Chlorimuronethyl Resistance Selectable Marker Unsuited for the transformation of rice blast fungus (Magnaporthe grisea)

Abstract: Chlorimuronethyl resistance gene is increasingly used as a selectable marker for transformation, especially fungal transformation. Magnaporthe grisea is an important model organism for investigating fungal pathogenicity, and Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated transformation (ATMT) is used for functional mutagenesis of the fungus. However, our results showed that rice blast strains collected from infectious rice fields have highly conserved resistance to chlorimuronethyl, even comparable to transformants which carrying chlorimuronethyl resistance genes as selectable marker in laboratory conditions. PCR results showed that all tested field strains presented the amplified products of the same size as the selectable marker amplified from plasmid carrying chlorimuronethyl gene. Sequence analysis of PCR products amplified from field strains confirmed that field strains harbored the highly identity homolog of chlorimuronethyl resistance gene. Blast search in GenBank suggested that the fragment is presenting in reference genome sequence of 70-15, but it is not a wide-spread gene in other organisms, excepted for Herpetosiphon aurantiacus. Although the origin and reason of the conserved chlorimuronethyl resistance gene in field isolates of blast fungus is unclear, the ecological function of the gene is noteworthy

Retrospective evaluation of whole exome and genome mutation calls in 746 cancer samples

Funder: NCI U24CA211006Abstract: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) curated consensus somatic mutation calls using whole exome sequencing (WES) and whole genome sequencing (WGS), respectively. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, which aggregated whole genome sequencing data from 2,658 cancers across 38 tumour types, we compare WES and WGS side-by-side from 746 TCGA samples, finding that ~80% of mutations overlap in covered exonic regions. We estimate that low variant allele fraction (VAF < 15%) and clonal heterogeneity contribute up to 68% of private WGS mutations and 71% of private WES mutations. We observe that ~30% of private WGS mutations trace to mutations identified by a single variant caller in WES consensus efforts. WGS captures both ~50% more variation in exonic regions and un-observed mutations in loci with variable GC-content. Together, our analysis highlights technological divergences between two reproducible somatic variant detection efforts

Visualization of drug delivery processes using AIEgens.

Drug delivery systems (DDSs) have been extensively studied as carriers to deliver small molecule chemo-drugs to tumors for cancer therapy. The therapeutic efficiency of chemo-drugs is crucially dependent on the effective drug concentrations in tumors and cancer cells. Novel DDSs that can simultaneously unveil drug distribution, drug release/activation behaviors and offer early evaluation of their therapeutic responses are highly desirable. Traditional fluorescent dye-labeled DDSs may suffer from notorious aggregation-caused quenching (ACQ) with limited sensitivity for bioimaging; in addition, the intrinsic fluorescence of these dyes requires careful selection of energy acceptor or quencher moieties for a light-up probe design, which complicates the development of self-reporting DDSs, especially the ones for reporting multiple processes. The recently emerged fluorogens with aggregation-induced emission characteristics (AIEgens) offer a straightforward solution to tackle this challenge. Thanks to the unique properties of AIEgens, new theranostic DDSs have been developed for simultaneous drug delivery and bioimaging with high signal to background ratio and multiple signal reporting capabilities. In this mini-review, we summarize the recent development of theranostic DDSs based on AIEgens for monitoring the drug distribution, drug activation and prediction of the therapeutic responses. Through illustration of their design principles and application examples, we hope to stimulate the interest in the design of more advanced theranostic DDSs for biomedical research

Visualization of drug delivery processes using AIEgens

10.1039/c6sc05421hChemical Science842537-254

A platinum prodrug conjugated with a photosensitizer with aggregation-induced emission (AIE) characteristics for drug activation monitoring and combinatorial photodynamic-chemotherapy against cisplatin resistant cancer cells

10.1039/c5cc01952dChemical Communications51418626-862

A Photoactivatable AIE Polymer for Light-Controlled Gene Delivery: Concurrent Endo/Lysosomal Escape and DNA Unpacking

10.1002/anie.201503640Angewandte Chemie - International Edition543911419-1142