Gene expression analysis in RA: towards personalized medicine.

Gene expression has recently been at the forefront of advance in personalized medicine, notably in the field of cancer and transplantation, providing a rational for a similar approach in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). RA is a prototypic inflammatory autoimmune disease with a poorly understood etiopathogenesis. Inflammation is the main feature of RA; however, many biological processes are involved at different stages of the disease. Gene expression signatures offer management tools to meet the current needs for personalization of RA patients' care. This review analyses currently available information with respect to RA diagnostic, prognostic and prediction of response to therapy with a view to highlight the abundance of data, whose comparison is often inconclusive due to the mixed use of material source, experimental methodologies and analysis tools, reinforcing the need for harmonization if gene expression signatures are to become a useful clinical tool in personalized medicine for RA patients.

Dynamics of chevron structure formation. II. Permeation-dominated phenomena.

This paper continues a study of the dynamics of chevron formation in smectic-A liquid crystals in samples with boundary conditions apparently favoring the bookshelf structure, with uniform layers perpendicular to the sample cell plane. The chevron structure that arises when the sample is cooled results from the mismatch between preferred bulk and surface layer thicknesses. In a previous paper we considered relaxation driven by the strong coupling between layer deformation and fluid flow. In this paper we discuss the alternative scenario in which boundary conditions suppress this coupling. Layer deformation now occurs by layer relaxation in the absence of fluid flow. This process is extremely slow and is governed by the nonlinear Fisher-Kolmogorov equation. Chevrons do form under some circumstances, but the process is irregular, and quasimetastable jagged multi-edged multi-tip-like structures can occur on intermediate time scales for suitable layer strains. In the absence of surface layer pinning, layer slippage occurs at the surfaces. We also examine the possibility that deformation may occur through a wave of invasion destroying the bookshelf region.