To investigate the contamination of PCBs in agricultural soils irrigated chronically with polluted water and the distribution and migration of PCBs under long-term irrigation, 100 farmland soil ...profile samples were collected in the Yellow River irrigation area in Inner Mongolia, China, to determine PCB content. Cluster analysis was used to identify possible sources of PCBs products, and the USEPA Health Risk Evaluation Model assessed the health risks posed by PCBs to humans. The results showed that the detection rates of eight monomers in the different soil layers of each sample site ranged from 5% to 90%, and the concentration ranged from not detected to 87.71 ng·g−1. The PCBs content showed a vertical distribution rule of accumulation in the shallow layer, sudden decrease in the middle layer. Low-chlorinated PCBs were dominant in each soil profile. Source identification indicated that PCB pollution in the study area originated mainly from the Aroclor1242, Aroclor1248, Aroclor1016, Aroclor1232, and Aroclor1221 industrial products and domestic transformer oil. Finally, a health risk assessment demonstrated that child and adult groups in study area were exposed to negligible carcinogenic and noncarcinogenic risks.
Background/Aims Pigeon breeder’s lung (PBL) results from Th1/Th2 cell imbalance. B cells inhibit the immune activity of Th1, and EBF3 is a key B cell factor. This study explored the relationship ...between EBF3 and Th1/Th2 imbalance in chronic PBL cases complicated with pulmonary fibrosis (PF). Methods Twenty Uygur PBL+PF patients, 20 pigeon breeders without PBL or PF, and 20 healthy individuals without pigeon breeding history constituted the patient I, negative control, and normal control groups, respectively. Peripheral blood specimens and case backgrounds were collected between June 2016 and March 2017. EBF3 gene methylation was analyzed by matrix assisted laser desorption ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry. To compare different mechanisms of PF progression in PBL, samples from 20 Uygur PBL patients without PF (at acute and sub-acute stages) were collected between October 2017 and February 2018, constituting the patient II group. EBF3 mRNA expression was evaluated by real-time polymerase chain reaction. IFN-γ, IL-4 and IL-10 expression and Th1/Th2 imbalance in PBL were evaluated by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and flow cytometry. Results CpG-2 and general methylation rates in the patient I group were lower than those in the control groups (P˂0.017). The level of EBF3 mRNA expression in the patient I group was significantly higher than that in any other group. Compared with the control groups, the patient I group showed a significantly higher level of IL-4, whereas the patient II group showed a significantly lower level. IL-10 was also expressed more highly in the patient I group than in any other group (P< 0.01). Flow cytometry showed INF-γ dominance (Th1 cytokine) in PBL at the acute/sub-acute stage and IL-4 dominance (Th2 cytokine) at the chronic stage after PF occurred. The general methylation rate was negatively correlated with the mRNA level, with the latter being positively correlated with the IL-10 level and number of pigeons bred in the past 3 months. IL-4 expression was negatively correlated with INF-γ but positively correlated with PF area and duration of pigeon breeding history. Conclusions After PF occurs in chronic PBL, the inflammation type changes from Th1 dominance to Th2 dominance. During PBL development, IL-10 increases before IL-4 does, which may be associated with EBF3 hypomethylation and the involvement of B lymphocytes.
This study examined the effects of the PI3K/AKT pathway and mitochondrial autophagy in macrophages and the leukocyte count after pulmonary infection. Sprague‒Dawley rats were subjected to tracheal ...injection of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) to establish animal models of pulmonary infection. By inhibiting the PI3K/AKT pathway or inhibiting/inducing mitochondrial autophagy in macrophages, the severity of the pulmonary infection and the leukocyte count were altered. The PI3K/AKT inhibition group did not show a significant difference in leukocyte counts compared with the infection model group. Mitochondrial autophagy induction alleviated the pulmonary inflammatory response. The infection model group had significantly higher levels of LC3B, Beclin1, and p-mTOR than the control group. The AKT2 inhibitor group exhibited significantly increased levels of LC3B and Beclin1 compared with the control group (
< 0.05), and the Beclin1 level was significantly higher than that in the infection model group (
< 0.05). Compared with the infection model group, the mitochondrial autophagy inhibitor group exhibited significantly decreased levels of p-AKT2 and p-mTOR, whereas the levels of these proteins were significantly increased in the mitochondrial autophagy inducer group (
< 0.05). PI3K/AKT inhibition promoted mitochondrial autophagy in macrophages. Mitochondrial autophagy induction activated the downstream gene
of the PI3K/AKT pathway, alleviated pulmonary inflammatory reactions, and decreased leukocyte counts.
Lung cancer kills more people than any other cancer in the United States. In addition to environmental factors, lung cancer has genetic risk factors as well, though the genetic etiology is still not ...well understood. We have performed whole exome sequencing on 262 individuals from 28 extended families with a family history of lung cancer.
Parametric genetic linkage analysis was performed on these samples using two distinct analyses-the lung cancer only (LCO) analysis, where only patients with lung cancer were coded as affected, and the all aggregated cancers (AAC) analysis, where other cancers seen in the pedigree were coded as affected.
The AAC analysis yielded a genome-wide significant result at rs61943670 in
at 12q23.3.
has been implicated somatically in lung cancer, but this germline finding is novel and is a significant expression quantitative trait locus in lung tissue. Interesting genome-wide suggestive haplotypes were also found within individual families, particularly near
at 7p36.1 in one family and a large linked haplotype spanning 4q21.3-28.3 in a different family. The 4q haplotype contains potential causal rare variants in
at 4q22.1 and
at 4q21.3.
Regions on 12q, 7p, and 4q are linked to increased cancer risk in highly aggregated lung cancer families, 12q across families and 7p and 4q within a single family.
, and
are currently the best candidate genes.
Functional work on these genes is planned for future studies and if confirmed would lead to potential biomarkers for risk in cancer.
Background Mycosis fungoides (MF), the most common cutaneous T-cell lymphoma, is most often seen in middle-aged to elderly men. Objective We conducted a retrospective study of the demographics and ...prognosis of patients with onset of MF before age 40 years. Methods Demographic data (age, sex, and race) and histology from 1074 patents with cutaneous T-cell lymphoma were stratified by age of onset and race and analyzed using Chi-square test. Results Women presented before age 40 years more often than men ( P = .038). Early onset of MF was diagnosed in 30 of 92 (32.6%) African American (AA), 31 of 87 (35.6%) Hispanic, and 103 of 809 (12.7%) Caucasian patients. MF was significantly more common in AA ( P = .0008) and Hispanic ( P = .0002) patients. Early-onset MF was more common among 21 of 60 AA women (35%, P = .0174) and 19 of 40 Hispanic women (47.5%, P = .0002) than among 50 of 350 Caucasian women (14.5%). Progression from initial TNM stage occurred in only 5 (10%) Caucasian, one (5%) Hispanic, and 8 (38%) AA women who presented before age 40 years. Six of 8 AA women who progressed died of their disease whereas two were long-term survivors after allogeneic transplantation. Limitations This was a retrospective study at one cancer center. Conclusion Although MF is considered to be a disease of middle-aged men, early-onset MF is more common among AA and Hispanic women. AA women with early onset may have a poor prognosis and should be considered for more aggressive therapy, including allogeneic transplantation.
Classification of Hyperspectral Images (HSIs) has gained attention for the past few decades. In remote sensing image classification, the labeled samples are insufficient or hard to obtain; however, ...the unlabeled ones are frequently rich and of a vast number. When there are no sufficient labeled samples, overfitting may occur. To resolve the overfitting issue, in this present work, we proposed a novel approach for HSI feature extraction, called robust regularized Block Low-Rank Discriminant Analysis (BLRDA), which is a robust and efficient feature extraction method to improve the HSIs’ classification accuracy with few labeled samples. To reduce the exponentially growing computational complexity of the low-rank method, we divide the entire image into blocks and implement the low-rank representation for each block respectively. Due to the symmetric matrix requirements for the regularized graph of discriminant analysis, the k-nearest neighbor is applied to handle the whole low-rank graph integrally. The low-rank representation and the kNN can maximally capture and preserve the global and local geometry of the data, respectively, and the performance of regularized discriminant analysis feature extraction can be apparently improved. Extensive experiments on multi-class hyperspectral images show that the proposed BLRDA is a very robust and efficient feature extraction method. Even with simple supervised and semi-supervised classifiers (nearest neighbor and SVM) and randomly given parameters, the feature extraction method achieves significant results with few labeled samples, which shows better performance than similar feature extraction methods.
We analyzed and integrated transcriptome data from two large studies of lung adenocarcinomas on distinct populations. Our goal was to investigate the variable gene expression alterations between ...paired tumor-normal tissues and prospectively identify those alterations that can reliably predict lung disease related outcomes across populations.
We developed a mixed model that combined the paired tumor-normal RNA-seq from two populations. Alterations in gene expression common to both populations were detected and validated in two independent DNA microarray datasets. A 10-gene prognosis signature was developed through a l1 penalized regression approach and its prognostic value was evaluated in a third independent microarray cohort.
Deregulation of apoptosis pathways and increased expression of cell cycle pathways were identified in tumors of both Caucasian and Asian lung adenocarcinoma patients. We demonstrate that a 10-gene biomarker panel can predict prognosis of lung adenocarcinoma in both Caucasians and Asians. Compared to low risk groups, high risk groups showed significantly shorter overall survival time (Caucasian patients data: HR = 3.63, p-value = 0.007; Asian patients data: HR = 3.25, p-value = 0.001).
This study uses a statistical framework to detect DEGs between paired tumor and normal tissues that considers variances among patients and ethnicities, which will aid in understanding the common genes and signalling pathways with the largest effect sizes in ethnically diverse cohorts. We propose multifunctional markers for distinguishing tumor from normal tissue and prognosis for both populations studied.
This study investigated the molecular mechanisms underlying the involvement of the Notch signaling pathway and autophagy in the development of pulmonary fibrosis in pigeon breeder’s lung (PBL). Rats ...were divided into control (Ctrl), PBL model (M), M + D (Notch signaling inhibition), M + W (autophagy inhibition), and M + R (autophagy induction) groups. Lyophilized protein powder from pigeon shedding materials was used as an allergen to construct a fibrotic PBL rat model. The mechanism by which Notch signaling regulated autophagy in the pulmonary fibrosis of PBL was investigated by inhibiting the Notch pathway and interfering with autophagy. Pulmonary interstitial fibrosis was significantly greater in the M group and the M + W group than in the M + D and M + R groups. The expression of α-smooth muscle actin was significantly higher in the M, M + D, and M + W groups than in the Ctrl group (
< 0.05). The expression of the cell autophagy markers Beclin1 and LC3 was lower in the M, M + D, and M + W groups than in the Ctrl group (
< 0.05), whereas Beclin1 and LC3 expressions were higher in the M + D and M + R groups than in the M group. The levels of reactive oxygen species in serum and lung tissues were higher in the M, M + D, M + W, and M + R groups than in the Ctrl group (
< 0.05). The Notch signaling pathway is involved in the pathological process of pulmonary fibrosis in the rat model of PBL by regulating autophagy.
In this study, we collected a total of 610 hospitalized patients from Wuhan between February 2, 2020, and February 17, 2020. We reported a potentially high false negative rate of real‐time ...reverse‐transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT‐PCR) testing for SARS‐CoV‐2 in the 610 hospitalized patients clinically diagnosed with COVID‐19 during the 2019 outbreak. We also found that the RT‐PCR results from several tests at different points were variable from the same patients during the course of diagnosis and treatment of these patients. Our results indicate that in addition to the emphasis on RT‐PCR testing, clinical indicators such as computed tomography images should also be used not only for diagnosis and treatment but also for isolation, recovery/discharge, and transferring for hospitalized patients clinically diagnosed with COVID‐19 during the current epidemic. These results suggested the urgent needs for the standard of procedures of sampling from different anatomic sites, sample transportation, optimization of RT‐PCR, serology diagnosis/screening for SARS‐CoV‐2 infection, and distinct diagnosis from other respiratory diseases such as fluenza infections as well.
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