A potential role for intragenic miRNAs on their hosts' interactome.

BACKGROUND: miRNAs are small, non-coding RNA molecules that mainly act as negative regulators of target gene messages. Due to their regulatory functions, they have lately been implicated in several diseases, including malignancies. Roughly half of known miRNA genes are located within previously annotated protein-coding regions ("intragenic miRNAs"). Although a role of intragenic miRNAs as negative feedback regulators has been speculated, to the best of our knowledge there have been no conclusive large-scale studies investigating the relationship between intragenic miRNAs and host genes and their pathways. RESULTS: miRNA-containing host genes were three times longer, contained more introns and had longer 5' introns compared to a randomly sampled gene cohort. These results are consistent with the observation that more than 60% of intronic miRNAs are found within the first five 5' introns. Host gene 3'-untranslated regions (3'-UTRs) were 40% longer and contained significantly more adenylate/uridylate-rich elements (AREs) compared to a randomly sampled gene cohort. Coincidentally, recent literature suggests that several components of the miRNA biogenesis pathway are required for the rapid decay of mRNAs containing AREs. A high-confidence set of predicted mRNA targets of intragenic miRNAs also shared many of these features with the host genes. Approximately 20% of intragenic miRNAs were predicted to target their host mRNA transcript. Further, KEGG pathway analysis demonstrated that 22 of the 74 pathways in which host genes were associated showed significant overrepresentation of proteins encoded by the mRNA targets of associated intragenic miRNAs. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that both host genes and intragenic miRNA targets may potentially be subject to multiple layers of regulation. Tight regulatory control of these genes is likely critical for cellular homeostasis and absence of disease. To this end, we examined the potential for negative feedback loops between intragenic miRNAs, host genes, and miRNA target genes. We describe, how higher-order miRNA feedback on hosts' interactomes may at least in part explain correlation patterns observed between expression of host genes and intragenic miRNA targets in healthy and tumor tissue.

The role of micafungin and anidulafungin in the treatment of systemic fungal infections: applications and patents for two novel echinocandins.

Fungal infections are becoming an increasing menace in the hospital care setting. Among them, non-albicans Candida species have gained significant attention. Especially in the ICU setting, therapeutic options are limited in many cases by the side-effects of conventional antifungal therapy. Echinocandins are a relatively new class of antifungal agents that promise good effectiveness against Candida and Aspergillus species. Due to their underlying mechanisms of action, they yield good tolerability and few limitations of usage. In the current manuscript we describe the patents of two recently approved echinocandins, micafungin (US approved 2005) and anidulafungin (2006) and provide an overview of the mechanisms, clinical effectiveness and safety of antifungal therapy with these agents.

The human factor in medical emergency simulation.

Medical errors rank high amongst leading causes of death. Especially in emergency care, when there is limited time to think, the "human factor", the interface between human action and the environmental system, has been recognized to be a critical part that determines the outcome. Recent models of human error are based on the principle that critical incidents are of multifactorial origin and reflect insufficiencies of the underlying system itself. The Human Simulation Center (HSC) was built specifically to train interaction between medical teams and to investigate the human factor in medical emergencies. In the following article we present "MevidIO", a live-monitoring and debriefing application framework. Developed for a full-scale simulation center designed to model error transduction in medical emergency care process chains, the framework integrates educational and scientific aspects.