Deciphering the universe of RNA structures and trans RNA-RNA interactions of transcriptomes in vivo: from experimental protocols to computational analyses

The last few years have seen an explosion of experimental and computational methods for investigating RNA structures of entire transcriptomes in vivo. Very recent experimental protocols now also allow trans RNA–RNA interactions to be probed in a transcriptome-wide manner. All of the experimental strategies require comprehensive computational pipelines for analysing the raw data and converting it back into actual RNA structure features or trans RNA–RNA interactions. The overall performance of these methods thus strongly depends on the experimental and the computational protocols employed. In order to get the best out of both worlds, both aspects need to be optimised simultaneously. This review introduced the methods and proposes ideas how they could be further improved

Chemoradiation for muscle invasive bladder cancer

The combination of varying treatment strategies (e.g. neoadjuvant chemotherapy and surgery or radiotherapy) in a multimodal setting are increasingly being used in various tumour types. For patients with muscle invasive bladder cancer, multimodal therapy consisting of transurethral resection followed by chemoradiation offers a bladder preserving treatment option. This treatment will result in good long term recurrence free survival, acceptable bladder function, and minimal gastro-intestinal toxicity. Nevertheless, a strict follow-up schedule with imaging and cystoscopy is required in order to detect local recurrence in time for salvage treatment