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81:e67-e73.PubMedCrossRef Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Authors’ contributions FE, PP, SL conceived the study and obtained grant funding, coordination of the original study, coordinated genotyping efforts, supervised data analysis, and drafted the manuscript. VB, FF and GB participated in data management and statistical analysis, and in drafting the manuscript. GC and LB participated in the design of the original study, data collection and patient management, and in drafting the final manuscript. CG, MP, and BG participated in design of original study, and participated in drafting of final

manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.”
“Background Telomerase, an enzyme related to cellular immortality, stabilizes telomere length by adding DNA repeats onto telomere ends [1, 2]. Many studies have revealed that telomerase activity is expressed in many different types of carcinomas, detected in more than 85% of the AZD6738 solubility dmso human carcinoma samples, and it has been found to be useful as a prognostic indicator [3–5]. Telomerase activity is mainly regulated by human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT), which is the catalytic subunit of telomerase [6, 7]. Also, hTERT

has been significantly detected in many types of sarcoma samples, and previous reports have indicated that hTERT expression is associated with tumor aggressiveness, feature and clinical outcome in sarcomas [8–14]. Therefore, hTERT may play an important role in telomere maintenance mechanisms in human sarcomas. However, it is notable that thus far, there has been no clear understanding of the mechanisms of hTERT expression especially in sarcomas. p38 is a mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) activated by phosphorylation cAMP on serine/threonine residue when cells are exposed to cellular stress, and has a wide variety of biological functions [15–17]. Recent studies have suggested that signals transmitted through MAP kinase can increase or decrease hTERT transcription in response to various stimuli, depending on the downstream mediators [18–22]. This study was undertaken to analyze the clinical significance of p38 MAPK and hTERT expression in primary tumor samples from soft tissue malignant fibrous histiocytomas (MFH), liposarcomas (LS) and bone MFH patients. In addition, with the broader aim of discovering regulation factors of hTERT in sarcomas, we investigated whether there is a correlation between hTERT and p38 MAPK.