Our findings suggest that vitamin D receptor haplotypes BsmI(G)#TaqI(C) and BsmI(A)#TaqI(T) have a protective effect against colorectal cancer in Caucasians.

Personalized medicine is a modern healthcare approach where information on each person's unique clinical constitution is exploited to realize early disease intervention based on more informed medical decisions. The application of diagnostic tools in combination with measurement evaluation that can be performed in a reliable and automated fashion plays a key role in this context. As the progression of various cancer diseases and the effectiveness of their treatments are related to a varying number of tumor cells that circulate in blood, the determination of their extremely low numbers by liquid biopsy is a decisive prognostic marker. To detect and enumerate circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in a reliable and automated fashion, we apply methods from machine learning using a naive Bayesian classifier (NBC) based on a probabilistic generative mixture model. Cells are collected with a functionalized medical wire and are stained for fluorescence microscopy so that their color signature can be used for classification through the construction of Red-Green-Blue (RGB) color histograms. Exploiting the information on the fluorescence signature of CTCs by the NBC does not only allow going beyond previous approaches but also provides a method of unsupervised learning that is required for unlabeled training data. A quantitative comparison with a state-of-the-art support vector machine, which requires labeled data, demonstrates the competitiveness of the NBC method. (5-7), much emphasis has been put on techniques that effectively collect CTCs from peripheral blood. Currently, the majority of studies use anti-epithelial-cell-adhesionmolecule (EpCAM) antibody-coated isolation systems (8-10), whereas other types of immunomagnetic devices (11-13), density gradient centrifugation (14) or membrane filtration (15,16), are also used for CTC enrichment. The subsequent CTC detection is realized by either immunocytological staining or polymerase chain reaction (17). Due to the extraordinary rarity of CTCs in patients, which have a typical ratio of one CTC per 10 8 blood cells (18), classical flow cytometry has proven unreliable and methods using intravital multiphoton flow cytometry and photoacoustic flowmetry are currently being developed (17,(19)(20)(21)(22). Although these methods have already successfully identified CTCs in control blood specimens spiked with cancer cell lines, they are not yet ready for use in detection of CTC in patients with cancer.The data of this study were generated by a technology that can collect CTCs in vivo using a functionalized and structured medical wire (FSMW) (23). Medical guidewires are widely used for angiography and insertion of venous catheters (24)

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St. John's wort and hyperforin concordantly affected expression of genes not only mediating metabolism and transport of exogenous and endogenous compounds, but also involved in energy metabolism, intracellular calcium regulation, cell proliferation and apoptosis.