Response to “Comment on ‘optimal exposure biomarkers for nonpersistent chemicals in environmental epidemiology’”

We appreciate the opportunity to respond to the letter from Stahlhut et al. regarding our Brief Communication. We stressed the importance of biospecimen integrity and the potential danger of unrecognized contamination of convenience samples, particularly with ubiquitous environmental chemicals such as bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates

Inhibitors of retrograde trafficking active against ricin and Shiga toxins also protect cells from several viruses, Chlamydiales and Leishmania

Medical countermeasures to treat biothreat agent infections require broad-spectrum therapeutics that do not induce agent resistance. A cell-based high-throughput screen (HTS) against ricin toxin combined with hit optimization allowed selection of a family of compounds that meet these requirements. The hit compound Retro-2 and its derivatives have been demonstrated to be safe in vivo in mice even at high doses. Moreover, Retro-2 is an inhibitor of retrograde transport that affects syntaxin-5- dependent toxins and pathogens. As a consequence, it has a broad-spectrum activity that has been demonstrated both in vitro and in vivo against ricin, Shiga toxin-producing O104:H4 enterohemorrhagic E. coli and Leishmania sp. and in vitro against Ebola, Marburg and poxviruses and Chlamydiales. An effect is anticipated on other toxins or pathogens that use retrograde trafficking and syntaxin-5. Since Retro-2 targets cell components of the host and not directly the pathogen, no selection of resistant pathogens is expected. These lead compounds need now to be developed as drugs for human use

Novel application of normalized pointwise mutual information(NPMI) to mine biomedical literature for gene sets associated with disease: use case in breast carcinogenesis

Data associated with article <i>Novel application of normalized pointwise mutual information (NPMI) to mine</i><div><i>biomedical literature for gene sets associated with disease: use case in breast </i><i>carcinogenesis </i>published in Computational Toxicology Journal accepted on June 18, 2018</div><div><br></div><div><div>S.M. Watford, R.G. Grashow, V.Y. De La Rosa, R.A. Rudel, K.P. Friedman, M.T. Martin, Novel application of normalized pointwise mutual information (NPMI) to mine biomedical literature for gene sets associated with disease: use case in breast carcinogenesis, Computational Toxicology (2018), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comtox.2018.06.003 </div></div

The comP locus of Neisseria gonorrhoeae encodes a type IV prepilin that is dispensable for pilus biogenesis but essential for natural transformation

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/74520/1/j.1365-2958.1999.01269.x.pd