Objectives This study aimed to explore the feasibility and safety of laparoscopic nephron-sparing surgery (LNSS) for complex renal cystic lesions. Methods A retrospective study was conducted on 83 ...cases of complex renal cystic lesions treated with LNSS in our hospital. There were 32 men and 51 women, ranging in age from 24 to 73 years (average, 47.22 ± 9.03 years). The diameter of the cysts was 1.5–5.9 cm (average, 3.44 ± 0.86cm). According to the Bosniak classification, there were 15 cases of type II, 23 cases of type IIF, 29 cases of type III, and 16 cases of type IV complex renal cystic lesions. According to clinical classification based on the difficulty of laparoscopic partial nephrectomy and the depth of the lesion, the 83 complex renal cystic lesions were divided into 48 cases of the extra-renal type, 15 cases of the centrally located type, seven cases of the renal sinus type, and 13 cases of the renal hilum type. Results Laparoscopic partial nephrectomy was successful in all 83 patients. The surgical time was 35–102 min (average, 52.13 ± 14.38 min), the intraoperative bleeding volume was 10–200 ml (average, 27.25 ± 12.26 ml), and the renal artery occlusion time was 12–28 min (average, 12.46 ± 4.45 min). There was no significant change in creatinine before and after surgery. The postoperative pathological results showed 71 cases of renal clear cell carcinoma, five cases of low malignant potential multilocular cystic renal tumors, and seven cases of pure renal cysts with all margins negative. Conclusions There is potential for the malignant transformation of complex renal cysts into renal cell carcinoma. For complex renal cysts classified as Bosniak IIF or higher, surgical intervention is recommended, and LNSS is safe and effective. The complexity of the surgical procedure varies depending on the location classification of the complex renal cysts.
Aristolochic acids (AAs) are a group of toxins commonly present in the plants of genus
and
, which are spread all over the world. Since the 1990s, AA-induced nephropathy (AAN) and upper tract ...urothelial carcinoma (UTUC) have been reported in many countries. The underlying mechanisms of AAN and AA-induced UTUC have been extensively investigated. AA-derived DNA adducts are recognized as specific biomarkers of AA exposure, and a mutational signature predominantly characterized by A→T transversions has been detected in AA-induced UTUC tumor tissues. In addition, various enzymes and organic anion transporters are involved in AA-induced adverse reactions. The progressive lesions and mutational events initiated by AAs are irreversible, and no effective therapeutic regimen for AAN and AA-induced UTUC has been established until now. Because of several warnings on the toxic effects of AAs by the US Food and Drug Administration and the regulatory authorities of some other countries, the sale and use of AA-containing products have been banned or restricted in most countries. However, AA-related adverse events still occur, especially in the Asian and Balkan regions. Therefore, the use of AA-containing herbal remedies and the consumption of food contaminated by AAs still carry high risk. More strict precautions should be taken to protect the public from AA exposure.
Improving crop salt tolerance is an adaptive measure to climate change for meeting future food demands. Previous studies have reported that glycine betaine (GB) plays critical roles as an osmolyte in ...enhancing plant salt resistance. However, the mechanism underlying the GB regulating plant Na
+
homeostasis during response to salinity is poorly understood. In this study, hydroponically cultured maize with 125 mM NaCl for inducing salinity stress was treated with 100 μM GB. We found that treatment with GB improved the growth of maize plants under non-stressed (NS) and salinity-stressed (SS) conditions. Treatment with GB significantly maintained the properties of chlorophyll fluorescence, including Fv/Fm, ΦPSII, and ΦNPQ, and increased the activity of the antioxidant enzymes for mitigating salt-induced growth inhibition. Moreover, GB decreased the Na
+
/K
+
ratio primarily by reducing the accumulation of Na
+
in plants. The results of NMT tests further confirmed that GB increased Na
+
efflux from roots under SS condition, and fluorescence imaging of cellular Na
+
suggested that GB reduced the cellular allocation of Na
+
. GB additionally increased Na
+
efflux in leaf protoplasts under SS condition, and treatment with sodium orthovanadate, a plasma membrane (PM) H
+
-ATPase inhibitor, significantly alleviated the positive effects of GB on Na
+
efflux under salt stress. GB significantly improved the vacuolar activity of NHX but had no significant effects on the activity of V type H
+
-ATPases. In addition, GB significantly upregulated the expression of the PM H
+
-ATPase genes,
ZmMHA2
and
ZmMHA4
, and the Na
+
/H
+
antiporter gene,
ZmNHX1.
While, the V type H
+
-ATPases gene,
ZmVP1
, was not significantly regulated by GB. Altogether these results indicate that GB regulates cellular Na
+
homeostasis by enhancing PM H+-ATPases gene transcription and protein activities to improve maize salt tolerance. This study provided an extended understanding of the functions of GB in plant responses to salinity, which can help the development of supportive measures using GB for obtaining high maize yield in saline conditions.
With the success of pre-trained language models, the performance of story ending generation has been dramatically improved while remaining challenging due to the lack of commonsense reasoning ...ability. Most previous works mainly focus on using commonsense knowledge to enhance the implicit correlations between words but ignore the hidden causality of sentences or events. In this paper, we propose Causal commonsense Enhanced joint model for story ending Generation (CEG), which incorporates causal commonsense events knowledge to generate a reasonable story ending. Specifically, we first develop a commonsense events inference model trained on GLUCOSE, which converts static knowledge into a dynamic generation model to discover unseen knowledge. It uses prompts to produce various commonsense events behind the stories as pseudo-labels of the dataset. Then, we propose a joint model for the causal events inference task and the story ending generation task to inject inference knowledge into the generation, which consists of a shared encoder, an inference decoder, and a generation decoder. In the causal events inference task, we use the shared encoder and the inference decoder to reason the causal events behind each sentence of the story context to help the model better understand the story and provide long-distance dependencies for the story ending generation. In story ending generation, we combine the hidden states of the causal events with the story context to generate the story ending by the shared encoder and the generation decoder. We jointly train the model on two tasks so that the generation decoder produces the story endings that better match the clues. Experimental results on the ROCStories dataset show that our model outperforms the previous works, demonstrating the effectiveness of the joint model and the generated causal events.
Plant growth exhibits rhythmic characteristics, and gibberellins (GAs) are involved in regulating cell growth, but it is still unclear how GAs crosstalk with circadian rhythm to regulate cell ...elongation. The study analyzed growth characteristics of wild-type (WT),
and
with GA
seedlings. We integrated metabolomes and transcriptomes to study the interaction between GAs and circadian rhythm in mediating leaf elongation. The rates of leaf growth were higher in WT than
, and
cell length was shorter when proliferated in darkness than light, and GA
restored
leaf growth. The differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between WT and
were mainly enriched in hormone signaling and cell wall synthesis, while DEGs in
were restored to WT by GA
. Moreover, the number of circadian DEGs that reached the peak expression in darkness was more than light, and the upregulated circadian DEGs were mainly enriched in cell wall synthesis. The differentially accumulated metabolites (DAMs) were mainly attributed to flavonoids and phenolic acid. Twenty-two DAMs showed rhythmic accumulation, especially enriched in lignin synthesis. The circadian DEGs
and
were identified as regulators of
and
, which were enzymes in lignin synthesis. Furthermore, GAs regulated
and
to modulate lignin biosynthesis for mediating leaf rhythmic growth.
Pheochromocytomas (PCC)/paragangliomas (PGL) are catecholamine (CA) -secreting neuroendocrine tumors, which are known as PPGL due to their histological and pathophysiological similarities. In ...addition to the typical triad of paroxysmal headache, palpitation, and sweating, PPGL may also be accompanied by symptoms and signs involving multiple organs and systems such as the cardiovascular system, digestive system, endocrine system, and nervous system. Currently, surgical resection is the first choice for PPGL. Safe and effective surgical management of complicated PPGL is the goal of clinical work. In this paper, we discuss this hot issue based on complicated PPGL cases, aiming to share our experience of the surgical management strategy of PPGL.
Dodder (
Cuscuta
spp.) species are obligate parasitic flowering plants that totally depend on host plants for growth and reproduction and severely suppress hosts’ growth. As a rootless and leafless ...plant, excised dodder shoots exhibit rapid growth and elongation for several days to hunt for new host stems, and parasitization could be reestablished. This is one unique ability of the dodder to facilitate its success in nature. Clearly, excised dodder stems have to recycle stored nutrients to elongate as much as possible. However, the mechanism of stored nutrient recycling in the
in vitro
dodder shoots is still poorly understood. Here, we found that dodder is a carbohydrate-rich holoparasitic plant. During the
in vitro
dodder shoot development, starch was dramatically and thoroughly degraded in the dodder shoots. Sucrose derived from starch degradation in the basal stems was transported to the shoot tips, in which EMP and TCA pathways were activated to compensate for carbon demand for the following elongation according to the variations of sugar content related to the crucial gene expression, and the metabolomics analysis. Additionally, antioxidants were significantly accumulated in the shoot tips in contrast to those in the basal stems. The variations of phytohormones (jasmonic acid, indole-3-acetic acid, and abscisic acid) indicated that they played essential roles in this process. All these data suggested that starch and sucrose degradation, EMP and TCA activation, antioxidants, and phytohormones were crucial and associated with the
in vitro
dodder shoot elongation.
Modified gibberellin (GA) signaling leads to semi-dwarfism with low nitrogen (N) use efficiency (NUE) in crops. An understanding of GA-mediated N uptake is essential for the development of crops with ...improved NUE. The function of GA in modulating N uptake capacity and nitrate (NO
) transporters (NRTs) was analyzed in the GA synthesis-deficient mutant z
grown under low (LN) and sufficient (SN) N conditions. LN significantly suppressed the production of GA
, GA
and GA
, and the
plants showed more sensitivity in shoots as well as LN stress. Moreover, the higher anthocyanin accumulation and the decrease of chlorophyll content were also recorded. The net NO
fluxes and
N content were decreased in
plants under both LN and SN conditions. Exogenous GA
could restore the NO
uptake in
plants, but uniconazole repressed NO
uptake. Moreover, the transcript levels of
were downregulated in
plants, while the GA
application enhanced the expression level. Furthermore, the RNA-seq analyses identified several transcription factors that are involved in the GA-mediated transcriptional operation of
related genes. These findings revealed that GAs influenced N uptake involved in the transcriptional regulation of
and physiological responses in maize responding to nitrogen supply.
Summary
Rice (Oryza sativa) is the staple food for over half the world’s population. Drought stress imposes major constraints on rice yields. Intriguingly, labdane‐related diterpenoid (LRD) ...phytoalexins in maize (Zea mays) affect drought tolerance, as indicated by the increased susceptibility of an insertion mutant of the class II diterpene cyclase ZmCPS2/An2 that initiates such biosynthesis. Rice also produces LRD phytoalexins, utilizing OsCPS2 and OsCPS4 to initiate a complex metabolic network.
For genetic studies of rice LRD biosynthesis the fast‐growing Kitaake cultivar was selected for targeted mutagenesis via CRISPR/Cas9, with an initial focus on OsCPS2 and OsCPS4. The resulting cps2 and cps4 knockout lines were further crossed to create a cps2x4 double mutant. Both CPSs also were overexpressed.
Strikingly, all of the cv Kitaake cps mutants exhibit significantly increased susceptibility to drought, which was associated with reduced stomatal closure that was evident even under well‐watered conditions. However, CPS overexpression did not increase drought resistance, and cps mutants in other cultivars did not alter susceptibility to drought, although these also exhibited lesser effects on LRD production.
The results suggest that LRDs may act as a regulatory switch that triggers stomatal closure in rice, which might reflect the role of these openings in microbial entry.
In order to study the space-time characteristics of sea clutter, the sea clutter is always measured by the airborne multichannel radar; however, the sea clutter shows the heterogeneity between range ...gates, which means the space-time covariance matrix’s correspondence to the single range gate cannot be estimated accurately. Meanwhile, the measurement of the sea clutter data by the airborne radar is usually affected by the motion of the platform, which makes the analysis results unrepresentative of the space-time characteristics of the pure sea clutter. In this paper, a sea clutter measurement method based on L-band shore-based multichannel radar is proposed, where the transmit sub-array periodically moves with the pulse repetition period to obtain multiple sets of coherent processing interval pulses for each range gate. This measurement method can exclude the influences of the moving platform. Moreover, a sea clutter space-time signal model of the single range gate is proposed, and the model is used to simulate three-dimensional sea clutter data with space-time coupling characteristics. With verification of the measured and simulated data, it can be seen that the data composed of single range gate and multiple coherent processing interval pulses can accurately estimate the space-time covariance matrix corresponding to this single range gate. Furthermore, the space-time characteristics are analyzed based on the measured data. The results show that the eigenvalue spectrum and the spread width of space-time power spectrum are influenced by the backscattering coefficient of sea clutter and the speed of sea surface motion. In comparison, the decorrelation effect caused by the backscattering coefficient of sea clutter is stronger than that caused by the speed of the surface motion. The proposed method is helpful for guiding multichannel sea clutter measurement and the analysis results are of great significance to the clutter suppression algorithms of the marine multichannel radar.
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