Pope Dodson (effectcow55)

Clearance of surgical margins in cervical cancer prevents the need for adjuvant chemoradiation and allows fertility preservation. In this study, we determined the capacity of the rapid evaporative ionization mass spectrometry (REIMS), also known as intelligent knife (iKnife), to discriminate between healthy, preinvasive, and invasive cervical tissue. Cervical tissue samples were collected from women with healthy, human papilloma virus (HPV) ± cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN), or cervical cancer. A handheld diathermy device generated surgical aerosol, which was transferred into a mass spectrometer for subsequent chemical analysis. Combination of principal component and linear discriminant analysis and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator was employed to study the spectral differences between groups. Significance of discriminatory m/z features was tested using univariate statistics and tandem MS performed to elucidate the structure of the significant peaks allowing separation of the two classes. We analyzed 87 samples (normal = 16, HPV ± CIN = 50, cancer = 21 patients). The iKnife discriminated with 100% accuracy normal (100%) vs. HPV ± CIN (100%) vs. cancer (100%) when compared to histology as the gold standard. When comparing normal vs. cancer samples, the accuracy was 100% with a sensitivity of 100% (95% CI 83.9 to 100) and specificity 100% (79.4 to 100). Univariate analysis revealed significant MS peaks in the cancer-to-normal separation belonging to various classes of complex lipids. The iKnife discriminates healthy from premalignant and invasive cervical lesions with high accuracy and can improve oncological outcomes and fertility preservation of women treated surgically for cervical cancer. Larger in vivo research cohorts are required to validate these findings. Copyright © 2020 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which is tightly coupled to the equatorial thermocline in the Pacific, is the dominant source of interannual climate variability, but its long-term evolution in response to climate change remains highly uncertain. This study uses Mg/Ca in planktonic foraminiferal shells to reconstruct sea surface and thermocline water temperatures (SST and TWT) for the past 142 ky in a western equatorial Pacific (WEP) core MD01-2386. Unlike the dominant 100-ky glacial-interglacial cycle recorded by SST and δ18O, which echoes the pattern seen in other WEP sites, the upper ocean thermal gradient shows a clear half-precessional (9.4 ky or 12.7 ky) cycle as indicated by the reconstructed and simulated temperature (ΔT) and δ18O differences between the surface and thermocline waters. This phenomenon is attributed to the interplay of subtropical-to-tropical thermocline anomalies forced by the antiphased meridional insolation gradients in the two hemispheres at the precessional band. In particular, the TWT shows greater variability than SST, and dominates the ΔT changes which couple with the west-east SST difference in the equatorial Pacific at the half-precessional band, implying a decisive role of the tropical thermocline in orbital-scale climate change.Paleoclimate research has built a framework for Earth's climate changes over the past 65 million years or even longer. However, our knowledge of weather-timescale extreme events (WEEs, also named paleoweather), which usually occur over several days or hours, under different climate regimes is almost blank because current paleoclimatic records rarely provide information with temporal resolution shorter than monthly scale. Here we show that giant clam shells (Tridacna spp.) from the tropical western Pacific have clear daily growth bands, and several 2-y-long (from January 29, 2012 to December 9, 2013) daily to hourly resolution biological and geochemical records, including daily growth rate, hourly elements/Ca ratios, and fluorescence intensity, were obtained. We found that the pulsed changes of these ultra-high-resolution proxy