Springer Nature

Uterine leiomyosarcoma is the most common uterine mesenchymal malignancy. The majority present at stage I with variable clinical outcome.

In this episode of ModPath Chat, Dr. David Chapel discusses his recently published multi-institutional study proposing a novel risk stratification model (shown below) for low stage uterine leiomyosarcoma.

Risk score = (coagulative necrosis)(1) + (mitoses > 25 per 2.4mm2)(2) + (atypical mitoses)(2) + (lymphovascular invasion)(3) + (serosal abutment)(5)

A recent study reported that 53% of mothers reported exposure to violence when they were children. And there is evidence that these experiences negatively impact the health and development of their offspring later on. Associations between maternal exposure to violence, psychopathology and children's mental health outcomes is well documented. However, the pre- and postnatal programming pathways between early exposure to violence, maternal psychopathology and children's cognitive and developmental milestones remain understudied.

In this episode, we meet Dr Dillon Browne, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor in psychology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He wanted to know if and how maternal early exposure to violence influences the developmental trajectories of children across the first four years of life.

Read the full article here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41390-022-01954-8

In this episode the audience will enjoy a great discussion of the growing potential of methylome and copy number profiling, a technique well established for the classification of brain tumors, in bone and soft tissue tumors diagnosis.

Nuclear overexpression of FOS and FOSB have emerged as a reliable surrogate markers to detect rearrangements of the transcription factors FOS and FOSB in osteoid osteoma and osteoblastoma. Limitations in specificity and sensitivity remains with some osteosarcoma showing nuclear FOS expression and a small number of osteoblastomas lacking rearrangements. Aggressive appearing osteoblastomas and osteoblastoma-like osteosarcoma can be difficult to distinguish.

The guest, Dr. Daniel Baumhoer, discusses the potential use of methylation and copy number profiling in this setting. Osteoblastomas were found to be uniformly characterized by flat copy number profiles that can add certainty to their diagnosis.

The XY sex-determination system of therian mammals has persisted for over 160 million years: but why? In this episode Aurora Ruiz-Herrera (Autonomous University of Barcelona) and Paul Waters (University of New South Wales) discuss the evolution of sex chromosomes and role of meiosis.

This episode explores the recent Heredity paper: “Fragile, unfaithful and persistent Ys—on how meiosis can shape sex chromosome evolution” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41437-022-00532-2

Sometimes, when researchers are conducting an experiment, the results are confusing. Maybe the control group of animals doesn’t behave the way a control should in theory be behaving. Maybe a researcher repeats a study and sees results that are unusually different from the first time around. The answers to these issues might lie in something called ‘hidden variables,’ according to a new study titled, “What’s wrong with my research? The impact of hidden variables on neuropsychopharmacology research.”

Brian Trainor is a professor of psychology at the University of California Davis, and he’s one of three authors of the study. His co-authors are Amanda Kentner, professor at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, and Hannah Butler-Struben, a graduate student in the animal behavior group at UC Davis. They say that many of the articles in the review are from journals about animal behavior that wouldn’t typically come across the desk of those working in the field of neuroscience.

Read the full article here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-022-01309-1

The genetic material locked within museum collections could help us better understand and conserve the world around us. In this episode PhD student Mario Ernst (Natural History Museum, Berlin) and Dr Knud Jønsson (Natural History Museum of Denmark) explain how, as they tell us about their work on a charismatic group of birds: the Asian orioles.

This episode explores the recent Heredity paper: “Utilizing museomics to trace the complex history and species boundaries in an avian-study system of conservation concern” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41437-022-00499-0

Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is a rare but serious condition of children and often progresses to heart failure. The outcomes for children with DCM are poor, with 50% of pediatric patients dying or needing a heart transplant within 5 years of diagnosis.

In this episode, Geoff Marsh meets professor Carmen Sucharov from the University of Colorado Anschutz campus and the director of the Pediatric Cardiology Research Laboratories. She and her team have been studying the regulation of micro-RNAs and their putative target genes in the pediatric DCM heart that may contribute to the distinctive phenotype of this disease in children.

Read the article here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41390-021-01548-w

Kirstie Cummings and Sofia Beas are both new assistant professors in the department of neurobiology at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. When they met, they discussed the job application process, their support network, and their own personal processes, and they decided to write an article that could serve as a resource for candidates from different backgrounds, many of whom might not have the same resources that Dr. Cummings and Dr. Beas did. The result was their paper, “A Scientific Approach to Navigating the Academic Job Market,” published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

Dr. Inti Zlobec, professor of digital pathology at the Institute of Pathology in the University of Bern, discusses her team’s recent publication in Modern Pathology on the role of image analysis in assessing area of extracellular mucin and predicting consensus molecular subtypes (CMS) in colorectal carcinoma. The utilized deep learning algorithm had an excellent agreement with pathologists’ estimates of mucin areas. Coupled with MSI, mucinous area estimates may predict CMS classification using only histopathology. This highlights the great potential of Image based classifier of molecular subtypes of colon cancer.

Thousands of women have been infected with SARS-CoV2 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

While very few of these infections have been shown to transmit vertically from mother to offspring, it remains unclear what effect, if any, a mother's SARS-CoV2 infection has on fetal development.

In this episode, we interview Dr Brian Kalish, from the University of Toronto and the Hospital for Sick Children to discuss a study he set up looking into this question, by characterising the composition and cell-type specific translational landscape of umbilical cord blood mononuclear cells.

Read the full article here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41390-021-01793-z