved in suppressing the inflammatory processes promoting tissue remodelingThe authors would like to acknowledge to European Union for the financial support under the scope of European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the projects 0302_CVMAR_I_1_P and 0474_BLUEBIOLAB_1_E (program INTERREG España-Portugal 2014/2020). Funding from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology for the grant of A. L. Alves (Ana Luísa Alves) under Doctoral Programme Do*Mar (PD/BD/127995/2016) is also acknowledgedPeer reviewe

Inferring the Regulatory Network of the miRNA-mediated Response to Biotic and Abiotic Stress in Melon

[EN] Background: MiRNAs have emerged as key regulators of stress response in plants, suggesting their potential as candidates for knock-in/out to improve stress tolerance in agricultural crops. Although diverse assays have been performed, systematic and detailed studies of miRNA expression and function during exposure to multiple environments in crops are limited. Results: Here, we present such pioneering analysis in melon plants in response to seven biotic and abiotic stress conditions. Deep-sequencing and computational approaches have identified twenty-four known miRNAs whose expression was significantly altered under at least one stress condition, observing that down-regulation was preponderant. Additionally, miRNA function was characterized by high scale degradome assays and quantitative RNA measurements over the intended target mRNAs, providing mechanistic insight. Clustering analysis provided evidence that eight miRNAs showed a broad response range under the stress conditions analyzed, whereas another eight miRNAs displayed a narrow response range. Transcription factors were predominantly targeted by stressresponsive miRNAs in melon. Furthermore, our results show that the miRNAs that are down-regulated upon stress predominantly have as targets genes that are known to participate in the stress response by the plant, whereas the miRNAs that are up-regulated control genes linked to development. Conclusion: Altogether, this high-resolution analysis of miRNA-target interactions, combining experimental and computational work, Illustrates the close interplay between miRNAs and the response to diverse environmental conditions, in melon.The authors thank Dr. A. Monforte for providing melon seeds and Dra. B. Pico (Cucurbits Group - COMAV) for providing melon seeds and Monosporascus isolate respectively. This work was supported by grants AGL2016-79825-R, BIO2014-61826-EXP (GG), and BFU2015-66894-P (GR) from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (co-supported by FEDER). The funders had no role in the experiment design, data analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Sanz-Carbonell, A.; Marques Romero, MC.; Bustamante-González, AJ.; Fares Riaño, MA.; Rodrigo Tarrega, G.; Gomez, GG. (2019). Inferring the Regulatory Network of the miRNA-mediated Response to Biotic and Abiotic Stress in Melon. BMC Plant Biology. 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12870-019-1679-0S117Zhang B. MicroRNAs: a new target for improving plant tolerance to abiotic stress. J Exp Bot. 2015;66:1749–61.Zhu JK. Abiotic stress signaling and responses in plants. Cell. 2016;167:313–24.Bielach A, Hrtyan M, Tognetti VB. Plants under stress: involvement of auxin and Cytokinin. Int J Mol Sci. 2017;4(18):7.Zarattini M, Forlani G. Toward unveiling the mechanisms for transcriptional regulation of proline biosynthesis in the plant cell response to biotic and abiotic stress conditions. Front Plant Sci. 2017;2(8):927.Nolan T, Chen J, Yin Y. Cross-talk of Brassinosteroid signaling in controlling growth and stress responses. Biochem J. 2017;474:2641–61.Mittler R. Abiotic stress, the field environment and stress combinations. Trends Plant Sci. 2006;11:15–9.Djami-Tchatchou AT, Sanan-Mishra N, Ntushelo K, Dubery IA. Functional roles of microRNAs in Agronomically important plants—potential as targets for crop improvement and protection. Front Plant Sci. 2017;8:378.Baxter A, Mittler R, Suzuki N. ROS as key players in plant stress signaling. J Exp Bot. 2014;65:1229–40.Golldack D, Li C, Mohan H, Probst N. Tolerance to drought and salt stress in plants: unraveling the signaling networks. Front Plant Sci. 2014;5:151.Lee SH, Li HW, Koh KW, Chuang HY, Chen YR, Lin CS, Chan MT. MSRB7 reverses oxidation of GSTF2/3 to confer tolerance of Arabidopsis thaliana to oxidative stress. J Exp Bot. 2014;65:5049–62.Carrera J, Rodrigo G, Jaramillo A, Elena SF. Reverse-engineering the Arabidopsis thaliana transcriptional network under changing environmental conditions. Genome Biol. 2009;10(9):R96.Shriram V, Kumar V, Devarumath RM, Khare TS, Wani SH. MicroRNAs as potential targets for abiotic stress tolerance in plants. Front Plant Sci. 2016;7:817.Sunkar R, Chinnusamy V, Zhu J, Zhu JH. Small RNAs as big players in plant abiotic stress responses and nutrient deprivation. Trends Plant Sci. 2007;12:301–9.Kumar R. Role of microRNAs in biotic and abiotic stress responses in crop plants. Appl Biochem Biotechnology. 2014;174:93–115.Reis RS, Eamens AL, Waterhouse PM. Missing pieces in the puzzle of plant MicroRNAs. Trends Plant Sci. 2015;20:721–8.Bartel DP. MicroRNAs: genomics, biogenesis, mechanism, and function. Cell. 2004;116:281–97.Borges F, Martienssen RA. The expanding world of small RNAs in plants. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol. 2015;16:727–41.Axtell MJ, Bartel DP. Antiquity of microRNAs and their targets in land-plants. Plant Cell. 2005;17:1658–73.Cuperus JT, Fahlgren N, Carrington JC. Evolution and functional diversification of MIRNA genes. Plant Cell. 2011;23:431–42.Cui J, You C, Chen X. The evolution of microRNAs in plants. Current Opinions in Plant Biology. 2016;35:61–7.Sunkar R, Li YF, Jagadeeswaran G. Functions of microRNAs in plant stress responses. Trends Plant Sci. 2012;17:196–203.Zhang T, Zhao YL, Zhao JH, Wang S, Jin Y, Chen ZQ, Fang YY, Hua CL, Ding SW, Guo HS. Cotton plants export microRNAs to inhibit virulence gene expression in a fungal pathogen. Nature Plants. 2016;2(10):16153.Chaloner T, vanKan JA, Grant-Downton R. RNA ‘Information Warfare’ in pathogenic and mutualistic interactions. Trends Plant Sci. 2016;9:738–48.Niu D, Wang Z, Wang S, Qiao L Zhao H. Profiling of small RNAs involved in plant-pathogen interactions. Methods Molecular Biology. 2015;1287:61–79.Wei S, Wang L, Zhang Y, Huang D. Identification of early response genes to salt stress in roots of melon (Cucumis melo L.) seedlings. Molecular Biology Report. 2013;40:2915–26.Clepet C, Joobeur T, Zheng Y, Jublot D, Huang M, Truniger V, et al. Analysis of expressed sequence tags generated from full-length enriched cDNA libraries of melon. BMC Genomics. 2011;12:252.González M, Xu M, Esteras C, Roig C, Monforte AJ, Troadec C, et al. Towards a TILLING platform for functional genomics in Piel de Sapo melons. BMC Research Notes. 2011;4:289.García MJ. The genome of melon (Cucumis melo L.). Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012;109:11872–7.Pollack FG, Uecker FA. Monosporascus cannonballus: an unusual ascomycete in cantaloupe roots. Mycologia. 1974;66:346–9.Kofalvi S, Marcos J, Cañizares MC, Pallas V, Candresse T. Hop stunt viroid (HSVd) sequence variants from Prunus species: evidence for recombination between HSVd isolates. J Gen Virol. 1997;78:3177–86.Sattar S, Song Y, Anstead J, Sunkar R, Thompson G. Cucumis melo expression profile during aphid herbivory in a resistant and susceptible interaction. Mol Plant-Microbe Interact. 2012;25:839–48.Herranz MC, Navarro JA, Sommen E, Pallas V. Comparative analysis among the small RNA populations of source, sink and conductive tissues in two different plant-virus pathosystems. BMC Genomics. 2015;16:117.Jagadeeswaran G, Nimmakayala P, Zheng Y, Gowdu K, Reddy UK, Sunkar R. Characterization of the small RNA component of leaves and fruits from four different cucurbit species. BMC Genomics. 2012;13:329.Kozomara A, Griffiths-Jones S. miRBase: annotating high confidence microRNAs using deep sequencing data. Nucleic Acids Res. 2014;42:D68–73.Barciszewska-Pacak M, Milanowska K, Knop K, Bielewicz D, Nuc P, Plewka P, et al. Arabidopsis microRNA expression regulation in a wide range of abiotic stress responses. Front Plant Sci. 2015;6:410.Zhou L, Liu Y, Liu Z, Kong D, Duan M, Luo L. Genome-wide identification and analysis of drought-responsive microRNAs in Oryza sativa. J Exp Bot. 2010;61:4157–68.Samad A, Sajad M, Nazaruddin N, Fauzi I, Murad A, Zainal Z, Ismanizan Ismail I. MicroRNA and transcription factor: key players in plant regulatory network. Front Plant Sci. 2017;8:565.Danisman S. TCP transcription factors at the Interface between environmental challenges and the Plant’s growth responses. Front Plant Sci. 2016;7:1930.Llave C, Xie Z, Kasschau KD, Carrington JC. Cleavage of scarecrow-like mRNA targets directed by a class of Arabidopsis miRNA. Science. 2002;297:2053–6.Gupta OP, Meena NL, Sharma I, et al. Differential regulation of microRNAs in response to osmotic, salt and cold stresses in wheat. Mol Biol Rep. 2014;41:4623.Wang M, Wang Q, Zhang B. 2013. Response of miRNAs and their targets to salt and drought stresses in cotton (Gossypium hirsutum ). Gene 30: 26–32.Savageau MA. Demand theory of gene regulation. I. Quantitative development of the theory. Genetics. 1998;149:1665–76.Negrão S, Schmöckel SM, Tester M. Evaluating physiological responses of plants to salinity stress. Ann Bot. 2017;119:1–11.Barabasi AL, Oltvai ZN. Network biology: understanding the cell's functional organization. Nat Rev Genet. 2004;5(2):101–13.Megraw M, Cumbie J, Ivanchenko M, Filichkin S. Small genetic circuits and MicroRNAs: big players in polymerase II transcriptional control in plants. Plant Cell. 2016;28:286–303.Wang St, Sun Xl, Hoshino Y, Yu Y, Jia B, et al. 2014. MicroRNA319 Positively Regulates Cold Tolerance by Targeting OsPCF6 and OsTCP21 in Rice (Oryza sativa). PLoS ONE 9(3): e91357.Fang Y, Xie K, Xiong L. Conserved miR164-targeted NAC genes regulate drought resistence in rice. J Exp Bot. 2014;65:2119–35.Goossens A, de la Fuente N, Forment J, Serrano R, Portillo F. Regulation of yeast H+-ATPase by protein kinases belonging to a family dedicated to activation of plasma membrane transporters. Mol Cell Biol. 2000;20:7654–61.Roig C, Fita A, Ríos G, Hammond JP, Nuez F, Picó B. Root transcriptional responses of two melon genotypes with contrasting resistance to Monosporascus cannonballus (Pollack et Uecker) infection. BMC Genomics. 2012;13:601.Martin M. Cutadapt removes adapter sequences from high-throughput sequencing reads. EMBnet Journal. 2011;17:10–2.R Core Team 2013. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. ISBN 3–900051–07-0, URL http://www.R-project.org /.Tarazona S, Furió-Tarí P, Turrà D, Di Pietro A, Nueda MJ, Ferrer A, Conesa A. Data quality aware analysis of differential expression in RNA-seq with NOISeq R/bioc package. Nucleic Acids Res. 2015;43:e140.Love MI, Huber W, Anders S. Moderated estimation of fold change and dispersion for RNA-seq data with DESeq2. Genome Biol. 2014;15(12):550.Robinson MD, McCarthy DJ, Smyth GK. edgeR: a Bioconductor package for differential expression analysis of digital gene expression data. Bioinformatics. 2010;26:139–40.Czimmerer Z, Hulvely J, Simandi Z, Varallyay E, Havelda Z, Szabo E, Balint BL. A versatile method to design stem-loop primer-based quantitative PCR assays for detecting small regulatory RNA molecules. PLoS One. 2013;8(1):e55168.Zhai J, Arikit S, Simon S, Kingham B, Meyers B. Rapid construction of parallel analysis of RNA end (PARE) libraries for Illumina sequencing. Methods. 2014;67:84–90.Pink S, Vogel S. 2014. D3NETWORK: Stata module to create network visualizations using D3.js http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:boc:bocode:s457844 .Csardi G, Nepusz T. The igraph software package for complex network research. Int J Complex Systems. 2006;1695:1–9

Pan-Cancer Analysis of lncRNA Regulation Supports Their Targeting of Cancer Genes in Each Tumor Context

Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are commonly dys-regulated in tumors, but only a handful are known toplay pathophysiological roles in cancer. We inferredlncRNAs that dysregulate cancer pathways, onco-genes, and tumor suppressors (cancer genes) bymodeling their effects on the activity of transcriptionfactors, RNA-binding proteins, and microRNAs in5,185 TCGA tumors and 1,019 ENCODE assays.Our predictions included hundreds of candidateonco- and tumor-suppressor lncRNAs (cancerlncRNAs) whose somatic alterations account for thedysregulation of dozens of cancer genes and path-ways in each of 14 tumor contexts. To demonstrateproof of concept, we showed that perturbations tar-geting OIP5-AS1 (an inferred tumor suppressor) andTUG1 and WT1-AS (inferred onco-lncRNAs) dysre-gulated cancer genes and altered proliferation ofbreast and gynecologic cancer cells. Our analysis in-dicates that, although most lncRNAs are dysregu-lated in a tumor-specific manner, some, includingOIP5-AS1, TUG1, NEAT1, MEG3, and TSIX, synergis-tically dysregulate cancer pathways in multiple tumorcontexts

Genomic, Pathway Network, and Immunologic Features Distinguishing Squamous Carcinomas

This integrated, multiplatform PanCancer Atlas study co-mapped and identified distinguishing molecular features of squamous cell carcinomas (SCCs) from five sites associated with smokin

Pan-cancer Alterations of the MYC Oncogene and Its Proximal Network across the Cancer Genome Atlas

Although theMYConcogene has been implicated incancer, a systematic assessment of alterations ofMYC, related transcription factors, and co-regulatoryproteins, forming the proximal MYC network (PMN),across human cancers is lacking. Using computa-tional approaches, we define genomic and proteo-mic features associated with MYC and the PMNacross the 33 cancers of The Cancer Genome Atlas.Pan-cancer, 28% of all samples had at least one ofthe MYC paralogs amplified. In contrast, the MYCantagonists MGA and MNT were the most frequentlymutated or deleted members, proposing a roleas tumor suppressors.MYCalterations were mutu-ally exclusive withPIK3CA,PTEN,APC,orBRAFalterations, suggesting that MYC is a distinct onco-genic driver. Expression analysis revealed MYC-associated pathways in tumor subtypes, such asimmune response and growth factor signaling; chro-matin, translation, and DNA replication/repair wereconserved pan-cancer. This analysis reveals insightsinto MYC biology and is a reference for biomarkersand therapeutics for cancers with alterations ofMYC or the PMN

Spatial Organization and Molecular Correlation of Tumor-Infiltrating Lymphocytes Using Deep Learning on Pathology Images

Beyond sample curation and basic pathologic characterization, the digitized H&E-stained images of TCGA samples remain underutilized. To highlight this resource, we present mappings of tumorinfiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) based on H&E images from 13 TCGA tumor types. These TIL maps are derived through computational staining using a convolutional neural network trained to classify patches of images. Affinity propagation revealed local spatial structure in TIL patterns and correlation with overall survival. TIL map structural patterns were grouped using standard histopathological parameters. These patterns are enriched in particular T cell subpopulations derived from molecular measures. TIL densities and spatial structure were differentially enriched among tumor types, immune subtypes, and tumor molecular subtypes, implying that spatial infiltrate state could reflect particular tumor cell aberration states. Obtaining spatial lymphocytic patterns linked to the rich genomic characterization of TCGA samples demonstrates one use for the TCGA image archives with insights into the tumor-immune microenvironment

N-glycosylation of mouse TRAIL-R and human TRAIL-R1 enhances TRAIL-induced death.

APO2L/TRAIL (TNF-related apoptosis-inducing ligand) induces death of tumor cells through two agonist receptors, TRAIL-R1 and TRAIL-R2. We demonstrate here that N-linked glycosylation (N-glyc) plays also an important regulatory role for TRAIL-R1-mediated and mouse TRAIL receptor (mTRAIL-R)-mediated apoptosis, but not for TRAIL-R2, which is devoid of N-glycans. Cells expressing N-glyc-defective mutants of TRAIL-R1 and mouse TRAIL-R were less sensitive to TRAIL than their wild-type counterparts. Defective apoptotic signaling by N-glyc-deficient TRAIL receptors was associated with lower TRAIL receptor aggregation and reduced DISC formation, but not with reduced TRAIL-binding affinity. Our results also indicate that TRAIL receptor N-glyc impacts immune evasion strategies. The cytomegalovirus (CMV) UL141 protein, which restricts cell-surface expression of human TRAIL death receptors, binds with significant higher affinity TRAIL-R1 lacking N-glyc, suggesting that this sugar modification may have evolved as a counterstrategy to prevent receptor inhibition by UL141. Altogether our findings demonstrate that N-glyc of TRAIL-R1 promotes TRAIL signaling and restricts virus-mediated inhibition

Overexpression of circulating MiR-30b-5p identifies advanced breast cancer

Breast cancer (BrC) remains the leading cause of cancer-related death in women, mainly due to recurrent and/or metastatic events, entailing the need for biomarkers predictive of progression to advanced disease. MicroRNAs hold promise as noninvasive cancer biomarkers due to their inherent stability and resilience in tissues and bodily fluids. There is increasing evidence that specific microRNAs play a functional role at different steps of the metastatic cascade, behaving as signaling mediators to enable the colonization of a specific organ. Herein, we aimed to evaluate the biomarker performance of microRNAs previously reported as associated with prognosis for predicting BrC progression in liquid biopsies. Background Breast cancer (BrC) remains the leading cause of cancer-related death in women, mainly due to recurrent and/or metastatic events, entailing the need for biomarkers predictive of progression to advanced disease. MicroRNAs hold promise as noninvasive cancer biomarkers due to their inherent stability and resilience in tissues and bodily fluids. There is increasing evidence that specific microRNAs play a functional role at different steps of the metastatic cascade, behaving as signaling mediators to enable the colonization of a specific organ. Herein, we aimed to evaluate the biomarker performance of microRNAs previously reported as associated with prognosis for predicting BrC progression in liquid biopsies. Methods Selected microRNAs were assessed using a quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction in a testing cohort of formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded primary (n = 16) and metastatic BrC tissues (n = 22). Then, miR-30b-5p and miR-200b-3p were assessed in a validation cohort #1 of formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded primary (n = 82) and metastatic BrC tissues (n = 93), whereas only miR-30b-5p was validated on a validation cohort #2 of liquid biopsies from BrC patients with localized (n = 20) and advanced (n = 25) disease. ROC curve was constructed to evaluate prognostic performance. Results MiR-30b-5p was differentially expressed in primary tumors and paired metastatic lesions, with bone metastases displaying significantly higher miR-30b-5p expression levels, paralleling the corresponding primary tumors. Interestingly, patients with advanced disease disclosed increased circulating miR-30b-5p expression compared to patients with localized BrC. Conclusions MiR-30b-5p might identify BrC patients at higher risk of disease progression, thus, providing a useful clinical tool for patients’ monitoring, entailing earlier and more effective treatment. Nonetheless, validation in larger multicentric cohorts is mandatory to confirm these findings.Research Center of Portuguese Oncology Institute of Porto (PI 74-CI-IPOP-19-2016). JL and CSG are supported by a PhD fellowship from FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (SFRH/ BD/132751/2017 and SFRH/BD/92786/2013, respectively). SS is supported by a PhD fellowship IPO/ESTIMA-1 NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000027. BMC is funded by FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (IF/00601/2012