Publications by authors named "Peifer M"

Background: Early diagnosis is crucial to the optimal management of patients with cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer's disease (AD) or AD-related dementias. For some patients, early detection of cognitive impairment enables access to disease-modifying therapies. For all patients, it allows access to psychosocial supports.

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Collective cell migration is critical for morphogenesis, homeostasis, and wound healing. Migrating mesenchymal cells form tissues that shape the body's organs. We developed a powerful model, exploring how nascent myotubes migrate onto the testis during pupal development, forming the muscles ensheathing it and creating its characteristic spiral shape.

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The network of proteins at the interface between cell-cell adherens junctions and the actomyosin cytoskeleton provides robust yet dynamic connections that facilitate cell shape change and motility. While this was initially thought to be a simple linear connection via classic cadherins and their associated catenins, we now have come to appreciate that many more proteins are involved, providing robustness and mechanosensitivity. Defining the full network of proteins in this network remains a key objective in our field.

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Prostate cancer (PCA) exhibits high levels of intratumoral heterogeneity. In this study, we developed a mathematical model to study the growth and genetic evolution of PCA. We explored the possible evolutionary patterns and demonstrated that tumor architecture represents a major bottleneck for divergent clonal evolution.

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Article Synopsis
  • Cells must change shape and move during development without disrupting tissue structure, requiring strong connections between adherens junctions and the actomyosin cytoskeleton.
  • Drosophila Canoe and mammalian Afadin are critical for this process, and understanding how Ras-family GTPases influence their function is a major focus of research.
  • Through experiments, researchers found that although both RA1 and RA2 domains bind to active Rap1 with similar strengths, they have different roles in Canoe function, with RA1 being essential while RA2 contributes to junction stability in certain developmental stages.
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Background: Primary aldosteronism (PA) is the most common cause of secondary hypertension, yet screening remains startlingly infrequent. We describe (1) PA screening practices in a large, diverse health system, (2) the development of a computable phenotype for PA screening, and (3) the design and pilot deployment of an electronic health record (EHR)-based active choice nudge to recommend PA screening.

Study Design: A multidisciplinary team developed a multipronged intervention to improve PA screening informed by guidelines, expertise, and multivariable analyses of factors associated with screening.

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Our current understanding of the molecular basis of embryonic development and the shared machinery underlying this remarkable process has its roots in three papers published 40 years ago, which summarize the results of the Nobel Prize-winning 'Heidelberg screen'. The genesis of these experiments that empowered us and the stories behind the experiments are worth revisiting.

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Collective cell migration is critical for morphogenesis, homeostasis, and wound healing. During development migrating mesenchymal cells form tissues that shape some of the body's organs. We have developed a powerful model for examining this, exploring how Drosophila testis nascent myotubes migrate onto the testis during pupal development, forming the muscles that ensheath it and also creating its characteristic spiral shape.

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Cell behavior emerges from the intracellular distribution of properties like protrusion, contractility and adhesion. Thus, characteristic emergent rules of collective migration can arise from cell-cell contacts locally tweaking architecture - orchestrating self-regulation during development, wound healing, and cancer progression. The new testis-nascent-myotube-system allows dissection of contact-dependent migration in vivo at high resolution.

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Importance: Socially vulnerable patients with symptomatic cholelithiasis are more likely to face barriers to accessing surgical care. This barrier to access can lead to delays in treatment, the need for emergent cholecystectomy, and worse outcomes.

Objectives: To determine the effectiveness of telemedicine vs in-person surgical consultation on access to elective cholecystectomy in socially vulnerable populations and to evaluate the association of scheduling navigation with access to elective cholecystectomy in these populations.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aims to understand how specific molecular changes, particularly the expression of a certain gene, influence the clinical outcomes of patients with pulmonary carcinoids, which can range from slow-growing to deadly tumors.
  • Researchers analyzed RNA sequencing data from two cohorts of pulmonary carcinoid patients (totaling 193) to determine the prognostic value of this gene expression and its relationship with telomerase activity, which is linked to tumor aggressiveness.
  • Results showed that high expression of the gene correlates with worse survival rates and is an independent predictor of poor clinical outcomes, suggesting that it could be a key factor in assessing the severity of pulmonary carcinoids.
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  • Cells change shape significantly during early development, leading to ordered tissue formation, but the mechanisms behind this are not well understood.
  • Research reveals that during gastrulation, a nematic liquid crystal phase appears in cells of fish, frogs, and fruit flies, showing similar long-range patterns of order across these different species.
  • A theoretical model combined with experiments on cell adhesion and specification helps identify the essential elements for this nematic phase, contributing to a broader understanding of embryonic development in animals.
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Cells undergo dramatic changes in morphology during embryogenesis, yet how these changes affect the formation of ordered tissues remains elusive. Here we find that the emergence of a nematic liquid crystal phase occurs in cells during gastrulation in the development of embryos of fish, frogs, and fruit flies. Moreover, the spatial correlations in all three organisms are long-ranged and follow a similar power-law decay with less than unity for the nematic order parameter, suggesting a common underlying physical mechanism unifies events in these distantly related species.

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Importance: Despite public health efforts, breast cancer screening rates remain below national goals.

Objective: To evaluate whether bulk ordering, text messaging, and clinician endorsement increase breast cancer screening rates.

Design, Setting, And Participants: Two concurrent, pragmatic, randomized clinical trials, each with a 2-by-2 factorial design, were conducted between October 25, 2021, and April 25, 2022, in 2 primary care regions of an academic health system.

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Background: The individual HLA-I genotype is associated with cancer, autoimmune diseases and infections. This study elucidates the role of germline homozygosity or allelic imbalance of HLA-I loci in esophago-gastric adenocarcinoma (EGA) and determines the resulting repertoires of potentially immunogenic peptides.

Methods: HLA genotypes and sequences of either (1) 10 relevant tumor-associated antigens (TAAs) or (2) patient-specific mutation-associated neoantigens (MANAs) were used to predict good-affinity binders using an in silico approach for MHC-binding (www.

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The evolutionary processes that underlie the marked sensitivity of small cell lung cancer (SCLC) to chemotherapy and rapid relapse are unknown. Here we determined tumour phylogenies at diagnosis and throughout chemotherapy and immunotherapy by multiregion sequencing of 160 tumours from 65 patients. Treatment-naive SCLC exhibited clonal homogeneity at distinct tumour sites, whereas first-line platinum-based chemotherapy led to a burst in genomic intratumour heterogeneity and spatial clonal diversity.

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We have made tremendous progress in identifying the machines that shape the architecture of actin filaments. However, we know less about the mechanisms mediating myosin assembly at the supramolecular level. In this issue, Quintanilla et al.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study focuses on the protein Canoe and its role in maintaining strong connections between adherens junctions and the actomyosin cytoskeleton, which is essential for cell shape changes during morphogenesis without damaging tissues.
  • It investigates the functionality of Canoe's largest domain, the Dilute domain, using various scientific methods, including structural predictions and mutant analysis.
  • Findings indicate that while mutants lacking the Dilute domain (CnoΔDIL) can survive and reproduce, they still show defects in eye development, demonstrating the critical role of junction-cytoskeletal connections in cellular movements and the evolutionary preservation of protein structures.
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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates how the protein Canoe (and its mammalian counterpart Afadin) links cell-cell adherens junctions to the actomyosin cytoskeleton, enabling cells to change shape during development without damaging tissues.
  • The researchers examined the structure and function of the Dilute domain in Canoe, discovering that while deletion of this domain still allows for viable and fertile mutants, it leads to reduced functionality and issues in specific developmental processes like eye development.
  • The findings highlight the importance of robust connections between adherens junctions and the cytoskeleton in morphogenesis, emphasizing the role of natural selection in maintaining protein structure within these resilient systems.
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Adenylosuccinate lyase deficiency is an ultrarare congenital metabolic disorder associated with muscle weakness and neurobehavioral dysfunction. Adenylosuccinate lyase is required for de novo purine biosynthesis, acting twice in the pathway at non-sequential steps. Genetic models can contribute to our understanding of the etiology of disease phenotypes and pave the way for development of therapeutic treatments.

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The discovery of frequent 8p11-p12 amplifications in squamous cell lung cancer (SQLC) has fueled hopes that FGFR1, located inside this amplicon, might be a therapeutic target. In a clinical trial, only 11% of patients with 8p11 amplification (detected by FISH) responded to FGFR kinase inhibitor treatment. To understand the mechanism of FGFR1 dependency, we performed deep genomic characterization of 52 SQLCs with 8p11-p12 amplification, including 10 tumors obtained from patients who had been treated with FGFR inhibitors.

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One central question for cell and developmental biologists is defining how epithelial cells can change shape and move during embryonic development without tearing tissues apart. This requires robust yet dynamic connections of cells to one another, via the cell-cell adherens junction, and of junctions to the actin and myosin cytoskeleton, which generates force. The last decade revealed that these connections involve a multivalent network of proteins, rather than a simple linear pathway.

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Bladder cancer (BC) expresses itself as a highly heterogeneous disease both at the histological and molecular level, often occurring as synchronous or metachronous multifocal disease with high risk of recurrence and potential to metastasize. Multiple sequencing studies focusing on both non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC) and muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC) gave insights into the extent of both inter- and intrapatient heterogeneity, but many questions on clonal evolution in BC remain unanswered. In this review article, we provide an overview over the technical and theoretical concepts linked to reconstructing evolutionary trajectories in BC and propose a set of tools and established software for phylogenetic analysis.

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