Extracellular DNAses Facilitate Antagonism and Coexistence in Bacterial Competitor-Sensing Interference Competition.

Over the last 4 decades, the rate of discovery of novel antibiotics has decreased drastically, ending the era of fortuitous antibiotic discovery. A better understanding of the biology of bacteriogenic toxins potentially helps to prospect for new antibiotics. To initiate this line of research, we quantified antagonists from two different sites at two different depths of soil and found the relative number of antagonists to correlate with the bacterial load and carbon-to-nitrogen (C/N) ratio of the soil.

Differential innate immune cell signatures and effects regulated by toll-like receptor 4 during murine lung tumor promotion.

Tumor promotion is an early and critical stage during lung adenocarcinoma (ADC). We previously demonstrated that Tlr4 mutant mice were more susceptible to butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT)-induced pulmonary inflammation and tumor promotion in comparison to Tlr4-sufficient mice. Our study objective was to elucidate the underlying differences in Tlr4 mutant mice in innate immune cell populations, their functional responses, and the influence of these cellular differences on ADC progenitor (type II) cells following BHT-treatment.

Epiregulin is required for lung tumor promotion in a murine two-stage carcinogenesis model.

Adenocarcinoma accounts for ∼40% of lung cancer, equating to ∼88 500 new patients in 2015, most of who will succumb to this disease, thus, the public health burden is evident. Unfortunately, few early biomarkers as well as effective therapies exist, hence the need for novel targets in lung cancer treatment. We previously identified epiregulin (Ereg), an EGF-like ligand, as a biomarker in several mouse lung cancer models.