An Immune Atlas of Clear Cell Renal Cell Carcinoma.

Immune cells in the tumor microenvironment modulate cancer progression and are attractive therapeutic targets. Macrophages and T cells are key components of the microenvironment, yet their phenotypes and relationships in this ecosystem and to clinical outcomes are ill defined. We used mass cytometry with extensive antibody panels to perform in-depth immune profiling of samples from 73 clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) patients and five healthy controls.

Alternative Computational Analysis Shows No Evidence for Nucleosome Enrichment at Repetitive Sequences in Mammalian Spermatozoa.

Samans et al. (2014) reported the enrichment of nucleosomes in human and bovine spermatozoa at centromere repeats and retrotransposon sequences such as LINE-1 and SINE. We demonstrate here that nucleosomal enrichments at repetitive sequences as reported result from bioinformatic analyses that make redundant use of sequencing reads that map to multiple locations in the genome.

The Paf1 complex represses small-RNA-mediated epigenetic gene silencing.

RNA interference (RNAi) refers to the ability of exogenously introduced double-stranded RNA to silence expression of homologous sequences. Silencing is initiated when the enzyme Dicer processes the double-stranded RNA into small interfering RNAs (siRNAs). Small RNA molecules are incorporated into Argonaute-protein-containing effector complexes, which they guide to complementary targets to mediate different types of gene silencing, specifically post-transcriptional gene silencing and chromatin-dependent gene silencing.