Search

Background. To assess the prognostic value of DNA ploidy in adenocarcinoma of the lung, the authors performed a flow cytometric study using paraffin embedded archival material from 160 patients (109 [68%] with aneuploid lesions, 51 [32%] with diploid lesions) who underwent surgical resection from 1982 to 1991. Methods. The proportion of DNA aneuploid tumors increased as the disease stage advanced, from 35 of 63 (55.5%) with Stage 1 disease to 15 of 20 (75.0%) with Stage 2 disease, to 40 of 53 (75.5%) with Stage 3a disease, to 19 of 24 (79.2%) with Stage 3b disease. However, this trend was not statistically significant. Comparison of the survival time of the 160 patients with adenocarcinoma of the lung with a median follow-up of 7.8 years revealed that patients with diploid tumors had significantly longer survival than did those with aneuploid tumors (P < 0.01). Results. Examination by stage showed that patients with Stage 1 disease with diploid tumors had significantly longer survival times than did those with aneuploid tumors W 0.05) but that there were no significant differences in clinical outcome in patients with Stage 2, 3a, and 3b diploid tumors. Conclusions. Analysis of aneuploid versus diploid DNA content in patients with Stage 1 adenocarcinoma of the lung is concluded to be useful in evaluating clinical outcome and prognosis. Cancer 1995; 75:2461-5. Key words: adenocarcinoma, lung, DNA ploidy, long term follow up.

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a fatal lung disease associated with significant morbidity and mortality. The international clinical practice guidelines for the diagnosis of IPF have recently been revised.

Since the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant (F1-NPP) accident in 2011, radiation effects on wildlife in the contaminated areas have been a major concern. The outskirts of the F1-NPP are mainly rural areas, where many rice fields, streams and reservoirs are located. We searched for wild medaka (small aquarium fish) around the F1-NPP and found two wild medaka habitats (S1 and S2). S1 is a stream located 4 km from the F1-NPP, where the ambient dose equivalent rate was 0.4-0.9 μSv/h (2013-14), and S2 is a reservoir located 7.5 km from the F1-NPP, where the ambient dose equivalent rate was 9.8-22 μSv/h (2013-14 and 2017-18). Dosimeters were placed for one day at the locations where the medaka were captured, and the absorbed dose rates were estimated. Radiation effects on wild medaka were examined using micronucleus assay between 2013 and 2018. No significant difference in frequency of micronucleated gill cells was observed among the wild medaka from S1, S2 and our cultivated medaka that were used as a control.

The cDNA for a novel member of the FGF family (XFGF-20) was isolated from a XenopuscDNA library prepared at the tailbud stage using as a probe the product of degenerate PCR performed with primers based on mammalian FGF-9s. This cDNA was 1860 bp long, and contained a single open reading frame that encoded 208 amino acid residues. The deduced amino acid sequence contained a motif characteristic of the FGF family and it was similar (73.1% overall homology) to XFGF-9 but differed from XFGF-9 in its amino-terminal region (33.3% homology). XFGF-20 mRNA was expressed only zygotically in embryos at and after the blastula stage, but it was also specifically expressed in the stomach and testis of adults. By contrast, XFGF-9 mRNA was expressed maternally in eggs and in many adult tissues. When XFGF-20 mRNA was overexpressed in early embryos, gastrulation was abnormal and development of anterior structures was suppressed. In such embryos, the expression of the Xbratranscript was suppressed during gastrulation while the expression of the transcripts of cerberus, Siamois, dkk-1, chordin,and Xotx-2genes was normal. These results suggest that correct expression of XFGF-20 during gastrulation is required for the formation of normal head structures in Xenopus laevisduring embryogenesis and that expression of the Xbragene mediates this phenomenon.

L1 (LINE-1) is a long interspersed repetitive sequence derived from a retrotransposon. Transfection studies using the CAT gene as a reporter demonstrated that the first 155bp in the human L1 sequence contains an element(s) responsible for the promoter activity in HeLa cells. The transcription was shown to initiate at the first nucleotide of the L1 sequence in the transgene. Three prominent nuclear protein binding sites were found in the 5′ region of the Li sequence by DNasel footprint analysis. One of the binding sites, designated as site A located at +3 to +26, was shown to be essential for the L1 transcription because the mutation at the site A caused almost complete loss of the promoter activity. A sequence AAGATGGCC at +11 to +19 in the site A was defined as a target core element for the protein binding. The site A-binding protein (designated TFL1-A) was found in various types of cells including an embryonic teratocarcinoma cell line. These results indicate that an internal short element located at the very 5' terminal of L1 sequence and the nuclear factor binding to the element play a crucial role in the transcription of human L1.

We developed a novel in vitro method for making nested deletions and applied it to a large-scale DNA sequencing. A DNA fragment to be sequenced (up to 15 kb long) was cloned with a new vector possessing two unique SfiI sites, digested by SfiI and ligated to generate a large head-to-tail concatemer. The large concatemer was randomly fragmented by sonication and then redigested by SfiI to separate insert and vector DNAs. The fragments of various length were then cloned into the other vector(s) specifically designed for selective cloning of insert-derived DNA fragments to generate a library of nested deletions. This method allowed a single person to generate >20 nested deletion libraries sufficient to cover 100 kb in a few days. We applied the method for sequencing of P1 clones and successfully determined the complete sequence of ∼300 kb of the human amyloid precursor protein (APP) locus on chromosome 21 with a redundancy of 3.8, reasonably low cost and very few gaps remaining to be closed. Development of some new instruments and software is also described which makes this method more applicable for large-scale sequencing.