Commensal bacterial orthologs of the human autoantigen Ro60 may trigger cross-reactive T and B cells that initiate and sustain chronic autoimmunity in lupus.

The use of novel nanostructured materials has attracted considerable interest in the food industry for their utilization as highly functional ingredients, high-performance packaging materials, processing aids, and food quality and safety sensors. Most previous application interest has focused on the development of nanoparticles. However, more recently, the ability to produce non-woven mats composed of nanofibers that can be used in food applications is beginning to be investigated. Electrospinning is a novel fabrication technique that can be used to produce fibers with diameters below 100 nm from (bio-) polymer solutions. These nanofibers have been shown to possess unique properties that distinguish them from non-woven fibers produced by other methods, e.g., melt-blowing. This is because first the process involved results in a high orientation of polymers within the fibers that leads to mechanically superior properties, e.g., increased tensile strengths. Second, during the spinning of the fibers from polymer solutions, the solvent is rapidly evaporated allowing the production of fibers composed of polymer blends that would typically phase separate if spun with other processes. Third, the small dimensions of the fibers lead to very high specific surface areas. Because of this the fiber properties may be greatly influenced by surface properties giving rise to fiber functionalities not found in fibers of larger sizes. For food applications, the fibers may find uses as ingredients if they are composed solely of edible polymers and GRAS ingredients, (e.g., fibers could contain functional ingredients such as nutraceuticals, antioxidants, antimicrobials, and flavors), as active packaging materials or as processing aids (e.g., catalytic reactors, membranes, filters ( Lala et al., 2007 Lala, N. L. , Ramaseshan, R. , Li, B. J. , Sundarrajan, S. , Barhate, R. S. , Liu, Y. J. and Ramakrishna, S. 2007. Fabrication of nanofibers with antimicrobial functionality used as filters: Protection against bacterial contaminants. Biotechnology and Bioengineering., 97(6): 1357 [Google Scholar] ), and sensors ( Manesh et al., 2007 Manesh, K. M. , Santhosh, P. , Gopalan, A. and Lee, K. P. 2007. Electrospun poly(vinylidene fluoride)/poly(aminophenylboronic acid) composite nanofibrous membrane as a novel glucose sensor. Analytical Biochemistry., 360(2): 189 [Google Scholar] ; Ren et al., 2006 Ren, G. L. , Xu, X. H. , Liu, Q. , Cheng, J. , Yuan, X. Y. , Wu, L. L. and Wan, Y. Z. 2006. Electrospun poly(vinyl alcohol)/glucose oxidase biocomposite membranes for biosensor applications. Reactive & Functional Polymers., 66(12): 1559 [Google Scholar] ; Sawicka et al., 2005 Sawicka, K. , Gouma, P. and Simon, S. 2005. Electrospun biocomposite nanofibers for urea biosensing. Sensors and Actuators B-Chemical., 108(1–2): 585 [Google Scholar] ). This review is therefore intended to introduce interested food and agricultural scientists to the concept of nano-fiber manufacturing with a particular emphasis on the use of biopolymers. We will review typical fabrication set-ups, discuss the influence of process conditions on nanofiber properties, and then review previous studies that describe the production of biopolymer-based nanofibers. Finally we briefly discuss emerging methods to further functionalize fibers and discuss potential applications in the area of food science and technology.

Small cell lung carcinoma (SCLC) is a neuroendocrine subtype of lung cancer that affects more than 200,000 people worldwide every year with a very high mortality rate. Here, we used a mouse genetics approach to characterize the cell of origin for SCLC; in this mouse model, tumors are initiated by the deletion of the Rb and p53 tumor suppressor genes in the lung epithelium of adult mice. We found that mouse SCLCs often arise in the lung epithelium, where neuroendocrine cells are located, and that the majority of early lesions were composed of proliferating neuroendocrine cells. In addition, mice in which Rb and p53 are deleted in a variety of non-neuroendocrine lung epithelial cells did not develop SCLC. These data indicate that SCLC likely arises from neuroendocrine cells in the lung.