Publications by authors named "Versteeg R"

Article Synopsis
  • PFAS, particularly PFOS, pose environmental and health risks due to their long-lasting presence, making their fate and transport in sedimentary aquifers complex.
  • The study examines how physical and geochemical differences in riparian floodplains affect the movement and concentration of PFOS during changes in river stages.
  • Findings highlight that sediment permeability is crucial for predicting PFOS behavior, emphasizing the need to accurately assess aquifer variability to understand PFAS dynamics effectively.
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Article Synopsis
  • The researchers introduced a new resonant inelastic hard x-ray scattering setup at the Bernina beamline in SwissFEL, featuring high energy, momentum, and temporal resolution using a compact Johann-type spectrometer.
  • They achieved an approximate resolution of 180 meV while studying honeycomb iridate α-LiIrO, confirming that their findings align well with previous synchrotron data.
  • The time-resolved RIXS transients revealed energy loss changes less than 2 eV, linked to electron hopping in the lattice, which were attributed to modulation of inter-site transition scattering efficiency and transient changes in on-site Coulomb interaction.
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Introduction: Cribriform growth pattern (CP) in prostate cancer (PCa) has been associated with different unfavourable oncological outcomes. This study addresses if CP in prostate biopsies is an independent risk factor for metastatic disease on PSMA PET/CT.

Methods: Treatment-naive patients with ISUP GG ≥ 2 staged with Ga-PSMA-11 PET/CT diagnosed from 2020 to 2021 were retrospectively enrolled.

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Introduction: Mutations affecting the RAS-MAPK pathway occur frequently in relapsed neuroblastoma tumors and are associated with response to MEK inhibition . However, these inhibitors alone do not lead to tumor regression , indicating the need for combination therapy.

Methods And Results: high-throughput combination screening, we identified that the MEK inhibitor trametinib can be combined with BCL-2 family member inhibitors, to efficiently inhibit growth of neuroblastoma cell lines with RAS-MAPK mutations.

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The pediatric extra-cranial tumor neuroblastoma displays a low mutational burden while recurrent copy number alterations are present in most high-risk cases. Here, we identify SOX11 as a dependency transcription factor in adrenergic neuroblastoma based on recurrent chromosome 2p focal gains and amplifications, specific expression in the normal sympatho-adrenal lineage and adrenergic neuroblastoma, regulation by multiple adrenergic specific (super-)enhancers and strong dependency on high SOX11 expression in adrenergic neuroblastomas. SOX11 regulated direct targets include genes implicated in epigenetic control, cytoskeleton and neurodevelopment.

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Intronic single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in FOXO3A are associated with human longevity. Currently, it is unclear how these SNPs alter FOXO3A functionality and human physiology, thereby influencing lifespan. Here, we identify a primate-specific FOXO3A transcriptional isoform, FOXO3A-Short (FOXO3A-S), encoding a major longevity-associated SNP, rs9400239 (C or T), within its 5' untranslated region.

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Apart from the anti-GD2 antibody, immunotherapy for neuroblastoma has had limited success due to immune evasion mechanisms, coupled with an incomplete understanding of predictors of response. Here, from bulk and single-cell transcriptomic analyses, we identify a subset of neuroblastomas enriched for transcripts associated with immune activation and inhibition and show that these are predominantly characterized by gene expression signatures of the mesenchymal lineage state. By contrast, tumors expressing adrenergic lineage signatures are less immunogenic.

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Despite intensive therapy, children with high-risk neuroblastoma are at risk of treatment failure. We applied a multiomic system approach to evaluate metabolic vulnerabilities in human neuroblastoma. We combined metabolomics, CRISPR screening, and transcriptomic data across more than 700 solid tumor cell lines and identified dihydroorotate dehydrogenase (DHODH), a critical enzyme in pyrimidine synthesis, as a potential treatment target.

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Formation of magnetic order alters the character of spin excitations, which then affects transport properties. We investigate the photoexcited ultrafast spin dynamics in different magnetic phases in Néel-type skyrmion host GaVS with time-resolved magneto-optical Kerr effect experiments. The coherent spin precession, whose amplitude is enhanced in the skyrmion-lattice phase, shows a signature of phase coexistence across the magnetic phase transitions.

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We present time-resolved magneto-optical spectroscopy on the magnetic Mott-Hubbard-insulating Kitaev spin liquid candidate α-RuCl to investigate the nonequilibrium dynamics of its antiferromagnetically ordered zigzag groundstate after photoexcitation. A systematic study of the transient magnetic linear dichroism under different experimental conditions (temperature, external magnetic field, photoexcitation density) gives direct access to the dynamical interplay of charge excitations with the zigzag ordered state on ultrashort time scales. We observe a rather slow initial demagnetization (few to 10s of ps) followed by a long-lived non-thermal antiferromagnetic spin-disordered state (100-1000s of ps), which can be understood in terms of holons and doublons disordering the antiferromagnetic background after photoexcitation.

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We present the results of a lab-scaled feasibility study to assess the performance of electrical resistivity tomography for detection, characterization, and monitoring of fuel grade ethanol releases to the subsurface. Further, we attempt to determine the concentration distribution of the ethanol from the electrical resistivity tomography data using mixing-models. Ethanol is a renewable fuel source as well as an oxygenate fuel additive currently used to replace the known carcinogen methyl tert-butyl ether; however, ethanol is preferentially biodegraded and a cosolvent.

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Half of the children diagnosed with neuroblastoma (NB) have high-risk disease, disproportionately contributing to overall childhood cancer-related deaths. In addition to recurrent gene mutations, there is increasing evidence supporting the role of epigenetic deregulation in disease pathogenesis. Yet, comprehensive cis-regulatory network descriptions from NB are lacking.

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Cancer therapy frequently fails due to the emergence of resistance. Many tumors include phenotypically immature tumor cells, which have been implicated in therapy resistance. Neuroblastoma cells can adopt a lineage-committed adrenergic (ADRN) or an immature mesenchymal (MES) state.

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Brain dopamine signaling is essential for the motivation to eat, and obesity is associated with altered dopaminergic signaling and increased food craving. We used molecular neuroimaging to explore whether striatal dopamine transporter (DAT) availability is associated with craving as measured with the General Food Craving Questionnaire-Trait (G-FCQ-T). We here show that humans with obesity ( = 34) experienced significantly more craving for food compared with lean subjects ( = 32), but food craving did not correlate significantly with striatal DAT availability as assessed with I-FP-CIT single-photon emission computed tomography.

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Motivation: Nutrient and contaminant behavior in the subsurface are governed by multiple coupled hydrobiogeochemical processes which occur across different temporal and spatial scales. Accurate description of macroscopic system behavior requires accounting for the effects of microscopic and especially microbial processes. Microbial processes mediate precipitation and dissolution and change aqueous geochemistry, all of which impacts macroscopic system behavior.

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Neuroblastomas are childhood tumors with frequent fatal relapses after induction treatment, which is related to tumor evolution with additional genomic events. Our whole-genome sequencing data analysis revealed a high frequency of somatic cytosine > adenine (C > A) substitutions in primary neuroblastoma tumors, which was associated with poor survival. We showed that increased levels of C > A substitutions correlate with copy number loss (CNL) of or Both genes encode DNA glycosylases that recognize 8-oxo-guanine (8-oxoG) lesions as a first step of 8-oxoG repair.

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Background And Objectives: Understanding resource allocation is important to ensure that limited health resources are spent where they bring the greatest benefit. The aim of this study was to explore how much of Australia's national health expenditure is allocated specifically to general practice services, and more broadly to primary healthcare (PHC) services.

Method: This study used multiple Australian institutional reports - produced by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Productivity Commission and Services Australia - to classify, compare and quantify general practice and PHC expenditure.

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Ornithine decarboxylase (ODC1), a critical regulatory enzyme in polyamine biosynthesis, is a direct transcriptional target of MYCN, amplification of which is a powerful marker of aggressive neuroblastoma. A single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), G316A, within the first intron of , results in genotypes wildtype GG, and variants AG/AA. CRISPR-cas9 technology was used to investigate the effects of AG clones from wildtype -amplified SK-N-BE(2)-C cells and the effect of the SNP on MYCN binding, and promoter activity was investigated using EMSA and luciferase assays.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in multiple changes in the delivery of general practice services. In response to the threat of the pandemic and in order to keep their businesses safe and viable, general practices have rapidly moved to new models of care, embraced Medicare-funded telehealth and responded to uncertain availability of personal protective equipment with innovation. These changes have shown the adaptability of general practice, helped keep patients and practice staff safe, and undoubtedly reduced community transmission and mortality.

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Personalized cancer treatments using combinations of drugs with a synergistic effect is attractive but proves to be highly challenging. Here we present an approach to uncover the efficacy of drug combinations based on the analysis of mono-drug effects. For this we used dose-response data from pharmacogenomic encyclopedias and represent these as a drug atlas.

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