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Ischemic stroke is a common cerebrovascular disease and recovering blood flow as early as possible is essential to reduce ischemic damage and maintain neuronal viability, but the reperfusion process usually causes additional damage to the brain tissue in the ischemic area, namely ischemia reperfusion injury. The accumulated studies have revealed that transplantation of exogenous neural stem cells (NSCs) is an ideal choice for the treatment of ischemia reperfusion injury. At present, the source and efficacy of exogenous NSCs after transplantation is still one of the key issues that need to be resolved. In this study, human umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells (hUC-MSCs) were obtained and induced into NSCs byadding growth factor and neuregulin1β (NRG1β) was introduced during the differentiation process of NSCs. Then, the rat middle cerebral artery occlusion/reperfusion (MCAO/R) models were established, and the therapeutic effects were evaluated among groups treated by NRG1β, NSCs and NSCs pretreated with 10 nM NRG1β (NSCs-10 nM NRG1β) achieved through intra-arterial injection. Our data show that the NSCs-10 nM NRG1β group significantly improves neurobehavioral function and infarct volume after MCAO/R, as well as cerebral cortical neuron injury, ferroptosis-related indexes and mitochondrial injury. Additionally, NSCs-10 nM NRG1β intervention may function through regulating the p53/GPX4/SLC7A11 pathway, and reducing the level of ferroptosis in cells, further enhance the neuroprotective effect on injured cells.

Invariant chain (Ii) isoform, through its thyroglobulin-like (Tg) domain, inhibits cysteine proteases during antigen presentation in vertebrates. In birds, the Ii of Muscovy Duck (MDIi) has 2 forms: MDIi-1 and MDIi-2 (MDIi isoform). To understand the genetic information and expression characteristics of MDIi-2, polymerase chain reaction, and bioinformatic analysis were performed for MDIi-2 from healthy adult Muscovy Duck. The full-length MDIi-2 cDNA sequence was found to be 1377-base pairs, encoding a 285-amino acid protein. MDIi-2 contains 63 amino acids with an insertion sequence in the Tg domain. MDIi-2 shares high identity (72.51-94.74%) with the same protein in other birds. The Tg domain of MDIi-2 is highly conserved and showed relatively high identity (96.83%) among all tested birds. The molecular structure of the Tg domain supports this conservation. MDIi-2 expression was measured in various tissues using real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction. Similar to MDIi-1, MDIi-2 was detected in all tissues but at different levels. Higher expression level was observed in the spleen, intestinal mucosa, and bursa stipe (bursa of Fabricius stipe) than in other tissues. This suggests that MDIi-2, like MDIi-1, plays an essential role in all tissues and that its differential expression may be related to its functions in these tissues. The coexistence of 2 MDIi isoforms indicates that their functions are correlated in Muscovy Duck. This study improves the understanding of poultry immunology and may be used to improve measures to protect Muscovy Duck from disease.

The invariant chain (Ii) plays an important role as a chaperone for MHC II maturation and facilitates antigen presentation in vertebrates. We cloned, characterized and made a homology analysis of healthy adult muscovy duck Ii (MDIi), from a poultry farm in the suburban district of Hefei city in China, by rapid amplification of cDNA ends (RACE)-PCR and by measuring expression of the MDIi gene in various tissues by real-time quantitative PCR. A full-length cDNA sequence of MDIi was obtained, 1188-bp long, encoding a 222-amino acid protein. A comparison of the amino acid sequence of Ii between muscovy duck and other birds showed high similarity (66.3-95.3%). Characteristic functional domains found in Ii of other species, such as cytoplasmic domain, transmembrane domain, class II-associated Ii-derived peptide (CLIP) and trimerization domain, were identified in MDIi. Although all functional domains of Ii were found to be highly conserved, small differences in the CLIP sequence occur among the various species. Expression of MDIi was detected in all tissues at different levels. A higher expression level was found in the spleen, intestinal mucosa and the bursa stipe (bursa of Fabricius stipe) than other tissues. This tissue-specific expression suggests that MDIi plays an essential role in all tissues and differential expression may be a function of the innate structures and essential functions of these tissues.

Protein function prediction is an important issue in the post-genomic era. When protein function is deduced from protein interaction data, the traditional methods treat each interaction sample equally, where the qualities of the interaction samples are seldom taken into account. In this paper, we investigate the effect of the quality of protein-protein interaction data on predicting protein function. Moreover, two improved methods, weight neighbour counting method (WNC) and weight chi-square method (WCHI), are proposed by considering the quality of interaction samples with the neighbour counting method (NC) and chi-square method (CHI). Experimental results have shown that the qualities of interaction samples affect the performances of protein function prediction methods seriously. It is also demonstrated that WNC and WCHI methods outperform NC and CHI methods in protein function prediction when example weights are chosen properly.