[Case of Marfan's syndrome with anterior sacral meningocele along with recurring bacterial meningitis].

We reported a 46-year-old woman with Marfan's syndrome exhibiting an incomplete Currarino triad and recurrent bacterial meningitis which recurred three times in about six months. An anterior sacral meningocele (ASM) was noted in a lumbar MRI, and multiple bone defects in the sacrum were noted in 3D-CT. Surgical approach to prevent the recurrence of infection was limited to plasty for the meningocele, but no meningitis has been observed for two years. Radical surgery should be considered in cases with ASM who recurred bacterial meningitis.

Effects of lowering the proposed top-concentration limit in an in vitro chromosomal aberration test on assay sensitivity and on the reduction of the number of false positives.

For the in vitro chromosomal aberration (CA) test, the proposed top-concentration limit will be reduced to '10mM or 2mg/mL' (whichever is lower) in the draft revised OECD (r-OECD) test guideline (TG) 473, down from '10mM or 5mg/mL' in the current OECD TG, which was adopted in 1997 (1997-OECD). It was previously reduced to 1mM or 0.5mg/mL in the International Conference of Harmonization (ICH) S2 (R1) guideline for pharmaceuticals. Reduction of the top-concentration limit is expected to reduce the number of false or misleading positives. However, this reduction may affect the sensitivity or specificity to predict rodent carcinogenicity. Thus, the effect of a reduction in the top-concentration limit on sensitivity and specificity was investigated by use of a dataset on 435 chemicals obtained from the 'Carcinogenicity and Genotoxicity eXperience' (CGX) database (267 CA-positives and 168 CA-negatives; 317 carcinogens and 118 non-carcinogens) where three TGs (i.e., 1997-OECD, r-OECD and ICH) were applied. The application of the r-OECD TG did not affect the sensitivity (63.1%) or specificity (59.3%) against carcinogenicity, compared with the 1997-OECD TG (sensitivity 63.1%, specificity 59.3%). However, the application of the ICH TG had certain effects, i.e., a decrease in sensitivity (45.4%) and an increase in specificity (72.9%). A change in the number of CA-positives by the application of each TG was also investigated by use of 124 CA-positives from the Japanese Existing Chemical (JEC) database. The application of r-OECD TG showed a small reduction in CA-positives, but the ICH TG reduced this number by approximately half. More than half of the CA-positives had a molecular weight <200. These results suggest that the r-OECD TG will not affect the sensitivity or specificity for the detection of rodent carcinogens, indicating the usefulness of the guideline. However, nearly no improvement with respect to a reduction in the number of false positives should be expected.

CELLPEDIA: a repository for human cell information for cell studies and differentiation analyses.

CELLPEDIA is a repository database for current knowledge about human cells. It contains various types of information, such as cell morphologies, gene expression and literature references. The major role of CELLPEDIA is to provide a digital dictionary of human cells for the biomedical field, including support for the characterization of artificially generated cells in regenerative medicine. CELLPEDIA features (i) its own cell classification scheme, in which whole human cells are classified by their physical locations in addition to conventional taxonomy; and (ii) cell differentiation pathways compiled from biomedical textbooks and journal papers. Currently, human differentiated cells and stem cells are classified into 2260 and 66 cell taxonomy keys, respectively, from which 934 parent-child relationships reported in cell differentiation or transdifferentiation pathways are retrievable. As far as we know, this is the first attempt to develop a digital cell bank to function as a public resource for the accumulation of current knowledge about human cells. The CELLPEDIA homepage is freely accessible except for the data submission pages that require authentication (please send a password request to cell-info@cbrc.jp). Database URL: http://cellpedia.cbrc.jp/