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A 19-year-old woman had stage IA endometrial carcinoma treated with medroxyprogesterone acetate and experienced a recurrence. This patient's experience illustrates the importance of a thorough history and endometrial assessment in younger patients., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflicts of interest., (© 2024 The Author(s). Clinical Case Reports published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

During the late stage of infection, alphabaculoviruses produce many occlusion bodies (OBs) in the nuclei of the insect host's cells through the hyperexpression of polyhedrin (POLH), a major OB component encoded by polh. The strong polh promoter has been used to develop a baculovirus expression vector system for recombinant protein expression in cultured insect cells and larvae. However, the relationship between POLH accumulation and the polh coding sequence remains largely unelucidated. This study aimed to assess the importance of polh codon usage and/or nucleotide sequences in POLH accumulation by generating a baculovirus Bombyx mori nucleopolyhedrovirus (BmNPV) expressing mutant polh (co-polh) optimized according to the codon preference of its host insect. Although the deduced amino acid sequence of CO-POLH was the same as that of wild-type POLH, POLH accumulation was significantly lower in cells infected with the co-polh mutant. This reduction was due to decreased polh mRNA levels rather than translational repression. Analysis of mutant viruses with chimeric polh revealed that a 30 base-pair (bp) 5' proximal polh coding region was necessary for maintaining high polh mRNA levels. Sequence comparison of wild-type polh and co-polh identified five nucleotide differences in this region, indicating that these nucleotides were critical for polh hyperexpression. Furthermore, luciferase reporter assays showed that the 30 bp 5' coding region was sufficient for maintaining the polh promoter-driven high level of polh mRNA. Thus, our whole-gene scanning by codon optimization identified important hidden nucleotides for polh hyperexpression in alphabaculoviruses., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Wolbachia are intracellular bacteria in insects that can manipulate the sexual development and reproduction by male killing or other methods. We have recently identified a Wolbachia protein named Oscar that acts as a male-killing factor for lepidopteran insects. Oscar interacts with the Masculinizer (Masc) protein, which is required for both masculinization and dosage compensation (DC) in lepidopteran insects. Embryonic expression of Oscar inhibits masculinization and causes male killing in two lepidopteran species, Ostrinia furnacalis and Bombyx mori. However, it remains unknown whether Oscar-induced male killing is caused by a failure of DC. Here, we performed a transcriptome analysis of Oscar complementary RNA-injected O. furnacalis and B. mori embryos, and found that Oscar primarily targets the Masc protein, resulting in male killing by interfering with DC in lepidopteran insects., (© 2023 The Authors. FEBS Letters published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Federation of European Biochemical Societies.)