Avoidance behaviour of aquatic macroinvertebrates for real-time detection of micropollutant surge in wastewater effluents.

Micropollutants are regularly detected at the outlets of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). Across urban and industrial WWTPs, monitoring directives only require assessment for a handful of chemicals via sampling methods that fail to capture the temporal variability in micropollutant discharge. In this study, we develop a biotest for real-time on-line monitoring of micropollutant discharge dynamics in WWTPs effluents.

Novel shear flow assay provides evidence for non-linear modulation of cancer invasion.

Cancer is a frequent disease in western countries and there is no effective treatment for metastasis, the main cause of death in cancer patients. The situation can be improved by a better understanding of the cancer invasion process. In order to reveal new aspects of this dynamic process, we developed a novel direct viewing cancer cell invasion assay with shear flow in vitro.

Evidence for protein 4.1B acting as a metastasis suppressor.

We compared a non-metastasising sarcoma cell population with three related populations of increasing metastatic potential. The metastatic cells in vitro exhibited a significantly reduced incidence of actin stress fibres but enhanced motility and chemotaxis. We also investigated gene expression underlying progression to a metastatic phenotype by performing a microarray analysis of the four sarcoma populations.

Cluster analysis of networks generated through homology: automatic identification of important protein communities involved in cancer metastasis.

Background: Protein-protein interactions have traditionally been studied on a small scale, using classical biochemical methods to investigate the proteins of interest. More recently large-scale methods, such as two-hybrid screens, have been utilised to survey extensive portions of genomes. Current high-throughput approaches have a relatively high rate of errors, whereas in-depth biochemical studies are too expensive and time-consuming to be practical for extensive studies.