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Gallic acid (GA) is a common phenolic acid that is widely used as an antibacterial agent in the food industry. In order to increase its applicability, this study investigated the antibacterial effects and mechanisms of GA on Escherichia coli O157:H7 (E. coli O157:H7) after UV-C light treatment combined with photodynamic therapy. This study evaluated the photodynamic effects of GA after UV-C irradiation (UVC-GA) based on changes in substances and ROS generation. Using E. coli O157:H7 as a model bacterium, the antibacterial effects were evaluated from various aspects, including MIC, MBC, time-kill curve, cell membrane damage, DNA damage, protein damage, motility changes, biofilm formation, and activity. In addition, the antibacterial mechanisms were further investigated by combining RT-qPCR analysis of gene expression. The results of this study demonstrated that GA has the ability to exert photodynamic effects, even after the removal of the UV-C light source, and can effectively reduce the number of viable E. coli O157:H7 cells. Moreover, UVC-GA caused significant damage to the cell membrane, DNA, and proteins, and according to the RT-qPCR results, the antibacterial mechanisms of UVC-GA and GA on E. coli O157:H7 were completely different. Based on the above results, food-sterilizing detergents can be developed and applied to contaminated oyster to provide an effective food cleaning effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Doxorubicin (DOX) is a potent chemotherapeutic drug; however, its clinical use is limited due to its cardiotoxicity. Mitochondrial dysfunction plays a vital role in the pathogenesis of DOX-induced cardiomyopathy. Follistatin-like protein 1 (FSTL1) is a potent cardiokine that protects the heart from diverse cardiac diseases, such as myocardial infarction, cardiac ischemia/reperfusion injury, and heart failure. However, its role in DOX-induced cardiomyopathy is unclear. Therefore, the present study investigated whether administering recombinant FSTL1 could mitigate DOX-induced cardiomyopathy and clarified the underlying molecular mechanisms. FSTL1 treatment attenuated DOX-induced cardiac dysfunction, cardiac fibrosis, and cellular apoptosis by inhibiting excess mitochondrial matrix protein methionine sulfoxide reductase B2 (MsrB2)-mediated mitophagy. Furthermore, FSTL1 administration reduced the expression of apoptotic proteins, including MsrB2, Bax, caspase 3, mitochondrial Parkin, and LC3-II, increased myocardial ATP content, and decreased cardiac malondialdehyde levels, thus protecting mitochondrial function against DOX-induced cardiac injury. Furthermore, FSTL1 treatment protected the contractile properties of adult cardiomyocytes against DOX-induced injury in vitro. Furthermore, carbonyl cyanide m-chlorophenylhydrazone, a mitophagy inducer, impaired the protective effects of FSTL1 in DOX-treated H9c2 cardiomyocytes. In conclusion, these results show that FSTL1 is a novel therapeutic agent against DOX-induced cardiotoxicity that improves mitochondrial function and decreases mitophagy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the major constitutes of human society, education has been continuously producing a huge amount of data and become an important of sources of big data. Deeply mining and analyzing these big education data are of practical significance for optimizing education resource deployment and improving education quality. However, the big education data are often of diverse types and from multiple parties, which raises a big challenge for accurate and reasonable educational data fusion especially when the educational data are correlated with each other. In view of this challenge, we put forward a novel cloud computing-aided multi-type data fusion approach considering data correlation in education, to accommodate the big volume, diverse types and correlation of educational data. In concrete, the data fusion operation is mainly based on the Mahalanobis distances which can overcome the data diversity in multiple-dimensional data fusion for education. Afterwards, we provide a case study to show the concrete steps of our proposal. At last, a set of experiments are deployed to validate the feasibility of our proposal in this paper. Experimental results prove the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach in dealing with multi-type data fusion with correlation in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urine is a complex biofluid that reflects both overall physiologic state and the state of the genitourinary tissues through which it passes. It contains both secreted proteins and proteins encapsulated in tissue-derived extracellular vesicles (EVs). To understand the population variability and clinical utility of urine, we quantified the secreted and EV proteomes from 190 men, including a subset with prostate cancer. We demonstrate that a simple protocol enriches prostatic proteins in urine. Secreted and EV proteins arise from different subcellular compartments. Urinary EVs are faithful surrogates of tissue proteomes, but secreted proteins in urine or cell line EVs are not. The urinary proteome is longitudinally stable over several years. It can accurately and non-invasively distinguish malignant from benign prostatic lesions and can risk-stratify prostate tumors. This resource quantifies the complexity of the urinary proteome and reveals the synergistic value of secreted and EV proteomes for translational and biomarker studies. Urine can be used to easily analyse the health of patients. Here, the authors identify proteins in urinary extracellular vesicles that distinguish prostate cancer from benign lesions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, micro-video is a popular form on various multimedia platforms. The venue information of micro-videos is beneficial for venue-related applications, such as personalized location recommendation and venue recognition. However, the performance of micro-video venue classification task is limited in existing works due to the ignorant of the global dependency of features. To this end, an enhanced non-local (ENL) module is devised to improve the expressiveness of features. Furthermore, in this paper an attention-enhanced joint learning model is proposed to generate discriminative venue representations in an end-to-end manner. Such unified model is consisted of normalized NeXtVLAD, ENL module, CNN layer, and context gate. Specifically, the sequential features extracted from multiple modalities are aggregated into compact vectors via parallel NNeXtVLAD modules. In ENL, the interactions between any two positions of the aggregated features are captured to reinforce the valuable information in multiple modalities. Moreover, the enhanced channel information is adaptively added for further feature enhancement. Then, a CNN layer is applied to fuse enhanced features of multiple modalities. In addition, the effective activation function is explored in the CNN layer to achieve better performance. Finally, the context gate method is used to dynamically model the relationships between features and venue categories for prediction. Experimental results on a public dataset reveal that our proposed micro-video venue classification scheme achieves state-of-the-art performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1Identification of mouse tumor pathology and origin through scRNA-Seq and IHC.a UMAP plots of the 5362 mammary cells and 25,312 tumor cells colored by samples (left). New mouse genetic model of breast cancer from IKK defects in dendritic cells revealed by single-cell RNA sequencing The apoptosis signaling was upregulated in T cells from the tumors, while the activated T-cell proliferation and adaptive immune response signalings were downregulated in the tumor T cells compared with those in the normal mammary T cells (Supplementary Fig. UMAP plots of the mammary and tumor cells by clusters, color-coded by cell subsets as indicated (right). b The landscape of inferred large-scale CNVs for epithelium from the tumor samples. [Extracted from the article]

A Gram-stain-positive, rod-shaped, facultatively anaerobic, motile and spore-forming bacterium with multiple flagella designated GXH0341T was isolated from the soil associated with decayed pine tree samples collected from Weizhou Island, Beihai, Guangxi, China. Growth occurred at 4–37 °C (optimum 30 °C), at pH 5.0–11.0 (optimum 8.0) and in the presence of 0–7% (w/v) NaCl (optimum 2%). Phylogenetic analysis based on 16S rRNA gene sequences indicated that strain GXH0341T was most closely related to Bacillus mesophilus DSM 101000 T (98.9%), followed by Bacillus salitolerans KC1T (96.95%) and Margalitia shackletonii DSM 18435 T (96.67%). Phylogenetic analysis revealed that strain GXH0341T represented a separate lineage within the genus Bacillus. Peroxidase is positive. The predominant quinone was MK-7 and the cell-wall diagnostic diamino acid was meso-diaminopimelic acid. The predominant polar lipids are diphosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylethanolamine, phosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylcholine, and two unidentified phospholipids. The major fatty acids are iso-C14:0, iso-C15:0, anteiso-C15:0 and iso-C16:0. The genome of GXH0341T comprises the biosynthetic gene cluster for T3PKS, terpene, lassopeptide and RRE-containing element as secondary metabolites. The average nucleotide identity values and the digital DNA-DNA hybridization values between GXH0341T and B. mesophilus DSM 101000 T were 78.22% and 21.00%, respectively, which were in the range of the recommended level for interspecies identity. The results of phenotypic, chemotaxonomic and genotypic analyses clearly indicated strain GXH0341T represents a novel species of the genus Bacillus, for which the name Bacillus pinisoli sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is GXH0341T (= MCCC 1K07157T = JCM 35212 T). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is not clear how the amino acid composition of the X sites in GXSXG domain affects the properties of the lipase. To address this, saturation mutation at these sites of Penicillium expansum lipase (PEL) was carried out. After screening, a mutant L133M with significantly different activity was obtained. The activity of L133M was lower than that of wild-type PEL (WT) when the reaction time was 3–10 min. However, it was 1.61 times that of WT under long-term (48 h) catalysis. WT exhibited interfacial activation when the concentration of p-nitrophenylbutyrate was higher than 3 mM, whereas L133M could only show interfacial activation at higher micelle concentration (p-nitrophenylbutyrate concentration > 5 mM), which seemed to be slower. Further analysis showed that a new hydrophobic interaction was generated between the methionine introduced at position 133 and the lid, which made the interface activation process more difficult. However, the binding energy between the activated mutant and the substrate was smaller, showing stronger activity. This work provides some reliable clues for further understanding the complex role of GXSXG domain in enzyme catalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel bacterium of the genus Pontibacter, designated GY10130T, was isolated from rhizosphere soil of a mangrove plant Rhizophora stylosa collected from Guangxi province, China. Strain GY10130T was Gram-stain negative, positive for oxidase activities, aerobic, short rod-shaped cells without flagella. Growth was observed at 10–40 °C (optimum, 28 °C), pH 6.0–9.0 (optimum, 7.0) and NaCl concentrations of 0–4% (optimum, 1%). Strain GY10130T is closely related to members of the genus Pontibacter, namely P. beigongshangensis CGMCC 1.17104T (97.8%) and P. amylolyticus CGMCC 1.12749T (95.0%), P. humi SWU8T (94.7%), and less than 94.0% with other currently described type strains of Pontibacter. The strain GY10130T showed an ANI value of 80.6% and dDDH value of 23.2% with P. beigongshangensis CGMCC 1.17104T, followed by P. amylolyticus CGMCC 1.12749T with ANI and dDDH values of 72.9 and 13.8%, respectively. Strain GY10130T contains carotenoid-like pigments, but flexirubin-type pigments were absent. The cellular fatty acids (> 10%) consist of summed feature 4 (17:1 iso I/anteiso B) and iso-C15:0. The predominant menaquinone is MK-7. The polar lipids comprise phosphatidylethanolamine, two unidentified glycolipids, two unidentified aminolipids and six unidentified phospholipids. The genome length of strain GY10130T was 6.2 Mbp with a DNA G + C content of 47.1 mol% and 4727 protein-coding genes. The result of polyphasic taxonomic study show strain GY10130T represents one novel species of Pontibacter, Pontibacter qinzhouensis sp. nov., with the type strain GY10130T (=NBRC 113901T = CGMCC 1.16772T). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anesthetic-induced brain activity study is crucial in avian cognitive-, consciousness-, and sleep-related research. However, the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the generation of brain rhythms and specific connectivity of birds during anesthesia are poorly understood. Although different kinds of anesthetics can be used to induce an anesthesia state, a comparison study of these drugs focusing on the neural pattern evolution during anesthesia is lacking. Here, we recorded local field potentials (LFPs) using a multi-channel micro-electrode array inserted into the nidopallium caudolateral (NCL) of adult pigeons (Columba livia) anesthetized with chloral hydrate, pelltobarbitalum natricum or urethane. Power spectral density (PSD) and functional connectivity analyses were used to measure the dynamic temporal neural patterns in NCL during anesthesia. Neural decoding analysis was adopted to calculate the probability of the pigeon’s brain state and the kind of injected anesthetic. In the NCL during anesthesia, we found elevated power activity and functional connectivity at low-frequency bands and depressed power activity and connectivity at high-frequency bands. Decoding results based on the spectral and functional connectivity features indicated that the pigeon’s brain states during anesthesia and the injected anesthetics can be effectively decoded. These findings provide an important foundation for future investigations on how different anesthetics induce the generation of specific neural patterns.Graphical Abstract: Anesthetic-induced brain activity study is crucial in avian cognitive-, consciousness-, and sleep-related research. However, the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the generation of brain rhythms and specific connectivity of birds during anesthesia are poorly understood. Although different kinds of anesthetics can be used to induce an anesthesia state, a comparison study of these drugs focusing on the neural pattern evolution during anesthesia is lacking. Here, we recorded local field potentials (LFPs) using a multi-channel micro-electrode array inserted into the nidopallium caudolateral (NCL) of adult pigeons (Columba livia) anesthetized with chloral hydrate, pelltobarbitalum natricum or urethane. Power spectral density (PSD) and functional connectivity analyses were used to measure the dynamic temporal neural patterns in NCL during anesthesia. Neural decoding analysis was adopted to calculate the probability of the pigeon’s brain state and the kind of injected anesthetic. In the NCL during anesthesia, we found elevated power activity and functional connectivity at low-frequency bands and depressed power activity and connectivity at high-frequency bands. Decoding results based on the spectral and functional connectivity features indicated that the pigeon’s brain states during anesthesia and the injected anesthetics can be effectively decoded. These findings provide an important foundation for future investigations on how different anesthetics induce the generation of specific neural patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature selection is a technique to improve the classification accuracy of classifiers and a convenient data visualization method. As an incremental, task oriented, and model-free learning algorithm, Q-learning is suitable for feature selection, this study proposes a dynamic feature selection algorithm, which combines feature selection and Q-learning into a framework. First, the Q-learning is used to construct the discriminant functions for each class of the data. Next, the feature ranking is achieved according to the all discrimination functions vectors for each class of the data comprehensively, and the feature ranking is doing during the process of updating discriminant function vectors. Finally, experiments are designed to compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with four feature selection algorithms, the experimental results on the benchmark data set verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, the classification performance of the proposed algorithm is better than the other feature selection algorithms, meanwhile the proposed algorithm also has good performance in removing the redundant features, and the experiments of the effect of learning rates on the our algorithm demonstrate that the selection of parameters in our algorithm is very simple. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of depletion of fossil energy and environmental impacts of its use, society has begun to develop vigorously renewable energy (RE). As a result, concerns about the availability of critical minerals used in RE systems have been raised. This paper uses a generalized Weng model to analyze the long-term production of critical minerals for China's RE development. In our pessimistic case, the results show that the production of most of the minerals investigated for China will peak before 2030, with a relatively high decline rate thereafter. This is an unsustainable situation for China's RE development unless large and growing quantities of these minerals can be imported. In our optimistic case, although this delays the peak date only slightly, it significantly increases the maximum production rate and lowers the subsequent decline rate. The impacts of many other factors on production, and the implications of China's domestic minerals production on world's minerals supply chain, are also analyzed. We conclude that both China and the world should pay close attention to the potential supply risks to critical minerals. Possible measures in response are suggested for both China and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postmenopausal women experience a higher risk for neurodegenerative diseases, including cognitive impairment and ischemic stroke. Many preclinical studies have indicated that estrogen replacement therapy (ERT) may provide protective effects against these neurological diseases. However, the results of Women's Health Initiative (WHI) studies have led to the proposal of "critical period hypothesis," which states that there is a precise window of opportunity for administering beneficial hormone therapy following menopause. However, the underlying molecular mechanisms require further characterization. Here, we explored the effects of ERT on cognition decline and global cerebral ischemia (GCI)-induced hippocampal neuronal damage in mice that had experienced both short-term (ovariectomized (OVX) 1 week) and long-term (OVX 10 weeks) estrogen deprivation. We also further explored the concentration of 17β-estradiol (E2) in the circulation and hippocampus and the expression of aromatase and estrogen receptors (ERα, ERα-Ser118, and ERβ). We found that the neuroprotective effectiveness of ERT against hippocampus damage exhibited in OVX1w mice was totally absent in OVX10w mice. Interestingly, the concentration of hippocampal E2 was irreversibly reduced in OVX10w mice, which was related to the decrease of aromatase expression in the hippocampus. In addition, long-term estrogen deprivation (LTED) led to a decrease in estrogen receptor proteins in the hippocampus. Thus, we concluded that the loss of ERT neuroprotection against hippocampus injury in LTED mice was related to the reduction in hippocampus E2 production and estrogen receptor degradation. These results provide several intervention targets to restore the effectiveness of ERT neuroprotection in elderly post-menopausal women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biomimetic nanozymes possessing natural enzyme-mimetic activities have been extensively applied in nanocatalytic tumor therapy. However, engineering hybrid biomimetic nanozymes to achieve superior nanozyme activity remained to be an intractable challenge in hypoxic tumors. Herein, a rod-like biomimetic hybrid inorganic MnO2-Au nanozymes are developed, where MnO2 and ultrasmall Au nanoparticles (NPs) are successively deposited on the mesoporous silica nanorod to cooperatively improve the O2 content and thermal sensitivity of hypoxic solid tumors guided by multi-modal imaging. Under the catalyzing of MnO2, the intratumoral H2O2 is decomposed to greatly accelerate O2 generation, which could boost the curative effect of radiation therapy (RT) and further enhance the Au-catalyzed glucose oxidation. Mutually, the Au NPs can steadily and efficiently catalyze the oxidation of glucose in harsh tumor microenvironment, thus sensitizing tumor cells to thermal ablation for mild photothermal therapy and further promoting the catalytic efficiency of MnO2 with the self-supplied H2O2/H+. As a result, this mutual-reinforcing cycle can endow the nanoplatform with accelerated O2 generation, thus alleviating hypoxic environment and further boosting RT effect. Furthermore, acute glucose consuming can induce downregulation expression of heat shock protein (HSP), achieving starvation-promoted mild photothermal therapy. This synthesized hybrid nanozymes proves to be a versatile theranostic agent for nanocatalytic cancer therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging nanozymes with natural enzyme-mimicking catalytic activities have inspired extensive research interests due to their high stability, low cost, and simple preparation, especially in the field of catalytic tumor therapy. Here, bio-breakable nanozymes based on glucose-oxidase (GOx)-loaded biomimetic Au–Ag hollow nanotriangles (Au–Ag–GOx HTNs) are designed, and they trigger an near-infrared (NIR)-II-driven plasmon-enhanced cascade catalytic reaction through regulating tumor microenvironment (TME) for highly efficient tumor therapy. Firstly, GOx can effectively trigger the generation of gluconic acid (H+) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), thus depleting nutrients in the tumor cells as well as modifying TME to provide conditions for subsequent peroxidase (POD)-like activity. Secondly, NIR-II induced surface plasmon resonance can induce hot electrons to enhance the catalytic activity of Au–Ag–GOx HTNs, eventually boosting the generation of hydroxyl radicals (•OH). Interestingly, the generated H2O2 and H+ can simultaneously induce the degradation of Ag nanoprisms to break the intact triangle nanostructure, thus promoting the excretion of Au–Ag–GOx HTNs to avoid the potential risks of drug metabolism. Overall, the NIR-II driven plasmon-enhanced catalytic mechanism of this bio-breakable nanozyme provides a promising approach for the development of nanozymes in tumor therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study a supply chain that consists of a manufacturer and a value-adding retailer that sell a product to customers through dual channels, i.e. a traditional channel (TC) and an online channel (OC). Observing that in practice, the manufacturer may or may not offer an OC guide price to the retailer and/or act as the leader in the supply chain, we discuss and compare two practical pricing strategies, with and without an OC guide price, under two different power configurations based on which member of the supply chain acts as the leader. Our results show that if the manufacturer does not provide a guide price, the retailer might/might not set a higher TC price than the two OC prices, depending on the level of migration effectiveness and the potential market demand. However, if the manufacturer does provide a guide price, the retailer will always charge a higher TC price than the guide price (or the two OC prices) when the retailer acts as the leader. Moreover, we show that the two players in the supply chain might or might not prefer the pricing strategies with an OC guide price. Our results also indicate that migration effectiveness harms the retailer's profit, and the manufacturer may benefit from mild competition between the two channels. Finally, we show that regardless of whether the manufacturer chooses to offer an OC guide price or not, both the manufacturer and the retailer prefer to act as the follower for high migration effectiveness and the profit of the supply chain will increase when the retailer acts as the leader (for low migration effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the large amount of micro-videos available in social network applications, micro-video venue category provides extremely valuable venue information that assists location-oriented applications, personalized services, etc. In this paper, we formulate micro-video venue classification as a multi-modal sequential modeling problem. Unlike existing approaches that use long short-term memory (LSTM) models to capture temporal patterns for micro-video, we propose multi-modality sequence model with gated fully convolutional blocks. Specifically, we firstly adopt three parallel gated fully convolutional blocks to extract spatiotemporal features from visual, acoustic and textual modalities of micro-videos. Then, an additional gated fully convolutional block is used to fuse such three modalities of spatiotemporal features. Finally, corresponding prototype is simultaneously learned to improve the robustness against softmax classification function. Extensive experimental results on a real-world benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in terms of both Micro-F and Macro-F scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Checkpoint blockade based immune therapy has shown to be effective but benefit only the minority of patients whose tumors have been pre-infiltrated by T cells. To overcome this obstacles, a PEG-modified Bi2Se3 nanocage (NC) loaded with imiquimod (R848), which could efficiently destroy the tumors thus producing enough tumor-associated antigens (TAA) and with the existence of R848, a toll-like-receptor-7 agonist, could generate strong anti-cancer immune responses is reported in this study. Moreover, immunogenic Bi2Se3 NC-PEG/R848 mediated photothermal therapy (PTT) sensitizes tumors to checkpoint inhibition mediated by a PD-L1 antibody, not only ablating cancer cells upon NIR laser but also causing strong anti-cancer immunity to suppress distant tumor growth post PTT. Both in vitro and in vivo experiments demonstrate that the Bi2Se3 NC-PEG/R848 could effectively activate a PTT-induced immune response as well as silence immune resistance based on PD-L1 checkpoint blockade to ablate the primary tumor and further inhibit the tumor metastasis. Bi2Se3 NC reported here exhibits high photothermal conversion efficiency and stability, as well as competent drug loading capacity with large hollow structures and high surface area. Our study not only provides a facial way to synthesize Bi2Se3 NC, but also offers an alternative strategy for tumor metastasis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design of vigorous tools for creatinine determination is extremely important in the diagnosis and treatment of kidney diseases. In the study, we examine a robust fluorescent turn-on probe (NCP-Pd) for creatinine detection in a completely aqueous solution based on the metal palladium-catalyzed reaction. In the presence of creatinine, the NCP-Pd dissociates and subsequently restores the fluorescence due to elimination of the heavy atom quenching effect and prevention of the photoinduced electron transfer effect. The probe NCP-Pd displays excellent detecting performance with respect to creatinine such as good water solubility, high selectivity, and a low detection limit (0.16 μM). Additionally, in order to ensure its clinical application, this probe is operated in blood serum samples for detecting creatinine and compared with a commercial clinical method. The results indicate an extremely high agreement with the commercial clinical method. Furthermore, the results confirm that the probe NCP-Pd exhibits satisfactory cell permeability and low cytotoxicity and can detect creatinine in L929 and HCT116 cells. The study provides a potential application for detecting creatinine and conducting pathological research on creatinine-involved diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pleione bulbocodioides is an endangered terrestrial orchid with significant medicinal and ornamental values. Here, we report on the first complete chloroplast (cp) genome of P. bulbocodioides. The circular genome was 159,269 bp in length and consisted of a pair of inverted repeats (IR 26,716 bp), which were separated by a large single-copy region (LSC 87,125 bp) and a small single-copy region (SSC 18,712 bp). It contained 115 unique genes, including 81 protein-coding genes, 30 tRNAs and 4 rRNAs. The maximum likelihood phylogenetic analysis indicated that P. bulbocodioides was closely related to the genera Cymbidium and Bletilla. The complete cp genome will useful for further studies of the endangered orchid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: microRNAs (miRNAs) have been documented playing a critical role in cancer development and progression. In this study, we investigated the role of miR-548l in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) migration and invasion. Methods: microRNAs microarray analysis was used to detect the differentially expressed miRNAs between various metastatic levels of NSCLC cells and further confirmed by real-time PCR analysis. To facilitate the delineation of the role of selected miR-548l in NSCLC pathology, we detected its expression in 22 NSCLC tissues. Proliferation, apoptosis, invasion and metastasis effects of the miRNA were evaluated using MTT, flow cytometry, wound healing and invasion assay following transfection with mimics and inhibitors. Luciferase assay and Western blot analysis were performed to assess miR-548l binding to AKT1 gene. AKT1 expression in the clinical tissues was evaluated using immunohistochemical staining. Results: The results showed a negative relationship between miR-548l expression and lymph node metastasis of NSCLC. Functional assays showed that over-expression of miR-548l suppressed NSCLC cell migration and invasion. Luciferase assays confirmed that miR-548l could directly bind to the 3′ untranslated region of AKT1. Further data showed that the over-expression of AKT1 could rescue the effects of miR-548l in NSCLC cells, and the miR-548l expression was inversely correlated with AKT1 expression in NSCLC tissues. These results indicated that AKT1 was involved in miR-548l-induced suppression of NSCLC cell migration and invasion. Conclusion: These results suggested that miR-548l may play a causal role through AKT1 in NSCLC invasion and metastasis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imaging agents that enable direct detection of apoptosis are highly desirable in the field of monitoring chemotherapeutic response as well as early diagnosis and disease monitoring. Previous work demonstrated that the dansyled amino acid DNSBA is used to specifically and selectively detect apoptotic cancer cells at the both early and late stages, but the mechanism remains unclear. In this work, we evaluated DNSBA as a tool for monitoring cell apoptosis in CNE1 tumor cell models both in vitro and ex vivo after its in vivo administration, which was confirmed by other assays. The ability of DNSBA to detect multiple pathways and different stages of apoptosis leading to cell death may be advantageous in the evaluation of cancer treatment indicative of a positive therapeutic outcome. The uptake change of molecular probes DNSBA in CNE1 cells represented the changes of apoptotic rate in a caspase-dependent manner. However, the accumulation of DNSBA in apoptotic cells did not increase with the enhanced membrane permeability. Furthermore, ex vivo study demonstrated DNSBA has a similar pattern as the TUNEL-positive cells. In conclusion, DNSBA cellular imaging is useful for the early assessment of treatment-induced apoptosis, and thus may act as a substitute for Annexin V for assessing treatment response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is one of the most common malignancies in Southeast Asia and radiotherapy or radiotherapy, in combination with chemotherapy is the primary treatment strategy. In this study, we adopted a metabolomic method to investigate the metabolic disorders in NPC and evaluate the effect of radiotherapy on metabolic profile alterations in NPC patients. To generate the NPC metabolic profiles, 402 serum samples were collected from 100 newly-diagnosed NPC patients and 100 healthy volunteers. Based on gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) metabolomics coupled with partial least squares-discriminant analysis, a NPC discrimination model was constructed with a sensitivity of 88 % (88/100) and a specificity of 92 % (92/100). Seven metabolites, including glucose, linoleic acid, stearic acid, arachidonic acid, proline, β-hydroxy butyrate and glycerol 1-hexadecanoate, were identified as contributing mostly to the discrimination of NPC serum from healthy controls. To validate if the model can be applied for therapeutic evaluation, 202 serum samples were collected from 20 patients receiving standard radiotherapy for up to a 3-year follow-up period. The metabolic footprints of 20 NPC patients treated with standard radiotherapy are visually presented. Based on the footprint trends of the sera samples in irradiation-treated NPC patients who were gradually closer to healthy controls or not, patients were divided into positive and negative groups, respectively. The coincident rate of the trends of metabolic footprints to the actual clinical prognosis trend was approximately 80 %. This study demonstrates that a GC-MS-based metabolic profiling approach as a novel strategy may be capable to delineating the potential of metabolite alterations in discrimination and therapeutic evaluation of NPC patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) is a hydrophilic and biocompatible polymer that can be crosslinked to form a hydrogel. When physically crosslinked using a freeze–thaw cycling process, the product hydrogel or cryogel (PVA-C) possesses unique mechanical properties that can be tuned to closely match those of soft tissues, thus making it an attractive candidate for biomedical and especially medical device applications. We review the freeze–thaw cycling process and processing parameters that impact on the properties of PVA-C and its nanocomposite products. Both the mechanical properties and diffusion properties relevant to biomedical application are discussed. Applications to orthopedic and cardiovascular devices are summarized and discussed. The concept of biomaterial–tissue hybrids that can impart the necessary hemocompatibility to PVA-C for cardiovascular device is introduced and demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Stathmin, a microtubule associated protein (MAP), is an important molecular target for cancer therapy. Paclitaxel is one of the primary antitumor drugs targeting microtubules (MTs). We hypothesized that decreasing the expression level of Stathmin might improve the effectiveness of paclitaxel in the treatment of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). Methods: NPC cell lines, CNE1-LMP1 and HNE2, and a CNE1-LMP1 tumor xenograft mouse model were used to test both in vitro and in vivo our siRNA-based Stathmin silencing strategy. The effects of Stathmin silencing on cell proliferation, apoptosis, and viability were investigated using MTT, AO/EB staining, TUNEL, caspase protein detection, and FCM assays. Cell migration and invasion were assayed using a Transwell assay. The combined effects of Stathmin silencing and paclitaxel were investigated using MTT, FCM, Western blot and indirect immunofluorescence assays. The effect of paclitaxel on Stathmin expression in NPC cells and, in addition, A375, MGC and HeLa cells was determined by RT-PCR and Western blotting. Results: We found that siRNA-mediated silencing of Stathmin suppresses proliferation, induces apoptosis through the mitochondrial pathway, and causes G2/M-phase cell cycle arrest in the NPC cell lines CNE1-LMP1 and HNE2. Also, the migration and invasion of the respective NPC cells were found to be inhibited. In addition, we show that a combination of Stathmin silencing and paclitaxel is more effective than either agent alone in inhibiting proliferation and inducing apoptosis, cell cycle arrest, and MT polymerization. Furthermore, we found that Stathmin expression in the tumor cells is down-regulated by paclitaxel treatment. Conclusion: siRNA-mediated silencing of Stathmin suppresses the proliferation, invasion and metastasis, and induces the apoptosis of NPC cells. Paclitaxel reduces the expression of Stathmin, and combining Stathmin silencing with paclitaxel treatment enhances MT polymerization. This combined strategy may provide a new approach for clinical NPC treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have previously shown that electroacupuncture (EA) pretreatment produces neuroprotective effects, which were mediated through an endocannabinoid signal transduction mechanism. Herein, we have studied the possible contribution of the phosphorylated form of glycogen synthase kinase-3β (GSK-3β) in EA pretreatment-induced neuroprotection via the cannabinoid CB1 receptor (CB1R). Focal transient cerebral ischemia was induced by middle cerebral artery occlusion in rats. Phosphorylation of GSK-3β at Ser-9 [p-GSK-3β (Ser-9)] was evaluated in the penumbra tissue following reperfusion. Infarct size and neurological score were assessed in the presence of either PI3K inhibitors or a GSK-3β inhibitor 72 h after reperfusion. Cellular apoptosis was evidenced by TUNEL staining and determination of the Bax/Bcl-2 ratio 24 h after reperfusion. The present study showed that EA pretreatment increased p-GSK-3β(Ser-9) 2 h after reperfusion in the ipsilateral penumbra. Augmented phosphorylation of GSK-3β induced similar neuroprotective effects as did EA pretreatment. By contrast, inhibition of PI3K dampened the levels of p-GSK-3β(Ser-9), and reversed not only the neuroprotective effect but also the anti-apoptotic effect following EA pretreatment. Regulation of GSK-3β by EA pretreatment was abolished following treatment with a CB1R antagonist and CB1R knockdown, whereas two CB1R agonists enhanced the phosphorylation of GSK-3β. Therefore we conclude that EA pretreatment protects against cerebral ischemia/reperfusion injury through CB1R-mediated phosphorylation of GSK-3β. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relevance feedback has proven to be a powerful tool to bridge the semantic gap between low-level features and high-level human concepts in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). However, traditional short-term relevance feedback technologies are confined to using the current feedback record only. Log-based long-term learning captures the semantic relationships among images in a database by analyzing the historical relevance information to boost the retrieval performance effectively. In this paper, we propose an expanded-judging model to analyze the historical log data’s semantic information and to expand the feedback sample set from both positive and negative relevant information. The index table is used to facilitate the log analysis. The expanded-judging model is applied in image retrieval by combining with short-term relevance feedback algorithms. Experiments were carried out to evaluate the proposed algorithm based on the Corel image database. The promising experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed expanded-judging model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foxtail millet (Setaria italica) is an important grain crop that is grown in arid regions. Here we sequenced 916 diverse foxtail millet varieties, identified 2.58 million SNPs and used 0.8 million common SNPs to construct a haplotype map of the foxtail millet genome. We classified the foxtail millet varieties into two divergent groups that are strongly correlated with early and late flowering times. We phenotyped the 916 varieties under five different environments and identified 512 loci associated with 47 agronomic traits by genome-wide association studies. We performed a de novo assembly of deeply sequenced genomes of a Setaria viridis accession (the wild progenitor of S. italica) and an S. italica variety and identified complex interspecies and intraspecies variants. We also identified 36 selective sweeps that seem to have occurred during modern breeding. This study provides fundamental resources for genetics research and genetic improvement in foxtail millet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DNAzymes (Dzs) are single-stranded DNA catalysts that specifically cleave the mRNA of targeted genes. Compared with other gene-silencing technologies, such as ribozymes, antisense oligonucleotide and small interference RNA (siRNA), DNAzymes have several advantages, including small molecular weight, diversity, low cost and relative stability in serum. With the evolution of molecular technology, the first DNAzyme was generated in vitro in 1994. From then on, DNAzymes have been studied in order to understand their structures, chemistry and biological applications. Particularly, DNAzymes have been widely applied as a new interference strategy in the treatment of many conditions, including cancer, viral diseases, and cardiovascular diseases. This review mainly summarizes the use of DNAzymes in the areas of cancer research and therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many human tumor cells are characterized by overexpression or mutation of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). Emerging evidence indicates that EGFR, as well as some of its downstream components, can translocate to the nucleus and play roles in transcriptional regulation, signaling conduction and repair of DNA double strands breaks (DSBs). EGFR in its nuclear manifestation promotes DSB repair by interacting with proteins including DNA-PK, ATM, Rad51 and BRCA1, involved in DSB repair, via the PI3K-Akt and Ras-Raf-MAPK pathways. DNA damage repair in tumor cells is emerging as an attractive target in radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Interruption of EGFR functions, or those of its downstream components, presents a promising strategy for confounding DNA damage repair in tumor cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Herein, we reported a octahedral Cd3(C3N3S3)2 coordination polymer as a new noble metal-free photocatalyst for robust photocatalytic H2O2 production from methanol/water solution. The coordination polymer can give an unprecedented H2O2 yield of ca. 110.0 mmol • L−1 • g−1 at pH = 2.8 under visible light illumination. The characterization results clearly revealed that the photocatalytic H2O2 production proceeds by a pathway of two-electron reduction of O2 on the catalyst surface. This work showed the potential perspective of Mx(C3N3S3)y (M = transitional metals) coordination polymers as a series of new materials for solar energy storage and conversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]