Search

Supplementary table S1. Prostate cancer susceptibility variants genotyped in the study.

Purpose: Gleason score (GS) 7 prostate cancer is a heterogeneous disease with different clinical behavior. We sought to identify genetic biomarkers that may predict the aggressiveness of GS 7 diseases.Experimental Design: We genotyped 72 prostate cancer susceptibility SNPs identified in genome-wide association studies in 1,827 white men with histologically confirmed prostate adenocarcinoma. SNPs associated with disease aggressiveness were identified by comparing high-aggressive (GS ≥8) and low-aggressive (GS ≤6) cases. The significant SNPs were then tested to see whether they could further stratify GS 7 prostate cancer.Results: Three SNPs—rs2735839, rs10486567, and rs103294—were associated with biopsy-proven high-aggressive (GS ≥8) prostate cancer (P < 0.05). Furthermore, the frequency of the variant allele (A) at rs2735839 was significantly higher in patients with biopsy-proven GS 4+3 disease than in those with GS 3 + 4 disease (P = 0.003). In multivariate logistic regression analysis, patients carrying the A allele at rs2735839 exhibited a 1.85-fold (95% confidence interval, 1.31–2.61) increased risk of being GS 4 + 3 compared with those with GS 3 + 4. The rs2735839 is located 600 base pair downstream of the KLK3 gene (encoding PSA) on 19q13.33 and has been shown to modulate PSA level, providing strong biologic plausibility for its association with prostate cancer aggressiveness.Conclusions: We confirmed the association of the rs2735839 with high-aggressive prostate cancer (GS ≥8). Moreover, we reported for the first time that rs2735839 can stratify GS 7 patients, which would be clinically important for more accurately assessing the clinical behavior of the intermediate-grade prostate cancer and for tailoring personalized treatment and posttreatment management. Clin Cancer Res; 20(19); 5133–9. ©2014 AACR.

Sensing human activities through wireless technology is the key to human-computer interaction. Relevant studies show that millimeter-wave radar has attracted more and more attention because it can accurately measure distance, velocity, and angle, and extract 3D point cloud images. However, the millimeter-wave point cloud is very sparse. For example, the depth neural network of PointNet is designed to deal with the LIDAR point cloud, which is not effective on the millimeter-wave radar point cloud. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a user activity perception system mmBheavior based on commercial millimeter-wave radar chip. Firstly, we use an improved clustering algorithm P-DBSCAN, which overcomes the problem of DBSCAN parameter sensitivity and realizes adaptive user target detection in the environment of changing number of people. Then we propose a new neural network architecture P-BiLSTMNet, which improves PointNet + + and introduces BiLSTM to learn the time dependence of point cloud. Experiments show that the system can classify all kinds of motion, and the accuracy is more than 93%.

Drought is a major abiotic stress to crop production. IPA1 (IDEAL PLANT ARCHITECTURE 1)/OsSPL14 encodes a transcription factor and has been reported to function in both rice ideal plant architecture and biotic resistance. Here, with a pair of IPA1/ipa1-NILs (Near Iso-genic Lines), we found that ipa1 could significantly improve rice drought tolerance at seedling stage. The ipa1 plants had a better-developed root system and smaller leaf stomatal aperture. Analysis of carbon-nitrogen metabolism-associated enzyme activity, gene expression, and metabolic profile indicated that ipa1 could tip the carbon-nitrogen metabolism balance towards an increased carbon metabolism pattern. In both the control and PEG-treated conditions, ABA content in the ipa1 seedlings was significantly higher than that in the IPA1 seedlings. Expression of the ABA biosynthesis genes was detected to be up-regulated, whereas the expression of ABA catabolism genes was down-regulated in the ipa1 seedlings. In addition, based on yeast one-hybrid assay and dual-luciferase assay, IPA1 was found to directly activate the promoter activity of OsHOX12, a transcription factor promoting ABA biosynthesis, and OsNAC52, a positive regulator of the ABA pathway. The expression of OsHOX12 and OsNAC52 was significantly up-regulated in the ipa1 plants. Combined with the previous studies, our results suggested that ipa1 could improve rice seedling drought tolerance mainly through activating the ABA pathway and that regulation of the ipa1-mediated ABA pawthway will be an important strategy for improving drought resistance of rice.

Here, the discussion focused on the function and possible mechanism of cancer stem cell-like cells (CSCs)-derived exosomalSpecifically, the bioinformatics analysis, dual-luciferase reporter assay and RT-qPCR were conducted to obtain the expression and regulation ofExosomalCSCs-derived exosomal

In view of the limited bandwidth of underwater video image transmission, a low bit rate underwater video compression coding method is proposed. Based on the preprocessing process of wavelet transform and coefficient down-sampling, the visual redundancy of underwater image is removed and the computational coefficients and coding bits are reduced. At the same time, combined with multi-level wavelet decomposition, inter frame motion compensation, entropy coding and other methods, according to the characteristics of different types of frame image data, reduce the number of calculations and improve the coding efficiency. The experimental results show that the reconstructed image quality can meet the visual requirements, and the average compression ratio of underwater video can meet the requirements of underwater acoustic channel transmission rate.

Electroacupuncture (EA) can improve myocardial ischemia (MI) injury; nevertheless, the mechanism is not entirely clear. And there were disagreements about whether the effect of EA at acupoint in disease-affected meridian is better than EA at acupoint in non-affected meridian and sham acupoint. Here, we showed that the effect of EA at Neiguan (PC6) is better than EA at Hegu (LI4) and sham acupoint in affecting RPP and ECG, increasing ATP and ADO production, decreasing AMP production, and upregulating the mRNA expression levels of A1AR, A2aAR, and A2bAR; knockdown of A1AR or A2bAR reversed the effect of EA at PC6 in alleviating MI injury; knockdown of A2aAR had no influence on the cardiac protection of EA at PC6; thus, the cardioprotective effect of EA at PC6 needs A1AR and A2bAR, instead of A2aAR; considering that the cardio protection of adenosine receptor needs activation of other adenosine receptors, one of the reasons may be that after silence of A1AR or A2bAR, EA at PC6 could not impact the expression levels of the other two adenosine receptors, and after silence of A2aAR, EA at PC6 could impact the expression levels of A1AR and A2bAR. These results suggested that EA at PC6 may be a potential and effective treatment for MI by activation of A1AR and A2bAR.

Background: In the pulmonary nodules computer aided diagnosis systems (CAD), feature selection plays an important role in reducing the false positive rate and improving the system accuracy. To solve the problem of feature selection techniques by which the diversity of features was damaged in the process of distinguishing malignant pulmonary nodules from benign pulmonary nodules, this study developed a novel feature selection algorithm for improving the accuracy of traditional computer-aided differential diagnosis for benign and malignant classification of pulmonary nodules. Method: Firstly, we divided the extracted features of nodules into several groups by using Gaussian mixture model (GMM). Secondly, we applied Relief and sequential forward selection (SFS) algorithm to find local optimum features dataset for each group. Afterwards, we used the optimumpath forest (OPF) classifier with the found features dataset to obtain the classification results. Finally, the local optimum features dataset with the highest area under curve AUC in all groups were added into the final selected set. Results: According to collected pulmonary nodules on computed tomography (CT) scans, tested with two set of samples, we achieved an average accuracy of 89.5%, sensitivity of 87.1% and specificity of 90.9% on the first set of samples, and 90.1%, 88.7% and 92.1% on the second set of samples. The areas under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves based on these two sample sets were 95.2%, and 96.3% respectively. Conclusions: This study shows that the proposed method was promising for improving the pulmonary nodules computer aided diagnosis systems performance of benign and malignant pulmonary nodules.

The development of hydrogel-integrated soft materials via the incorporation of therapeutic medicines into biocompatible hydrogels, serving as host, will significantly contribute to advances in medical diagnosis and treatment. Furthermore, intelligent hydrogels having the ability to respond to local environmental conditions offer a promising approach for the development of novel solutions in the biomedical field. Bioinspired intelligent hydrogels are now becoming a potentially powerful biomaterial class for tissue engineering, drug delivery, and medical device. Recent advances include bioinspired intelligent hydrogels that possess unique mechanical and optical properties as a result of their nature-inspired complex-structured design. This review highlights the latest advances in intelligent bionic hydrogels, as well as strategies targeting smart response of their characteristics across multiple dimensions (such as temperature, light, pH, among others). Finally, the potential development and prospective application of mimicking the natural intelligence of multifunctional medical hydrogels are also discussed.

4129 Background: Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is one of the most lethal solid tumors. Distant metastasis is the leading cause of cancer death. Approximately 50% of PDAC patients are discovered to have distant metastases, mainly in the liver. Chemotherapy is the main recommended treatment for metastatic PDACs, with a median survival time of only 4-6 months and the 5-year survival of 1%. Therefore, deciphering the molecular mechanisms of metastatic PDAC is urgently for exploring effective therapeutic targets. Methods: 93 normal-paired samples from patients with PDAC were analyzed using hybridization capture-based next generation sequencing. Somatic and germline mutations were identified including 500 genes associated with tumor development. Sequencing data were analyzed to call tumor specific single nucleotide variants (SNV), small insertions and deletions (InDels), copy number alterations (CNA) and gene fusions and rearrangements. Results: A total 93 patients with PDAC were analyzed, including hepatic metastases (15/93), lymph node metastases (1/93), colon metastases (1/93), pelvic metastases (1/93), and no distant metastasis (75/93). In PDAC patients without distant metastasis, the most frequent mutated gene was KRAS (72%), followed by TP53 (60%), CDKN2A (21%), SMAD4 (17%), ARID1A (11%), RNF43 (9%), and RBM10 (8%). In PDAC patients with hepatic metastases, we found that the most frequent one was KRAS (100%), followed by TP53 (87%), CDKN2A (40%), SMAD4 (40%), RNF43 (13%), and RBM10 (6%). Furthermore, four PDAC patients occurred KRAS copy number amplification, including 2 cases of hepatic metastases. And a hepatic metastases PDAC patient had ERBB2 and MET copy number amplification. We also found that seven no-metastasis patients carried pathogenic or likely pathogenic germline variants, including BRIP1, PALB2, RECQL, ATM, RAD50, FANCM and BRCA1. Conclusions: High frequency mutation genes in PDAC patients with hepatic metastases were highly consistent with those of no-metastasis patients. KRAS and TP53 gene co-mutations were extensively mutated in hepatic metastases patients. Our results revealed the molecular mechanisms driving PDAC hepatic metastases should be considered in further study.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Up to 40%-65% of patients with perihilar cholangiocarcinoma (PHC) rapidly progress to early recurrence (ER) even after curative resection. Quantification of ER risk is difficult and a reliable prognostic prediction tool is absent. We developed and validated a multilevel model, integrating clinicopathology, molecular pathology and radiology, especially radiomics coupled with machine-learning algorithms, to predict the ER of patients after curative resection in PHC. METHODS In total, 274 patients who underwent contrast-enhanced CT (CECT) and curative resection at 2 institutions were retrospectively identified and randomly divided into training (n = 167), internal validation (n = 70) and external validation (n = 37) sets. A machine-learning analysis of 18,120 radiomic features based on multiphase CECT and 48 clinico-radiologic characteristics was performed for the multilevel model. RESULTS Comprehensively, 7 independent factors (tumour differentiation, lymph node metastasis, pre-operative CA19-9 level, enhancement pattern, A-Shrink score, V-Shrink score and P-Shrink score) were built to the multilevel model and quantified the risk of ER. We benchmarked the gain in discrimination with the area under the curve (AUC) of 0.883, superior to the rival clinical and radiomic models (AUCs 0.792-0.805). The accuracy (ACC) of the multilevel model was 0.826, which was significantly higher than those of the conventional staging systems (AJCC 8th (0.641), MSKCC (0.617) and Gazzaniga (0.581)). CONCLUSION The radiomics-based multilevel model demonstrated superior performance to rival models and conventional staging systems, and could serve as a visual prognostic tool to plan surveillance of ER and guide post-operative individualized management in PHC.

Plant major resistance (R) genes are effective in detecting pathogen signal molecules and triggering robust defense responses. Investigating the natural variation in R genes will allow identification of the critical amino acid residues determining recognition specificity in R protein and the discovery of novel R alleles. The rice blast resistance gene Pike, comprising of two adjacent CC-NBS-LRR genes, namely, Pike-1 and Pike-2, confers broad-spectrum resistance to Magnaporthe oryzae. Here, we demonstrated that Pike-1 determined Pike-specific resistance through direct interaction with the pathogen signal molecule AvrPik. Analysis of natural variation in 79 Pike-1 variants in the Asian cultivated rice Oryza sativa and its wild relatives revealed that the CC and NBS regions, particularly the CC region of the Pike-1 protein were the most diversified. We also found that balancing selection had occurred in O. sativa and O. rufipogon to maintain the genetic diversity of the Pike-1 alleles. By analysis of amino acid sequences, we identified 40 Pike-1 variants in these rice germplasms. These variants were divided into three major groups that corresponded to their respective clades. A new Pike allele, designated Pikg, that differed from Pike by a single amino acid substitution (D229E) in the Pike-1 CC region of the Pike protein was identified from wild rice relatives. Pathogen assays of Pikg transgenic plants revealed a unique reaction pattern that was different from that of the previously identified Pike alleles, namely, Pik, Pikh, Pikm, Pikp, Piks and Pi1. These findings suggest that minor amino acid residues in Pike-1/Pikg-1 determine pathogen recognition specificity and plant resistance. As a new blast R gene derived from rice wild relatives, Pikg has potential applications in rice breeding.

In this paper, the microstructure evolution and ultrasonic velocity variation of Ti6Al4V Ti-alloy bars under different conventional forging deformation degrees and triple heat treatment were investigated, it was found that the the orientation of microstructure is the main factor influencing the ultrasonic velocity. Meanwhile, taking the ultrasonic velocity as target, the ultrasonic velocity variation under given conventional forging process combined with different triple heat treatment conditions (heating temperatures, holding time) were revealed, it was found that the α-β phase ratio, the volume fraction and morphology of equiaxed αp and lamellar αs are also influencing the ultrasonic velocity.

Additional file 2: Figure S1. Exosomal miR-200c-3p expression in HCT-116, HT-29 and SW480 CRC cell lines after LPS stimulation. Cells were treated with 10 ng/mL LPS for 24 h before isolating exosomes. Total RNAs were extracted from exosomes, and cDNAs were synthesized from miRNAs. Expression levels of miR-200c-3p in exosomes were measured by quantitative real-time PCR (n = 3). Two-tailed t-test was performed for statistical analysis. * p

Ideal Plant Architecture 1 (IPA1) encodes SQUAMOSA PROMOTER BINDING PROTEIN-LIKE 14 (SPL14) with a pleiotropic effect on regulating rice development and biotic stress responses. To investigate the role of IPA1 in early seedling development, we developed a pair of IPA1/ipal-NILs and found that seed germination and early seedling growth were retarded in the ipa1-NIL. Analysis of the soluble sugar content, activity of amylase, and expression of the α-amylase genes revealed that the starch metabolism was weakened in the ipa1-NIL germinating seeds. Additionally, the content of bioactive gibberellin (GA) was significantly lower than that in the IPA1-NIL seeds at 48 h of imbibition. Meanwhile, the expression of GA synthesis-related gene OsGA20ox1 was downregulated, whereas the expression of GA inactivation-related genes was upregulated in ipa1-NIL seeds. In addition, the expression of OsWRKY51 and OsWRKY71 was significantly upregulated in ipa1-NIL seeds. Using transient dual-luciferase and yeast one-hybrid assays, IPA1 was found to directly activate the expression of OsWRKY51 and OsWRKY71, which would interfere with the binding affinity of GA-induced transcription factor OsGAMYB to inhibit the expression of α-amylase genes. In summary, our results suggest that IPA1 negatively regulates seed germination and early seedling growth by interfering with starch metabolism via the GA and WRKY pathways.

Little is known about the genetic predictors of prostate cancer aggressiveness and reclassification in men with localized prostate cancer undergoing active surveillance. The Wnt signaling pathway is important for prostate cancer development and progression. Identifying genetic variants associated with prostate cancer aggressiveness and reclassification may have a potential role in the management of localized patients. In this study, we used a three-phase design. In phases I and II prostate cancer patient cohort, 578 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from 45 genes of the Wnt signaling pathway were analyzed in 1762 localized prostate cancer patients. Twelve SNPs from four regions were significantly associated with aggressive disease, among which, three linked SNPs in CSNK1A1 at 5q32 (represented by rs752822) may differentiate GS 4+3 from GS 3+4 patients (OR = 1.44, 95% CI = 1.12-1.87, P = 4.76×10(-3)). In phase III active surveillance (AS) cohort, genotyping of rs752822 (candidate from phases I and II) and previously identified rs2735839 were determined in 494 GS ≤7 patients. We found a significant association between rs2735839 and prostate cancer reclassification in the AS cohort (AG + AA versus GG, HR = 1.59, 95% CI = 1.11-2.28, P = 0.012) and a suggestive association of rs752822. Jointly, rs752822 and rs2735839 showed good potentials in risk-stratifying GS 7 patients and predicting disease reclassification (OR = 2.71, 95% CI = 1.62-4.51, P = 1×10(-4) in phase II; HR = 1.89, 95% CI = 1.13-3.18, P = 0.016 in phase III). In summary, rs752822 and rs2735839 may assist in risk-stratifying GS 7 patients and predict prostate cancer reclassification. The significant associations were independent from GS, T stage and PSA levels at baseline.

// Huakang Tu 1 , Jian Gu 1 , Qing H. Meng 2 , Jeri Kim 3 , John W. Davis 4 , Yonggang He 5 , Elizabeth A. Wagar 2 , Timothy C. Thompson 3 , Christopher J. Logothetis 3 , Xifeng Wu 1 1 Department of Epidemiology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, USA 2 Department of Laboratory Medicine, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, USA 3 Department of Genitourinary Medical Oncology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, USA 4 Department of Urology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, USA 5 Department of Surgery, Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China Correspondence to: Xifeng Wu, e-mail: xwu@mdanderson.org Keywords: mitochondrial DNA copy number, prostate cancer, aggressiveness, recurrence, progression Received: August 19, 2015 Accepted: October 16, 2015 Published: October 26, 2015 ABSTRACT We investigated whether low mitochondrial DNA copy number (mtDNAcn) in peripheral blood leukocytes at diagnosis was associated with an increased risk of the aggressive form of the tumor and disease progression among localized prostate cancer (PCa) patients. We recruited 1,751 non-Hispanic white men with previously untreated PCa from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. mtDNAcn was categorized into three groups according to tertiles. We used multivariate logistic regression to estimate the odds ratios (ORs) and 95 percent confidence intervals (95% CIs) for the association of mtDNAcn with the risk of having aggressive PCa at diagnosis. We used Cox proportional hazards model to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% CIs for disease progression. We observed an inverse association between aggressiveness of PCa and mtDNAcn ( P < 0.001). In multivariate analysis, compared to patients in the highest tertile of mtDNAcn, those in the second and lowest tertiles had significantly increased risks of presenting with the high-risk form of PCa, as defined by the D’Amico criteria, with ORs of 1.33 (95% CI, 0.89–1.98; P = 0.17) and 1.53 (95% CI, 1.02–2.30; P = 0.04), respectively. Furthermore, PCa patients in the lowest and second tertiles combined relative to those in the highest tertile had a 56% increased risk of disease progression (HR, 1.56; 95% CI, 0.96–2.54; P = 0.07). In summary, our results suggested that low mtDNAcn in peripheral blood leukocytes was associated with aggressive PCa at diagnosis and might further predict poor progression-free survival among localized PCa patients.

To explore the factors affecting the operative difficulty of triple-port laparoscopic surgery (TLS) in anterior resection.A retrospective case-control study was carried out. Clinical and MRI imaging data of 106 colorectal cancer cases undergoing TLS anterior resection at Department of Colorectal Surgery of Ruijin Hospital between 2013 and 2016 were retrospectively analyzed.(1) patients receiving TLS anterior resection (Dixon operation); (2) preoperative stageI( to III( malignant tumor;(3) distance of 5-15 cm from inferior margin of tumor to anal verge; and (4) available preoperative rectal MRI.(1) patients receiving preoperative adjuvant therapy; (2) patients with low rectal cancer or with local advanced disease; (3) T4b tumor. Rectal MRI was introduced to measure the structure of pelvis. In sagittal view, superior margin of the first sacral vertebrae, superior margin of the third sacral vertebrae, apex of coccyx, and the line of superior margin of pubic symphysis were used to form a pentagon. The 5 lines were marked as N, O, P, Q, R, and the 5 included angles were marked as angle 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Organs (uterus and prostate) and tumor (transverse diameter, longitudinal diameter, section area, lesion length, distance to circumference cutting edge) were also measured on MRI. The operative time was applied to be the indicator of operative difficulty and patients were divided into 2 groups according to median operative time. Baseline information (age, gender, BMI, distance from inferior margin of tumor to anal verge, operative history, length of tumor), preoperative tumor staging, and MRI measurements (pelvis, tumor, uterus, prostate), etc were compared between two groups. Factors affecting operative difficulty of TLS were analyzed with logistic regression model.Of 106 enrolled patients, 73 were male and 33 female with mean age of (59.8±12.2) years and mean BMI of (22.8±3.3) kg/mSurgeons may have less difficulty in performing TLS anterior resection for patients with longer distance from inferior margin of tumor to anal verge. In preoperative assessment of operative difficulty of TLS, comprehensive evaluation should be performed. Distance from inferior margin of tumor to anal verge should be regarded as the main factor, and MRI (R+N)/(O+P) and transverse diameter of tumor should be used as important reference, leading to reasonable choice of cases for TLS and smooth pass of study curve.

To explore the protective effect of acupuncture along meridians on rats with myocardial ischemia and its effect and action mechanism on cardiomyocyte energy metabolism.A total of 104 healthy 12-week-old SD rats were fed adaptively for 1 week and included into study with no disease symptoms observed. Of them, 24 SD rats were selected regardless of gender, and were randomly divided into a blank group and a sham operation group, 12 rats in each one. The remaining 80 SD rats were treated with ligation of left anterior descending coronary artery to establish the model of myocardial ischemia. The successful rate of model establishment was 60%, and 48 rats survived. They were randomly divided into a model group, an acupuncture along meridian group, an acupuncture along another-meridian group and a non-acupoint group, 12 rats in each one. The blank group was not treated with operation, but only bundle fixation. The sham operation group was treated with sham operation (coronary artery was not ligatured). The model group bundle fixation. The acupuncture along meridian group were treated with electroacupuncture (EA) at "Neiguan" (PC 6), the acupuncture along another-meridian group were treated with EA at "Hegu" (LI 4), and the non-acupoints group were treated at a non-acupoint which located in the hollow of the 3rd and 4th metatarsal bones of the dorsal foot of fore rate limb. Each bundle fixation or EA was given for 30 min, once a day for consecutive 5 days. The electrocardiogram was tested in all groups; the apoptosis rate of cardiomyocytes was detected by Tunel; the contents of ATP, ADP and AMP in myocardium were detected by high performance liquid chromatography.The ST segment voltage after model establishment was higher than that before modeling (allAcupuncture along meridians can effectively relieve the damage of cardiac muscle tissue; the possible mechanism is to increase ATP and reduce ADP, AMP of cardiomyocytes, so EC level is elevated and myocardial cell apoptosis is inhibited, leading to protective effect on cardiac muscle tissue and cells.

Leukemia inhibitory factor receptor (LIFR) has been documented as a cancer promoter and to be present at high levels in various types of tumor tissues. In our search for molecules prognostic of colorectal cancer (CRC), we found high levels of LIFR in CRC tissue samples. Further analyses revealed that LIFR was indeed prognostic of CRC patient survival, and was associated with tumor size, lymphatic metastasis and stages. LIFR was found to promote tumor growth, metastasis and angiogenesis both in vitro and in vivo. High levels of LIFR in CRC facilitated proliferation and migration of endothelial cells, resulting in an increase in angiogenic activity. Moreover, interleukin 8 (IL-8) was found to play a role in the LIFR induced angiogenesis. IL-8 levels were correlated with LIFR levels in CRC tissues, whereas depletion of IL-8 led to a reduced angiogenic activity of LIFR in CRC cells. In addition, LIFR increased phosphorylation level of Erk, which regulates il-8 transcription. We conclude that LIFR is possibly a valuable prognostic marker for CRC. Our results also implicate a mechanism by which LIFR regulates tumor angiogenesis through Erk/IL-8 pathway, and that LIFR could be a potential therapeutic target for CRC.

Rice blast disease caused by Magnaporthe oryzae is an important limiting factor to rice production in the world. Introgression of blast resistance genes into improved germplasm by marker-assisted selection has been considered as an effective and environmentally beneficial means to control this disease. Pike, a broad-spectrum blast resistance gene, was cloned by map-based strategy recently in our laboratory. Two adjacent CC-NBS-LRR genes (designated as Pike-1 and Pike-2) were required for Pike-mediated resistance. In the current study, sequence alignment of the SNP G1328C and the SNP-surrounding region let us find that the Pik DNA variants of the studied rice lines appear to be divided into G-, C-, T- and G’-types. Based on the four genotypes, a Pike-specific marker system consisting of three PCR-based markers CP-G1328C, CP-G1328T and CP-G1328G’ was developed and used to effectively differentiate G-type allele from each of the others. Using this marker system, we investigated distribution of the Pik DNA variants in a set of 326 rice varieties or breeding lines and found that there were 2, 130, 135 and 59 rice lines identified to carry G-, C-, T- and G’-type alleles, respectively. In addition, with sequence data of the SNP G1328C-containing genomic region derived from 56 rice lines, we constructed a phylogenetic tree with three major clades which just corresponded to the types of the Pik DNA variants described above.

Serum testosterone is a potential marker to distinguish between indolent and aggressive prostate cancer (PCa). The present study aimed to investigate whether low levels of total serum testosterone at diagnosis were associated with aggressive PCa and poor clinical outcomes. In total, 762 non-Hispanic Caucasian men with previously untreated PCa were recruited from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (Houston, TX, USA). Patients were categorized into three groups based on their total serum testosterone levels according to clinical guidelines [low (350 ng/dl)]. PCa aggressiveness (low-, intermediate- or high-risk, or metastatic) was compared using multinomial logistic regression. Rates of disease progression, mortality from any cause and PCa-specific mortality were compared using the multivariate Cox proportional hazards model. Testosterone levels significantly decreased as PCa aggressiveness increased (P

Chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection can lead to liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. Current therapies have a very limited efficacy in virus clearance. New antiviral targets and agents are urgently needed. The envelope of HBV virion contains three surface glycoproteins, namely the large (LHBs), middle (MHBs), and small (SHBs) proteins. LHBs has an amino terminal preS which is composed of the preS1 and preS2 domains. The amino half of preS1 which is myristoylated plays a pivotal role in HBV entry, which can be exploited as an antiviral target. A common motif of five amino acids had been previously discovered to bind preS11–65 and HBV particles. In this study, we used preS11–65 to screen a phage display library of random penta-peptides to select the penta-peptides possessing a high preS1-binding affinity. After nine rounds of panning, we obtained one peptide designated as A5 which could bind preS1 with a high affinity. By systematically substituting each residue of A5 with the other 19 amino acids, we identified a novel peptide with an increased preS1-binding affinity. Both peptides could inhibit HBV attachment to HepG2 cells, making them be potential candidates for HBV entry inhibitors.

In the object recognition process of the remote sensing image, as the object data is influenced by the imaging scale, intensity and the shape of the object, the distribution of the object data is very different with that of known training data which leads to the low reliability of the object recognition. Aimed at the problem, an object recognition method based on transfer learning framework for the remote sensing image is proposed in this paper. The feature vectors of the object data are extracted by an improved LBP firstly, and then the transfer learning is used to find the common parameters among the feature spaces of the object data with the different distributions. The transfer learning method can transfer knowledge from the old object data to the new object data and improve the performance of the object recognition. According to the experiments in the satellite remote sensing images, it shows that the accuracy of object recognition has been greatly improved by our proposed method compared with the other classical methods.

Tiller number is one of the key factors that influences rice plant type and yield components. In this study, an EMS-induced rice tiller suppression mutant ts1 was characterized. Morphological and histological observations revealed that, in the ts1 plants, the tiller buds were abnormally formed and therefore cannot outgrow into tillers. With an F2 population derived from a cross between ts1 and an indica cultivar Wushansimiao, a major gene, tiller suppression 1 (ts1) was fine-mapped to a 108.5 kb genomic region between markers ID8378 and SSR6884 on the short arm of rice chromosome 2. Candidate gene analysis identified nineteen putative genes. Among them, ORF4 (LOC_Os02g01610) is a PPR gene which harbored a point mutation c.+733/C→T in ts1 mutant plants. A co-dominant SNP marker cd-733C/T was subsequently developed and the SNP assay demonstrated that the point mutation co-segregated with tiller suppression phenotype. Quantitative RT-PCR analysis showed that the expression level of ORF4 in ts1 plants was significantly lower than that in their wild plants, and the expression of rice tillering regulators MOC1 and HTD1 was also significantly decreased in ts1 plants. Our data indicated that ORF4 was a strong candidate gene for ts1 and ts1 might play a role in regulating rice tillering through MOC1 and HTD1 associated pathway. The results above provide a basis for further functional characterization of ts1 and will shed light on molecular mechanism of rice tillering. The informative SNP marker cd-733C/T will facilitate marker-assisted selection of ts1 in rice plant type breeding.