Inhibin was first characterized in mammals as a gonadal dimeric protein that inhibited pituitary follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) secretion. As in mammals, inhibin-specific α subunit (INHA/Inha/inha) has also been characterized in teleosts; however, its functions and physiological importance in fish reproduction remain unknown. Using CRISPR/Cas9 method, we generated an inha-deficient zebrafish line and analyzed its reproductive performance. As expected, pituitary expression of fshb increased significantly in both young and adult inha mutant. The expression of lhb also increased in the mutant, but only in sexually mature adults. Interestingly, the expression of activin βA (inhbaa) increased significantly in both ovary and testis of inha mutant and the expression of ovarian aromatase (cyp19a1a) also increased dramatically in the mutant ovary. The juvenile female mutant showed clear signs of early follicle activation or precocious puberty onset. However, the adult female mutant was infertile with follicles arrested at full-grown stage without final oocyte maturation and ovulation. Although follicle growth was overall normal in the mutant, the size and distribution of yolk granules in oocytes were distinct and some follicles showed granulosa cell hypertrophy. In contrast to females, inha null males showed normal spermatogenesis and fertility. As reported in mammals, we also found sporadic tumor formation in inha mutants. Taken together, our study not only confirmed some conserved roles of inhibin across vertebrates such as inhibition of FSH biosynthesis and tumor formation, but also revealed novel aspects of inhibin functions such as disruption of folliculogenesis and female infertility but no obvious involvement in spermatogenesis in fish.

Dextran sulfate sodium (DSS) is commonly used in rodent IBD models to chemically induce acute intestinal inflammation. The acute course of colitis includes colon tissue damages and recovery from wounded tissues. As skin wound repair was delayed by splenectomy, we asked whether splenectomy would induce the delay of colonic wound healing. In splenectomized mice, body weight recovery, disease score and colon length were delayed. Surprisingly we found a great increase of Gr1+CD11b+ cells in spleen and bone marrow of DSS-administered mice. Anti-Gr-1 antibody treatment worsened the DSS- administered colitis. These results indicate that Gr1+CD11b+ cells induced by DSS worked to repair colon wound healing and repair colitis.

Ovarian high-grade serous carcinoma (HGSC) prognosis correlates directly with presence of intratumoral lymphocytes. However, cancer immunotherapy has yet to achieve meaningful survival benefit in patients with HGSC. Epigenetic silencing of immunostimulatory genes is implicated in immune evasion in HGSC and re-expression of these genes could promote tumour immune clearance. We discovered that simultaneous inhibition of the histone methyltransferases G9A and EZH2 activates the CXCL10-CXCR3 axis and increases homing of intratumoral effector lymphocytes and natural killer cells whilst suppressing tumour-promoting FoxP3 + CD4 T cells. The dual G9A/EZH2 inhibitor HKMTI-1-005 induced chromatin changes that resulted in the transcriptional activation of immunostimulatory gene networks, including the re-expression of elements of the ERV-K endogenous retroviral family.Importantly, treatment with HKMTI-1-005 improved the survival of mice bearing Trp53 -/null ID8 ovarian tumours and resulted in tumour burden reduction. These results indicate that inhibiting G9A and EZH2 in ovarian cancer alters the immune microenvironment and reduces tumour growth and therefore positions dual inhibition of G9A/EZH2 as a strategy for clinical development.Research.

Purpose: Ovarian high-grade serous carcinoma (HGSC) is usually diagnosed at late stage. We investigated whether late-stage HGSC has unique genomic characteristics consistent with acquisition of evolutionary advantage compared with early-stage tumors. Experimental Design: We performed targeted next-generation sequencing and shallow whole-genome sequencing (sWGS) on pretreatment samples from 43 patients with FIGO stage I–IIA HGSC to investigate somatic mutations and copy-number (CN) alterations (SCNA). We compared results to pretreatment samples from 52 patients with stage IIIC/IV HGSC from the BriTROC-1 study. Results: Age of diagnosis did not differ between early-stage and late-stage patients (median 61.3 years vs. 62.3 years, respectively). TP53 mutations were near-universal in both cohorts (89% early-stage, 100% late-stage), and there were no significant differences in the rates of other somatic mutations, including BRCA1 and BRCA2. We also did not observe cohort-specific focal SCNA that could explain biological behavior. However, ploidy was higher in late-stage (median, 3.0) than early-stage (median, 1.9) samples. CN signature exposures were significantly different between cohorts, with greater relative signature 3 exposure in early-stage and greater signature 4 in late-stage. Unsupervised clustering based on CN signatures identified three clusters that were prognostic. Conclusions: Early-stage and late-stage HGSCs have highly similar patterns of mutation and focal SCNA. However, CN signature analysis showed that late-stage disease has distinct signature exposures consistent with whole-genome duplication. Further analyses will be required to ascertain whether these differences reflect genuine biological differences between early-stage and late-stage or simply time-related markers of evolutionary fitness.