STAT transcription factors play a critical role in mediating the effects of cytokines on myeloid cells. As STAT target genes control key processes such as survival, proliferation and self-renewal, it is not surprising that constitutive activation of STATs, particularly STAT3 and STAT5, are common events in many myeloid tumors. STATs are activated both by mutant tyrosine kinases as well as other...

derivatives suppress TH17 cell differentiation by antagonizing RORgammat activity. Activating mutations in JAK2, a tyrosine kinase that serves as a critical signaling protein for multiple cytokines, are associated with BCR-ABL1–negative myelo-proliferative neoplasms. In this issue of Blood, Zheng and colleagues report that the constitutively activated kinase CK2 binds to JAK2 and is required fo...

Monocytes remodel the extracellular matrix (ECM) by secreting proteins composing the ECM such as fibronectin (FN) and degrading proteases such as matrix metalloproteinase-9 (MMP-9), which cleaves FN into fragments. The effects of FN and its fragmented products on the expression of monocyte MMP-9 are controversial and largely unknown. We showed that in human monocytes, the proinflammatory cytoki...

Adipocytes play important roles in lipid storage, energy homeostasis and whole body insulin sensitivity. Studies in the last two decades have identified the hormones and cytokines that activate specific STATs in adipocytes in vitro and in vivo. Five of the seven STAT family members are expressed in adipocyte (STATs 1, 3, 5A, 5B and 6). Many transcription factors, including STATs, have been show...

We prove that every digraph of circumference l has DAG-width at most l and this is best possible. As a consequence of our result we deduce that the k-linkage problem is polynomially solvable for every fixed k in the class of digraphs with bounded circumference. This answers a question posed in [2]. We also prove that the weak k-linkage problem (where we ask for arc-disjoint paths) is polynomial...