Willingness to pay (WTP) for reductions in health risk associated with consuming pesticide residues on vegetables are estimated using the contingent valuation method with in‐person interviews of ...married females in Taiwan. Estimated median WTP for 25 per cent, 50 per cent and 90 per cent reductions in the risk of developing cancer from consuming pesticide residues on a popular Taiwanese vegetable, bok choy, are estimated as 46 per cent, 56 per cent and 75 per cent of the current price of bok choy, respectively. WTP is significantly related to the scope or magnitude of the risk reduction, although it varies less than proportionately to the risk increment. WTP is also significantly related to measures of consumer preferences for health.
The kinesin superfamily is an important member of motor proteins, playing important roles in cell growth and development. Studies on KIF2A of the kinesin-13 family have mainly focused on cell ...division, while the relationship between KIF2A and signaling pathways remains unclear. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether KIF2A has a regulatory effect on the PI3K/AKT pathway, thus affecting spermatogenic cell proliferation and apoptosis during spermatogenesis, and whether its interacting protein PLK1 is involved in this process. RNAi experiments were performed in our study. Our results showed that KIF2A upregulates the PI3K/AKT signaling pathway through its interacting protein PLK1 during the spermatogenesis of Eriocheir sinensis. E. sinensis is an animal model for studying the reproduction and development of crustaceans. In this study, we knocked down the Es-Kif2a gene by injecting dsRNA into E. sinensis and inhibited Es-Plk1 gene expression by injecting PLK1 inhibitor BI6727 into E. sinensis. Then, the cell proliferation level, apoptosis level, and PI3K/AKT signaling expression level were detected. Our results showed that the proliferation level of spermatogenic cells decreased, while the apoptosis level increased after Es-Kif2a knockdown or Es-Plk1 inhibition. In order to verify whether these changes are caused by regulating the PI3K/AKT pathway, we detected the expression of PI3K and AKT proteins after Es-Kif2a knockdown or Es-Plk1 inhibition. Western Blot showed that in both the Es-Kif2a knockdown group and the Es-Plk1 inhibition group, the expression of PI3K and AKT proteins decreased. In addition, immunofluorescence showed that Es-KIF2A and Es-PLK1 proteins were co-localized during E. sinensis spermatogenesis. To further explore the upstream and downstream relationship between Es-KIF2A and Es-PLK1, we detected the expression level of Es-PLK1 after Es-Kif2a knockdown as well as the expression level of Es-KIF2A after Es-Plk1 inhibition. Western Blot showed that the expression of Es-PLK1 decreased after Es-Kif2a knockdown, while there was no significant change of Es-KIF2A after Es-Plk1 inhibition, indicating that Es-PLK1 may be a downstream factor of Es-KIF2A. Taken together, these results suggest that Es-KIF2A upregulates the PI3K/AKT signaling pathway through Es-PLK1 during the spermatogenesis of E. sinensis, thereby affecting the proliferation and apoptosis levels of spermatogenic cells.
To summarize the clinical features and therapeutic approach of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) complicated by transverse myelitis (TM).
The clinical characteristics, laboratory examinations, ...treatment and prognosis of 6 SLE cases with TM were retrospectively analyzed with review of the literatures.
The 6 patients consisted of 5 females and 1 male aged 14 to 36 years (mean 23 years). The mean duration from symptom onset of SLE to TM was 8 months (1 to 13 months). All the patients had lower limb hypodynamia, and 3 of them developed upper limb hypodynamia. MRI scanning of the spine identified lesions in the cervical spinal cord in 2 cases, thoracic lesions in 3 cases, and multiple involvement of the cervical, thoracic and lumbar cord in 1 case. Examination of the cerebrospinal fluid yielded no specific findings except for leukocytosis in 1 case and hypoglycemia in another. Five cases were treated with high-dose MP+CTX, and the other case was treated with MP (80 mg/day)+CTX. Five patients responded favorably t
To study the changes of amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF) of the resting-fMRI in the mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (mTLE) with bilateral hippocampal sclerosis (HS), and discussed its ...underlying neuro-pathophysiological mechanism.
The resting-fMRI data of 20 TLE patients with HS and 20 normal volunteers were performed ALFF analysis. The amplitude of the blood oxygenation level-dependent activation of the resting-state brain was investigated. The brain structures showing increased and decreased ALFF in TLE patients were demonstrated by comparing to normal subjects with 2-sample t-test with threshold of P < 0.01.
By comparison with that of normal subjects, the regions showing increased and decreased ALFF in TLE patients were distributed in the brain symmetrically and bilaterally. The regions showing increased ALFF were distributed with center of limbic system, such as parahippocampal gyri, amygdala, hypothalamus, dorsal anterior cingulate gyrus and part of posterior insular lobe, as well as the neoco
AIM: To detect linc00675 expression in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma(PDAC),to analyze the relationship between the expression level of linc00675 and the clinical pathological characteristics,to ...explore the biological functions of linc00675,and to determine whether linc00675 has independent prognostic value in PDAC.METHODS: We studied linc00675 expression among eight histologically confirmed PDAC tissue samples and four chronic pancreatitis tissue samples through microarray screening. RT-q PCR was conducted to further investigate linc00675 expression in PDAC cell lines as well as archived tissues from a large cohort of PDAC patients. The correlations between the level of lnc00675 and clinicopathological characteristics and survival in patients with pancreatic cancer were evaluated using Correlation analysis. Univariate andmultivariate analyses were conducted to predict whether lnc00675 expression is an independent prognostic and recurrence factor in patients with pancreatic cancer. After downregulating the expression of linc00675 through si RNA,MTT assay,flow cytometry,transwell assay and Western blot were used to explore the biological function of linc00675 in proliferation,invasion,and cell cycle progression of pancreatic cancer cells. The relative molecular expression levels of epithelial-mesenchymal transition were determined by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction(RT-PCR) and Western blot.RESULTS: The expression of Linc00675 in PDAC tissue samples was shown to be 672 times that in chronic pancreatitis tissue samples by microarray screening(P = 3.69 × 10-5). This finding was confirmed in tumor tissues from 90 patients with PDAC compared with adjacent normal tissue samples by quantitative RTPCR. We found that linc00675 overexpression positively correlated with lymph node metastasis(P = 0.005),perineural invasion(P = 0.006),and poor survival(P < 0.001). Univariate and multivariate analyses showed that linc00675 expression served as an independent predictor of overall survival(P = 0.009). Additionally,receiver operating characteristic curve analysis showed that high linc00675 might serve as a predictor of tumor progression within 6 mo to a year after surgery. In vitro functional analysis demonstrated that knockdown of linc00675 attenuated pancreatic cancer cell proliferation and invasion as well as induced S phase arrest. Suppression of linc00675 in pancreatic cancer cells resulted can reverse the progress of epithelialmesenchymal transition.CONCLUSION: Linc00675 may function as an oncogene during PDAC development,and its expression is an independent predictor of unfavorable prognosis in patients with PDAC.
Sea-island cotton (Gossypium barbadense L.) is one of the most valuable cotton species due to its silkiness, luster, long staples, and high strength, but its fiber development mechanism has not been ...surveyed comprehensively. We constructed a normalized fiber cDNA library (from -2 to 25 dpa) of G. barbadense cv. Pima 3-79 (the genetic standard line) by saturation hybridization with genomic DNA. We screened Pima 3-79 fiber RNA from five developmental stages using a cDNA array including 9,126 plasmids randomly selected from the library, and we selected and sequenced 929 clones that had different signal intensities between any two stages. The 887 high-quality expressed sequence tags obtained were assembled into 645 consensus sequences (582 singletons and 63 contigs), of which 455 were assigned to functional categories using gene ontology. Almost 50% of binned genes belonged to metabolism functional categories. Based on subarray analysis of the 887 high-quality expressed sequence tags with 0-, 5-, 10-, 15-, and 20-dpa RNA of Pima 3-79 fibers and a mixture of RNA of nonfiber tissues, seven types of expression profiles were elucidated. Furthermore our results showed that phytohormones may play an important role in the fiber development.
In our previous work, we developed a computational tool, PreK‐ClassK‐ClassKv, to predict and classify potassium (K+) channels. For K+ channel prediction (PreK) and classification at family level ...(ClassK), this method performs well. However, it does not perform so well in classifying voltage‐gated potassium (Kv) channels (ClassKv). In this paper, a new method based on the local sequence information of Kv channels is introduced to classify Kv channels. Six transmembrane domains of a Kv channel protein are used to define a protein, and the dipeptide composition technique is used to transform an amino acid sequence to a numerical sequence. A Kv channel protein is represented by a vector with 2000 elements, and a support vector machine algorithm is applied to classify Kv channels. This method shows good performance with averages of total accuracy (Acc), sensitivity (SE), specificity (SP), reliability (R) and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 98.0%, 89.9%, 100%, 0.95 and 0.94 respectively. The results indicate that the local sequence information‐based method is better than the global sequence information‐based method to classify Kv channels.
Edited by Juan LIU
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