Search

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is an aggressive hematologic cancer in adults. Some patients exhibit restricted T cell infiltration and do not respond to routine treatments. This may be prevented by enhancing adaptive immunity by stimulating innate immune cells inside the tumor microenvironment (TME). To activate the adaptive immunological reaction against tumors, type I interferons (IFNs) can promote the presentation of tumor-specific cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) cell recruitment. During the activation of innate immunity, cyclic di-nucleotides (CDNs) bind to and stimulate the stimulator of interferon genes (STING), a protein localized inside the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) membrane, resulting in the expression of type I IFNs. The efficacy of STING agonists as effective stimulators of the anti-tumor response in AML is being investigated in numerous clinical studies. Therefore, the purpose of this investigation was to thoroughly review existing knowledge in this field and provide perspective into the clinical potential of STING agonists in AML. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key message: Lack of structural components results in inflorescence stem bending. Differentially expressed genes involved in lignin and hemicellulose biosynthesis are vital; genes involved in cellulose and glycan biosynthesis are also relevant. An erect inflorescence stem is essential for high-quality cut herbaceous peony flowers. To explore the factors underlying inflorescence stem bending, major cell walls contents were measured, and stem structure was observed in two herbaceous peony varieties with contrasting stem straightness traits ('Da Fugui', upright; 'Chui Touhong', bending). In addition, Illumina sequencing was performed and weighted correlation network analysis (WGCNA) was used to analyze the results. The results showed significant differences in lignin, hemicellulose and soluble sugar contents, sclerenchyma and xylem areas and thickening in cell walls in pith at stage S3, when bending begins. In addition, 44,182 significantly differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were found, and these DEGs were mainly enriched in 36 pathways. Among the DEGs, hub genes involved in lignin, cellulose, and xylan biosynthesis and transcription factors that regulated these process were identified by WGCNA. These results suggested that the contents of compounds that provided cell wall rigidity were vital factors affecting inflorescence stem straightness in herbaceous peony. Genes involved in or regulating the biosynthesis of these compounds are thus important; lignin and hemicellulose are of great interest, and cellulose and glycan should not be ignored. This paper lays a foundation for developing new herbaceous peony varieties suitable for cut flowers by molecular-assisted breeding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synthetic talking avatar has been demonstrated to be very useful in human-computer interactions. In this paper, we discuss the problem of acoustic to articulatory mapping and explore different kinds of models to describe the mapping function. We try general linear model (GLM), Gaussian mixture model (GMM), artificial neural network (ANN) and deep neural network (DNN) for the problem. Taking the advantage of neural network that its prediction stage can be finished in a very short time (e.g. real-time), we develop a real-time speech driven talking avatar system based on DNN. The input of the system is acoustic speech and the output is articulatory movements (that are synchronized with the input speech) on a three-dimensional avatar. Several experiments are conducted to compare the performance of GLM, GMM, ANN and DNN on a well known acoustic-articulatory English speech corpus MNGU0. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed acoustic to articulatory mapping method with DNN can achieve the best performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Outcomes of radical debridement versus no debridement for the treatment of thoracic and lumbar spinal tuberculosis" by J. Qian and colleagues that was published in a previous issue of the periodical.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "A randomized study of autologous conditioned plasma and steroid injections in the treatment of lateral epicondylitis," by R. Lebiedziński and colleagues in the July 2015 issue.

A letter to the editor concerning the article "Continuous Wound Infusion of Ropivacaine for the Control of Pain After Thoracolumbar Spinal Surgery: A Randomized Clinical Trial" published online in 2015 is presented.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Release of the medial head of the gastrocnemius for Achilles tendinopathy in sedentary patients: a retrospective study" by N. Maffulli and A. Del Buono in the January 2015 issue is presented.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Effect of pulsed electromagnetic field therapy in patients undergoing total knee arthroplasty: a randomized controlled trial" by Paolo Adravanti, S. Nicoletti and S. Setti and colleagues in a 2014 issue.