Search

Objective To explore the role of Dickkopf-related protein 1 (DKK1) in hypertension and its effect on urinary sodium excretion. Methods Twelve rats with normal blood pressure (Wister Kyoto rats, WKY), and 12 primary hypertension rats (spontaneously hypertensive rats, SHRs), all male, at an age of 8~10 weeks, weighing 190~210 g, were employed in this study. The expression of DKK1 and β-catenin in the kidney of WKY and SHR rats was detected by Western blotting. Then 12 WKY rats were randomly divided into WKY+DKK1 group and WKY control group (n=6), and so were the 12 SHR rats. Recombinant protein DKK 16 ng/(g·d) was pumped into the rats from the DKK1 groups via micro-syringe. The blood pressure of all the rats was measured by non-invasive tail-cuff method. And the urine was collected by metabolic cages for 24-hour urinary volume and urinary sodium, which were adjusted with their weight. The expression of DKK1 and β-catenin protein in renal proximal tubule epithelial (RPT) cells (WKY-RPT and SHR-RPT) was detected by Western blotting. After intervention with recombinant protein DKK1, DKK1 siRNA (siDKK1), and β-catenin nuclear signal inhibitor (inhibitor of β-catenin-responsive transcription, ICRT 14), inhibitor of GSK3β (6-bromoindirubin-3′-oxime, BIO), the expression of DKK1 and β-catenin and the activity of Na+-K+-ATPase were measured. Results The expression level of DKK1 was lower, while that of β-catenin (indicating Wnt/β-catenin was activated) was higher in the renal tissue of SHR rats than of WKY rats. When the SHR+ DKK1 group was compared with the SHR group, the systolic blood pressure was significantly decreased at 2 weeks after implantation (145.21±2.83 vs 156.07±3.08 mmHg, P < 0.05), and both urine volume (37.40±3.76 vs 27.24±2.30 mL/kg, P < 0.05) and urinary sodium excretion (0.79±0.09 vs 0.51±0.09 mmol/kg, P < 0.05) within 24 h were increased. There were no significant differences in above indexes between WKY+DKK1 group and WKY group. The expression of DKK1 was lower in the SHR-RPT cells than the WKY-RPT cells, and that of β-catenin was opposite. Intervention of DKK1 expression would cause the change of β-catenin (indicating the alteration of Wnt/β-catenin pathway), and thus affect the activity of Na+-K+-ATPase, and the activity of Na+-K+-ATPase was negatively correlated with DKK1. Conclusion DKK1 can reduce Na+-K+-ATPase activity at least partially by inhibiting the Wnt/β-catenin pathway, promote urinary sodium excretion and lower blood pressure.

Video anomaly detection is a challenging task because of diverse abnormal events. To this task, methods based on reconstruction and prediction are wildly used in recent works, which are built on the assumption that learning on normal data, anomalies cannot be reconstructed or predicated as good as normal patterns, namely the anomaly result with more errors. In this paper, we propose to discriminate anomalies from normal ones by the duality of normality-granted optical flow, which is conducive to predict normal frames but adverse to abnormal frames. The normality-granted optical flow is predicted from a single frame, to keep the motion knowledge focused on normal patterns. Meanwhile, We extend the appearance-motion correspondence scheme from frame reconstruction to prediction, which not only helps to learn the knowledge about object appearances and correlated motion, but also meets the fact that motion is the transformation between appearances. We also introduce a margin loss to enhance the learning of frame prediction. Experiments on standard benchmark datasets demonstrate the impressive performance of our approach.

Electron cyclotron resonance radio frequency (ECR-rf) hybrid krypton-diluted oxygen plasmas were used to pattern the surfaces of diamond films with the assistance of a physical mask, while optical emission spectroscopy was employed to characterize the plasma. It was found that with krypton dilution the etching rate decreased, and also the aspect ratios of nanotips formed in micro-holes were significantly modified. The oxygen atomic densities were estimated by oxygen atom optical emission and argon actinometry. Under a microwave power of 300 W and rf bias of −300 V, the absolute density of ground-state oxygen atoms decreased from 1.3×1012 cm−3 to 1.4×1011 cm−3 as the krypton dilution ratio increased to 80%, accompanied by the decrease in the plasma excitation temperature. It is concluded that oxygen atoms play a dominant role in diamond etching. The relative variations in the horizontal and vertical etching rates induced by the addition of krypton are attributed to the observations of thicker nanotips at a high krypton dilution ratio.

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been suggested to serve as an important role in tumor development and progression. The aim of this study was to analyse the association between lncRNA metastasis-associated lung adenocarcinoma transcript 1 (MALAT1) and cancer patients' overall survival. We systematically and carefully searched the studies from electronic databases and seriously identified according to eligibility criteria. The correlation between lncRNA MALAT1 expression and overall survival in human cancers was evaluated through Review Manager. A total of 8 studies which included 792 cancer patients were included in the final analysis. Meta-analysis showed that lncRNA MALAT1 overexpression was correlated with a poor overall survival and the pooled hazard ratio (HR) and corresponding 95% confidence interval (CI) was 1.94 (95% CI 1.59-2.38). From subgroup analyses, we present evidence that lncRNA MALAT1 overexpression was an unfavorable prognostic factor for patients' overall survival in non-small cell lung cancer and pancreatic cancer, the pooled HRs (95% CI) were 1.86 (95% CI 1.27-2.73) and 1.78 (95% CI 1.30-2.44), respectively. In conclusion, lncRNA MALAT1 is a potential prognostic factor in human cancers.

Methylenediphosphonic Acid (MDP) was found to be a simple, cheap and reusable heterogeneous catalyst for the acetylation of structurally diverse alcohols, phenols and amines with acetic anhydride under solvent-free conditions at room temperature. This method showed preferential selectivity for the acetylation of the amino group in the presence of hydroxyl group. The method is very mild and the yields were in excellent.

In this paper, the authors construct a class of fractal surfaces, Bush type surfaces, based on the Bush type functions. The Box dimension, Packing dimension and Hausdorff dimension of such surfaces are investigated.

Transplantation of stem cells into damaged hearts has had modest success as a treatment for ischemic heart disease. One of the limitations is the poor stem cell survival in the diseased microenvironment. Prolyl hydroxylase domain protein 2 (PHD2) is a cellular oxygen sensor that regulates 2 key transcription factors involved in cell survival and inflammation: hypoxia-inducible factor and nuclear factor-κB.We studied whether and how PHD2 silencing in human adipose-derived stem cells (ADSCs) enhances their cardioprotective effects after transplantation into infarcted hearts.ADSCs were transduced with lentiviral short hairpin RNA against prolyl hydroxylase domain protein 2 (shPHD2) to silence PHD2. ADSCs, with or without shPHD2, were transplanted after myocardial infarction in mice. ADSCs reduced cardiomyocyte apoptosis, fibrosis, and infarct size and improved cardiac function. shPHD2-ADSCs exerted significantly more protection. PHD2 silencing induced greater ADSC survival, which was abolished by short hairpin RNA against hypoxia-inducible factor-1α. Conditioned medium from shPHD2-ADSCs decreased cardiomyocyte apoptosis. Insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) levels were significantly higher in the conditioned medium of shPHD2-ADSCs versus ADSCs, and depletion of IGF-1 attenuated the cardioprotective effects of shPHD2-ADSC-conditioned medium. Nuclear factor-κB activation was induced by shPHD2 to induce IGF-1 secretion via binding to IGF-1 gene promoter.PHD2 silencing promotes ADSCs survival in infarcted hearts and enhances their paracrine function to protect cardiomyocytes. The prosurvival effect of shPHD2 on ADSCs is hypoxia-inducible factor-1α dependent, and the enhanced paracrine function of shPHD2-ADSCs is associated with nuclear factor-κB-mediated IGF-1 upregulation. PHD2 silencing in stem cells may be a novel strategy for enhancing the effectiveness of stem cell therapy after myocardial infarction.