Chondrosarcoma (CHS) is a heterogeneous collection of malignant bone tumours and is the second most common primary malignancy of bone after osteosarcoma. Recent work has identified frequent, recurrent mutations in IDH1/2 in nearly half of central CHS. However, there has been little systematic genomic analysis of this tumour type and thus the contribution of other genes is unclear. Here we report comprehensive genomic analyses of 49 cases of CHS. We identified hypermutability of the major cartilage collagen COL2A1 with insertions, deletions and rearrangements identified in 37% of cases. The patterns of mutation were consistent with selection for variants likely to impair normal collagen biosynthesis. In addition we identified mutations in IDH1/2 (59%), TP53 (20%), the RB1 pathway (33%) and hedgehog signaling (18%).

BackgroundEukaryotic mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK/MPK) signaling cascades transduce and amplify environmental signals via three types of reversibly phosphorylated kinases to activate defense gene expression. Canola (oilseed rape, Brassica napus) is a major crop in temperate regions. Identification and characterization of MAPK and MAPK kinases (MAPKK/MKK) of canola will help to elucidate their role in responses to abiotic and biotic stresses.ResultsWe describe the identification and analysis of seven MKK (BnaMKK) and 12 MPK (BnaMPK) members from canola. Sequence alignments and phylogenetic analyses of the predicted amino acid sequences of BnaMKKs and BnaMPKs classified them into four different groups. We also examined the subcellular localization of four and two members of BnaMKK and BnaMPK gene families, respectively, using green fluorescent protein (GFP) and, found GFP signals in both nuclei and cytoplasm. Furthermore, we identified several interesting interaction pairs through yeast two-hybrid (Y2H) analysis of interactions between BnaMKKs and BnaMPKs, as well as BnaMPK and BnaWRKYs. We defined contiguous signaling modules including BnaMKK9-BnaMPK1/2-BnaWRKY53, BnaMKK2/4/5-BnaMPK3/6-BnaWRKY20/26 and BnaMKK9-BnaMPK5/9/19/20. Of these, several interactions had not been previously described in any species. Selected interactions were validated in vivo by a bimolecular fluorescence complementation (BiFC) assay. Transcriptional responses of a subset of canola MKK and MPK genes to stimuli including fungal pathogens, hormones and abiotic stress treatments were analyzed through real-time RT-PCR and we identified a few of BnaMKKs and BnaMPKs responding to salicylic acid (SA), oxalic acid (OA), Sclerotinia sclerotiorum or other stress conditions. Comparisons of expression patterns of putative orthologs in canola and Arabidopsis showed that transcript expression patterns were generally conserved, with some differences suggestive of sub-functionalization.ConclusionsWe identified seven MKK and 12 MPK genes from canola and examined their phylogenetic relationships, transcript expression patterns, subcellular localization, and protein-protein interactions. Not all expression patterns and interactions were conserved between canola and Arabidopsis, highlighting the limitations of drawing inferences about crops from model species. The data presented here provide the first systematic description of MKK-MPK-WRKY signaling modules in canola and will further improve our understanding of defense responses in general and provide a basis for future crop improvement.

The automatic diagnosis of various retinal diseases from fundus images is important to support clinical decisionmaking. However, developing such automatic solutions is challenging due to the requirement of a large amount of humanannotated data. Recently, unsupervised/self-supervised feature learning techniques receive a lot of attention, as they do not need massive annotations. Most of the current self-supervised methods are analyzed with single imaging modality and there is no method currently utilize multi-modal images for better results. Considering that the diagnostics of various vitreoretinal diseases can greatly benefit from another imaging modality, e.g., FFA, this paper presents a novel self-supervised feature learning method by effectively exploiting multi-modal data for retinal disease diagnosis. To achieve this, we first synthesize the corresponding FFA modality and then formulate a patient feature-based softmax embedding objective. Our objective learns both modality-invariant features and patient-similarity features. Through this mechanism, the neural network captures the semantically shared information across different modalities and the apparent visual similarity between patients. We evaluate our method on two public benchmark datasets for retinal disease diagnosis. The experimental results demonstrate that our method clearly outperforms other self-supervised feature learning methods and is comparable to the supervised baseline. Our code is available at GitHub 1. Index Terms-Retinal disease diagnosis, self-supervised learning, multi-modal data I. INTRODUCTION C OLOR fundus photography has been widely used in clinical practice to evaluate various conventional ophthalmic diseases, e.g., age-related macular degeneration (AMD) [1], pathologic myopia (PM) [2], and diabetic retinopathy [3, 4]. Recently, deep learning has shown very good performance on a variety of automatic ophthalmic disease detection problems from fundus images [5-7], and these techniques can help ophthalmologists in decision making. The success is attributed to the learned representative features from fundus images, which requires a large amount of training data with massive human annotations. However, it is tedious and expensive to annotate the fundus images, since experts are needed to provide reliable labels. Hence, in this paper, our goal is to learn the representative features from data itself, without any human

Hypoxia in solid tumors is thought to be an important factor in resistance to therapy, but the extreme microscopic heterogeneity of the partial pressures of oxygen (pO 2) between the capillaries makes it difficult to characterize the scope of this phenomenon without invasive sampling of oxygen distributions throughout the tissue. Here we develop a noninvasive method to track spatial oxygen distributions in tumors during fractionated radiotherapy, using oxygen-dependent quenching of phosphorescence, oxygen probe Oxyphor PtG4 and the radiotherapy-induced Cherenkov light to excite and image the phosphorescence lifetimes within the tissue. Mice bearing MDA-MB-231 breast cancer and FaDu head neck cancer xenografts show different pO 2 responses during each of the 5 fractions (5 Gy per fraction), delivered from a clinical linear accelerator. This study demonstrates subsurface in vivo mapping of tumor pO 2 distributions with submillimeter spatial resolution, thus providing a methodology to track response of tumors to fractionated radiotherapy.

Clinical studies of idiotype (Id) vaccination in patients with lymphoma have established a correlation between the induced anti-Id antibody responses and favorable clinical outcomes. To streamline the production of an Id vaccine, we engineered a small diabody (Db) molecule containing both a B-cell-targeting moiety (anti-CD19) and a lymphoma Id. This molecule (αCD19-Id) was designed to penetrate lymph nodes and bind to noncognate B cells to form an antigen presentation array. Indeed, the αCD19-Id molecule accumulated on B cells in vivo after s.c. administration. These noncognate B cells, decorated with the diabody, could then stimulate the more rare Id-specific B cells. Peptide epitopes present in the diabody linker augmented the response by activating CD4 + helper T cells. Consequently, the αCD19-Id molecule induced a robust Id-specific antibody response and protected animals from tumor challenge. Such diabodies are produced in a cell-free protein expression system within hours of amplification of the specific Ig genes from the B-cell tumor. This customized product can now be available to vaccinate patients before they receive other, potentially immunosuppressive, therapies.immunotherapy | tumor-specific antigen | bispecific antibody fragments I diotype (Id), the unique Ig molecule of each lymphoma tumor, is a good target for the immune system. Passively administered monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) against this target are effective in therapy (1). Furthermore, studies of Id vaccination had suggested a correlation between induced anti-Id antibody responses and progression-free survival and overall survival of patients (2-4). Despite these encouraging results, phase III trials have not established a clinical benefit from Id vaccination, except for a possible subset of patients who have prolonged remissions after initial chemotherapy (5-7). One possible problem may have been the chemical conjugation of Id to the carrier protein, keyhole limpet hemocyanin (KLH). Antigenic determinants on the Id could have been damaged in this process (8). Recombinant vaccines that do not require chemical conjugation may lead to improved immunogenicity and clinical outcomes.Recent studies on antigen (Ag) acquisition by B cells have provided new insights for vaccine design. The majority of B cells reside in follicles within secondary lymphoid organs. Foreign Ags in the form of immune complexes are transported into lymph node follicles by subcapsular sinus macrophages (9-11), and into spleen follicles by marginal zone B cells (12). In the follicles, nonspecific B cells retain immune complexes on their cell surfaces. Some complexes are transferred to follicular dendritic cells (9-11), whereas others may directly cross-link the Ag-specific receptors (BCRs) on cognate B cells (10, 11). These roles played by noncognate B cells in the generation of specific antibody responses were previously not appreciated. In addition to forming immune complexes that facilitate entering the follicles and presenting on the cell surface, foreign Ags may also b...

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First, making from eucalyptus cellulose fiber, the influences of different compound enzymolysis conditions on the morphology of cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) were studied. Under the actions of the compound enzyme composed of cellulase and xylanase with the concentration ratio of 9:1, total enzyme concentrations of 10 and 500 U mL −1 and the hydrolysis time of 12 and 5 h, the rod-like CNCs (length 600 nm, width 30 nm) and the spherical CNCs (40 nm) were obtained, respectively. Subsequently, the crystallinities, chemical structures, and thermal stabilities of the rod-like and spherical CNCs revealed that, the CNCs structures were still similar to those of the eucalyptus cellulose fiber, the thermal decomposition temperatures of the rod-like and spherical CNCs (345, 343 C) were a little lower than that of the eucalyptus cellulose fiber (364 C). Lastly, the control mechanism of CNC morphology by the compound enzymatic hydrolysis was also discussed.Recently, various methods have been adopted for the preparation of CNCs, in which mechanical and hydrolyzed methods are the two main kinds. The mechanical methods include high-pressure homogenization, grinding, sonication, and so forth, 16 whose main drawback