The value of contrast-enhanced ultrasound in differentiating benign from malignant retroperitoneal masses.

Objectives: To evaluate the value of contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) perfusion patterns in the differentiation of benign and malignant retroperitoneal masses (RMs).

Methods: Between 2006 and 2023, 122 consecutive patients with an RM visualizable by B-mode US were investigated additionally with CEUS. On CEUS, the extent of enhancement (classified as marked, reduced, or absent) and the homogeneity of enhancement (HE; classified as homogeneous or inhomogeneous) were evaluated.

Polarization Saturation in Multilayered Interfacial Ferroelectrics.

Van der Waals polytypes of broken inversion and mirror symmetries  have been recently shown to exhibit switchable electric polarization even at the ultimate two-layer thin limit. Their out-of-plane polarization has been found to accumulate in a ladder-like fashion with each successive layer, offering 2D building blocks for the bottom-up construction of 3D ferroelectrics. Here, it is demonstrated experimentally that beyond a critical stack thickness, the accumulated polarization in rhombohedral polytypes of molybdenum disulfide saturates.

Nature as blueprint: Global phenotype engineering of CHO production cells based on a multi-omics comparison with plasma cells.

Especially for the production of artificial, difficult to express molecules a further development of the CHO production cell line is required to keep pace with the continuously increasing demands. However, the identification of novel targets for cell line engineering to improve CHO cells is a time and cost intensive process. Since plasma cells are evolutionary optimized for a high antibody expression in mammals, we performed a comprehensive multi-omics comparison between CHO and plasma cells to exploit optimized cellular production traits.