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The house mouse or Mus musculus has become a premier mammalian model for genetic research due to its genetic and physiological similarities to humans. It brought mechanistic insights into numerous human diseases and has been routinely used to assess drug efficiency and toxicity, as well as to predict patient responses. To facilitate molecular mechanism studies in mouse, we present the Mouse Interactome Database (MID, Version 1), which includes 155,887 putative functional associations between mouse protein-coding genes inferred from functional association evidence integrated from 9 public databases. These putative functional associations are expected to cover 19.32% of all mouse protein interactions, and 26.02% of these function associations may represent protein interactions. On top of MID, we developed a gene set linkage analysis (GSLA) web tool to annotate potential functional impacts from observed differentially expressed genes. Two case studies show that the MID/GSLA system provided precise and informative annotations that other widely used gene set annotation tools, such as PANTHER and DAVID, did not. Both MID and GSLA are accessible through the website http://mouse.biomedtzc.cn.

Despite earlier studies demonstrating characteristics of colon cancer stem cells (CCSCs) and the role of epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) in tumor development, it remains controversial as to the relationship between CCSCs and EMT. In this study, in order to present an insight into this relationship in colon cancer, we developed HCT116 and HT29 sphere models, which are known to be the cells enriching cancer stem cells. Compared to their parental counterparts, spheroid cells displayed lower homotypic/heterotypic adhesion but higher in vitro migratory/invasive capacity, as well as higher tumorigenic and metastatic potential in vivo. The spheroid cells also demonstrated down-regulated E-cadherin and up-regulated α-SMA and Vimentin expression, which is the typical phenotype of EMT. In order to explore whether this phenomenon is associated to activation of Wnt/β-catenin pathway, we detected several key signaling molecules. Compared with their parental cells, HCT116 and HT29 spheroid cells demonstrated down-regulated expression of GSK3β, but up-regulated expression of Slug and Snail. And also, the up-regulation of nucleus β-catenin in spheroid cells indicated that the free β-catenin transferred from cytoplasm to cell nucleus. Our findings indicate that spheroid cells have the characteristics of colon cancer stem cells, and EMT may account for their stemness and malignancy. And persistent activation of Wnt/β-catenin pathway may play an important role in the EMT of CCSCs.

BACKGROUND:The aim of this study was to determine whether baseline C-reactive protein (CRP) levels and CRP kinetics predict the overall survival in metastatic nasopharyngeal carcinoma (mNPC) patients. METHODS:A total of 116 mNPC patients from January 2006 to July 2011 were retrospectively reviewed. Serum CRP level was measured at baseline and thereafter at the start of each palliative chemotherapy cycle for all patients. RESULTS:Patients with higher values of baseline CRP (≥ 3.4 mg/L) had significantly worse survival than those with lower baseline CRP values (< 3.4 mg/L). Patients were divided into four groups according to baseline CRP and CRP kinetics: (1) patients whose CRP < 3.4 mg/L and never elevated during treatment; (2) patients whose CRP < 3.4 mg/L and elevated at least one time during treatment; (3) patients whose CRP ≥ 3.4 mg/L and normalized at least one time during treatment; and (4) patients whose CRP ≥ 3.4 mg/L and never normalized during treatment. The patients were further assigned to non-elevated, elevated, normalized, and non-normalized CRP groups. Overall survival rates were significantly different among the four groups, with three-year survival rates of 68%, 41%, 33%, and 0.03% for non-elevated, elevated, normalized, and non-normalized CRP groups respectively. When compared with the non-elevated group, hazard ratios of death were 1.69, 2.57, and 10.34 in the normalized, elevated, and non-normalized groups (P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS:Baseline CRP and CRP kinetics may be useful to predict the prognosis of metastatic NPC patients treated with palliative chemotherapy and facilitate individualized treatment. A prospective study to validate this prognostic model is still needed however.