Evi1 Counteracts Anti-Leukemic and Stem Cell Inhibitory Effects of All-Trans Retinoic Acid on Flt3-ITD/Npm1c-Driven Acute Myeloid Leukemia Cells.

All-trans retinoic acid (atRA) has a dramatic impact on the survival of patients with acute promyelocytic leukemia, but its therapeutic value in other types of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) has so far remained unclear. Given that AML is a stem cell-driven disease, recent studies have addressed the effects of atRA on leukemic stem cells (LSCs). atRA promoted stemness of MLL-AF9-driven AML in an Evi1-dependent manner but had the opposite effect in Flt3-ITD/Nup98-Hoxd13-driven AML. Overexpression of the stem cell-associated transcription factor EVI1 predicts a poor prognosis in AML, and is observed in different genetic subtypes, including cytogenetically normal AML. Here, we therefore investigated the effects of Evi1 in a mouse model for cytogenetically normal AML, which rests on the combined activity of Flt3-ITD and Npm1c mutations. Experimental expression of Evi1 on this background strongly promoted disease aggressiveness. atRA inhibited leukemia cell viability and stem cell-related properties, and these effects were counteracted by overexpression of Evi1. These data further underscore the complexity of the responsiveness of AML LSCs to atRA and point out the need for additional investigations which may lay a foundation for a precision medicine-based use of retinoids in AML

SAT-Based Synthesis Methods for Safety Specs

Automatic synthesis of hardware components from declarative specifications is an ambitious endeavor in computer aided design. Existing synthesis algorithms are often implemented with Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs), inheriting their scalability limitations. Instead of BDDs, we propose several new methods to synthesize finite-state systems from safety specifications using decision procedures for the satisfiability of quantified and unquantified Boolean formulas (SAT-, QBF- and EPR-solvers). The presented approaches are based on computational learning, templates, or reduction to first-order logic. We also present an efficient parallelization, and optimizations to utilize reachability information and incremental solving. Finally, we compare all methods in an extensive case study. Our new methods outperform BDDs and other existing work on some classes of benchmarks, and our parallelization achieves a super-linear speedup. This is an extended version of [5], featuring an additional appendix.Comment: Extended version of a paper at VMCAI'1

On QBF Proofs and Preprocessing

QBFs (quantified boolean formulas), which are a superset of propositional formulas, provide a canonical representation for PSPACE problems. To overcome the inherent complexity of QBF, significant effort has been invested in developing QBF solvers as well as the underlying proof systems. At the same time, formula preprocessing is crucial for the application of QBF solvers. This paper focuses on a missing link in currently-available technology: How to obtain a certificate (e.g. proof) for a formula that had been preprocessed before it was given to a solver? The paper targets a suite of commonly-used preprocessing techniques and shows how to reconstruct certificates for them. On the negative side, the paper discusses certain limitations of the currently-used proof systems in the light of preprocessing. The presented techniques were implemented and evaluated in the state-of-the-art QBF preprocessor bloqqer.Comment: LPAR 201

Incremental QBF Solving

We consider the problem of incrementally solving a sequence of quantified Boolean formulae (QBF). Incremental solving aims at using information learned from one formula in the process of solving the next formulae in the sequence. Based on a general overview of the problem and related challenges, we present an approach to incremental QBF solving which is application-independent and hence applicable to QBF encodings of arbitrary problems. We implemented this approach in our incremental search-based QBF solver DepQBF and report on implementation details. Experimental results illustrate the potential benefits of incremental solving in QBF-based workflows.Comment: revision (camera-ready, to appear in the proceedings of CP 2014, LNCS, Springer

CCancer: a bird’s eye view on gene lists reported in cancer-related studies

CCancer is an automatically collected database of gene lists, which were reported mostly by experimental studies in various biological and clinical contexts. At the moment, the database covers 3369 gene lists extracted from 2644 papers published in ∼80 peer-reviewed journals. As input, CCancer accepts a gene list. An enrichment analyses is implemented to generate, as output, a highly informative survey over recently published studies that report gene lists, which significantly intersect with the query gene list. A report on gene pairs from the input list which were frequently reported together by other biological studies is also provided. CCancer is freely available at http://mips.helmholtz-muenchen.de/proj/ccancer

The Role of Geography in the Information Economy: The Case of Multimedia

In der Diskussion um die Zukunft der Arbeit in der Informationsgesellschaft findet sich sehr häufig die Ansicht vertreten, dass durch die rapide fortschreitende Globalisierung wirtschaftliche Strukturen und Abläufe zunehmend enträumlicht werden und ihre regionale Einbettung immer mehr an Bedeutung verliert. Der Beitrag versucht diese Behauptung zu relativieren. Er tut dies beispielhaft mittels einer Analyse der Multimedia-Industrie. Untersucht wird die räumliche Verteilung der Multimedia-Produzenten sowie die Unternehmens- und Beschäftigungsstrukture

Expressions 1986

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