Editorial

The editorial frames a special issue that introduces Scandinavian cinema and media scholars to ecomedia studies and its potentials

Role of insulin and IGF1 receptors in proliferation of cultured renal proximal tubule cells

We have used a murine proximal tubule cell line (MCT cells) to determine the presence and binding characteristics of insulin and IGF1 receptors and to correlate these parameters with the concentration-response relationships for ligand-induced cellular proliferation. Separate insulin and IGF1 receptors were identified by equilibrium binding assays. Half-maximal displacement of either peptide occurred at 3-10 nM; crossover binding to the alternate receptor occurred with a 10- to 100-fold lower affinity. Peptide effects on cellular proliferation were determined by measuring [3H]thymidine incorporation. Both insulin and IGF1 stimulate thymidine incorporation in a dose-dependent manner with similar increases above the basal level. The estimated half-maximal stimulation (EC50) occurred at 4 nM for IGF1 and 8 nM for insulin. A comparison of the receptor binding affinities with the dose-response relationships for [3H]thymidine incorporation reveals that each growth factor appears to be exerting its effect via binding to its own receptor. Therefore, in this cell line, physiologic concentrations of either insulin or IGF1 can modulate cellular growth. To our knowledge this is the first demonstration of a mitogenic effect which may be modulated by ligand binding to the insulin receptor in proximal tubule epithelia

Phase stability in nanoscale material systems: extension from bulk phase diagrams

Phase diagrams of multi-component systems are critical for the development and engineering of material alloys for all technological applications. At nano dimensions, surfaces (and interfaces) play a significant role in changing equilibrium thermodynamics and phase stability. In this work, it is shown that these surfaces at small dimensions affect the relative equilibrium thermodynamics of the different phases. The CALPHAD approach for material surfaces (also termed “nano-CALPHAD”) is employed to investigate these changes in three binary systems by calculating their phase diagrams at nano dimensions and comparing them with their bulk counterparts. The surface energy contribution, which is the dominant factor in causing these changes, is evaluated using the spherical particle approximation. It is first validated with the Au–Si system for which experimental data on phase stability of spherical nano-sized particles is available, and then extended to calculate phase diagrams of similarly sized particles of Ge–Si and Al–Cu. Additionally, the surface energies of the associated compounds are calculated using DFT, and integrated into the thermodynamic model of the respective binary systems. In this work we found changes in miscibilities, reaction compositions of about 5 at%, and solubility temperatures ranging from 100–200 K for particles of sizes 5 nm, indicating the importance of phase equilibrium analysis at nano dimensions

A hemolytic anti‐LKE associated with a rare LKE‐negative, “weak P” red blood cell phenotype: alloanti‐LKE and alloanti‐P recognize galactosylgloboside and monosialogalactosylgloboside (LKE) antigens

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110583/1/trf12772.pd

Cancer gene prioritization by integrative analysis of mRNA expression and DNA copy number data: a comparative review

A variety of genome-wide profiling techniques are available to probe complementary aspects of genome structure and function. Integrative analysis of heterogeneous data sources can reveal higher-level interactions that cannot be detected based on individual observations. A standard integration task in cancer studies is to identify altered genomic regions that induce changes in the expression of the associated genes based on joint analysis of genome-wide gene expression and copy number profiling measurements. In this review, we provide a comparison among various modeling procedures for integrating genome-wide profiling data of gene copy number and transcriptional alterations and highlight common approaches to genomic data integration. A transparent benchmarking procedure is introduced to quantitatively compare the cancer gene prioritization performance of the alternative methods. The benchmarking algorithms and data sets are available at http://intcomp.r-forge.r-project.orgComment: PDF file including supplementary material. 9 pages. Preprin

MBASED: allele-specific expression detection in cancer tissues and cell lines

Allele-specific gene expression, ASE, is an important aspect of gene regulation. We developed a novel method MBASED, meta-analysis based allele-specific expression detection for ASE detection using RNA-seq data that aggregates information across multiple single nucleotide variation loci to obtain a gene-level measure of ASE, even when prior phasing information is unavailable. MBASED is capable of one-sample and two-sample analyses and performs well in simulations. We applied MBASED to a panel of cancer cell lines and paired tumor-normal tissue samples, and observed extensive ASE in cancer, but not normal, samples, mainly driven by genomic copy number alterations. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13059-014-0405-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

The Troubles

pages 16-3