CD4 T Cells Mediate Dendritic Cell Licensing to Promote Multi-Antigen Anti-Leukemic Immune Response.

Background: Single antigen (Ag)-targeted immunotherapies for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) are highly effective; however, up to 50% of patients relapse after these treatments. Most of these relapses lack target Ag expression, suggesting targeting multiple Ags would be advantageous.

Materials & Methods: The multi-Ag immune responses to ALL induced by transducing cell lines with xenoAgs green fluorescent protein and firefly luciferase was elucidated using flow cytometry, ELISA, and ELISpot assays.

Vaginal metatranscriptome meta-analysis reveals functional BV subgroups and novel colonisation strategies.

Background: The application of '-omics' technologies to study bacterial vaginosis (BV) has uncovered vast differences in composition and scale between the vaginal microbiomes of healthy and BV patients. Compared to amplicon sequencing and shotgun metagenomic approaches focusing on a single or few species, investigating the transcriptome of the vaginal microbiome at a system-wide level can provide insight into the functions which are actively expressed and differential between states of health and disease.

Results: We conducted a meta-analysis of vaginal metatranscriptomes from three studies, split into exploratory (n = 42) and validation (n = 297) datasets, accounting for the compositional nature of sequencing data and differences in scale between healthy and BV microbiomes.

Toward a Procedure for the Template Free Growth of Te Nanowires Across an Insulator by Electrodeposition.

In this work, we present a method for direct, site-selective growth of tellurium nanowires by electrochemical deposition. The Te nanowires were grown laterally between two specially designed nanoband electrodes across a gap, and over a dielectric material, forming a lateral device structure directly. The resulting wires are crystalline and phase pure, as evidenced by Raman spectroscopy, EDS (energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy), and ADF-STEM (annular dark field scanning transmission electron microscopy).

Rifaximin prophylaxis causes resistance to the last-resort antibiotic daptomycin.

Multidrug-resistant bacterial pathogens like vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium (VREfm) are a critical threat to human health. Daptomycin is a last-resort antibiotic for VREfm infections with a novel mode of action, but for which resistance has been widely reported but is unexplained. Here we show that rifaximin, an unrelated antibiotic used prophylactically to prevent hepatic encephalopathy in patients with liver disease, causes cross-resistance to daptomycin in VREfm.