On Wednesday, Facebook released a digital resource center to expand its efforts against online harassment.
Facebook
On Wednesday, Facebook released a digital resource center to expand its efforts against online harassment.
Facebook
Facebook has rolled out a tool to address online harassment that some digital safety advocates are calling a beneficial, but belated, first step.
The social networking site with 1.2 billion users worldwide released a "bullying prevention hub" this week. It's essentially an online resource center with suggestions for teens, parents and educators on how to address bullying — both online and off — and take action on Facebook.
The site is also beginning to roll out more options for teens to report when posts are making them uncomfortable.
The idea is to build on Facebook's existing tools, says company spokesman Matt Steinfeld.
For example, the site unveiled social reporting in 2011, which encouraged users to send a message to a friend asking for help or ask another user to take down a photo. The latter was particularly successful, Steinfeld says: 83 percent of the time, if you reach out to a user who has a photo you don't want to be in, that user will take it off.
"We were pretty impressed when we rolled out social reporting a couple of years ago that people were willing to engage with each other, as long as we suggested some text to use," he says.
An example of the reporting tool that Facebook is in the process of making available to its users.
Facebook
An example of the reporting tool that Facebook is in the process of making available to its users.
Facebook
And Facebook hopes this will be true of bullying as well. The hub gives suggested conversation starters for victims ("Hey, NAME — that comment wasn't funny. I don't like it, please take it down"), as well as for people who are accused of bullying and people who witness it.
"There's a lot of literature on how people interact face to face. ... What we're trying to do is apply those studies to an online setting. And it's tough," Steinfeld says. "People are really hungry for help."
Innovative, Or Too Late?
Jim Steyer is CEO of Common Sense Media, an organization that promotes safe technology and media for kids, and he says he's glad to see Facebook taking positive steps toward combating online harassment. He also says this should have been done earlier.
"We think cyberbullying is an enormous challenge facing every young person," Steyer says. "Facebook has been a big part of the problem in this area."
He also says that Facebook's "ever-changing privacy policy" confuses users instead of keeping them safe.
But Facebook's Steinfeld says the company is serious about the cause. "Bullying prevention has been something we've worked on for a long time," he says. "We're the first Internet company that's putting bullying prevention resources in the heart of the product itself."
Other Internet companies are, more and more, taking the blame for recent bullying-related teen suicides.
Rebecca Ann Sedwick, a 12-year-old girl who died in September, had been harassed on Facebook, The New York Times reports. But after her mother closed Rebecca's account, the bullying returned viciously on other social messaging applications, like Ask.fm, Kik and Voxer.
London's The Telegraph also links Ask.fm — a site where people can ask each other questions, often anonymously — to several teen suicides in Britain and Ireland.
Beyond Facebook
It's part of a larger teen migration away from Facebook, Steyer says.
Last week, the company's chief financial officer, David Ebersman, told analysts that although usage among U.S. teens overall has been stable, "we did see a decrease in daily users, specifically among younger teens."
Earlier this fall, financial services firm Piper Jaffray reported that 23 percent of teens thought Facebook was the most important social network, down from 42 percent last fall. And 17 percent of teens say social networks other than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Tumblr or Pinterest were the most important, up from only 2 percent a year ago.
According to Common Sense Media, middle-schoolers are most affected by online harassment. So will an anti-bullying campaign on Facebook affect the age group that needs it the most?
"There are enough teens still on Facebook that it could," says Jennifer Hartstein, a psychologist who works with adolescents and digital behavior. "And maybe it's a good model for other sites that teens are now going to."
Steyer says the effort will be most effective when it spreads to Instagram, which Facebook owns, and beyond. "These sites have to take way more responsibility for this."
When you've got a foot of freshly fallen snow to absorb any impact, there's no sledding stunt that seems too dangerous. It's only when you're careening down a hill towards a jump that the gravity of the situation hits you, and that's when you realize a sled with a built-in shock absorbing spring like the Yooner is a wonderful idea.
AT&T supplies information on international calls that travel over its network, including ones that start or end in the U.S., under a voluntary contract with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, The New York Times reported Thursday.
The CIA pays the carrier more than $10 million annually for the data, including the date, duration, and numbers involved in a call, the Times said, citing unnamed government officials. The calls include ones that are made by customers of other carriers but travel partly on AT&T's network. For calls with a U.S. participant, AT&T doesn't tell the CIA the identity of the U.S. caller and masks several digits of the domestic number, the report said.
The CIA isn't allowed to conduct domestic spying. However, the agency can hand over the masked numbers to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which can subpoena AT&T for the uncensored data, the Times said. The FBI, in turn, sometimes shares information with the CIA about the U.S. participant in a call.
The latest report is likely to heighten concerns about the U.S. government's surveillance of voice and data communications around the world. Disclosures made by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden starting earlier this year have helped to spark calls for reform of surveillance practices and rankled several U.S. allies.
In an emailed statement, the CIA said it doesn't comment on alleged intelligence sources or methods.
"The CIA protects the nation and upholds the privacy rights of Americans by ensuring that its intelligence collection activities are focused on acquiring foreign intelligence and counterintelligence in accordance with U.S. laws," said Dean Boyd, director of the CIA Office of Public Affairs. The agency is subject to oversight from multiple entities, he said.
AT&T does not comment on questions concerning national security, spokesman Mark Siegel said in a statement emailed to IDG News Service.
"In all cases, whenever any governmental entity anywhere seeks information from us, we ensure that the request and our response are completely lawful and proper," Siegel wrote. "We ensure that we maintain customer information in compliance with the laws of the United States and other countries where information may be maintained. Like all telecom providers, we routinely charge governments for producing the information provided."
Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com
If a tree falls in Brazil? Amazon deforestation could mean droughts for western US
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
7-Nov-2013
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Contact: Morgan Kelly mgnkelly@princeton.edu 609-258-5729 Princeton University
In research meant to highlight how the destruction of the Amazon rainforest could affect climate elsewhere, Princeton University-led researchers report that the total deforestation of the Amazon may significantly reduce rain and snowfall in the western United States, resulting in water and food shortages, and a greater risk of forest fires.
The researchers report in the Journal of Climate that an Amazon stripped bare could mean 20 percent less rain for the coastal Northwest and a 50 percent reduction in the Sierra Nevada snowpack, a crucial source of water for cities and farms in California. Previous research has shown that deforestation will likely produce dry air over the Amazon. Using high-resolution climate simulations, the researchers are the first to find that the atmosphere's normal weather-moving mechanics would create a ripple effect that would move that dry air directly over the western United States from December to February.
Specifically, a denuded Amazon would develop a weather cycle consisting of abnormally dry air in the sun-scorched northern Amazon around the equator weighted by wetter air in the cooler south. Research has speculated that this pattern would be similar to the warm-water climate pattern El Nio, which during the winter months brings heavy precipitation to southern California and the Sierra Nevada region while drying out the Pacific Northwest.
The Princeton-led researchers found that the Amazon pattern would be subject to the same meandering high-altitude winds known as Rossby waves that distribute the El Nio system worldwide from its source over the Pacific Ocean. Rossby waves are instrumental forces in Earth's weather that move east or west across the planet, often capturing the weather of one region such as chill Arctic air and transporting it to another. Because the Amazon pattern forms several thousand miles to the southeast from El Nio, the researchers report, the Rossby waves that put the rainy side of El Nio over southern California would instead subject that region to the dry end of the Amazon pattern. The pattern's rainy portion would be over the Pacific Ocean south of Mexico.
First author David Medvigy, an assistant professor of geosciences at Princeton, explained that the findings stand as one possible outcome of Amazon deforestation in regions outside of South America consequences that scientists are working to understand. The rainforest influences various aspects of the surrounding climate, including cloud coverage, heat absorption and rainfall.
"The big point is that Amazon deforestation will not only affect the Amazon it will not be contained. It will hit the atmosphere and the atmosphere will carry those responses," Medvigy said.
"It just so happens that one of the locations feeling that response will be one we care about most agriculturally," he said. "If you change the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, where most of the irrigation for California's Central Valley comes from, then by this study deforestation of the Amazon could have serious consequences for the food supply of the United States."
Because the exact result of Amazon deforestation is impossible to know currently, the behavior and impact of El Nio provides one of the best ideas of how the loss of the Amazon could play out, Medvigy said. Studies have suggested since 1993 that an Amazon without trees will develop an El Nio-like pattern, the researchers reported. The researchers then focused on the northwestern United States because the region is typically sensitive to El Nio.
"We don't know what the world will be like without the Amazon. We know exactly what happens with El Nio it's been studied extensively," Medvigy said. "Our intention with this paper was to identify an analogy between El Nio and Amazon deforestation. There's good reason to believe there will be strong climatic similarities between the two. Research like this will give us a handle on what to expect from Amazon deforestation."
Medvigy worked with second author Robert Walko, a senior scientist in the division of meteorology and physical oceanography at the University of Miami; Martin Otte, a postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Atmospheric Modeling and Analysis Division; and Roni Avissar, a University of Miami professor of meteorology and physical oceanography and dean of the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.
The high resolution of the researchers' climate model allowed them to see the otherwise subtle pull of the Rossby waves, Medvigy said. The typical model buries finer atmospheric features under a scale of about 200 kilometers twice the width of the Andes Mountains. Medvigy and his co-authors spotted the intricacies of the Amazon's future weather pattern using a resolution as fine as 25 kilometers, he said.
The researchers based their simulation on the Amazon's complete removal, an exaggerated level of destruction needed to produce a noticeable effect, Medvigy said. Nonetheless, clear-cutting of the Amazon marches on, although conservation efforts have significantly slowed deforestation in countries such as Brazil since the mid-2000s. In addition, research has shown that climate change, especially a spike in the global temperature, could wipe out as much as 85 percent of the forest.
The Amazon's fragility and vulnerability combined with its outsized sway over the climate add an urgency to better understanding how the forest's disappearance will affect the larger climate, particularly for agriculturally important areas such as California, Medvigy said.
"We know the Amazon is being deforested, but we don't know for sure what's going to happen because of it," Medvigy said. "Other scientists need to do these simulations and see if they get the same results. If they do, then policymakers will have to take notice."
###
The paper, "Simulated changes in Northwest US climate in response to Amazon deforestation," was published in the Nov. 15 edition of the Journal of Climate. This work was supported by awards from the National Science Foundation (grant numbers 1151102 and 0902197).
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If a tree falls in Brazil? Amazon deforestation could mean droughts for western US
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
7-Nov-2013
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Contact: Morgan Kelly mgnkelly@princeton.edu 609-258-5729 Princeton University
In research meant to highlight how the destruction of the Amazon rainforest could affect climate elsewhere, Princeton University-led researchers report that the total deforestation of the Amazon may significantly reduce rain and snowfall in the western United States, resulting in water and food shortages, and a greater risk of forest fires.
The researchers report in the Journal of Climate that an Amazon stripped bare could mean 20 percent less rain for the coastal Northwest and a 50 percent reduction in the Sierra Nevada snowpack, a crucial source of water for cities and farms in California. Previous research has shown that deforestation will likely produce dry air over the Amazon. Using high-resolution climate simulations, the researchers are the first to find that the atmosphere's normal weather-moving mechanics would create a ripple effect that would move that dry air directly over the western United States from December to February.
Specifically, a denuded Amazon would develop a weather cycle consisting of abnormally dry air in the sun-scorched northern Amazon around the equator weighted by wetter air in the cooler south. Research has speculated that this pattern would be similar to the warm-water climate pattern El Nio, which during the winter months brings heavy precipitation to southern California and the Sierra Nevada region while drying out the Pacific Northwest.
The Princeton-led researchers found that the Amazon pattern would be subject to the same meandering high-altitude winds known as Rossby waves that distribute the El Nio system worldwide from its source over the Pacific Ocean. Rossby waves are instrumental forces in Earth's weather that move east or west across the planet, often capturing the weather of one region such as chill Arctic air and transporting it to another. Because the Amazon pattern forms several thousand miles to the southeast from El Nio, the researchers report, the Rossby waves that put the rainy side of El Nio over southern California would instead subject that region to the dry end of the Amazon pattern. The pattern's rainy portion would be over the Pacific Ocean south of Mexico.
First author David Medvigy, an assistant professor of geosciences at Princeton, explained that the findings stand as one possible outcome of Amazon deforestation in regions outside of South America consequences that scientists are working to understand. The rainforest influences various aspects of the surrounding climate, including cloud coverage, heat absorption and rainfall.
"The big point is that Amazon deforestation will not only affect the Amazon it will not be contained. It will hit the atmosphere and the atmosphere will carry those responses," Medvigy said.
"It just so happens that one of the locations feeling that response will be one we care about most agriculturally," he said. "If you change the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, where most of the irrigation for California's Central Valley comes from, then by this study deforestation of the Amazon could have serious consequences for the food supply of the United States."
Because the exact result of Amazon deforestation is impossible to know currently, the behavior and impact of El Nio provides one of the best ideas of how the loss of the Amazon could play out, Medvigy said. Studies have suggested since 1993 that an Amazon without trees will develop an El Nio-like pattern, the researchers reported. The researchers then focused on the northwestern United States because the region is typically sensitive to El Nio.
"We don't know what the world will be like without the Amazon. We know exactly what happens with El Nio it's been studied extensively," Medvigy said. "Our intention with this paper was to identify an analogy between El Nio and Amazon deforestation. There's good reason to believe there will be strong climatic similarities between the two. Research like this will give us a handle on what to expect from Amazon deforestation."
Medvigy worked with second author Robert Walko, a senior scientist in the division of meteorology and physical oceanography at the University of Miami; Martin Otte, a postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Atmospheric Modeling and Analysis Division; and Roni Avissar, a University of Miami professor of meteorology and physical oceanography and dean of the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.
The high resolution of the researchers' climate model allowed them to see the otherwise subtle pull of the Rossby waves, Medvigy said. The typical model buries finer atmospheric features under a scale of about 200 kilometers twice the width of the Andes Mountains. Medvigy and his co-authors spotted the intricacies of the Amazon's future weather pattern using a resolution as fine as 25 kilometers, he said.
The researchers based their simulation on the Amazon's complete removal, an exaggerated level of destruction needed to produce a noticeable effect, Medvigy said. Nonetheless, clear-cutting of the Amazon marches on, although conservation efforts have significantly slowed deforestation in countries such as Brazil since the mid-2000s. In addition, research has shown that climate change, especially a spike in the global temperature, could wipe out as much as 85 percent of the forest.
The Amazon's fragility and vulnerability combined with its outsized sway over the climate add an urgency to better understanding how the forest's disappearance will affect the larger climate, particularly for agriculturally important areas such as California, Medvigy said.
"We know the Amazon is being deforested, but we don't know for sure what's going to happen because of it," Medvigy said. "Other scientists need to do these simulations and see if they get the same results. If they do, then policymakers will have to take notice."
###
The paper, "Simulated changes in Northwest US climate in response to Amazon deforestation," was published in the Nov. 15 edition of the Journal of Climate. This work was supported by awards from the National Science Foundation (grant numbers 1151102 and 0902197).
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
FILE - In this Jan. 18, 2012, file photo, Alexes Garcia makes cinnamon rolls for student's lunch in the kitchen at Kepner Middle School in Denver. The rolls are made using apple sauce instead of trans fats. Heart-clogging trans fats have been slowly disappearing from grocery aisles and restaurant menus in the last decade as nutritionists have criticized them and local governments have banned them. The Food and Drug Administration is now finishing the job as they announce Nov. 7, 2013, that it will require the food industry to gradually phase out trans fats, saying they are a threat to the health of Americans.(AP Photo/Ed Andrieski, File)
FILE - In this Jan. 18, 2012, file photo, Alexes Garcia makes cinnamon rolls for student's lunch in the kitchen at Kepner Middle School in Denver. The rolls are made using apple sauce instead of trans fats. Heart-clogging trans fats have been slowly disappearing from grocery aisles and restaurant menus in the last decade as nutritionists have criticized them and local governments have banned them. The Food and Drug Administration is now finishing the job as they announce Nov. 7, 2013, that it will require the food industry to gradually phase out trans fats, saying they are a threat to the health of Americans.(AP Photo/Ed Andrieski, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Heart-clogging trans fats have been slowly disappearing from grocery aisles and restaurant menus in the last decade. Now, the Food and Drug Administration is finishing the job.
The FDA announced Thursday it will require the food industry to gradually phase out artificial trans fats, saying they are a threat to people's health. Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said the move could prevent 20,000 heart attacks and 7,000 deaths each year.
Hamburg said that while the amount of trans fats in the country's diet has declined dramatically in the last decade, they "remain an area of significant public health concern." The trans fats have long been criticized by nutritionists, and New York City and other local governments have banned them.
The agency isn't yet setting a timeline for the phase-out, but it will collect comments for two months before officials determine how long it will take. Different foods may have different timelines, depending how easy it is to find a substitute.
"We want to do it in a way that doesn't unduly disrupt markets," said Michael Taylor, FDA's deputy commissioner for foods. Still, he says, the food "industry has demonstrated that it is, by and large, feasible to do."
Though they have been removed from many items, the fats are still found in processed foods, including in some microwave popcorns and frozen pizzas, refrigerated doughs, cookies, biscuits and ready-to-use frostings. They are also sometimes used by restaurants that use the fats for frying. Many larger chains have phased them out, but smaller restaurants may still get food containing trans fats from suppliers.
Trans fats are widely considered the worst kind for your heart, even worse than saturated fats, which also can contribute to heart disease. Trans fats are used both in processed food and in restaurants, often to improve the texture, shelf life or flavor of foods. Diners shouldn't be able to detect a taste difference if trans fats are replaced by other fats.
To phase them out, the FDA said it had made a preliminary determination that trans fats no longer fall in the agency's "generally recognized as safe" category, which is reserved for thousands of additives that manufacturers can add to foods without FDA review. Once trans fats are off the list, anyone who wants to use them would have to petition the agency for a regulation allowing it, and that would likely not be approved.
The fats are created when hydrogen is added to vegetable oil to make it more solid, which is why they are often called partially hydrogenated oils. The FDA is not targeting small amounts of trans fats that occur naturally in some meat and dairy products, because they would be too difficult to remove and aren't considered a major public health threat on their own.
Scientists say there are no health benefits to trans fats and say they can raise levels of so-called "bad" cholesterol, increasing the risk of heart disease — the leading cause of death in the United States.
Many companies have already phased out trans fats, prompted by new nutrition labels introduced by FDA in 2006 that list trans fats and an by an increasing number of local laws that have banned them. In 2011, Wal Mart pledged to remove all artificial trans fats from the foods the company sells by 2016.
As a result of the local and federal efforts and many companies' willingness to remove them, consumers have slowly eaten fewer of the fats. According to the FDA, trans fat intake among American consumers declined from 4.6 grams per day in 2003 to around one gram per day in 2012.
Dr. Leon Bruner, chief scientist at the Grocery Manufacturers Association, said in a statement his group estimates that food manufacturers have voluntarily lowered the amount of trans fats in food products by 73 percent.
The group, which represents the country's largest food companies, did not speculate on a reasonable timeline or speak to how difficult the move may be for some manufacturers. Bruner said in a statement that "consumers can be confident that their food is safe, and we look forward to working with the FDA to better understand their concerns and how our industry can better serve consumers."
FDA officials say they have been working on trans fat issues for around 15 years — the first goal was to label them — and have been collecting data to justify a possible phase-out since just after President Barack Obama came into office in 2009.
The advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest first petitioned FDA to ban trans fats nine years ago. The group's director, Michael Jacobson, says the move is "one of the most important lifesaving actions the FDA could take."
He says the agency should try to move quickly as it determines a timeline.
"Six months or a year should be more than enough time, especially considering that companies have had a decade to figure out what to do," Jacobson said.
___
Follow Mary Clare Jalonick on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mcjalonick
After taking a week to crunch the numbers, look at the data points and put together some fancy pie charts (we assume), Sony's finally ready to reveal its initial firmware upgrade plans. Five devices in the lineup made the cut to receive Android 4.4 KitKat at a to-be-determined future date, and ten ...
HPV can damage genes and chromosomes directly, whole-genome sequencing study shows
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
7-Nov-2013
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Contact: Darrell E. Ward Darrell.Ward@osumc.edu 614-293-3737 Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
COLUMBUS, Ohio The virus that causes cervical, head and neck, anal and other cancers can damage chromosomes and genes where it inserts its DNA into human DNA, according to a new study led by researchers at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC James).
It's long been known that cancer-causing types of human papillomavirus (HPV) produce two viral proteins, called E6 and E7, which are essential for the development of cancer. However, they are not sufficient to cause cancer. Additional alterations in host-cell genes are necessary for cancer to develop. Here, scientists identified a new mechanism by which HPV may damage host DNA directly and contribute to cancer development.
Published in the journal Genome Research, this laboratory study used whole-genome sequencing to investigate the relationship between the HPV and host genomes in human cancers.
"Our sequencing data showed in vivid detail that HPV can damage host-cell genes and chromosomes at sites of viral insertion," says co-senior author David Symer, MD, PhD, assistant professor of molecular virology, immunology and medical genetics at the OSUCCC James.
"HPV can act like a tornado hitting the genome, disrupting and rearranging nearby host-cell genes," Symer explains. "This can lead to overexpression of cancer-causing genes in some cases, or it can disrupt protective tumor-suppressor genes in others. Both kinds of damage likely promote the development of cancer."
"We observed fragments of the host-cell genome to be removed, rearranged or increased in number at sites of HPV insertion into the genome," says co-senior author Maura Gillison, MD, PhD, professor of medicine, epidemiology and otolaryngology and the Jeg Coughlin Chair of Cancer Research at the OSUCCC James. "These remarkable changes in host genes were accompanied by increases in the number of HPV copies in the host cell, thereby also increasing the expression of viral E6 and E7, the cancer-promoting genes."
HPV causes about 610,000 cancers annually worldwide, including virtually all cervical cancers, and many anogenital and head and neck cancers. How it causes cancer isn't completely understood.
The two cancer-causing proteins, E6 and E7, silence two key tumor-suppressor genes in host cells, contributing to cancer development. "E6 and E7 are critically important for the virus to cause cancer. Our findings shed light on how HPV, and perhaps other viruses, can disrupt the structure of host chromosomes and genes and thereby contribute to cancer development," Gillison explains.
For this study, Symer, Gillison and their colleagues examined 10 cancer-cell lines and two head and neck tumor samples from patients. Along with whole-genome sequencing, the scientists used several molecular assays, including RNA sequencing, spectral karyotyping (SKY) and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH).
Key technical findings included:
The genome-wide analysis, at single nucleotide resolution, identified a striking and recurrent association between HPV integrants and adjacent genomic amplifications, deletions and translocations;
The HPV integrants mapped broadly across the human genome, with no evidence of recurrent integration into particular chromosomal hotspots;
The researchers proposed a "looping" model by which abnormal viral replication results in the extraordinary damage that occurs to host chromosomes at the sites of viral DNA insertion.
"Our study reveals new and interesting information about what happens to HPV in the 'end game' in cancers," Symer says. "Overall, our results shed new light on the potentially critical, catastrophic steps in the progression from initial viral infection to development of an HPV-associated cancer."
###
Funding from the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC James), the Ohio Supercomputer Center, an Ohio Cancer Research Associate grant, the Oral Cancer Foundation and the Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute Center for Cancer Research, supported this research.
Other researchers involved in this study were Keiko Akagi, Jingfeng Li, Tatevik R. Broutian, Weihong Xiao, Bo Jiang, Theodoros N. Teknos, Bhavna Kumar and Dandan He, The Ohio State University; Hesed Padilla-Nash, Danny Wangsa, Thomas Ried, National Cancer Institute; James W. Rocco, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute strives to create a cancer-free world by integrating scientific research with excellence in education and patient-centered care, a strategy that leads to better methods of prevention, detection and treatment. Ohio State is one of only 41 National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers and one of only four centers funded by the NCI to conduct both phase I and phase II clinical trials. The NCI recently rated Ohio State's cancer program as "exceptional," the highest rating given by NCI survey teams. As the cancer program's 228-bed adult patient-care component, The James is a "Top Hospital" as named by the Leapfrog Group and one of the top cancer hospitals in the nation as ranked by U.S.News & World Report.
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HPV can damage genes and chromosomes directly, whole-genome sequencing study shows
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
7-Nov-2013
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Contact: Darrell E. Ward Darrell.Ward@osumc.edu 614-293-3737 Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
COLUMBUS, Ohio The virus that causes cervical, head and neck, anal and other cancers can damage chromosomes and genes where it inserts its DNA into human DNA, according to a new study led by researchers at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC James).
It's long been known that cancer-causing types of human papillomavirus (HPV) produce two viral proteins, called E6 and E7, which are essential for the development of cancer. However, they are not sufficient to cause cancer. Additional alterations in host-cell genes are necessary for cancer to develop. Here, scientists identified a new mechanism by which HPV may damage host DNA directly and contribute to cancer development.
Published in the journal Genome Research, this laboratory study used whole-genome sequencing to investigate the relationship between the HPV and host genomes in human cancers.
"Our sequencing data showed in vivid detail that HPV can damage host-cell genes and chromosomes at sites of viral insertion," says co-senior author David Symer, MD, PhD, assistant professor of molecular virology, immunology and medical genetics at the OSUCCC James.
"HPV can act like a tornado hitting the genome, disrupting and rearranging nearby host-cell genes," Symer explains. "This can lead to overexpression of cancer-causing genes in some cases, or it can disrupt protective tumor-suppressor genes in others. Both kinds of damage likely promote the development of cancer."
"We observed fragments of the host-cell genome to be removed, rearranged or increased in number at sites of HPV insertion into the genome," says co-senior author Maura Gillison, MD, PhD, professor of medicine, epidemiology and otolaryngology and the Jeg Coughlin Chair of Cancer Research at the OSUCCC James. "These remarkable changes in host genes were accompanied by increases in the number of HPV copies in the host cell, thereby also increasing the expression of viral E6 and E7, the cancer-promoting genes."
HPV causes about 610,000 cancers annually worldwide, including virtually all cervical cancers, and many anogenital and head and neck cancers. How it causes cancer isn't completely understood.
The two cancer-causing proteins, E6 and E7, silence two key tumor-suppressor genes in host cells, contributing to cancer development. "E6 and E7 are critically important for the virus to cause cancer. Our findings shed light on how HPV, and perhaps other viruses, can disrupt the structure of host chromosomes and genes and thereby contribute to cancer development," Gillison explains.
For this study, Symer, Gillison and their colleagues examined 10 cancer-cell lines and two head and neck tumor samples from patients. Along with whole-genome sequencing, the scientists used several molecular assays, including RNA sequencing, spectral karyotyping (SKY) and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH).
Key technical findings included:
The genome-wide analysis, at single nucleotide resolution, identified a striking and recurrent association between HPV integrants and adjacent genomic amplifications, deletions and translocations;
The HPV integrants mapped broadly across the human genome, with no evidence of recurrent integration into particular chromosomal hotspots;
The researchers proposed a "looping" model by which abnormal viral replication results in the extraordinary damage that occurs to host chromosomes at the sites of viral DNA insertion.
"Our study reveals new and interesting information about what happens to HPV in the 'end game' in cancers," Symer says. "Overall, our results shed new light on the potentially critical, catastrophic steps in the progression from initial viral infection to development of an HPV-associated cancer."
###
Funding from the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC James), the Ohio Supercomputer Center, an Ohio Cancer Research Associate grant, the Oral Cancer Foundation and the Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute Center for Cancer Research, supported this research.
Other researchers involved in this study were Keiko Akagi, Jingfeng Li, Tatevik R. Broutian, Weihong Xiao, Bo Jiang, Theodoros N. Teknos, Bhavna Kumar and Dandan He, The Ohio State University; Hesed Padilla-Nash, Danny Wangsa, Thomas Ried, National Cancer Institute; James W. Rocco, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute strives to create a cancer-free world by integrating scientific research with excellence in education and patient-centered care, a strategy that leads to better methods of prevention, detection and treatment. Ohio State is one of only 41 National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers and one of only four centers funded by the NCI to conduct both phase I and phase II clinical trials. The NCI recently rated Ohio State's cancer program as "exceptional," the highest rating given by NCI survey teams. As the cancer program's 228-bed adult patient-care component, The James is a "Top Hospital" as named by the Leapfrog Group and one of the top cancer hospitals in the nation as ranked by U.S.News & World Report.
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