Optimisation of global stem cell donor recruitment based on analysis of unsuccessful donor searches.

Despite over 41 million registered potential volunteer stem cell donors worldwide, many patients in need of a transplant do not find an HLA-matched unrelated donor or cord blood units, with the respective odds differing significantly between various populations. In this study, we analysed data of 2205 unsuccessful real-life donor searches sent to the DKMS Registry to identify populations in which further donor recruitment would be associated with particularly large patient benefits. For that purpose, we estimated haplotype frequencies of 67 donor populations at various sample sizes and entered them into two different mathematical models. These models assessed patient benefits from population-specific donor recruitment, operationalised by the number of originally unsuccessful searches that may become successful due to new donors. Consistently, across the different mathematical models and sample sizes, we obtained several countries from East and Southeast Asia (Thailand, Vietnam, China, and the Philippines) and the population of Asians in the USA as countries/populations where donor recruitment activities would be particularly beneficial for patients. We also identified various countries in Southeast and Central Europe as possible target regions for donor recruitment with above-average patient benefits. The results presented are registry-specific in the sense that they were obtained by optimising unsuccessful searches that had been sent to the DKMS Registry. Therefore, it would be desirable to apply the presented methods to a global data set that includes all unsuccessful stem cell donor searches worldwide and uses population-specific haplotype frequencies based on all donors available in the WMDA Search & Match Service.

5 years DKMS Chile: approach, results and impact of the first unrelated stem cell donor center in Chile.

Introduction: Allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo-HSCT) is performed worldwide to treat blood cancer and other life-threatening blood disorders. As successful transplantation requires an HLA-compatible donor, unrelated donor centers and registries have been established worldwide to identify donors for patients without a family match. Ethnic minorities are underrepresented in large donor registries. Matching probabilities are higher when donors and patients share the same ethnic background, making it desirable to increase the diversity of the global donor pool by recruiting donors in new regions. Here, we report the establishment and the first 5 years of operation of the first unrelated stem cell donor center in Chile, a high-income country in South America with a population of over 19 million. Methods: We used online and in-person donor recruitment practices through patient appeals and donor drives in companies, universities, the armed forces, and public services. After confirmatory typing donors were subjected to medical work-up and cleared for donation. Results: We recruited almost 170,000 donors in 5 years. There were 1,488 requests received for confirmatory typing and donor availability checks, of which 333 resulted in medical work-up, leading to 194 stem cell collections. Products were shipped to Chile (48.5%) and abroad. Even when the COVID-19 pandemic challenged our activities, the number of donors recruited and shipped stem cell products remained steady. In Chile there was an almost 8-fold increase in unrelated donor transplantation activity from 16 procedures in 2016-2018 to 124 procedures in 2019-2021, mainly for pediatric patients following the center's establishment. We estimate that 49.6% of Chilean patients would find at least one matched unrelated donor in the global DKMS donor pool. Discussion: Establishing a DKMS donor center in Chile has significantly increased donor availability for Chilean patients and contributed to an increase of unrelated donor stem cell transplant activity.

Ribose-protonated DNA base excision repair: a combined theoretical and experimental study.

Living organisms protect the genome against external influences by recognizing and repairing damaged DNA. A common source of gene mutation is the oxidized guanine, which undergoes base excision repair through cleavage of the glycosidic bond between the ribose and the nucleobase of the lesion. We unravel the repair mechanism utilized by bacterial glycosylase, MutM, using quantum-chemical calculations involving more than 1000 atoms of the catalytic site. In contrast to the base-protonated pathway currently favored in the literature, we show that the initial protonation of the lesion's ribose paves the way for an almost barrier-free glycosidic cleavage. The combination of theoretical and experimental data provides further insight into the selectivity and discrimination of MutM's binding site toward various substrates.

Benchmarking Hydrogen and Carbon NMR Chemical Shifts at HF, DFT, and MP2 Levels.

An extensive study of error distributions for calculating hydrogen and carbon NMR chemical shifts at Hartree-Fock (HF), density functional theory (DFT), and Møller-Plesset second-order perturbation theory (MP2) levels is presented. Our investigation employs accurate CCSD(T)/cc-pVQZ calculations for providing reference data for 48 hydrogen and 40 carbon nuclei within an extended set of chemical compounds covering a broad range of the NMR scale with high relevance to chemical applications, especially in organic chemistry. Besides the approximations of HF, a variety of DFT functionals, and conventional MP2, we also present results with respect to a spin component-scaled MP2 (GIAO-SCS-MP2) approach. For each method, the accuracy is analyzed in detail for various basis sets, allowing identification of efficient combinations of method and basis set approximations.

An extrapolation method for the efficient calculation of molecular response properties within Born-Oppenheimer molecular dynamics.

The calculation of molecular response properties in dynamic molecular systems is a major challenge that requires sampling over many steps of, e.g., Born-Oppenheimer molecular dynamics (BO-MD) simulations. We present an extrapolation scheme to accelerate such calculations for multiple steps within BO-MD trajectories or equivalently within other sampling methods of conformational space. The extrapolation scheme is related to the one introduced by Pulay and Fogarasi [Chem. Phys. Lett., 2004, 386, 272] for self-consistent field (SCF) energy calculations. We extend the extrapolation to the quantities within our density matrix-based Laplace-transformed coupled perturbed SCF (DL-CPSCF) method that allows for linear-scaling calculations of response properties for large molecular systems. Here, we focus on the example of calculating NMR chemical shifts for which the number of required DL-CPSCF iterations reduces by roughly 40-70%.

Distance-dependent Schwarz-based integral estimates for two-electron integrals: reliable tightness vs. rigorous upper bounds.

A new integral estimate for four-center two-electron integrals is introduced that accounts for distance information between the bra- and ket-charge distributions describing the two electrons. The screening is denoted as QQR and combines the most important features of the conventional Schwarz screening by Häser and Ahlrichs published in 1989 [J. Comput. Chem. 10, 104 (1989)] and our multipole-based integral estimates (MBIE) introduced in 2005 [D. S. Lambrecht and C. Ochsenfeld, J. Chem. Phys. 123, 184101 (2005)]. At the same time the estimates are not only tighter but also much easier to implement, so that we recommend them instead of our MBIE bounds introduced first for accounting for charge-distance information. The inclusion of distance dependence between charge distributions is not only useful at the SCF level but is particularly important for describing electron-correlation effects, e.g., within AO-MP2 theory, where the decay behavior is at least 1/R(4) or even 1/R(6). In our present work, we focus on studying the efficiency of our QQR estimates within SCF theory and demonstrate the performance for a benchmark set of 44 medium to large molecules, where savings of up to a factor of 2 for exchange integrals are observed for larger systems. Based on the results of the benchmark set we show that reliable tightness of integral estimates is more important for the screening performance than rigorous upper bound properties.

Convergence of Electronic Structure with the Size of the QM Region: Example of QM/MM NMR Shieldings.

The influence of the chemical environment on NMR shifts of a central molecular region is studied for several biomolecular and supramolecular systems. To investigate the long-range effects, we systematically increase the QM region until the changes of the NMR shielding tensor are negligible for the considered nuclei; that is, convergence with the selected QM size is reached. To reach size convergence, QM regions with up to about 1500 atoms and 15 000 basis functions are treated by our density matrix-based linear-scaling coupled perturbed self-consistent field methods. The results also provide insights into the locality and convergence of the electronic structure. Furthermore, we demonstrate to what extent the inclusion of the chemical environment as partial point charges within a hybrid QM/MM approach improves the convergence behavior. In addition, some benchmark data on NMR accuracies are provided using various ab initio methods.