Minimally invasive surgery may not be an appropriate surgical approach in intermediate- and high-risk endometrial carcinoma, even though adjuvant therapy is given. The objective of this study was to evaluate the results of open surgery including lymphadenectomy without adjuvant therapy in patients with uterine-confined intermediate- and high-risk endometrioid endometrial carcinoma. Two hundred fifty-six patients with uterine-confined endometrioid endometrial carcinoma were treated with open surgery, including pelvic with or without para-aortic lymphadenectomy. Of the 81 patients with uterine-confined intermediate- or high-risk disease, 77 were treated with systematic lymphadenectomy without adjuvant therapy. Seven patients developed recurrence, comprising 5.5% (3/55) and 18.2% (4/22) of the intermediate- and high-risk patients, respectively. The time to recurrence was 1–66 months. The sites of recurrence were the vaginal apex (n = 2), lung (n = 2), vaginal sidewall (n = 1), pelvic lymph nodes (n = 1), and para-aortic to supraclavicular nodes (n = 1). Of these, five patients were alive without disease after salvage treatment, but two understaged high-risk patients died of disease. The five-year disease-specific survival rates of intermediate- and high-risk patients were 100% and 90%, respectively. The present study indicated that patients with uterine-confined intermediate- and high-risk endometrioid endometrial carcinoma had excellent survival when treated with open surgery, including lymphadenectomy alone. The safety of omitting adjuvant therapy should be evaluated in prospective randomized trials comparing open surgery with minimally invasive surgery.

Autophagy is a conserved cellular degradation process in eukaryotes, in which cytoplasmic components and organelles are digested in vacuoles/ lysosomes. Recently, autophagic degradation of nuclear materials, termed "nucleophagy", has been reported. In the multinucleate filamentous fungus Aspergillus oryzae, a whole nucleus is degraded by nucleophagy after prolonged culture. While developing an H2B-EGFP processing assay for the evaluation of nucleophagy in A. oryzae, we found that nucleophagy is efficiently induced by carbon or nitrogen depletion. Microscopic observations in a carbon depletion condition clearly demonstrated that autophagosomes selectively sequester a particular nucleus, despite the presence of multiple nuclei in the same cell. Furthermore, AoNsp1, the A. oryzae homolog of the yeast nucleoporin Nsp1p, mainly localized at the nuclear periphery, but its localization was restricted to the opposite side of the autophagosome being formed around a nucleus. In contrast, the perinuclear ER visualized with the calnexin AoClxA was not morphologically affected by nucleophagy. The findings of nucleophagy-inducing conditions enabled us to characterize the morphological process of autophagic degradation of a whole nucleus in multinucleate cells.

Actin filaments are involved in various cell motility processes. Actin polymerization is primarily governed by monomer association and dissociation occurring at the rapid-growing end called the barbed end, which generates the force to push the plasma membrane forward. Individual actin filaments bind to one nucleotide and its hydrolysis energy is used to maintain the filamentous form by changing the characteristics of the subunits. The asymmetry of the individual actin filaments is also important for detecting the asymmetry of the cell. However, asymmetry at the subunit level including conformational and temporal changes in actin filaments has not been visualized yet. Here, we used "Forster (or fluorescence) resonance energy transfer (FRET)-actin filament" by copolymerizing an equal amount of donor and acceptor labelled actin. FRET efficiency change was measured along each actin filament under a light microscope. The FRET efficiency was lower near the end region than in the interior regions. Fluctuations in the FRET efficiency (fFRET) were used to monitor local flexibilities along each actin filament. The fFRET was larger near the end region than the interior region. Our quantified data showed that spatial change of fFRET along actin filaments was rapidly decayed from the barbed end from near the pointed end toward internal region, suggesting that the behaviour of actin subunits near ends is affected from each end. Our result revealed that actin filaments have different orientations locally. These orientations appear when actin forms filaments, which may contribute the cell motility.

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