Despite the technological improvement of radiologic, endoscopic and nuclear imaging, the accuracy of diagnostic procedures for tumors can be limited whenever a mass-forming lesion is identified. This ...is true also because bioptical sampling cannot be properly guided into the lesions so as to puncture neoplastic tissue and to avoid necrotic areas. Under these circumstances, invasive and expensive procedures are still required to obtain diagnosis which is mandatory to plan the most appropriate therapeutic strategy. In order to test if electrical impedance spectroscopy may be helpful in providing further evidence for cancer detection, resistivity measurements were taken on 22 mice, 11 wild‐type and 11
sparc
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– (knock out for the protein SPARC: secreted protein acidic and rich in cysteine), bearing mammary carcinomas, by placing a needle-probe into tumor, peritumoral and contralateral healthy fat areas. Tumor resistivity was significantly lower than both peritumoral fat and contralateral fat tissues. Resistivity in
sparc
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– mice was lower than wild-type animals. A significant frequency dependence of resistivity was present in tissues analyzed. We conclude that accurate measurements of resistivity may allow to discriminate between tissues with different pathological and/or structural characteristics. Therefore, resistivity measurements could be considered for in vivo detection and differential diagnosis of tumor masses.
Neutrinos and their matter counterpart-antineutrinos-are helping scientists to address a varied range of applications beyond fundamental particle physics: in particular they are presently offering a ...unique possibility to established independently the absolute amount of U and Th in the Earth's crust and mantle, thus settling a very long discussion about the Earth's internal heat sources initiated almost 200 years ago.
Borexino has been a neutrino detector based on ultrapure liquid scintillator, located at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, Italy. Its main scientific goal was the real-time measurement of ...solar neutrino fluxes, which play an irreplaceable role for the comprehension of the mechanisms powering our star. Over the past two years, the Borexino collaboration has pursued the improvement of the CNO flux measurement, obtaining further indications about the solar metallicity. In a parallel way, Borexino has demonstrated for the first time the possibility of exploiting the directional Cherenkov information, in a liquid scintillator detector, for the detection of sub-MeV solar neutrinos.
Background
The orexigenic peptide ghrelin has anti‐inflammatory properties in colitis, however, the mechanism of action and the immune cells targeted remain still to be elucidated. Here, we assessed ...the possible effect of ghrelin on T helper (Th) cells in a T cell transfer model of chronic colitis.
Methods
Disease was induced in the recombination activating gene 1 knockout mice (Rag1−/−) by adoptive transfer of naïve Th cells from ghrelin receptor knockout mice (GRLN‐R−/−) or littermate wild‐type (WT) mice. The course and severity of colitis was assessed by monitoring body weight, diarrhea score, histological analysis, gene expression, and flow cytometry analysis. The possible effects of ghrelin on Th cell proliferation, polarization, and apoptosis was examined in vitro.
Key Results
Our data showed that Rag1−/− mice injected with GRLN‐R−/− Th cells displayed increased severity of colitis compared to mice injected with WT Th cells. In addition, Rag1−/− mice injected with GRLN‐R−/− Th cells had significantly higher intestinal inflammation and increased accumulation of Th1 and Th17 cells in the colon. In vitro, ghrelin directly affected proliferation of Th cells and induced apoptosis whereas it did not influence Th cell polarization.
Conclusion & Inferences
Our observations suggest that ghrelin modulates Th effector cells in the gut controlling proliferation and inducing apoptosis. Our findings further support the use of ghrelin as a novel therapeutic option to treat intestinal inflammatory diseases.
The expression of the orexigenic hormone ghrelin and its receptor has been reported on various immune cells including T helper (Th) cells both in humans and rodents. Based on the above, and taking into account the large expression of ghrelin in the bowel mucosa, we hypothesized that this peptide may directly modulate intestinal Th cells during colonic inflammation. Hence, we used a well‐characterized model of Th cell‐induced chronic colitis that allowed us to study the influence of ghrelin receptor specifically on Th cells. In this study, we observed that the lack of ghrelin signaling in Th cells significantly worsens colitis with increased colonic inflammation. Our data revealed a specific immunomodulatory effect of ghrelin on Th cells, making the ghrelin receptor a suitable therapeutic candidate to treat chronic intestinal inflammatory diseases.
Large-area PhotoMultiplier Tubes (PMT) allow to efficiently instrument Liquid Scintillator (LS) neutrino detectors, where large target masses are pivotal to compensate for neutrinos' extremely ...elusive nature. Depending on the detector light yield, several scintillation photons stemming from the same neutrino interaction are likely to hit a single PMT in a few tens/hundreds of nanoseconds, resulting in several photoelectrons (PEs) to pile-up at the PMT anode. In such scenario, the signal generated by each PE is entangled to the others, and an accurate PMT charge reconstruction becomes challenging. This manuscript describes an experimental method able to address the PMT charge reconstruction in the case of large PE pile-up, providing an unbiased charge estimator at the permille level up to 15 detected PEs. The method is based on a signal filtering technique (Wiener filter) which suppresses the noise due to both PMT and readout electronics, and on a Fourier-based deconvolution able to minimize the influence of signal distortions—such as an overshoot. The analysis of simulated PMT waveforms shows that the slope of a linear regression modeling the relation between reconstructed and true charge values improves from 0.769±0.001 (without deconvolution) to 0.989±0.001 (with deconvolution), where unitary slope implies perfect reconstruction. A C++ implementation of the charge reconstruction algorithm is available online at 1.
The endocytoscopy system is a novel diagnostic technique that provides extremely high-magnification imaging of the gastrointestinal mucosa. We are currently using a prototype Olympus endocytoscope ...for clinical research in gastrointestinal tumors. In one surgical specimen obtained after resection of a cancer of the transverse colon, focal abnormalities of colonic glands were detected 7 cm away from the primary tumor, within macroscopically normal mucosa. Our finding, which was confirmed by histopathological examination, suggests the need for further clinical investigation to assess whether endocytoscopy is able to identify premalignant changes in apparently normal mucosa. This could potentially be useful for accurate evaluation before planning minimally invasive therapy.
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