细胞程序性死亡通路的研究进展

细胞程序性死亡(programmed cell death,PCD)一直被看做是细胞凋亡(apoptosis).随着细胞生物学研究的深入,新的细胞死亡途径逐渐被揭示出来,如胀亡、自噬、副凋亡等.这些通路有些是caspase依赖的,有些不依赖于caspase途径.在细胞程序性死亡过程中,各种通路不是单独起作用的,而是相互交联的,有彼此重叠的机制出现.目前,Clarke形态学分类法是得到大多数学者认可的细胞程序性死亡的分类方式.按照该分类法,可将PCD分为3大类,即:Ⅰ型细胞程序性死亡、Ⅱ型细胞程序性死亡和Ⅲ型细胞程序性死亡.     

Statistical power in physical anthropology: a technical report

A statistical power analysis of The American Journal of Physical Anthropology (Volume 44, 1976) was conducted. Twenty-five articles, which included 3,304 major significance tests, constituted the final sample. Resultant power estimates of 0.38, 0.62, and 0.81, corresponding to small, medium, and large population effects respectively, were obtained. Although the medium effect size estimate falls short of the recommended 0.80 level, the statistical power of physical anthropological research fares well relative to several of the social scientific fields of inquiry.     

Power, precaution, Type II error and sampling design in assessment of environmental impacts

Increasingly, environmental managers attempt to incorporate precautionary principles into decision making. In any quantitative analysis of impacts, precaution is closely related to the power of the analysis to detect an impact. Designs of sampling to detect impacts are, however, complex because of natural spatial and temporal variability and the intrinsic nature of the statistical interactions which define impacts. Here, pulse and press responses and impacts that affect time courses (temporal variance) were modelled to determine the influences of increasing temporal replication—sampling more times in each of several longer periods before and again after an impact.Increasing the number of control or reference locations and number of replicate sample units at each time and place of sampling investigated the influence of spatial replication on power. From numerous scenarios of impacts, with or without natural spatial and temporal interactions (i.e. not caused by an impact), general recommendations are possible. Detecting press impacts requires maximal numbers of control locations. Shorter-term pulse impacts are best detected when the number of periods sampled is maximized. Impacts causing changes in temporal variance are most likely to be detected by sampling with the greatest possible number of periods or times within periods.To allow precautionary decision making, the type of predicted impact should be specified with its magnitude and duration. Only then can sampling be designed to be powerful, thereby allowing precautionary concepts to be invoked.     

Values,Errors, and Precautions

In the environmental health literature, errors in interpreting studies or data are not infrequent. Many are of the Type II variety. Common solecisms of this type are: treating the criterion of p < 0.05 as a sacrament; demanding complete confounder control; arguing for the existence of phantom confounders; arguing that the effect size is trivial; building nonveridical models; arguing for no effect from inadequate sample size; demanding causal proof; arguing that causality is reversed; conducting a ballot of published studies. These are examined in this paper.     

细菌脂肪酶分泌的研究进展

细菌脂肪酶是一类重要的工业用酶,其分泌系统有着严谨的机制。革兰阳性细菌利用Sec-转运系统使脂肪酶跨过质膜完成分泌;革兰氏阴性细菌的外泌蛋白通过Sec-转运系统、Tat-转运系统或其他机制跨越内膜后,还必须利用Ⅰ型、Ⅱ型、Ⅲ型、Ⅳ型与Ⅴ型分泌系统来完成跨外膜分泌。详细介绍细菌脂肪酶分泌主要依赖的Sec-或Tat-跨内膜的转运系统及革兰氏阴性细菌的Ⅰ型、Ⅱ型与Ⅴ型自分泌系统的3种不同分泌方式。细菌脂肪酶分泌的研究对人们认识其分泌机制,并利用基因工程的手段提高其外泌产量等具有重要的指导意义。     

When have we looked hard enough? A novel method for setting minimum survey effort protocols for flora surveys

There is now a substantial body of literature documenting the detectability of plants and animals under standard survey conditions. Despite the evidence that many flora and fauna species have detection probabilities of less than one, it is still the default assumption of most environmental impact assessment processes that if a species is present, it will be detected. Here we briefly review a number of existing studies that have estimated the survey effort necessary to detect animal species, based on what is known about their detection rates in standard surveys. We then propose a novel method, based on failure‐time analysis, for quantifying the detectability of and determining appropriate survey effort for plant species during flora surveys. We provide computer code for implementing the method in the Bayesian freeware WinBUGS. Methods for estimating detectability can be used to inform minimum survey requirements and have important applications in environmental impact assessment and monitoring.     

Structure-based design of isoindoline-1,3-diones and 2,3-dihydrophthalazine-1,4-diones as novel B-Raf inhibitors

Structure-guided design led to the discovery of novel chemical scaffolds for B-Raf inhibitors. Both type I and type II kinase inhibitors have been explored and lead compounds with good potency and excellent selectivity have been identified.     

P > .05: The incorrect interpretation of “not significant” results is a significant problem

Statistically nonsignificant (p > .05) results from a null hypothesis significance test (NHST) are often mistakenly interpreted as evidence that the null hypothesis is true—that there is “no effect” or “no difference.” However, many of these results occur because the study had low statistical power to detect an effect. Power below 50% is common, in which case a result of no statistical significance is more likely to be incorrect than correct. The inference of “no effect” is not valid even if power is high. NHST assumes that the null hypothesis is true; p is the probability of the data under the assumption that there is no effect. A statistical test cannot confirm what it assumes. These incorrect statistical inferences could be eliminated if decisions based on p values were replaced by a biological evaluation of effect sizes and their confidence intervals. For a single study, the observed effect size is the best estimate of the population effect size, regardless of the p value. Unlike p values, confidence intervals provide information about the precision of the observed effect. In the biomedical and pharmacology literature, methods have been developed to evaluate whether effects are “equivalent,” rather than zero, as tested with NHST. These methods could be used by biological anthropologists to evaluate the presence or absence of meaningful biological effects. Most of what appears to be known about no difference or no effect between sexes, between populations, between treatments, and other circumstances in the biological anthropology literature is based on invalid statistical inference.     

基于环境DNA-宏条形码技术的水生生态系统入侵生物的早期监测与预警

外来生物入侵是继生境破坏后造成生物多样性丧失的第二大威胁因素, 已对入侵地的生态安全、经济和社会发展及人类健康等造成严重负面影响, 成为21世纪五大全球性环境问题之一。作为水产养殖、航运和水生宠物交易大国, 我国水生生态系统的生物入侵问题尤为严重。研究表明, 系统地构建并应用早期监测预警技术是防控水生生态系统生物入侵最有效的途径。和陆生生物相比, 水生生物群落的物种繁多、群落结构复杂、生物形体微小且在入侵初期群体规模极小、隐匿于水下、可用于物种鉴定的外部形态缺乏, 使得在水生生态系统中构建并应用早期监测和预警体系在技术层面更具挑战。随着高通量测序技术的快速发展, 环境DNA-宏条形码技术成为构建水生生态系统入侵生物早期监测与预警技术的首选。本文主要综述了基于环境DNA-宏条形码技术的水生生态系统入侵生物的早期监测与预警技术方法; 解析了环境DNA-宏条形码监测系统的应用现状、技术优势; 着重探讨了影响监测结果准确性的I型和II型错误及其产生原因, 并为避免两类错误提供了可行的优化/改进方案; 最后对该方法在水生入侵生物监测中的应用前景进行了展望。     

Likelihood-based genetic mark-recapture estimates when genotype samples are incomplete and contain typing errors

Genotypes produced from samples collected non-invasively in harsh field conditions often lack the full complement of data from the selected microsatellite loci. The application to genetic mark-recapture methodology in wildlife species can therefore be prone to misidentifications leading to both ‘true non-recaptures’ being falsely accepted as recaptures (Type I errors) and ‘true recaptures’ being undetected (Type II errors). Here we present a new likelihood method that allows every pairwise genotype comparison to be evaluated independently. We apply this method to determine the total number of recaptures by estimating and optimising the balance between Type I errors and Type II errors. We show through simulation that the standard error of recapture estimates can be minimised through our algorithms. Interestingly, the precision of our recapture estimates actually improved when we included individuals with missing genotypes, as this increased the number of pairwise comparisons potentially uncovering more recaptures. Simulations suggest that the method is tolerant to per locus error rates of up to 5% per locus and can theoretically work in datasets with as little as 60% of loci genotyped. Our methods can be implemented in datasets where standard mismatch analyses fail to distinguish recaptures. Finally, we show that by assigning a low Type I error rate to our matching algorithms we can generate a dataset of individuals of known capture histories that is suitable for the downstream analysis with traditional mark-recapture methods.