Deorphanization of the human leukocyte tyrosine kinase (LTK) receptor by a signaling screen of the extracellular proteome.

There are many transmembrane receptor-like proteins whose ligands have not been identified. A strategy for finding ligands when little is known about their tissue source is to screen each extracellular protein individually expressed in an array format by using a sensitive functional readout. Taking this approach, we have screened a large collection (3,191 proteins) of extracellular proteins for their ability to activate signaling of an orphan receptor, leukocyte tyrosine kinase (LTK). Only two related secreted factors, FAM150A and FAM150B (family with sequence similarity 150 member A and member B), stimulated LTK phosphorylation. FAM150A binds LTK extracellular domain with high affinity (K(D) = 28 pM). FAM150A stimulates LTK phosphorylation in a ligand-dependent manner. This strategy provides an efficient approach for identifying functional ligands for other orphan receptors.

Compilación de un corpus para la enseñanza de la traducción médica / Compiling a corpus for teaching medical translation

Fundamento: la traducción médica cuenta con un sinnúmero de fuentes documentales; la mayor dificultad radica en saber evaluarlas. El corpus es una herramienta idónea para hacerlo de forma confiable y rápida, así como para definir objetivos de aprendizaje basados en la tipología textual y orientados a la práctica profesional.Objetivo: compilar un corpus electrónico que responda a los requerimientos de la práctica profesional para asumir la traducción médica especializada. Métodos: investigación pedagógica realizada en la provincia de Cienfuegos, cuyas unidades de análisis estuvieron conformadas por el registro de trabajo de los traductores del Centro Provincial de Información de Ciencias Médicas y traductores especializados en esta área, a los cuales se les aplicó un cuestionario para determinar con exactitud sus necesidades de consulta, que condicionaron los criterios de diseño del corpus. Se analizó un conjunto de textos extraídos de fuentes altamente acreditadas a partir de los cuales se realizó la selección y compilación final. Posteriormente se procedió a la validación del corpus como herramienta documental para la enseñanza de la traducción médica especializada.Resultados: concentración de encargos de traducción en los temas: tumores malignos, hipertensión, cardiopatías, diabetes mellitus y neumonías. Tipología textual predominante: evaluativa y transmisión de actualidad inmediata, con abundancia de artículos originales y revisiones. Los criterios de diseño del corpus fueron: no anotado, documentado, especializado, textual, monitor y comparable. Conclusiones: el corpus es un apoyo útil para mostrar las particularidades léxicas, terminológicas, semánticas, discursivas y contextuales de la comunicación biomédica, permite definir objetivos de aprendizaje y problemas de traducción(AU)

Background: medical translation has countless documentary sources; the major difficulty lies in knowing how to assess them. The corpus is the ideal tool to perform this activity in a rapid and reliable way, and to define the learning objectives based on text typology and oriented towards professional practice.Objective: to compile an electronic corpus that meets the requirements of the professional practice to perform specialized medical translation.Methods: a pedagogical research was conducted in the province of Cienfuegos. The units of analysis involved records from translators of the Provincial Medical Sciences Information Center and specialized translators in this field, who completed a questionnaire to accurately determine their information needs, conditioning the corpus design criteria. The analysis of a set of texts extracted from highly reputable sources led to the text selection and final compilation. Subsequently, the validation of the corpus as a documentary tool for teaching specialized medical translation was performed. Results: there was a concentration of translation assignments in the topics: malignant tumors, hypertension, heart disease, diabetes mellitus and pneumonias. The predominant text typologies were: evaluative and dissemination of current research, with plenty original articles and reviews. The text corpus design criteria were: unannotated, documented, specialized, monitor and comparable. Conclusions: the corpus is a useful tool to show the lexical, terminological, semantic, discursive and contextual particularities of biomedical communication. It allows defining learning objectives and translation problems.(AU)

Discovery of a cytokine and its receptor by functional screening of the extracellular proteome.

To understand the system of secreted proteins and receptors involved in cell-cell signaling, we produced a comprehensive set of recombinant secreted proteins and the extracellular domains of transmembrane proteins, which constitute most of the protein components of the extracellular space. Each protein was tested in a suite of assays that measured metabolic, growth, or transcriptional responses in diverse cell types. The pattern of responses across assays was analyzed for the degree of functional selectivity of each protein. One of the highly selective proteins was a previously undescribed ligand, designated interleukin-34 (IL-34), which stimulates monocyte viability but does not affect responses in a wide spectrum of other assays. In a separate functional screen, we used a collection of extracellular domains of transmembrane proteins to discover the receptor for IL-34, which was a known cytokine receptor, colony-stimulating factor 1 (also called macrophage colony-stimulating factor) receptor. This systematic approach is thus useful for discovering new ligands and receptors and assessing the functional selectivity of extracellular regulatory proteins.

A comprehensive collection of chicken cDNAs.

Birds have played a central role in many biological disciplines, particularly ecology, evolution, and behavior. The chicken, as a model vertebrate, also represents an important experimental system for developmental biologists, immunologists, cell biologists, and geneticists. However, genomic resources for the chicken have lagged behind those for other model organisms, with only 1845 nonredundant full-length chicken cDNA sequences currently deposited in the EMBL databank. We describe a large-scale expressed-sequence-tag (EST) project aimed at gene discovery in chickens (http://www.chick.umist.ac.uk). In total, 339,314 ESTs have been sequenced from 64 cDNA libraries generated from 21 different embryonic and adult tissues. These were clustered and assembled into 85,486 contiguous sequences (contigs). We find that a minimum of 38% of the contigs have orthologs in other organisms and define an upper limit of 13,000 new chicken genes. The remaining contigs may include novel avian specific or rapidly evolving genes. Comparison of the contigs with known chicken genes and orthologs indicates that 30% include cDNAs that contain the start codon and 20% of the contigs represent full-length cDNA sequences. Using this dataset, we estimate that chickens have approximately 35,000 genes in total, suggesting that this number may be a characteristic feature of vertebrates.