Glycolipid GD3 and GD3 synthase are key drivers for glioblastoma stem cells and tumorigenicity

The cancer stem cells (CSCs) of glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), a grade IV astrocytoma, have been enriched by the expressed marker CD133. However, recent studies have shown that CD133⁻ cells also possess tumor-initiating potential. By analysis of gangliosides on various cells, we show that ganglioside D3 (GD3) is overexpressed on eight neurospheres and tumor cells; in combination with CD133, the sorted cells exhibit a higher expression of stemness genes and self-renewal potential; and as few as six cells will form neurospheres and 20–30 cells will grow tumor in mice. Furthermore, GD3 synthase (GD3S) is increased in neurospheres and human GBM tissues, but not in normal brain tissues, and suppression of GD3S results in decreased GBM stem cell (GSC)-associated properties. In addition, a GD3 antibody is shown to induce complement-dependent cytotoxicity against cells expressing GD3 and inhibition of GBM tumor growth in vivo. Our results demonstrate that GD3 and GD3S are highly expressed in GSCs, play a key role in glioblastoma tumorigenicity, and are potential therapeutic targets against GBM.Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is extremely infiltrative and difficult to treat, and most patients develop recurrence after therapy. Over the past decade, many studies have suggested that bulk GBM tumors harbor cancer stem cells (CSCs) (1, 2), a distinct subpopulation of cancer cells that are able to initiate new tumors efficiently, have long-term self-renewal capacity, and survive better against chemo- or radiotherapy (2–4). CD133 has become a widely used marker for the enrichment of GBM CSCs (GSCs) and other tumor types (5–10). However, recent studies have shown that CD133 is not specific for GSCs because CD133⁻ cells also possess tumor-initiating potential (11–13), indicating the need to identify more specific and exclusive markers for GSCs to facilitate our understanding of GSCs and therapeutic development against GBM. Several reports have proposed L1CAM, A2B5, integrin α6, MET, and CD15 as markers for GSCs (14–18). However, none of these protein markers could be used specifically to identify GSCs, and no study was reported with respect to glycans as potential markers, although glycan biosynthesis involves multiple genes and it is possible to create different structures in cancer progression. It is noted that ganglioside D2 (GD2) and ganglioside D3 (GD3) were found on the surface of neural stem cells (NSCs) and that stage-specific embryonic antigen 3 (SSEA3) and SSEA4 were found on embryonic stem cells and cancer cells (19–21), but there is no glycan marker found on the surface of GSCs.Gangliosides are sialic acid-containing glycosphingolipids (GSLs) that are most abundant in the nervous system (22). The expression levels and patterns of gangliosides during brain development shift from simple gangliosides, such as GM3 and GD3, to complex gangliosides, such as GM1, GD1a, GD1b, and GT1b (23, 24). Moreover, several unique ganglioside markers, including SSEA3, SSEA4, GD2, and GD3, have been identified in stem cells (19). GD3, a b-series ganglioside containing two sialic acids, is highly expressed in mouse and human embryonic NSCs (20, 25). In cancers, GD3 is highly accumulated in human primary melanoma tissues as well as in established melanoma cell lines (26), whereas human normal melanocytes express no or minimal levels of GD3 (27). Moreover, malignant gliomas contain higher levels of GD3, and its expression correlates with the degree of malignancy (28). GD3 is produced from the precursor GM3 by the activity of GD3 synthase (GD3S), which mediates the properties of CSCs through the c-MET signaling pathway and correlates with poor prognosis in triple-negative human breast tumors (29). These findings suggest that GD3 may play an important role in the transformation of normal cells into tumors, and imply that GD3 could be a cell surface marker for GSCs.This study was designed to identify glycan markers for the enrichment of GBM stem cells and then uses these enriched GBM stem cells to characterize tumorigenicity, their association with clinical GBM specimens, and their regulation in tumor progression. The results showed that GD2 and GD3 were positively stained on GBM neurospheres. We found that cells with high GD3 expression display functional characteristics of GSCs. Suppression of GD3S, a critical enzyme for GD3 synthesis, impeded neurosphere formation and tumor initiation. The expression of GD3S correlated with the grades of astrocytomas and mediated self-renewal through c-Met activation. Furthermore, a GD3 antibody was found to eliminate the GD3⁺ cells through complement-dependent cytotoxicity (CDC) in vitro and to suppress tumor growth in mice. These results suggest that GD3 could be a significant biomarker for GSCs, that CD3 could be combined with CD133 for the enrichment of GSCs, and that both GD3 and GD3S could be targets for the development of new therapies against GBM.     

The effect of tranexamic acid on artificial joint materials: a biomechanical study (the bioTRANX study)

Background

Tranexamic acid (TXA) has been successfully used to reduce bleeding in joint replacement. Recently local TXA has been advocated to reduce blood loss in total knee or hip replacement; however, this raised concerns about potential adverse effects of TXA upon the artificial joint replacement.

Materials and methods

In this biomechanical study we compared the effects of TXA and saline upon the following biomechanical properties of artificial joint materials—(1) tensile properties (ultimate strength, stiffness and Young’s modulus), (2) the wear rate using a multi-directional pin-on-plate machine, and (3) the surface topography of pins and plates before and after wear rate testing.

Results

There were no significant differences in tensile strength, wear rates or surface topography of either ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene pins or cobalt chromium molybdenum metal plates between specimens soaked in TXA and specimens soaked in saline.

Conclusion

Biomechanical testing shows that there are no biomechanical adverse affects on the properties of common artificial joint materials from using topical TXA.

Level of evidence

V     

How Can I Manage Thrombocytopenia in Hemodialysis Patient? A Review

Hemodialysis (HD) is the most important treatment for patients with end‐stage renal disease (ESRD). Thrombocytopenia is a potential treatment complication related to dialysis. Under normal circumstances, the platelet count would slightly decrease within the first hour of HD, but get restored towards the end of procedure. In most patients, the platelet count can be maintained within the normal range, and the occurrence of thrombocytopenia is relatively rare in clinical practice. Therefore, the possibility of thrombocytopenia in HD patients is often ignored. Moreover, thrombocytopenia might be misdiagnosed and mistreated. At present, almost all articles on the subject, apart from some case reports, focus on pseudothrombocytopenia and heparin‐induced thrombocytopenia. In this review, we summarized various underlying causes, mechanisms, and diagnostic approaches to thrombocytopenia in HD patients. The review aims to provide a guide for clinicians interested in the causes and adequate treatment of thrombocytopenia.     

DhhP,a Cyclic di-AMP Phosphodiesterase of Borrelia burgdorferi,Is Essential for Cell Growth and Virulence

Cyclic di-AMP (c-di-AMP) is a recently discovered second messenger in bacteria. Most of work on c-di-AMP signaling has been done in Gram-positive bacteria, firmicutes, and actinobacteria, where c-di-AMP signaling pathways affect potassium transport, cell wall structure, and antibiotic resistance. Little is known about c-di-AMP signaling in other bacteria. Borrelia burgdorferi, the causative agent of Lyme disease, is a spirochete that has a Gram-negative dual membrane. In this study, we demonstrated that B. burgdorferi BB0619, a DHH-DHHA1 domain protein (herein designated DhhP), functions as c-di-AMP phosphodiesterase. Recombinant DhhP hydrolyzed c-di-AMP to pApA in a Mn²⁺- or Mg²⁺-dependent manner. In contrast to c-di-AMP phosphodiesterases reported thus far, DhhP appears to be essential for B. burgdorferi growth both in vitro and in the mammalian host. Inactivation of the chromosomal dhhP gene could be achieved only in the presence of a plasmid-encoded inducible dhhP gene. The conditional dhhP mutant had a dramatic increase in intracellular c-di-AMP level in comparison to the isogenic wild-type strain. Unlike what has been observed in Gram-positive bacteria, elevated cellular c-di-AMP in B. burgdorferi did not result in an increased resistance to β-lactamase antibiotics, suggesting that c-di-AMP''s functions in spirochetes differ from those in Gram-positive bacteria. In addition, the dhhP mutant was defective in induction of the σ^S factor, RpoS, and the RpoS-dependent outer membrane virulence factor OspC, which uncovers an important role of c-di-AMP in B. burgdorferi virulence.     

Spacer layer design for efficient fully printable mesoscopic perovskite solar cells

The spacer layer is a key component of fully printable mesoscopic perovskite solar cells, but its precise characteristics are far from being understood in relation to the device design. In the present work, we perform a detailed systematic study on the effects of spacer parameters, such as size of building blocks, layer thickness, etc., on properties of the perovskite filler, insulating ability and performance of fully printable mesoscopic perovskite solar cells by combining the techniques of time-resolved photoluminescence, high-resolution TEM, insulating resistance measurements, impedance spectroscopy and J–V characteristics. Drawing on the deep understanding from these studies, we formulate key principles, which are anticipated to guide the design of the advanced spacer layer for fully printable mesoscopic perovskite solar cells.

Key principles and reasonable routes are proposed to advance the spacer layer design for fully printable mesoscopic perovskite solar cells.

Lead halide perovskite (PVSK) as a promising semiconducting material has been introduced as a light harvesting semiconductor because of its ease of fabrication and excellent physical properties, such as tunable bandgap, strong absorbance, long carrier diffusion length and shallow intrinsic trap state level.^1–9 Extremely flat and compact perovskite thin film with large crystal size has gained particular attention to boost power conversion efficiency (PCE) by sequential deposition method, vapor deposition, solvent-annealing, solvent engineering, hot-casting method, intramolecular exchange methods, and additive, etc.^10–16 Benefiting from rapid improvements in formation of high quality perovskite thin film, a certified PCE of 25.2% has been achieved.¹⁷ However, illumination stability in real environment still remains a serious challenge due to the inherent moisture and UV sensitivity of perovskite. Moreover, using expensive and rare metals as back contact, such as gold and silver, may limit large-scale production in the future. As the competing architecture of perovskite solar cells, TiO₂/spacer/carbon (abbreviated as TSC) films based fully printable mesoscopic perovskite solar cells (FP-MPSC) have attracted a lot of researchers due to their low cost and printable large-scale production process.^18–21 In this type of solar cell, carbon can efficiently collect hole from perovskite layer even without any other hole transporting materials.^22,23 Most importantly, FP-MPSC could work with excellent illumination stability and heat-stress stability by filling TSC films with (5-AVA)_xMA_1−xPbI₃ (5-AVA = 5-aminovaleric acid, MA = methylammonium), although the efficiency of 12.8% is still far behind from the most efficient solar cell.^16,21,24Spacer, as an important part of FP-MPSC, plays a crucial role in obtaining high performance device. Basically, the spacer layer mainly burdens triple important tasks in the efficient mesoscopic perovskite solar cells. Firstly, the core function of spacer is to separate anode and cathode and to prevent electrons in TiO₂ from transporting directly to carbon electrode. The separating property of spacer depends on spacer particle sizes, morphology, materials, etc. This requires that spacer layer has no cracking and has wide bandgap. Secondly, the perovskite confined in the mesopores of spacer layer can absorb photons transmitted through perovskite/TiO₂ composite layer and have contribution to photocurrents. Thirdly, the holes produced in the perovskite/TiO₂ composite layer have to go through perovskite/spacer composite layer to reach carbon electrode. And the electrons produced in the perovskite/spacer composite layer have to go through perovskite/spacer composite layer to reach TiO₂ electrode. Because spacer layer has these important functions, some research on spacer layer have been carried out. Recently, Al₂O₃ or ZrO₂ spacer layer was compared with respect to their pore size.²⁵ However, conclusion of the effect of pore size in two different materials was incomplete. The effect of spacer layer thickness was simply discussed both in monolithic dye-sensitized solar cells and FP-MPSC.^20,26 The morphology of spacer layer was also improved to increase PCE of FP-MPSC.²⁷ Although these researches made some progress, there are no clear standards that what should an ideal spacer layer satisfy. Therefore, it is urgent to carry out detailed study on how the parameters of spacer affect the above functions and performance of mesoscopic printable perovskite solar cells.In the present study, the effects of size of building blocks of spacer layer, thickness of spacer layer on property of perovskite crystals, insulating property, and performance of mesoscopic perovskite solar cells were investigated in details. Based on these deep understandings, critical principles to design advanced spacer layer are proposed.ZrO₂ is used as spacer material due to its large band gap and high conduction band energy level. There are five different sizes of spacer building blocks in this study. The average particle sizes of spacer are measured to be about 5 nm, 10 nm, 20 nm, 60 nm and 100 nm, respectively, and hereafter referred to as S5, S10, S20, S60, S100 spacer, respectively. SEM images of as-prepared spacer films using these building blocks are shown in Fig. 1. X-ray diffraction patterns of spacer film with different particle sizes are presented in Fig. 1f, indicating that the five spacer films were all tetragonal crystal phase as majority phase. From Scherrer equation, the crystal sizes of spacer building blocks were calculated to be about 5 nm, 10 nm, 20 nm, 30 nm, 30 nm, respectively. These results indicated that the S60 and S100 particles are consisted of 30 nm sized crystal ZrO₂. Fig. 1 presents that there is a large difference in surface morphology with particle size increasing. There are cracks in S5 and S10 spacer films and micrometer scale pores exist in the S100 spacer, while the surface of S20 and S60 are very uniform without defects.Open in a separate windowFig. 1SEM images of spacer films with particle size of 5 nm (a), 10 nm (b), 20 nm (c), 60 nm (d) and 100 nm (e), respectively. (f) XRD patterns of spacer film with different building block sizes.During solvent evaporation of perovskite precursor, perovskite crystal growth is restricted by randomly interconnected mesopores of spacer film, leading to nanoscale crystal size and random crystal orientation, as observed by high resolution transmission electron microscope (Fig. 2a), in which clear crystal lattices of perovskite crystals can be distinguished from spacer particles. Meanwhile, the mesopores of spacer film is fulfilled with perovskite materials, providing continuous channels for charge carriers. The crystal size of perovskite material in spacer film is strongly influenced by mesopore size of spacer layer, as seen in XRD intensity of perovskite at 2θ of about 14.2° (Fig. 2b). There is an apparent trend that the intensity increased with increasing the particle size of spacer film. As a reference, perovskite was also deposited on bare glass, which exhibited the best crystallinity. The calculated sizes of perovskite from XRD spectra are 4.3 nm, 3.9 nm, 6.2 nm, 11.5 nm, and 12.6 nm, respectively, for the S5, S10, S20, S60, and S100 spacer layer. Apparently, the sizes of perovskite crystals confined in the spacer layer are smaller than the average pore sizes of spacer layer measured by N₂ absorption/desorption isotherms (Table S1^†). The high-resolution TEM image also gives consistent results. For example, the sizes of perovskite crystals confined in the S20 spacer layer are between 8.4 nm to 12.7 nm measured in the TEM image (Fig. 2a). The infiltrated perovskite started to nucleate onto the heterogeneous surface of spacer building blocks with high surface area, resulting to multiple nucleation centers and small crystal size. In order to evaluate the effect of spacer particle size on physiochemical properties of perovskite, the band-edge emission spectra of perovskite/spacer composite film were measured in Fig. 2c. The band-edge emission spectrum of perovskite deposited on bare glass peaked at 762 nm (with photon energy of 1.627 eV). As the particle size of spacer film decreased, a blue shift of the band-edge photoluminescence occurred, and linewidth broadened. The peak position of perovskite emission spectra can be tuned in the range of 33 nm through varying the pore size of spacer film. The increase of emission line width at grain boundaries can be attributed to disorder and defects of perovskite,^14,15 which also led to the decrease of lifetime in time-resolved PL (Fig. 2d). Perovskite film grown on glass has the lifetime of 141.9 ns. However, perovskite grown in spacer film decreased to 0.5 ns, 8.4 ns, 24.1 ns, 37.2 ns, 53.7 ns, for S5, S10, S20, S60, S100, respectively.Open in a separate windowFig. 2(a) High resolution transmission electron microscope image of perovskite/S20 spacer film composite. (b) XRD of perovskite/spacer film composite. (c) Steady PL emission spectra and (d) time-resolved PL of perovskite/spacer film composite.The particle size of spacer also has large effect on insulating ability of spacer films with the same thickness. FTO/spacer/carbon configuration was designed to measure the insulating ability of spacer layers. In ideal conditions, the resistance between carbon and FTO, defined as insulating resistance (R_I), should be infinite, indicating that there is not any leakage current from ideal insulating spacer. However, all of the measured resistance has finite values, summarized in 28–31Photovoltaic parameters of mesoscopic perovskite solar cells based on spacer with different building block sizes

Correlation of restenosis after rabbit carotid endarterectomy and inflammatory cytokines

Objective:To establish rabbit model of restenosis after carotid endartereclomy surgery,and to study tissue inflammatory cytokines(TNF-α,IL-61 involved in restenosis.Methods:A total of 32 rabbits were randomly divided into two groups:model group and control group.The right common carotid artery in rabbits was damaged by carotid endar terectomy in model group.The tissues were harvested at different time points respectively,the pathological changes of the vascular wall after operation were observed at different time points.The changes of expression of tissue vascular wall inflammatory cytokines(TNF-α.IL-6)at different lime points after the surgery was observed by RT-PCR,and the changes of serum inflammatory cytokines(TNT-α,IL-6)were detected by F.I.1SA.Results:The new intima appeared after 7 days of the injury and reached the peak on 28 d which is uneven and significantly thicker than the control group(P0.01).The tissue inflammatory cytokines(TNF-α,IL-6)were significantlv increased after the rabbit common carotid artery injury,which was significant difference compared with normal control group(P0.05).Conclusions:The tissue inflammatory factors significantly increase after the rabbit carotid artery injury,which suggests the mutual concurrent effects of inflammatory cytokines can result in the proliferation of vascular restenosis.     

Type II p21-activated kinases (PAKs) are regulated by an autoinhibitory pseudosubstrate

The type II p21-activated kinases (PAKs) are key effectors of RHO-family GTPases involved in cell motility, survival, and proliferation. Using a structure-guided approach, we discovered that type II PAKs are regulated by an N-terminal autoinhibitory pseudosubstrate motif centered on a critical proline residue, and that this regulation occurs independently of activation loop phosphorylation. We determined six X-ray crystal structures of either full-length PAK4 or its catalytic domain, that demonstrate the molecular basis for pseudosubstrate binding to the active state with phosphorylated activation loop. We show that full-length PAK4 is constitutively autoinhibited, but mutation of the pseudosubstrate releases this inhibition and causes increased phosphorylation of the apoptotic regulation protein Bcl-2/Bcl-X_L antagonist causing cell death and cellular morphological changes. We also find that PAK6 is regulated by the pseudosubstrate region, indicating a common type II PAK autoregulatory mechanism. Finally, we find Src SH3, but not β-PIX SH3, can activate PAK4. We provide a unique understanding for type II PAK regulation.