The antitumor agent 3-bromopyruvate has a short half-life at physiological conditions.

Clinical research is currently exploring the validity of the anti-tumor candidate 3-bromopyruvate (3-BP) as a novel treatment for several types of cancer. However, recent publications have overlooked rarely-cited earlier work about the instability of 3-BP and its decay to 3-hydroxypyruvate (3-HP) which have obvious implications for its mechanism of action against tumors, how it is administered, and for precautions when preparing solutions of 3-BP. This study found the first-order decay rate of 3-BP at physiological temperature and pH has a half-life of only 77 min.

Primary cardiac angiosarcoma: in a patient with a dacron aortic prosthesis.

This is a report of a primary cardiac angiosarcoma in a woman who, several years earlier, had undergone repair of an aortic dissection with a Dacron graft prosthesis. Dacron prostheses have rarely been associated with neoplasia, and this, to our knowledge, is the first reported case of primary cardiac angiosarcoma in association with Dacron. Our patient presented with extensive metastases.

The genome of the natural genetic engineer Agrobacterium tumefaciens C58.

The 5.67-megabase genome of the plant pathogen Agrobacterium tumefaciens C58 consists of a circular chromosome, a linear chromosome, and two plasmids. Extensive orthology and nucleotide colinearity between the genomes of A.