前沿科技及其它

Normal DNA methylation is an epigenetic modification required for proper development. Aberrant DNA methylation, in contrast, is frequently observed in many different malignancies including leukemias and lymphomas. Global DNA methylation profiling addresses the methyla ...

Minimal residual disease (MRD) diagnostics is of high clinical relevance in patients with indolent B-cell Non-Hodgkin lymphomas (B-NHL) and serves as a surrogate parameter to evaluate treatment effectiveness and long-term prognosis. MRD diagnostics performed by real-time quan ...

Cancer genes are often deregulated by genomic rearrangements. Accordingly, analysis of the participant chromosomes responsible now occupies a key role in characterizing and identifying cancer cell lines. Cytogenetics may also be used to study the nature and extent of chromosome br ...

The main prerequisition for any research, development, or production programs involving cell lines is whether a cell line is authentic or not. Microsatellites in the human genome harboring short tandem repeat (STR) DNA markers allow the identification of individual cell lines at the DNA le ...

Studies of the same cell lines by different laboratories are common in the literature and often show different results with the same methodology. Use of best cell culture practices is essential to ensure consistent and reproducible results. Assay outcomes are easily influenced by many fac ...

The successful storage of cell lines depends upon many factors, including the condition of the cells to be frozen and the experience of the operator. Attempting to freeze down unhealthy, contaminated or poorly labelled cells can have huge implications for a research laboratory. This chapter ...

Three experimental systems based on mouse models are currently used to study breast cancer: transgenic mice, carcinogen-induced models, and xenografts of breast cancers. Each of these models has advantages and limitations. This chapter focuses on xenotransplantation of breast ca ...

Maintenance of a mitotically inactive feeder layer which is able to provide extracellular matrix and growth factors can be critical in establishing and maintaining primary tumor cells. How feeder cells are handled and processed is crucial for providing trouble-free support for prima ...

Drug design is an iterative process requiring cycles of compound synthesis and testing, with each successive synthesis phase yielding molecules predicted to have improved characteristics over the previous set of compounds. In the field of cancer drug discovery, a key early-stage elem ...

The advent of recent technologies such as gene expression microarrays and high-throughput sequencing methods has allowed for unveiling the molecular complexity of cancer. However, compared to the genomic discovery stage, the functional characterization of genes that have been f ...

Most of the current therapies against cancer, and also those against immune diseases or viral infections, consist of empirically designed combination strategies, combining a variety of therapeutic agents. Drug combinations are widely used because multiple drugs affect multiple ...

Therapeutic strategies for cancer include chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and radiation. Such therapies result in significant short-term clinical responses; however, relapses and recurrences occur with no treatments. Targeted therapies using monoclonal antibodies ha ...

The plasma membrane proteome can be defined as the entire complement of proteins present in the plasma membrane at a specific time. The process of carcinogenesis leads to changes in the array of proteins present in the plasma membrane proteome. Analysis of differential expression of such prot ...

Quantitative reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) offers a robust method for the measurement of RNA levels for any gene within cells harvested at any point before or during cell culture. The key elements of RNA extraction followed by a two-step qRT-PCR method (reverse ...

Microbial contamination is a major issue in cell culture, but there are a range of procedures which can be adopted to prevent or eliminate contamination. Contamination may arise from the operator and the laboratory environment, from other cells used in the laboratory, and from reagents. Some i ...

Mycoplasma contamination may have multiple effects on cultured cell lines and this can also have a significant influence on the results of scientific studies, and certainly on the quality of cell culture products used in medicine and pharmacology. The elimination of mycoplasma contami ...

The detection of mycoplasmas in human and animal cell cultures is mandatory for every cell culture laboratory, because these bacteria are common contaminants, persist unrecognized in cell cultures for many years, and affect research results as well as the purity of cell culture products. T ...

Ovarian carcinomas show considerable heterogeneity of origin, both in terms of site and tissue. The most important and also most frequent of these tumors arise from the coelomic epithelium and are therefore characterized as epithelial ovarian carcinomas (EOC). EOC is often large and adva ...

Cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) keratinocytes readily grow, expand in culture, and continuously passage, suggesting either spontaneous immortalisation at the early stage of culture or inherent proliferative capacity. One feature of SCC keratinocytes is genomic DNA r ...

Recently developed methods are described for the culture of cells from primary human melanomas and benign or dysplastic naevi (moles). These allow the culture of viable cells from the great majority of such lesions, and the maintenance of what appears to be the predominant population of pigme ...