-
[show abstract]
[hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: Objectives: Percutaneous stenting of occluded peripheral vessels is a well-established technique in clinical practice. Unfortunately, the patency rates of small-caliber vessels after stenting remain unsatisfactory. The aim of the BioStent concept is to overcome in-stent restenosis by excluding the diseased vessel segment entirely from the blood stream, in addition to providing an intact endothelial cell layer. Design: The concept combines the principles of vascular tissue engineering with a self-expanding stent: casting of the stent within a cellularized fibrin gel structure, followed by bioreactor conditioning, allows complete integration of the stent within engineered tissue. Materials and Methods: Small-caliber BioStents (Ø=6 mm; n=4) were produced by casting a nitinol stent within a thin fibrin/vascular smooth muscle cell (vSMC) mixture, followed by luminal endothelial cell seeding, and conditioning of the BioStent within a bioreactor system. The potential remodeling of the fibrin component into tissue was analyzed using routine histological methods. Scanning electron microscopy was used to assess the luminal endothelial cell coverage following the conditioning phase and crimping of the stent. Results: The BioStent was shown to be noncytotoxic, with no significant effect on cell proliferation. Gross and microscopic analysis revealed complete integration of the nitinol component within a viable tissue structure. Hematoxylin and eosin staining revealed a homogenous distribution of vSMCs throughout the thickness of the BioStent, while a smooth, confluent luminal endothelial cell lining was evident and not significantly affected by the crimping/release process. Conclusions: The BioStent concept is a platform technology offering a novel opportunity to generate a viable, self-expanding stent structure with a functional endothelial cell lining. This platform technology can be transferred to different applications depending on the luminal cell lining required.
Tissue Engineering Part A 04/2012; 18(17-18):1818-26. · 4.64 Impact Factor
-
Oliver Soehnlein,
Sarawuth Wantha,
Sakine Simsekyilmaz,
Yvonne Döring,
Remco T A Megens,
Sebastian F Mause,
Maik Drechsler,
Ralf Smeets,
Stefan Weinandy, Fabian Schreiber, [......],
Santosh Vijayan,
Marc A M J van Zandvoort,
Birgitta Agerberth,
Christine T Pham,
Richard L Gallo,
Tilman M Hackeng,
Elisa A Liehn,
Alma Zernecke,
Doris Klee,
Christian Weber
[show abstract]
[hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: Percutaneous transluminal angioplasty with stent implantation is used to dilate arteries narrowed by atherosclerotic plaques and to revascularize coronary arteries occluded by atherothrombosis in myocardial infarction. Commonly applied drug-eluting stents release antiproliferative or anti-inflammatory agents to reduce the incidence of in-stent stenosis. However, these stents may still lead to in-stent stenosis; they also show increased rates of late stent thrombosis, an obstacle to optimal revascularization possibly related to endothelial recovery. Here, we examined the contribution of neutrophils and neutrophilic granule proteins to arterial healing after injury. We found that neutrophil-borne cathelicidin (mouse CRAMP, human LL-37) promoted reendothelization and thereby limited neointima formation after stent implantation. We then translated these findings to an animal model using a neutrophil-instructing, biofunctionalized, miniaturized Nitinol stent coated with LL-37. This stent reduced in-stent stenosis in a mouse model of atherosclerosis, suggesting that LL-37 may promote vascular healing after interventional therapy.
Science translational medicine 10/2011; 3(103):103ra98. · 7.80 Impact Factor
-
[show abstract]
[hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: Analyzing the functional potential of newly sequenced genomes and metagenomes has become a common task in biomedical and biological research. With the advent of high-throughput sequencing technologies comparative metagenomics opens the way to elucidate the genetically determined similarities and differences of complex microbial communities. We developed the web server 'CoMet' (http://comet.gobics.de), which provides an easy-to-use comparative metagenomics platform that is well-suitable for the analysis of large collections of metagenomic short read data. CoMet combines the ORF finding and subsequent assignment of protein sequences to Pfam domain families with a comparative statistical analysis. Besides comprehensive tabular data files, the CoMet server also provides visually interpretable output in terms of hierarchical clustering and multi-dimensional scaling plots and thus allows a quick overview of a given set of metagenomic samples.
Nucleic Acids Research 05/2011; 39(Web Server issue):W518-23. · 8.03 Impact Factor
-
[show abstract]
[hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: Existing coalescent models and phylogenetic tools based on them are not designed for studying the genealogy of sequences like those of HIV, since in HIV recombinants with multiple cross-over points between the parental strains frequently arise. Hence, ambiguous cases in the classification of HIV sequences into subtypes and circulating recombinant forms (CRFs) have been treated with ad hoc methods in lack of tools based on a comprehensive coalescent model accounting for complex recombination patterns.
We developed the program ARGUS that scores classifications of sequences into subtypes and recombinant forms. It reconstructs ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs) that reflect the genealogy of the input sequences given a classification hypothesis. An ARG with maximal probability is approximated using a Markov chain Monte Carlo approach. ARGUS was able to distinguish the correct classification with a low error rate from plausible alternative classifications in simulation studies with realistic parameters. We applied our algorithm to decide between two recently debated alternatives in the classification of CRF02 of HIV-1 and find that CRF02 is indeed a recombinant of Subtypes A and G.
ARGUS is implemented in C++ and the source code is available at http://gobics.de/software.
Bioinformatics 06/2010; 26(11):1409-15. · 5.47 Impact Factor
-
[show abstract]
[hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: SUMMARY: Assessment of phylogenetic diversity is a key element to the analysis of microbial communities. Tools are needed to handle next-generation sequencing data and to cope with the computational complexity of large-scale studies. Here, we present Treephyler, a tool for fast taxonomic profiling of metagenomes. Treephyler was evaluated on real metagenome to assess its performance in comparison to previous approaches for taxonomic profiling. Results indicate that Treephyler is in terms of speed and accuracy prepared for next-generation sequencing techniques and large-scale analysis. AVAILABILITY: Treephyler is implemented in Perl; it is portable to all platforms and applicable to both nucleotide and protein input data. Treephyler is freely available for download at http://www.gobics.de/fabian/treephyler.php.
Bioinformatics 02/2010; 26(7):960-1. · 5.47 Impact Factor
-
[show abstract]
[hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: In the absence of whole genome sequences for many organisms, the use of expressed sequence tags (EST) offers an affordable approach for researchers conducting phylogenetic analyses to gain insight about the evolutionary history of organisms. Reliable alignments for phylogenomic analyses are based on orthologous gene sequences from different taxa. So far, researchers have not sufficiently tackled the problem of the completely automated construction of such datasets. Existing software tools are either semi-automated, covering only part of the necessary data processing, or implemented as a pipeline, requiring the installation and configuration of a cascade of external tools, which may be time-consuming and hard to manage. To simplify data set construction for phylogenomic studies, we set up a web server that uses our recently developed OrthoSelect approach. To the best of our knowledge, our web server is the first web-based EST analysis pipeline that allows the detection of orthologous gene sequences in EST libraries and outputs orthologous gene alignments. Additionally, OrthoSelect provides the user with an extensive results section that lists and visualizes all important results, such as annotations, data matrices for each gene/taxon and orthologous gene alignments. The web server is available at http://orthoselect.gobics.de.
Nucleic Acids Research 07/2009; 37(Web Server issue):W185-8. · 8.03 Impact Factor
-
Hervé Philippe,
Romain Derelle,
Philippe Lopez,
Kerstin Pick,
Carole Borchiellini,
Nicole Boury-Esnault,
Jean Vacelet,
Emmanuelle Renard,
Evelyn Houliston,
Eric Quéinnec,
Corinne Da Silva,
Patrick Wincker,
Hervé Le Guyader,
Sally Leys,
Daniel J Jackson, Fabian Schreiber,
Dirk Erpenbeck,
Burkhard Morgenstern,
Gert Wörheide,
Michaël Manuel
[show abstract]
[hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: The origin of many of the defining features of animal body plans, such as symmetry, nervous system, and the mesoderm, remains shrouded in mystery because of major uncertainty regarding the emergence order of the early branching taxa: the sponge groups, ctenophores, placozoans, cnidarians, and bilaterians. The "phylogenomic" approach [1] has recently provided a robust picture for intrabilaterian relationships [2, 3] but not yet for more early branching metazoan clades. We have assembled a comprehensive 128 gene data set including newly generated sequence data from ctenophores, cnidarians, and all four main sponge groups. The resulting phylogeny yields two significant conclusions reviving old views that have been challenged in the molecular era: (1) that the sponges (Porifera) are monophyletic and not paraphyletic as repeatedly proposed [4-9], thus undermining the idea that ancestral metazoans had a sponge-like body plan; (2) that the most likely position for the ctenophores is together with the cnidarians in a "coelenterate" clade. The Porifera and the Placozoa branch basally with respect to a moderately supported "eumetazoan" clade containing the three taxa with nervous system and muscle cells (Cnidaria, Ctenophora, and Bilateria). This new phylogeny provides a stimulating framework for exploring the important changes that shaped the body plans of the early diverging phyla.
Current biology: CB 05/2009; 19(8):706-12. · 10.99 Impact Factor
-
[show abstract]
[hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: Phylogenetic studies using expressed sequence tags (EST) are becoming a standard approach to answer evolutionary questions. Such studies are usually based on large sets of newly generated, unannotated, and error-prone EST sequences from different species. A first crucial step in EST-based phylogeny reconstruction is to identify groups of orthologous sequences. From these data sets, appropriate target genes are selected, and redundant sequences are eliminated to obtain suitable sequence sets as input data for tree-reconstruction software. Generating such data sets manually can be very time consuming. Thus, software tools are needed that carry out these steps automatically.
We developed a flexible and user-friendly software pipeline, running on desktop machines or computer clusters, that constructs data sets for phylogenomic analyses. It automatically searches assembled EST sequences against databases of orthologous groups (OG), assigns ESTs to these predefined OGs, translates the sequences into proteins, eliminates redundant sequences assigned to the same OG, creates multiple sequence alignments of identified orthologous sequences and offers the possibility to further process this alignment in a last step by excluding potentially homoplastic sites and selecting sufficiently conserved parts. Our software pipeline can be used as it is, but it can also be adapted by integrating additional external programs. This makes the pipeline useful for non-bioinformaticians as well as to bioinformatic experts. The software pipeline is especially designed for ESTs, but it can also handle protein sequences.
OrthoSelect is a tool that produces orthologous gene alignments from assembled ESTs. Our tests show that OrthoSelect detects orthologs in EST libraries with high accuracy. In the absence of a gold standard for orthology prediction, we compared predictions by OrthoSelect to a manually created and published phylogenomic data set. Our tool was not only able to rebuild the data set with a specificity of 98%, but it detected four percent more orthologous sequences. Furthermore, the results OrthoSelect produces are in absolut agreement with the results of other programs, but our tool offers a significant speedup and additional functionality, e.g. handling of ESTs, computing sequence alignments, and refining them. To our knowledge, there is currently no fully automated and freely available tool for this purpose. Thus, OrthoSelect is a valuable tool for researchers in the field of phylogenomics who deal with large quantities of EST sequences. OrthoSelect is written in Perl and runs on Linux/Mac OS X. The tool can be downloaded at (http://gobics.de/fabian/orthoselect.php).
BMC Bioinformatics 02/2009; 10:219. · 2.75 Impact Factor
