As a key immune cytokine, C‐X‐C motif chemokine ligand 13 (CXCL13) has been reported to play critical roles in immune control of hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection. We aimed to screen ...single‐nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of CXCL13 for predicting response to pegylated interferon‐alpha (PegIFNα) therapy of chronic hepatitis B (CHB) patients. Two independent cohorts with a total of 945 (Cohort 1, n = 238; Cohort 2, n = 707) hepatitis B e antigen (HBeAg)‐positive CHB patients treated with PegIFNα were enrolled in this retrospective cohort study. Eight candidate SNPs were selected through gene‐wide SNP mining within or flanking CXCL13. A polygenic score (PGS) was utilized to assess the cumulative effects of multiple SNPs. The associations of candidate SNPs and PGS with combined response (CR, defined as the combination of HBeAg seroconversion and HBV DNA level <3.3log10 IU/mL) and hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) level were evaluated. Among the eight candidate SNPs, rs76084459 which is located at upstream of CXCL13 was significantly associated with both CR (p = 0.002) and HBsAg level (p = 0.015). A PGS integrating CXCL13_rs76084459 and five other SNPs, which were previously identified as predictors of PegIFNα treatment response, was further strongly correlated with CR (p = 1.759 × 10−10) and HBsAg level (p = 0.004). This study demonstrated that CXCL13_rs76084459 can predict response to PegIFNα treatment of HBeAg‐positive CHB patients. A PGS composed of six SNPs including CXCL13_rs76084459 predicts PegIFNα treatment response better.
The concept of Big Data is popular in a variety of domains. The purpose of this review was to summarize the features, applications, analysis approaches, and challenges of Big Data in health care. Big ...Data in health care has its own features, such as heterogeneity, incompleteness, timeliness and longevity, privacy, and ownership. These features bring a series of challenges for data storage, mining, and sharing to promote health-related research. To deal with these challenges, analysis approaches focusing on Big Data in health care need to be developed and laws and regulations for making use of Big Data in health care need to be enacted. From a patient perspective, application of Big Data analysis could bring about improved treatment and lower costs. In addition to patients, government, hospitals, and research institutions could also benefit from the Big Data in health care.
An electrochemically enabled C(sp3)–C(sp) cross-coupling reaction is herein described for the synthesis of internal alkynes. This method is suitable not only for a diverse range of acetylenic ...sulfones, but also for a wide range of alkyl radical precursors, such as alkyl iodides, N-hydroxyphthalimide esters and Katritzky salts. This method can also be applied to vinylation, thioetherification, selenation and hydrogenation reactions. This reaction has a lot of significant advantages such as mild conditions, broad functional group tolerance, simple operation and easy purification and scale-up.
An adhesive LaCrO3 perovskite coating has been prepared on stainless steel substrate by cathodic electrodeposition from aqueous solution 0.03 M La(CH3COO)3 + 0.03 M CrCl3 + 0.03 M Na3C6H5O7, followed ...by heat-treatment at 800°C in air. The electrodeposition of La-Cr coatings has been examined in the solution with pH of 2∼3 at the current density of 1∼5 mA cm−2. It is shown that the change of pH by even 0.1 can affect obviously the deposition of La-Cr coatings, and increasing the current density will lead to the generation of more cracks in the coatings. A more uniform and compact La-Cr coating can be obtained in the solution with the optimized pH value of 2.7 at the optimized current density of 1 mA cm−2. The La and Cr deposits change from their metallic states to the hydroxides during electrodeposition, corresponding to the increase in the pH with time. The as-prepared La-Cr coating is rich in La, due to the strong coordination of trivalent chromium with complex agent in the bath. The outward diffusion of Cr from the stainless steel substrate supplies the as-prepared La-rich coating to form LaCrO3 during heat-treatment.
Abstract
It is widely believed that different parts of a classical Chinese poem vary in syntactic properties. The middle part is usually parallel, i.e. the two lines in a couplet have similar ...sentence structure and part of speech; in contrast, the beginning and final parts tend to be non-parallel. Imagistic language, dominated by noun phrases evoking images, is concentrated in the middle; propositional language, with more complex grammatical structures, is more often found at the end. We present the first quantitative analysis on these linguistic phenomena—syntactic parallelism, imagistic language, and propositional language—on a treebank of selected poems from the Complete Tang Poems. Written during the Tang Dynasty between the 7th and 9th centuries CE, these poems are often considered the pinnacle of classical Chinese poetry. Our analysis affirms the traditional observation that the final couplet is rarely parallel; the middle couplets are more frequently parallel, especially at the phrase rather than the word level. Further, the final couplet more often takes a non-declarative mood, uses function words, and adopts propositional language. In contrast, the beginning and middle couplets employ more content words and tend toward imagistic language.
MicroRNA (miRNA)-target interaction (MTI) plays a substantial role in various cell activities, molecular regulations and physiological processes. Published biomedical literature is the carrier of ...high-confidence MTI knowledge. However, digging out this knowledge in an efficient manner from large-scale published articles remains challenging. To address this issue, we were motivated to construct a deep learning-based model. We applied the pre-trained language models to biomedical text to obtain the representation, and subsequently fed them into a deep neural network with gate mechanism layers and a fully connected layer for the extraction of MTI information sentences. Performances of the proposed models were evaluated using two datasets constructed on the basis of text data obtained from miRTarBase. The validation and test results revealed that incorporating both PubMedBERT and SciBERT for sentence level encoding with the long short-term memory (LSTM)-based deep neural network can yield an outstanding performance, with both F1 and accuracy being higher than 80% on validation data and test data. Additionally, the proposed deep learning method outperformed the following machine learning methods: random forest, support vector machine, logistic regression and bidirectional LSTM. This work would greatly facilitate studies on MTI analysis and regulations. It is anticipated that this work can assist in large-scale screening of miRNAs, thereby revealing their functional roles in various diseases, which is important for the development of highly specific drugs with fewer side effects. Source code and corpus are publicly available at https://github.com/qi29.
Uromodulin (Umod, Tamm-Horsfall protein) is the most abundant urinary
N
-glycoprotein produced exclusively by the kidney. It can form filaments to antagonize the adhesion of uropathogens. However, ...the site-specific
N
-glycosylation signatures of Umod in healthy individuals and patients with IgA nephropathy (IgAN) remain poorly understood due to the lack of suitable isolation and analytical methods. In this study, we first presented a simple and fast method based on diatomaceous earth adsorption to isolate Umod. These isolated glycoproteins were digested by trypsin and/or Glu-C. Intact
N
-glycopeptides with or without HILIC enrichment were analyzed using our developed EThcD-sceHCD-MS/MS. Based on the optimized workflow, we identified a total of 780 unique intact
N
-glycopeptides (7
N
-glycosites and 152
N
-glycan compositions) from healthy individuals. As anticipated, these glycosites exhibited glycoform heterogeneity. Almost all
N
-glycosites were modified completely by the complex type, except for one
N
-glycosite (N275), which was nearly entirely occupied by the high-mannose type for mediating Umod's antiadhesive activity. Then, we compared the
N
-glycosylation of Umod between healthy controls (
n
= 9) and IgAN patients (
n
= 9). The
N
-glycosylation of Umod in IgAN patients will drastically decrease and be lost. Finally, we profiled the most comprehensive site-specific
N
-glycosylation map of Umod and revealed its alterations in IgAN patients. Our method provides a high-throughput workflow for characterizing the
N
-glycosylation of Umod, which can aid in understanding its roles in physiology and pathology, as well as serving as a potential diagnostic tool for evolution of renal tubular function.
Uromodulin (Umod, Tamm-Horsfall protein) is the most abundant urinary
N
-glycoprotein produced exclusively by the kidney.
The application of carboxylic acid and natural iron oxide in heterogeneous AOP systems for the treatment of organic pollutants in water has attracted extensive attention. In this work, ...ethylenediamine-
N
,
N
′-disuccinic acid (EDDS) was complexed with ferrihydrite to improve the photo-Fenton system for bisphenol A (BPA) degradation, and the mechanism of the system was investigated. TEM, XRD and BET were used to investigate the morphology, structure and specific surface area of ferrihydrite. The characterization results revealed that ferrihydrite was amorphous and agglomerated, its main composition was 2-2lfh, and its specific surface area was 297.5 m
2
g
−1
. BPA degradation experiments, carried out at different influence factors including the initial concentration of EDDS, amount of ferrihydrite and initial concentration of H
2
O
2
, showed a maximum degradation rate of BPA of 85.1% under the optimal conditions (at 1.0 mmol L
−1
EDDS, 0.6 g L
−1
ferrihydrite and 0.5 mmol L
−1
H
2
O
2
). Finally, in order to analyze the mechanism of BPA degradation, 2-propanol and chloroform were used as free radical scavengers to capture hydroxyl radicals (&z.rad;OH) and superoxide anion radicals (&z.rad;O
2
−
) respectively. The results indicated that &z.rad;OH radicals and
1
O
2
play an important role under aerobic conditions, while &z.rad;O
2
−
radicals produced by the reaction of H
2
O
2
and holes are non-negligible under anaerobic conditions. Moreover, the iron dissolution also plays a promoting role in BPA degradation. Overall, Fe(
iii
) and Fe(
ii
) redox processes are accelerated due to the Fe(
iii
)-EDDS complex reaction under irradiation and in the presence of &z.rad;O
2
−
radicals and trace iron dissolution, which increases the number of reactive species in the system. The BPA degradation is facilitated by various reactive species including &z.rad;OH radicals,
1
O
2
and &z.rad;O
2
−
radicals.
The application of carboxylic acid and natural iron oxide in heterogeneous AOP systems for the treatment of organic pollutants in water has attracted extensive attention.
Uromodulin (Umod, Tamm–Horsfall protein) is the most abundant urinary N -glycoprotein produced exclusively by the kidney. It can form filaments to antagonize the adhesion of uropathogens. However, ...the site-specific N -glycosylation signatures of Umod in healthy individuals and patients with IgA nephropathy (IgAN) remain poorly understood due to the lack of suitable isolation and analytical methods. In this study, we first presented a simple and fast method based on diatomaceous earth adsorption to isolate Umod. These isolated glycoproteins were digested by trypsin and/or Glu-C. Intact N -glycopeptides with or without HILIC enrichment were analyzed using our developed EThcD-sceHCD-MS/MS. Based on the optimized workflow, we identified a total of 780 unique intact N -glycopeptides (7 N -glycosites and 152 N -glycan compositions) from healthy individuals. As anticipated, these glycosites exhibited glycoform heterogeneity. Almost all N -glycosites were modified completely by the complex type, except for one N -glycosite (N275), which was nearly entirely occupied by the high-mannose type for mediating Umod's antiadhesive activity. Then, we compared the N -glycosylation of Umod between healthy controls ( n = 9) and IgAN patients ( n = 9). The N -glycosylation of Umod in IgAN patients will drastically decrease and be lost. Finally, we profiled the most comprehensive site-specific N -glycosylation map of Umod and revealed its alterations in IgAN patients. Our method provides a high-throughput workflow for characterizing the N -glycosylation of Umod, which can aid in understanding its roles in physiology and pathology, as well as serving as a potential diagnostic tool for evolution of renal tubular function.
This paper explores the use of statistical methods to describe the phenomenon of parallelism in Classical Chinese poems. We apply a graph-based clustering method to automatically induce word clusters ...from a corpus of poems. We describe several methods for computing similarity scores. We compare these methods by evaluating the quality of the induced clusters, with respect to a semantic taxonomy for parallelism proposed by a literary scholar.
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