Mechanical imbalance between normal and transformed cells drives epithelial homeostasis through cell competition.

Cell competition in epithelial tissue eliminates transformed cells expressing activated oncoproteins to maintain epithelial homeostasis. Although the process is now understood to be of mechanochemical origin, direct mechanical characterization and associated biochemical underpinnings are lacking. Here, we employ tissue-scale stress and compressibility measurements and theoretical modeling to unveil a mechanical imbalance between normal and transformed cells, which drives cell competition.

Accumulation of annexin A2 and S100A10 prevents apoptosis of apically delaminated, transformed epithelial cells.

In various epithelial tissues, the epithelial monolayer acts as a barrier. To fulfill its function, the structural integrity of the epithelium is tightly controlled. When normal epithelial cells detach from the basal substratum and delaminate into the apical lumen, the apically extruded cells undergo apoptosis, which is termed anoikis.

The real-world data of lipid-lowering treatment in patients with peripheral artery disease and its association with severity of disease.

Background: The risk of coronary artery disease in peripheral arterial disease (PAD) is high, life prognosis is poor, and lipid-lowering treatment with statins has been reported to improve prognosis. In clinical practice, however, hypolipidemia is more common in patients with severe PAD and statin prescription rates appear to be low, but specific data are scarce in Japan. Therefore, we conducted this cross-sectional study in collaboration with other centers of vascular surgery to determine the rate of statin prescriptions for PAD patients in real-world practice, the rate of achievement of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol control targets, and whether statin non-use is a determinant factor of critical limb ischemia (CLI).

Prosthesis use and the change in activities of daily living following below-knee amputation in patients undergoing hemodialysis.

Introduction: Patients undergoing hemodialysis are at an increased risk of peripheral arterial disease, amputation of lower extremities, and decline of activities of daily living. Although a prosthesis is used to support activities of daily living, no previous study reported the association of prosthesis use with the change in activities of daily living following leg amputation in hemodialysis patients. The purpose of this study was to compare the changes in activities of daily living following amputation between those who created a prosthesis and those who did not.

ePURE_JSBML: A Tool for Constructing a Deterministic Model of a Reconstituted Escherichia coli Protein Translation System with a User-Specified Nucleic Acid Sequence.

A protein synthesis system is one of the most important and complex biological networks, which translates DNA-encoded information into specific functions. Here, ePURE_JSBML, a tool for constructing biologically relevant large-scale and detailed computational models based on a reconstituted cell-free protein synthesis system, is presented; the user can specify the mRNA sequence, initial component concentration, and decoding rule. Model construction is based on Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML) using JSBML, a pure Java programming library.