The Ursinus Weekly, October 15, 1951

Henning W. Prentis slated as speaker at Founders\u27 Day program, October 24 • Chaplain first Forum speaker on October 31 • Curtain Club adds sixty new members at annual party • New preceptress in charge of 646 Main • 300 books added to Library collection • Piano recital date moved to Nov. 8 • Cub and Key honor given to Jay Kern • Y plans weekend trip, arranges fireside chats • Date announced for civil service exam • WAA to sell socks, Christmas cards • Soph class plans year; Informal dance Nov. 3 • French Club discusses plans • Rev. Creager to speak • Juniors to sponsor G. E. House of Magic • German Club schedules trips and welcomes Inge Rudloff • 12 students become psychology majors • Spirit Committee fans campus enthusiasm • Editorials: No complaints; British voters go to polls; McCarthy vs. free speech • Letter to the editor • Dorm initiations give jokers a release • So the frosh love customs? Scribes of 1955 reveal all • Dr. Miller\u27s family hits high spots in European tour • Four teams open intradorm football • Hockey and soccer are overshadowed, but fortunately have excellent leaders • Dickinson hands Ursinus season\u27s second defeat • Dr. Roelofs keeps athletes in shape • Garnet eleven will play host to Bears Saturday • Alumnae team is undefeated; Faces Owlettes on Saturday • Harry Spangler succeeds Gerry Seeders as head coach of Ursinus court team • Bears defeated by Stevens Tech • Rittenhouse, Feldt to manage girls intramural program • Beardwood Chemical Society hears lecture on narcotics • Lit reading givenhttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/weekly/1523/thumbnail.jp

The Ursinus Weekly, November 3, 1952

Rushees sign sorority bids Saturday morn • Girls plan fashion show • Dr. Wagner gives med school advice • Freshmen hear Dr. Helfferich • Students discuss social life ideas at fireside chat • WSGA enforces poster removal • Quartet to sing on TV • Music Club to hold Sadie Hawkins Day square dance • Seven articles, four books left unclaimed in Dean\u27s office • Campus favors Eisenhower by majority of 151 votes • Campus Chest to hold poll this Tuesday • Group to give play Tuesday • Bus. Ad. club hears H. D. Leopold speak • Ten new members added to Weekly news and feature staff • Bazaar, ball held • Editorials: Vote is not I.Q. test; Positive ideas needed • Letters to the editor • Adlai apologia • Eisenhower: Man of integrity, character • Republican foreign policy unrealistic • Reiss, McConnell clash; Debate Ike - Adlai issue • Isolina Torres will teach in native Honduras • Woes of practice teachers, lesson plans and little devils • Belles blank Bryn Mawr • Third team is victorious, 2-0 • Ursinus Bears win in last 20 seconds: Wagner defeated 12-7 on Dick Glock\u27s aerial to Swett in thrilling climax • Bears to place streak on line • Ursinus girls sparkle in all college tournament • Merrifield, Rittenhouse and Seifert selected • Curtis beats Brodbeck, 6-0 • Engagements announced • French Club to meethttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/weekly/1504/thumbnail.jp

Insensitivity of chloroplast gene expression to DNA methylation

Presence and possible functions of DNA methylation in plastid genomes of higher plants have been highly controversial. While a number of studies presented evidence for the occurrence of both cytosine and adenine methylation in plastid genomes and proposed a role of cytosine methylation in the transcriptional regulation of plastid genes, several recent studies suggested that at least cytosine methylation may be absent from higher plant plastid genomes. To test if either adenine or cytosine methylation can play a regulatory role in plastid gene expression, we have introduced cyanobacterial genes for adenine and cytosine DNA methyltransferases (methylases) into the tobacco plastid genome by chloroplast transformation. Using DNA cleavage with methylation-sensitive and methylation-dependent restriction endonucleases, we show that the plastid genomes in the transplastomic plants are efficiently methylated. All transplastomic lines are phenotypically indistinguishable from wild-type plants and, moreover, show no alterations in plastid gene expression. Our data indicate that the expression of plastid genes is not sensitive to DNA methylation and, hence, suggest that DNA methylation is unlikely to be involved in the transcriptional regulation of plastid gene expression

The SysteMHC Atlas project.

Mass spectrometry (MS)-based immunopeptidomics investigates the repertoire of peptides presented at the cell surface by major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecules. The broad clinical relevance of MHC-associated peptides, e.g. in precision medicine, provides a strong rationale for the large-scale generation of immunopeptidomic datasets and recent developments in MS-based peptide analysis technologies now support the generation of the required data. Importantly, the availability of diverse immunopeptidomic datasets has resulted in an increasing need to standardize, store and exchange this type of data to enable better collaborations among researchers, to advance the field more efficiently and to establish quality measures required for the meaningful comparison of datasets. Here we present the SysteMHC Atlas (https://systemhcatlas.org), a public database that aims at collecting, organizing, sharing, visualizing and exploring immunopeptidomic data generated by MS. The Atlas includes raw mass spectrometer output files collected from several laboratories around the globe, a catalog of context-specific datasets of MHC class I and class II peptides, standardized MHC allele-specific peptide spectral libraries consisting of consensus spectra calculated from repeat measurements of the same peptide sequence, and links to other proteomics and immunology databases. The SysteMHC Atlas project was created and will be further expanded using a uniform and open computational pipeline that controls the quality of peptide identifications and peptide annotations. Thus, the SysteMHC Atlas disseminates quality controlled immunopeptidomic information to the public domain and serves as a community resource toward the generation of a high-quality comprehensive map of the human immunopeptidome and the support of consistent measurement of immunopeptidomic sample cohorts

Metastatic chromophobe renal cell carcinoma treated with targeted therapies: A Renal Cross Channel Group study

Background: Treatment of non–clear cell renal cell carcinoma (RCC) remains controversial despite several recent prospective studies of targeted therapies (TT). Often Vascular Endothelial growth Factor (VEGF) and Mammalian Target of Rapamycin (mTOR) inhibitors are used, extrapolating the data from use of these agents in clear cell RCC. Methods: We performed a retrospective data analysis within the Renal Cross Channel Group to determine metastatic chromophobe RCC (mChRCC) outcomes in the TT era. The end-points were overall response, overall survival (OS) and time to treatment failure (TTF). The two latter were estimated using the Kaplan–Meier method. Results: 91 mChRCC patients from 26 centres were included. Median follow-up from the date of first metastasis was 6.1 years (range: 0–13.9). Median OS was 37.9 months (95% confidence interval [CI]: 21.4–46.8) from the diagnosis of metastatic disease. Among the 61 patients who received TT, 50 (82%) were treated with anti-angiogenic (AA) and 11 with mTOR inhibitors. Median TTF and OS in patients receiving a first line of AA was 8.7 months (95% CI: 5.2–10.9) and 22.9 months (95% CI: 17.8–49.2) versus 1.9 months (95% CI: 1.0–6.0) and 3.2 months (95% CI: 2.3–not evaluable) with mTOR inhibitors, respectively. A stratified log-rank test was used to compare AA and mTOR inhibitors TT, while controlling the effect of the International Metastatic RCC Database Consortium risk group and no significant difference between AA and mTOR inhibitors was observed for TTF (p = 0.26) or for OS (p = 0.55). Conclusion: We report the largest retrospective cohort of patients with mChRCC treated with TT and no significant difference between AA and mTOR inhibitors was observed for TTF and OS

Massively Parallel Sequencing and Analysis of the Necator americanus Transcriptome

The blood-feeding hookworm Necator americanus infects hundreds of millions of people. To elucidate fundamental molecular biological aspects of this hookworm, the transcriptome of adult Necator americanus was studied using next-generation sequencing and in silico analyses. Contigs (n = 19,997) were assembled from the sequence data; 6,771 of them had known orthologues in the free-living nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, and most encoded proteins with WD40 repeats (10.6%), proteinase inhibitors (7.8%) or calcium-binding EF-hand proteins (6.7%). Bioinformatic analyses inferred that C. elegans homologues are involved mainly in biological pathways linked to ribosome biogenesis (70%), oxidative phosphorylation (63%) and/or proteases (60%). Comparative analyses of the transcriptomes of N. americanus and the canine hookworm, Ancylostoma caninum, revealed qualitative and quantitative differences. Essential molecules were predicted using a combination of orthology mapping and functional data available for C. elegans. Further analyses allowed the prioritization of 18 predicted drug targets which did not have human homologues. These candidate targets were inferred to be linked to mitochondrial metabolism or amino acid synthesis. This investigation provides detailed insights into the transcriptome of the adult stage of N. americanus

Metastatic chromophobe renal cell carcinoma treated with targeted therapies: A Renal Cross Channel Group study

$\textbf{Background}$ Treatment of non–clear cell renal cell carcinoma (RCC) remains controversial despite several recent prospective studies of targeted therapies (TT). Often Vascular Endothelial growth Factor (VEGF) and Mammalian Target of Rapamycin (mTOR) inhibitors are used, extrapolating the data from use of these agents in clear cell RCC. $\textbf{Methods}$ We performed a retrospective data analysis within the Renal Cross Channel Group to determine metastatic chromophobe RCC (mChRCC) outcomes in the TT era. The end-points were overall response, overall survival (OS) and time to treatment failure (TTF). The two latter were estimated using the Kaplan–Meier method. $\textbf{Results}$ 91 mChRCC patients from 26 centres were included. Median follow-up from the date of first metastasis was 6.1 years (range: 0–13.9). Median OS was 37.9 months (95% confidence interval [CI]: 21.4–46.8) from the diagnosis of metastatic disease. Among the 61 patients who received TT, 50 (82%) were treated with anti-angiogenic (AA) and 11 with mTOR inhibitors. Median TTF and OS in patients receiving a first line of AA was 8.7 months (95% CI: 5.2–10.9) and 22.9 months (95% CI: 17.8–49.2) versus 1.9 months (95% CI: 1.0–6.0) and 3.2 months (95% CI: 2.3–not evaluable) with mTOR inhibitors, respectively. A stratified log-rank test was used to compare AA and mTOR inhibitors TT, while controlling the effect of the International Metastatic RCC Database Consortium risk group and no significant difference between AA and mTOR inhibitors was observed for TTF (p = 0.26) or for OS (p = 0.55). $\textbf{Conclusion}$ We report the largest retrospective cohort of patients with mChRCC treated with TT and no significant difference between AA and mTOR inhibitors was observed for TTF and OS

Rats with Features of Metabolic Syndrome Exhibit Sex-specific Differences in Nociception

Introduction: Pain processing is polygenically modulated and varies as a function of sex, body habitus, modality, and genotype. Human pain has been positively correlated with obesity (J Pain 8: 430, 2007) and both pain processing and self-reports of pain vary between men and women (J Pain 13: 228, 2012; J Pain 101: 259, 2003). Rats selectively bred to have features of metabolic syndrome (Science 307: 418, 2005) may provide an animal model that can help elucidate the underlying neurochemical mechanisms contributing to differences in pain that are sex-specific and associated with obesity/metabolic syndrome (Anesthesiology 113: 1176, 2010). As an initial step prior to pharmacological studies of chronic pain, this experiment is testing the hypothesis that rats with features of metabolic syndrome exhibit sex-specific differences in nociception. Materials and methods: To date we have used multimodal pain testing to evaluate nociceptive responses in male (n = 3) and female (n = 3) rats with features of metabolic syndrome. The experiments quantified hind paw withdrawal latency to a heat stimulus using the Hargreaves method (Pain 32: 77, 1988). Gram-equivalent responses to mechanical stimuli were quantified using the up-down method (J Neurosci Methods 53: 55, 1994). Duration of response to the acetone spray test was used to characterize the response to a cold thermal stimulus (Anesth Analg 101: 457, 2005). Results: Responses were quantified (mean ± SD) for male and female rats on each of the three pain modalities tested. Paw withdrawal latencies (PWL) in seconds for females (7.26 ± 1.45) and males (5.98 ± 1.51) differed by 21.4%. Responses to mechanical stimuli (in grams) for females (8.66 ± 6.35) and males (5.40 ± 5.21) differed by 60.4%. Duration of response to the acetone spray test in seconds for females (0.5 ± 0) and males (0.67 ± 0.26) differed by 33.3%. Discussion: Previous studies found that lean rats selectively bred for enhanced aerobic fitness had higher thresholds for heat nociception than did rats bred to promote features of metabolic syndrome (Neurosci Lett 443: 37, 2008). Lean/fit rats also recover more rapidly from neuropathic pain caused by chronic constriction injury of the sciatic nerve (Anesthesiology 113: 1176, 2010). The present results indicate that in obese rats with features of metabolic syndrome the females had a longer PWL, a greater threshold for mechanical nociception, and a longer duration of response to the acetone test. These data imply a lower pain threshold in the obese, male rats. The preliminary results also suggest that rats selectively bred to enhance the polygenic modulation of obesity/metabolic syndrome offer a unique resource for studies aiming to elucidate mechanisms contributing to sex-specific differences in nociceptive processing