Zebrafish as a model to understand extraocular motor neuron diversity.

Motor neurons have highly diverse anatomical, functional and molecular features, and differ significantly in their susceptibility in disease. Extraocular motor neurons, residing in the oculomotor, trochlear and abducens cranial nuclei (nIII, nIV and nVI), control eye movements. Recent work has begun to clarify the developmental mechanisms by which functional diversity among extraocular motor neurons arises.

Cytokine screening identifies TNF to potentially enhance immunogenicity of pediatric sarcomas.

Introduction: Pediatric sarcomas, including osteosarcoma (OS), Ewing sarcoma (EwS) and rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS) carry low somatic mutational burden and low MHC-I expression, posing a challenge for T cell therapies. Our previous study showed that mediators of monocyte maturation sensitized the EwS cell line A673 to lysis by HLA-A*02:01/CHM1-specific allorestricted T cell receptor (TCR) transgenic CD8 T cells (CHM1 CD8 T cells).

Methods: In this study, we tested a panel of monocyte maturation cytokines for their ability to upregulate immunogenic cell surface markers on OS, EwS and RMS cell lines, using flow cytometry.

Evolutionarily conserved brainstem architecture enables gravity-guided vertical navigation.

The sensation of gravity anchors our perception of the environment and is important for navigation. However, the neural circuits that transform gravity into commands for navigation are undefined. We first determined that larval zebrafish (Danio rerio) navigate vertically by maintaining a consistent heading across a series of upward climb or downward dive bouts.

A Web-Based Questionnaire Builder to Facilitate form Management for the Electronic Data Capture with REDCap.

REDCap, a popular platform for building surveys for electronic data capture, offers two methods for creating questionnaires: an interactive web interface to modify single questions and an upload method to import entire questionnaires. Both methods present limitations in terms of usability and time needed for different tasks. We propose a browser-based web application to design and manage REDCap questionnaires using a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get approach.

Noncovalent Fluorophore Labeling of Proteins by Propidium Iodide in Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate Capillary Gel Electrophoresis.

Sodium dodecyl sulfate capillary gel electrophoresis is one of the frequently used methods for size-based protein separation in molecular biology laboratories and the biopharmaceutical industry. To increase throughput, quite a few multicapillary electrophoresis systems have been recently developed, but most of them only support fluorescence detection, requiring fluorophore labeling of the sample proteins. To avoid the time-consuming derivatization reaction, we developed an on-column labeling approach utilizing propidium iodide for the first time in SDS-CGE of proteins, a dye only used before for nucleic acid analysis.