Investigating how genes jointly affect complex human diseases is important, yet challenging. The network approach (e.g., weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA)) is a powerful tool. ...However, genomic data usually contain substantial batch effects, which could mask true genomic signals. Paired design is a powerful tool that can reduce batch effects. However, it is currently unclear how to appropriately apply WGCNA to genomic data from paired design. In this paper, we modified the current WGCNA pipeline to analyse high-throughput genomic data from paired design. We illustrated the modified WGCNA pipeline by analysing the miRNA dataset provided by Shiah et al. (2014), which contains forty oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) specimens and their matched non-tumourous epithelial counterparts. OSCC is the sixth most common cancer worldwide. The modified WGCNA pipeline identified two sets of novel miRNAs associated with OSCC, in addition to the existing miRNAs reported by Shiah et al. (2014). Thus, this work will be of great interest to readers of various scientific disciplines, in particular, genetic and genomic scientists as well as medical scientists working on cancer.
Traumatic brain injury in China Jiang, Ji-Yao; Gao, Guo-Yi; Feng, Jun-Feng ...
Lancet neurology,
March 2019, 2019-03-00, 20190301, Volume:
18, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
China has more patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI) than most other countries in the world, making this condition a major public health concern. Population-based mortality of TBI in China is ...estimated to be approximately 13 cases per 100 000 people, which is similar to the rates reported in other countries. The implementation of various measures, such as safety legislation for road traffic, establishment of specialised neurosurgical intensive care units, and the development of evidence-based guidelines, have contributed to advancing prevention and care of patients with TBI in China. However, many challenges remain, which are augmented further by regional differences in TBI care. High-level care, such as intracranial pressure monitoring, is not universally available yet. In the past 30 years, the quality of TBI research in China has substantially improved, as evidenced by an increasing number of clinical trials done. The large number of patients with TBI and specialised trauma centres offer unique opportunities for TBI research in China. Furthermore, the formation and development of research collaborations between China and international groups are considered essential to advancing the quality of TBI care and research in China, and to improve quality of life in patients with this condition.
Storing and sharing of medical data in the cloud environment, where computing resources including storage is provided by a third party service provider, raise serious concern of individual privacy ...for the adoption of cloud computing technologies. Existing privacy protection researches can be classified into three categories, i.e., privacy by policy, privacy by statistics, and privacy by cryptography. However, the privacy concerns and data utilization requirements on different parts of the medical data may be quite different. The solution for medical dataset sharing in the cloud should support multiple data accessing paradigms with different privacy strengths. The statistics or cryptography technology alone cannot enforce the multiple privacy demands, which blocks their application in the real-world cloud. This paper proposes a practical solution for privacy preserving medical record sharing for cloud computing. Based on the classification of the attributes of medical records, we use vertical partition of medical dataset to achieve the consideration of different parts of medical data with different privacy concerns. It mainly includes four components, i.e., (1) vertical data partition for medical data publishing, (2) data merging for medical dataset accessing, (3) integrity checking, and (4) hybrid search across plaintext and ciphertext, where the statistical analysis and cryptography are innovatively combined together to provide multiple paradigms of balance between medical data utilization and privacy protection. A prototype system for the large scale medical data access and sharing is implemented. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed solution.
•Proposed a hybrid solution for privacy preserving data sharing in cloud environment.•Different methods are innovatively combined to support multiple paradigms of medical data sharing with different privacy strengths.•The experimental evaluations are reported based on the implementation of four basic components and a real world case study.
The capacity of anode materials plays a critical role in the performance of lithium‐ion batteries. Using the nanocrystals of oxygen‐free metal‐organic framework ZIF‐67 as precursor, a one‐step ...calcination approach toward the controlled synthesis of CoO nanoparticle cookies with excellent anodic performances is developed in this work. The CoO nanoparticle cookies feature highly porous structure composed of small CoO nanoparticles (≈12 nm in diameter) and nitrogen‐rich graphitic carbon matrix (≈18 at% in nitrogen content). Benefiting from such unique structure, the CoO nanoparticle cookies are capable of delivering superior specific capacity and cycling stability (1383 mA h g−1 after 200 runs at 100 mA g−1) over those of CoO and graphite.
CoO nanoparticle cookies are synthesized via a one‐step calcination approach, using the nanocrystals of oxygen‐free MOF ZIF‐67 as a single precursor. The CoO nanoparticle cookies feature a unique, porous structure composed of CoO nanoparticles and nitrogen‐rich carbon matrix. As anode materials of lithium‐ion batteries, the CoO nanoparticle cookies deliver superior specific capacity and cycling stability to those of CoO and graphite.
Activated carbon fibers (ACFs) were used for the adsorption of phenol, 2-chlorophenol (2-CP), 4-chlorophenol (4-CP), 2,4-dichlorophenol (DCP), 2,4,6-trichlorophenol (TCP), 4-nitrophenol (4-NP) and ...2,4-dinitrophenol (DNP) from aqueous solutions, and the adsorption capacities followed the order of TCP
>
DNP
≈
DCP
>
4-NP
>
4-CP
>
2-CP
>
phenol. Adsorption isotherms at different temperatures were determined and modeled with Langmuir, Freundlich and Redlich–Peterson equations. Thermodynamic parameters were calculated and correlated with the adsorption behaviors. The effects of solution pH on the adsorption were also studied. The adsorption mechanism was discussed based on the experimental results, and the π–π interactions, solvent effects, hydrophobic interactions and molecular dimensions were considered to be important in the adsorption. Kinetic studies showed rapid adsorption kinetics of the phenols, due to the open pore structure of the ACFs. The kinetics was fitted with the pseudo-first-order, pseudo-second-order and intraparticle diffusion models. Steric effects on adsorption kinetics were observed for TCP, 4-NP and DNP, but serious impact on the ultimate uptake was only found for DNP. The relationship between the steric effects and the molecular dimension was also proposed.
Endophytic actinobacteria, which exist in the inner tissues of living plants, have attracted increasing attention among taxonomists, ecologists, agronomists, chemists and evolutionary biologists. ...Numerous studies have indicated that these prolific actinobacteria appear to have a capacity to produce an impressive array of secondary metabolites exhibiting a wide variety of biological activity, such as antibiotics, antitumor and anti-infection agents, plant growth promoters and enzymes, and may contribute to their host plants by promoting growth and enhancing their ability of withstanding the environmental stresses. These microorganisms may represent an underexplored reservoir of novel species of potential interest in the discovery of novel lead compounds and for exploitation in pharmaceutical, agriculture and industry. This review focuses on new findings in the isolation methods, bio- and chemical diversity of endophytic actinobacteria and reveals the potential biotechnological application. The facing problems and strategies for biodiversity research and bioactive natural products producing are also discussed.
To combine flexibility and modifiability towards a more controllable complexity of MOFs, a post‐synthetic variable‐spacer installation (PVSI) strategy is used to implement kinetic installation/ ...uninstallation of secondary ligands into/from a robust yet flexible proto‐Zr‐MOF. This PVSI process features precise positioning of spacers with different length, size, number, and functionality, enabling accurate fixation of successive breathing stages and fine‐tuning of pore surface. It shows unprecedented synthetic tailorability to create complicated MOFs in a predictable way for property modification, for example, CO2 and R22 adsorption/separation, thermal/chemical stability, and extended breathing behavior.
Bringing PSM into dynamic MOFs: Post‐synthetic modification (PSM) is used to install/uninstall varied linkers into/from a flexible Zr‐MOF. This post‐synthetic variable‐spacer installation (PVSI) strategy is used to tune elastic deformation, breathing behavior, and stabilization of the framework in controllable and predictable way. Tuning the pore surface leads to a larger surface area and improved gas separation and adsorption capacity.
The blood vessels are the primary anatomical structure that can be visible in retinal images. The segmentation of retinal blood vessels has been accepted worldwide for the diagnosis of both ...cardiovascular (CVD) and retinal diseases. Thus, it requires an appropriate vessel segmentation method for automatic detection of retinal diseases such as diabetic retinopathy and cataract. The detection of retinal diseases using computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) can help people to avoid the risks of visual impairment and save medical resources. This survey presents a comparative analysis of various machine learning and deep learning-based methods for automated blood vessel segmentation in retinal images. This paper briefly describes fundus photography, publicly available retinal databases, pre-processing and post-processing techniques for retinal vessels segmentation. A comprehensive review of the state of the art supervised and unsupervised blood vessel segmentation methodologies are presented in this paper. The objective of this study is to establish a professional structure to familiarize an individual with up-to-date vessel segmentation techniques. Moreover, we compared these approaches to the dataset, evaluation metrics, pre-processing and post-processing steps, feature extraction, segmentation methods, and induced results.
Glucosinolates are token stimuli in host selection of many crucifer specialist insects, but the underlying molecular basis for host selection in these insects remains enigmatic. Using a combination ...of behavioral, electrophysiological, and molecular methods, we investigate glucosinolate receptors in the cabbage butterfly Pieris rapae. Sinigrin, as a potent feeding stimulant, elicited activity in larval maxillary lateral sensilla styloconica, as well as in adult medial tarsal sensilla. Two P. rapae gustatory receptor genes PrapGr28 and PrapGr15 were identified with high expression in female tarsi, and the subsequent functional analyses showed that Xenopus oocytes only expressing PrapGr28 had specific responses to sinigrin; when ectopically expressed in Drosophila sugar sensing neurons, PrapGr28 conferred sinigrin sensitivity to these neurons. RNA interference experiments further showed that knockdown of PrapGr28 reduced the sensitivity of adult medial tarsal sensilla to sinigrin. Taken together, we conclude that PrapGr28 is a gustatory receptor tuned to sinigrin in P. rapae, which paves the way for revealing the molecular basis of the relationships between crucifer plants and their specialist insects.
Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a common disorder of unknown etiology. Studies have found a close relation between IBS and microRNAs (miRNAs), but the study concerning the relationship between IBS ...and miR‐181c‐5p in IBS is still blank. Thus, this study aims to explore the role of miR‐181c‐5p in IBS via interleukin 1α (IL1A). Initially, microarray analysis was used to retrieve the genes related to IBS and to predict miRNAs regulating IL1A gene. IBS model was then established with abdominal withdraw reflection (AWR) and Bristol stool grading in mice measured. Afterwards, the functional role of miR‐181c‐5p in IBS was determined using the ectopic expression, depletion and reporter assay experiments, as well as miR‐181c‐5p and IL1A expression detected. Subsequently, expression of tumor necrosis factor‐α (TNF‐α), interleukin‐2 (IL‐2), and IL‐6 were detected to further determine the effects of miR‐181c‐5p and IL1A on inflammation in IBS. miR‐181c‐5p and IL1A might be involved in IBS. miR‐181c‐5p was found to be decreased while IL1A was increased in IBS rats. In addition, miR‐181c‐5p could target and inhibit expression of IL1A, and IBS mice exhibited elevated AWR and Bristol stool grading, namely 6 to 7 points (70.4 38 of 54). Moreover, with the overexpression of miR‐181c‐5p or silencing of IL1A, the expression of TNF‐α, IL‐2, and IL‐6 was decreased. Collectively, this study suggested that overexpressed miR‐181c‐5p could silence IL1A, thus inhibiting low‐grade inflammation in IBS rats. miR‐181c‐5p/IL1A is expected to serve as a novel target for the treatment of IBS.
Collectively, this study suggested that overexpressed miR‐181c‐5p could silence interleukin 1α (IL1A), thus inhibiting low‐grade inflammation in irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) rats. miR‐181c‐5p/IL1A is expected to serve as a novel target for the treatment of IBS.
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