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The article presents author's comments on the contemporary societies being permeated by technoscience.

No data are available regarding obesity and outcome in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL). We analyzed 263 patients from the AGMT CLL-8a Mabtenance trial for the impact of obesity. The trial included patients after rituximab-containing induction treatment in first or second line that had achieved at least a PR. A randomization to rituximab maintenance treatment (375 mg/m 2 q3 months for 2 years) vs observation was performed. In this cohort 22% of the patients (58/263) were classified as obese. The baseline response to induction treatment was inferior in obese patients with a lower CR rate (43.1% vs 60.5% in obese vs non-obese, P = 0.018) and with a lower rate of patients achieving MRD negativity after chemoimmunotherapy induction treatment (19.6% vs 35.8%, P = 0.02). The PFS outcome of obese patients was significantly worse in the observation group of the trial (24 vs 39 months median PFS, P = 0.03). However, in the rituximab maintenance group the outcome for obese vs non-obese was not different (P = 0.4). In summary, obesity was overall associated with a worse outcome of chemoimmunotherapy induction. However, rituximab maintenance treatment seems to be able to overcome this negative effect., (© 2019 The Authors. Cancer Medicine published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

The crystal structure of the title compound, C(6)H(16)N(2)O(3) (2+)·2Cl(-), has been reported previously by Palm [Acta Cryst. (1967 ▶), 22, 209-216] from Weisenberg camera data, with R1 = 10.5%, isotropic refinement of non-H atoms and H atoms not located. We remeasured a data set of the title compound and present a more precise structure determination. The asymmetric unit contains two unique 1,3-diammonio-1,2,3-tride-oxy-cis-inositol cations and four Cl(-) counter-ions. The cyclo-hexane rings of both inositol cations adopt chair conformations with two axial hy-droxy groups. An extended network of hydrogen bonds is formed. The four chloride counter ions are hydrogen bonded to the hydroxy and ammonium groups of the cations by N-H⋯Cl and O-H⋯Cl interactions. The cations are aligned into wavy layers by cation⋯cation interactions of the form N-H⋯O(ax), N-H⋯O(eq) and O(ax)-H⋯O(eq). Intramolecular hydrogen bonding between the axial hydroxy groups is, however, not observed.

2-D separation of bacterial membrane proteins is still difficult despite using high-resolution IPG-IEF/SDS-PAGE. We were searching for alternative methods to avoid typical problems such as precipitation, low solubility, and aggregation of membrane proteins in the 1-D separation with IPG-IEF. Blue native electrophoresis (BNE) and agarose IEF (A-IEF) were tested for their separation capacity and their capability of replacing IPG-IEF in the first dimension. SDS-PAGE was chosen for the second dimension on account of its outstanding resolution. We could confirm that only A-IEF was a useful replacement for the IPG-IEF in the first dimension resulting in 2-D protein distributions with additional membrane protein spots not being found after IPG-IEF/SDS-PAGE. A second interesting result was that the agarose IEF mediates the possibility of separation of membrane proteins in a partially native state in the first dimension. This native A-IEF resulted in drastically changed spot patterns with an acidic shift of nearly all spots and divergent distribution of proteins compared to non-native A-IEF and IPG-IEF. We found out that native and non-native A-IEF are powerful tools to supplement IPG-IEF/SDS-PAGE.