This Week in Experimental and Molecular Pathology

In Experimental and Molecular Pathology, researchers at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College report on chimerism analyses for recipients of allogeneic stem cell transplants. PCR analysis of short tandem repeats are commonly used in allogeneic transplant recipients, the team says, and are generally performed on blood and marrow aspirates, but it is unknown whether it is necessary to look at both. In this study, the researchers performed a retrospective analysis of 42 consecutive adult allogeneic stem cell transplant recipients, and found that PCR analyses of STRs for chimerism performed on unfractionated blood highly "correlated with results obtained using unfractionated marrow aspirates at 30, 60, or 90 days following transplant." Further, the authors add, "overall and relapse-free survival of patients experiencing full donor chimerism was not statistically different from patients demonstrating mixed chimerism at days 30, 60, and 90 following [stem cell transplant]." This suggests that chimerism analyses may be assessed on peripheral blood alone, they write.

Also in Experimental and Molecular Pathology, researchers in Argentina report on the ability of N-(2-mercaptopropionyl)-glycine, or MPG, to protect against ischemia-reperfusion injury in hypertrophied hearts. The team isolated hearts from spontaneously hypertensive rats and age-matched normotensive rats, and the subjected the hearts to 50-minute global ischemia and two-hour reperfusion. "The treatment with MPG decreased infarct size, preserved [glutathione] levels and decreased SOD and MnSOD cytosolic activities, [thiobarbituric acid reactive substances] concentration, and H2O2 induced-mPTP opening in both rat strains," the authors write. "Our results show that, in both hypertrophied and normal hearts, an attenuation of mPTP opening via reduction of oxidative stress appears to be the predominant mechanism involved in the cardioprotection against reperfusion injury MPG-mediated."