Transcriptional landscape of human keratinocyte models exposed to 60-GHz millimeter-waves

The use of millimeter waves (MMW) will exponentially grow in the coming years due to their future utilization in 5G/6G networks. The question of possible biological effects at these frequencies has been raised. In this present study, we aimed to investigate gene expression changes under exposure to MMW using the Bulk RNA Barcoding and sequencing (BRB-seq) technology. To address this issue, three exposure scenarios were performed aiming at: i) comparing the cellular response of two primary culture of keratinocytes (HEK and NHEK) and one keratinocyte derivate cell line (HaCaT) exposed to MMW; ii) exploring the incident power density dose-effect on gene expression in HaCaT cell line; and, iii) studying the exposure duration at the new ICNIRP exposure limit for the general population. With the exception of heat effect induced by high power MMW (over 10 mW/cm2), those exposure scenarios have not enabled us to demonstrate important gene expression changes in the different cell populations studied. Very few differentially genes were observed between MMW exposed samples and heat shock control, and most of them were significantly associated with heat shock response that may reflect small differences in the heat generation. Together these results show that acute exposure to MMW has no effects on the transcriptional landscape of human keratinocyte models under athermal conditions.

Distinct subsets of multi-lymphoid progenitors support ontogeny-related changes in human lymphopoiesis

Changes in lymphocyte production patterns occurring across human ontogeny remain poorly defined. In this study, we demonstrate that human lymphopoiesis is supported by three waves of embryonic, fetal, and postnatal multi-lymphoid progenitors (MLPs) differing in CD7 and CD10 expression and their output of CD127-/+ early lymphoid progenitors (ELPs). In addition, our results reveal that, like the fetal-to-adult switch in erythropoiesis, transition to postnatal life coincides with a shift from multilineage to B lineage-biased lymphopoiesis and an increase in production of CD127+ ELPs, which persists until puberty. A further developmental transition is observed in elderly individuals whereby B cell differentiation bypasses the CD127+ compartment and branches directly from CD10+ MLPs. Functional analyses indicate that these changes are determined at the level of hematopoietic stem cells. These findings provide insights for understanding identity and function of human MLPs and the establishment and maintenance of adaptative immunity.

The Male Fertility Gene Atlas: a web tool for collecting and integrating OMICS data in the context of male infertility

STUDY QUESTION

How can one design and implement a system that provides a comprehensive overview of research results in the field of epi-/genetics of male infertility and germ cells?

SUMMARY ANSWER

Working at the interface of literature search engines and raw data repositories, the newly developed Male Fertility Gene Atlas (MFGA) provides a system that can represent aggregated results from scientific publications in a standardized way and perform advanced searches, for example based on the conditions (phenotypes) and genes related to male infertility.

WHAT IS KNOWN ALREADY

PubMed and Google Scholar are established search engines for research literature. Additionally, repositories like Gene Expression Omnibus and Sequence Read Archive provide access to raw data. Selected processed data can be accessed by visualization tools like the ReproGenomics Viewer.

STUDY DESIGN, SIZE, DURATION

The MFGA was developed in a time frame of 18 months under a rapid prototyping approach.

PARTICIPANTS/MATERIALS, SETTING, METHODS

In the context of the Clinical Research Unit 'Male Germ Cells' (CRU326), a group of around 50 domain experts in the fields of male infertility and germ cells helped to develop the requirements engineering and feedback loops. They provided a set of 39 representative and heterogeneous publications to establish a basis for the system requirements.

MAIN RESULTS AND THE ROLE OF CHANCE

The MFGA is freely available online at https://mfga.uni-muenster.de. To date, it contains 115 data sets corresponding to 54 manually curated publications and provides an advanced search function based on study conditions, meta-information and genes, whereby it returns the publications' exact tables and figures that fit the search request as well as a list of the most frequently investigated genes in the result set. Currently, study data for 31 different tissue types, 32 different cell types and 20 conditions are available. Also, ∼8000 and ∼1000 distinct genes have been found to be mentioned in at least 10 and 15 of the publications, respectively.

LARGE SCALE DATA

Not applicable because no novel data were produced.

LIMITATIONS, REASONS FOR CAUTION

For the most part, the content of the system currently includes the selected publications from the development process. However, a structured process for the prospective literature search and inclusion into the MFGA has been defined and is currently implemented.

WIDER IMPLICATIONS OF THE FINDINGS

The technical implementation of the MFGA allows for accommodating a wide range of heterogeneous data from aggregated research results. This implementation can be transferred to other diseases to establish comparable systems and generally support research in the medical field.

STUDY FUNDING/COMPETING INTEREST(S)

This work was carried out within the frame of the German Research Foundation (DFG) Clinical Research Unit 'Male Germ Cells: from Genes to Function' (CRU326). The authors declare no conflicts of interest.