[Interaction between HIV-1 and GB virus type-C during coinfection status]. / Interacción entre el virus de la inmunodeficiencia humana y el virus GB tipo-C durante el estado de co-infección.

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection is one of the most important problems in public health. It is estimated that 3 3 million people are infected around the world. HIV and GBV-C share the same transmission route, being frequent the co-infection. Since both viruses replicate in CD4+ lymphocytes, recent studies have described an interaction. Decreasing of HIV viral load and higher CD4 counts have been observed in co-infected patients, leading a better clinical outcome. Nevertheless, some epidemiological studies have shown contradictory results. Additionally, in vitro models report inhibition of HIV by E1, E2, NS3 and NS5A GBV-C proteins, resulting in a decreasing of p24 antigen. This review summarizes the principal findings about co-infection and mechanisms that have been proposed for HIV-1 inhibition.

Molecular biomarkers in acute myeloid leukemia.

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is the most common acute leukemia in adults. The pathophysiology of this disease is just beginning to be understood at the cellular and molecular level, and currently cytogenetic markers are the most important for risk stratification and treatment of AML patients. However, with the advent of new technologies, the detection of other molecular markers such as point mutations and characterization of epigenetic and proteomic profiles, have begun to play an important role in how the disease is approached. Recent evidence shows that the identification of new AML biomarkers contributes to a better understanding of the molecular basis of the disease, is significantly useful in screening, diagnosis, prognosis and monitoring of AML, as well as the possibility of predicting each individual's response to treatment. This review summarizes the most relevant molecular (genetic, epigenetic, and protein) biomarkers associated with acute myeloid leukemia and discusses their clinical importance in terms of risk prediction, diagnosis and prognosis.

Bio-EdIP: An automatic approach for in vitro cell confluence images quantification.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Cell imaging is a widely-employed technique to analyze multiple biological processes. Therefore, simple, accurate and quantitative tools are needed to understand cellular events. For this purpose, Bio-EdIP was developed as a user-friendly tool to quantify confluence levels using cell culture images. METHODS: The proposed algorithm combines a pre-processing step with subsequent stages that involve local processing techniques and a morphological reconstruction-based segmentation algorithm. Segmentation performance was assessed in three constructed image sets, comparing F-measure scores and AUC values (ROC analysis) for Bio-EdIP, its previous version and TScratch. Furthermore, segmentation results were compared with published algorithms using eight public benchmarks. RESULTS: Bio-EdIP automatically segmented cell-free regions from images of in vitro cell culture. Based on mean F-measure scores and ROC analysis, Bio-EdIP conserved a high performance regardless of image characteristics of the constructed dataset, when compared with its previous version and TScratch. Although acquisition quality of the public dataset affected Bio-EdIP segmentation, performance was better in two out of eight public sets. CONCLUSIONS: Bio-EdIP is a user-friendly interface, which is useful for the automatic analysis of confluence levels and cell growth processes using in vitro cell culture images. Here, we also presented new manually annotated data for algorithms evaluation.

Interacción entre el virus de la inmunodeficiencia humana y el virus GB tipo-C durante el estado de co-infección / Interaction between HIV-1 and GB virus type-C during coinfection status

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection is one of the most important problems in public health. It is estimated that 3 3 million people are infected around the world. HIV and GBV-C share the same transmission route, being frequent the co-infection. Since both viruses replicate in CD4+ lymphocytes, recent studies have described an interaction. Decreasing of HIV viral load and higher CD4 counts have been observed in co-infected patients, leading a better clinical outcome. Nevertheless, some epidemiological studies have shown contradictory results. Additionally, in vitro models report inhibition of HIV by E1, E2, NS3 and NS5A GBV-C proteins, resulting in a decreasing of p24 antigen. This review summarizes the principal findings about co-infection and mechanisms that have been proposed for HIV-1 inhibition.

La infección por el virus de la inmunodeficiencia humana (VIH) continúa siendo uno de los principales problemas en salud pública; se estima que existen actualmente más de 33 millones de personas infectadas en el mundo. El VIH y el virus GB tipo C (GBV-C) comparten la misma vía de transmisión, por lo que es frecuente encontrar individuos co-infectados. Estudios recientes han descrito un efecto inhibitorio asociado a disminución en la carga viral de VIH, altos recuentos de CD4 y mayor tiempo de sobrevida en pacientes co-infectados, resultando en un mejor pronóstico y menor progreso a SIDA; adicionalmente, estudios in vitro indican que las proteínas virales E1, E2, NS3 y NS5A del GBV-C estarían implicadas en la inhibición del VIH-1. En el presente artículo se revisan los principales aspectos de la co-infección, y se describen los mecanismos propuestos para la inhibición de la replicación del VIH-1 mediada por las proteínas virales del GBV-C.