Association of Oncogenic Human Papillomaviruses(HPV 16, 18) with Cervical Intraepithelial Neoplasia and Cervical Cancer

The prevalence of oncogenic human papillomavirus (HPV) type 16 and 18 was investigated by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method in cervical scrapes omitting prior DNA extraction. Samples were obtained from 70 gynecologic inpatients with normal cervix and 160 women with cervical neoplastic lesion ( N = 50 in cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) I, N = 50 in CIN II, N = 30 in CIN III, N = 30 in invasive cervical cancer). Eight members were excluded from the data due to failure of ,f3-g10bin amplification during the PCR procedure. The HPV 16 prevalence rate was 19.1 % (13/68) in the normal group, 38.8 % (19/49) in CIN 1,57.1 % (28/49) in CIN 11,75.9 % (22/29) in CIN III, 88.9% (24/27) in invasive cancer. For HPV type 18, DNA positivity was 4.4 % (3/68), 8.2 % (4/49), 12.2 % (6/49), 13.8 % (4/29), 18.5 % (5/27), respectively. In the whole series a consistent correlation was found between HPV positivity and severity of cervical lesion. HPV 16 was the more prevalent type and about five times more common than HPV 18. These results suggest that HPV 16 and 18 may be strongly associated with carcinogenesis of cervical cancer. The high risk HPV typing by direct PCR from cervical scrapes can be used as a useful marker for the presence of neoplastic cells and also served as a simple tool in identifying women who are at risk of developing dysplasia and cervical cancer

Spontaneous Oscillatory Rhythm in Retinal Activities of Two Retinal Degeneration (rd1 and rd10) Mice

Previously, we reported that besides retinal ganglion cell (RGC) spike, there is ~ 10 Hz oscillatory rhythmic activity in local field potential (LFP) in retinal degeneration model, rd1 mice. The more recently identified rd10 mice have a later onset and slower rate of photoreceptor degeneration than the rd1 mice, providing more therapeutic potential. In this study, before adapting rd10 mice as a new animal model for our electrical stimulation study, we investigated electrical characteristics of rd10 mice. From the raw waveform of recording using 8×8 microelectrode array (MEA) from in vitro-whole mount retina, RGC spikes and LFP were isolated by using different filter setting. Fourier transform was performed for detection of frequency of bursting RGC spikes and oscillatory field potential (OFP). In rd1 mice, ~10 Hz rhythmic burst of spontaneous RGC spikes is always phase-locked with the OFP and this phase-locking property is preserved regardless of postnatal ages. However, in rd10 mice, there is a strong phase-locking tendency between the spectral peak of bursting RGC spikes (~5 Hz) and the first peak of OFP (~5 Hz) across different age groups. But this phase-locking property is not robust as in rd1 retina, but maintains for a few seconds. Since rd1 and rd10 retina show phase-locking property at different frequency (~10 Hz vs. ~5 Hz), we expect different response patterns to electrical stimulus between rd1 and rd10 retina. Therefore, to extract optimal stimulation parameters in rd10 retina, first we might define selection criteria for responding rd10 ganglion cells to electrical stimulus

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Involvement of NF-κB and AP-1 in COX-2 upregulation by human papillomavirus 16 E5 oncoprotein

The human papillomavirus (HPV) E6 and E7 oncoproteins play important roles in cervical carcinogenesis through multiple mechanisms, including upregulation of cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2), which has been shown to be involved in both carcinogenesis and cancer progression. To explore the role of E5 in cervical carcinogenesis, we herein investigated the effect of HPV 16 E5 on COX-2 expression. Our results revealed that E5 induced COX-2 expression through the epidermal growth factor receptor-signaling pathway, with nuclear factor-kappaB (NF-kappa B) and activator protein-1 (AP-1) acting as critical factors in E5-induced COX-2 expression. NF-kappa B inhibition blocked COX-2 expression more potently than inhibition of AP-1. Our findings collectively suggest that the HPV 16 E5 oncoprotein mediates cervical carcinogenesis at least in part via upregulation of COX-2 expression through NF-kappa B and AP-1, with NF-kappa B playing a larger role.Subbaramaiah K, 2007, CANCER RES, V67, P3976, DOI 10.1158/0008-5472.CAN-06-4273Ishikawa H, 2006, INT J RADIAT ONCOL, V66, P1347, DOI 10.1016/j.ijrobp.2006.07.007Kang SB, 2006, CANCER LETT, V237, P305, DOI 10.1016/j.canlet.2005.06.027Kim SH, 2006, CELL MOL LIFE SCI, V63, P930, DOI 10.1007/s00018-005-5561-xKim SH, 2004, J CANCER RES CLIN, V130, P551, DOI 10.1007/s00432-004-0567-6Pruthi RS, 2004, BJU INT, V93, P275, DOI 10.1111/j.1464-410X.2004.04601.xHallak A, 2003, DIGEST DIS SCI, V48, P1998Kim MH, 2003, GYNECOL ONCOL, V90, P83, DOI 10.1016/S0090-8258(03)00224-5Subbaramaiah K, 2003, TRENDS PHARMACOL SCI, V24, P96Subbaramaiah K, 2002, J BIOL CHEM, V277, P18649, DOI 10.1074/jbc.M111415200ZUR HH, 2002, NAT REV CANCER, V2, P342Zhang BY, 2002, J VIROL, V76, P220, DOI 10.1128/JVI.76.1.220-231.2002Anderson WF, 2002, CURR PHARM DESIGN, V8, P1035Surh YJ, 2001, MUTAT RES-FUND MOL M, V480, P243, DOI 10.1016/S0027-5107(01)00183-XGuo YS, 2001, J BIOL CHEM, V276, P22941Gaffney DK, 2001, INT J RADIAT ONCOL, V49, P1213Kulkarni S, 2001, CLIN CANCER RES, V7, P429Crusius K, 1998, EXP CELL RES, V241, P76Ristimaki A, 1997, CANCER RES, V57, P1276Luque I, 1997, SEMIN CANCER BIOL, V8, P103ZUR HH, 1994, ANNU REV MICROBIOL, V48, P427STRAIGHT SW, 1993, J VIROL, V67, P4521WERNESS BA, 1990, SCIENCE, V248, P76HAWLEYNELSON P, 1989, EMBO J, V8, P3905KAUR P, 1989, J GEN VIROL, V70, P1261DYSON N, 1989, SCIENCE, V243, P9341