Role of Chitosan in the Regulation of the Growth,Antioxidant System and Photosynthetic Characteristics of Maize Seedlings under Cadmium Stress

Russian Journal of Plant Physiology - Cadmium (Cd) pollution was becoming more and more serious; there is an urgent need for an effective solution to inhibit the harm of cadmium stress. Chitosan...     

DHHC4 and DHHC5 Facilitate Fatty Acid Uptake by Palmitoylating and Targeting CD36 to the Plasma Membrane

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PyMINEr Finds Gene and Autocrine-Paracrine Networks from Human Islet scRNA-Seq

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Probiotic Therapy (BIO-THREE) Mitigates Intestinal Microbial Imbalance and Intestinal Damage Caused by Oxaliplatin

Probiotics and Antimicrobial Proteins - Gastrointestinal mucositis associated with the use of chemotherapeutic drugs can seriously affect the quality of life of patients. In this study, a probiotic...     

Accurate cancer classification using expressions of very few genes

We aim at finding the smallest set of genes that can ensure highly accurate classification of cancers from microarray data by using supervised machine learning algorithms. The significance of finding the minimum gene subsets is three-fold: 1) it greatly reduces the computational burden and "noise" arising from irrelevant genes. In the examples studied in this paper, finding the minimum gene subsets even allows for extraction of simple diagnostic rules which lead to accurate diagnosis without the need for any classifiers, 2) it simplifies gene expression tests to include only a very small number of genes rather than thousands of genes, which can bring down the cost for cancer testing significantly, 3) it calls for further investigation into the possible biological relationship between these small numbers of genes and cancer development and treatment. Our simple yet very effective method involves two steps. In the first step, we choose some important genes using a feature importance ranking scheme. In the second step, we test the classification capability of all simple combinations of those important genes by using a good classifier. For three "small" and "simple" data sets with two, three, and four cancer (sub)types, our approach obtained very high accuracy with only two or three genes. For a "large" and "complex" data set with 14 cancer types, we divided the whole problem into a group of binary classification problems and applied the 2-step approach to each of these binary classification problems. Through this "divide-and-conquer" approach, we obtained accuracy comparable to previously reported results but with only 28 genes rather than 16,063 genes. In general, our method can significantly reduce the number of genes required for highly reliable diagnosis     

Downregulation of lysyl oxidase-like 4 LOXL4 by miR-135a-5p promotes lung cancer progression in vitro and in vivo

Aberrant microRNAs are widely identified in multiple cancers, including lung cancer. miR-135a-5p can function as a significant tumor regulator in diverse cancers via impacting multiple genes in oncogenic pathways. Nevertheless, the biological role of miR-135a-5p in lung cancer is poorly known. Here, we investigated its function in lung cancer. As exhibited, miR-135a-5p was elevated in lung cancer cells in contrast to BEAS-2B cells. Then, we inhibited miR-135a-5p expression by transfecting LV-anti-miR-135a-5p into lung cancer cells. As displayed, miR-135a-5p was obviously reduced in A549 and H1299 cells. Knockdown of miR-135a-5p repressed lung cancer cell growth and cell proliferation. Meanwhile, cell colony formation capacity was depressed, cell apoptosis was enhanced and cell cycle progression was blocked in G1 phase by inhibition of miR-135a-5p in vitro. Additionally, the migration and invasion of A549 and H1299 cells was strongly depressed by LV-anti-miR-135a-5p. For another, by using informatics analysis, lysyl oxidase-like 4 (LOXL4) was speculated as the downstream target of miR-135a-5p. We validated their direct correlation and moreover, overexpression of miR-135a-5p restrained LOXL4 levels in lung cancer cells. Subsequently, we proved that miR-135a-5p promoted lung cancer development via targeting LOXL4 by carrying out the in vivo assays. Taken these together, our study revealed miR-135a-5p might be indicated as a perspective for lung cancer via targeting LOXL4.     

Purple sweet potato color attenuated NLRP3 inflammasome by inducing autophagy to delay endothelial senescence

Autophagy is a vital negative factor regulating cellular senescence. Purple sweet potato color (PSPC), one type of flavonoid, has been demonstrated to suppress endothelial senescence and restore endothelial function in diabetic mice by inhibiting the nucleotide-binding oligomerization domain, leucine rich repeat and pyrin domain containing protein 3 (NLRP3) inflammasome. However, the roles of autophagy in the inflammatory response during endothelial senescence are unknown. Here, we found that PSPC augmented autophagy to restrict high-glucose-induced premature endothelial senescence. In addition, PSPC administration impaired endothelium aging in diabetic mice by increasing autophagy. Inhibition of autophagy accelerated endothelial senescence, while enhancement of autophagy delayed senescence. Moreover, deactivation of the NLRP3 inflammasome triggered by PSPC was autophagy-dependent. Autophagy receptor microtubule-associated protein 1 light chain 3 and p62 interacted with the inflammasome component NLRP3, suggesting that autophagosomes target the NLRP3 inflammasome and deliver it to the lysosome for degradation. Altogether, PSPC amplified cellular autophagy, subsequently attenuated NLRP3 inflammasome activity and finally delayed endothelial senescence to ameliorate cardiovascular complication. These results suggest a potential therapeutic target in senescence-related cardiovascular diseases.     

Erratum: “CTAB-PEG DNA Extraction from Fungi with High Contents of Polysaccharides”

Molecular Biology - The original article can be found online at DOI: 10.1134/S0026893318040088 Page 622, in Reagents and Solutions should read 20 mg/mL proteinase K; Page 622, in Reagents...     

Proteomic analysis of the similarities and differences of soil drought and polyethylene glycol stress responses in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.)

Plant Molecular Biology - Our results reveal both soil drought and PEG can enhance malate, glutathione and ascorbate metabolism, and proline biosynthesis, whereas soil drought induced these...