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Animal studies on vascular aging pose a few limitations. One of the most important reasons for this is the absence of a fast and efficient model of vascular tissue aging. In this study, ex vivo aortic culture and Matrigel subcutaneous implantation are combined to develop a new model for studying vascular cellular senescence. Eight‐week‐old C57BL/6J mice are used to obtain aortas. Bleomycin is used to induce aortas senescence in vitro. Then, aortas are transplanted to the acceptor mice with Matrigel. Senescence is evaluated using western blotting, quantitative polymerase chain reaction, and senescence‐associated beta‐galactosidase activity. Inflammatory cytokines are detected using Luminex Liquid Suspension Chip. RNA levels are analyzed by transcriptome sequencing. The results revealed that vessels in the bleomycin group exhibited significant senescence than those in the control group that can be enhanced by stripping vessel adventitia. The levels of cytokines such as interleukin (IL‐2, IL‐1β, and IL‐6 increased significantly in the ex vivo model. Furthermore, transcriptome sequencing revealed 56 significantly differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in ex vivo model vessels compared with those in naturally aging aortas. In conclusion, this study introduces a cost‐effective and time‐saving vessel senescence model for vascular cellular senescence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background SNP genotyping microarrays have revolutionized the study of complex disease. The current range of commercially available genotyping products contain extensive catalogues of low frequency and rare variants. Existing SNP calling algorithms have difficulty dealing with these low frequency variants, as the underlying models rely on each genotype having a reasonable number of observations to ensure accurate clustering. Results Here we develop KRLMM, a new method for converting raw intensities into genotype calls that aims to overcome this issue. Our method is unique in that it applies careful between sample normalization and allows a variable number of clusters k (1, 2 or 3) for each SNP, where k is predicted using the available data. We compare our method to four genotyping algorithms (GenCall, GenoSNP, Illuminus and OptiCall) on several Illumina data sets that include samples from the HapMap project where the true genotypes are known in advance. All methods were found to have high overall accuracy (> 98%), with KRLMM consistently amongst the best. At low minor allele frequency, the KRLMM, OptiCall and GenoSNP algorithms were observed to be consistently more accurate than GenCall and Illuminus on our test data. Conclusions Methods that tailor their approach to calling low frequency variants by either varying the number of clusters (KRLMM) or using information from other SNPs (OptiCall and GenoSNP) offer improved accuracy over methods that do not (GenCall and Illuminus). The KRLMM algorithm is implemented in the open-source crlmm package distributed via the Bioconductor project (http://www.bioconductor. org). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hierarchically porous SiO 2 /C hollow microspheres (HPSCHMs) were synthesized by a hydrothermal and NaOH-etching combined route. The adsorption performance of the prepared HPSCHMs was investigated to remove Congo Red (CR) in aqueous solution. The results show that the synthesized composite possesses a hollow microspherical structure with hierarchical pores and a diameter of about 100-200 nm, and its surface area is up to 1154 m 2 g -1 . This material exhibits a remarkable adsorption performance for CR in solution, and its maximum adsorption amount for CR can reach up to 2512 mg g -1 . It shows faster adsorption and much higher adsorption capacity than the commercial AC and γ-Al 2 O 3 samples under the same conditions. The studies of the kinetics and thermodynamics indicate that the adsorption of CR on the PHSCHM sample obeys the pseudo-second order model well and belongs to physisorption. The adsorption activation energy is about 7.72 kJ mol -1 . In view of the hierarchically meso-macroporous structure, large surface area and pore volume, the HPSCHM material could be a promising adsorbent for removal of pollutants, and it could also be used as a catalyst support., Competing Interests: There are no conflicts to declare., (This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry.)