Exposure to 1950-MHz TD-SCDMA Electromagnetic Fields Affects the Apoptosis of Astrocytes via Caspase-3-Dependent Pathway

The usage of mobile phone increases globally. However, there is still a paucity of data about the impact of electromagnetic fields (EMF) on human health. This study investigated whether EMF radiation would alter the biology of glial cells and act as a tumor-promoting agent. We exposed rat astrocytes and C6 glioma cells to 1950-MHz TD-SCDMA for 12, 24 and 48 h respectively, and found that EMF exposure had differential effects on rat astroctyes and C6 glioma cells. A 48 h of exposure damaged the mitochondria and induced significant apoptosis of astrocytes. Moreover, caspase-3, a hallmark of apoptosis, was highlighted in astrocytes after 48 h of EMF exposure, accompanied by a significantly increased expression of bax and reduced level of bcl-2. The tumorigenicity assays demonstrated that astrocytes did not form tumors in both control and exposure groups. In contrast, the unexposed and exposed C6 glioma cells show no significant differences in both biological feature and tumor formation ability. Therefore, our results implied that exposure to the EMF of 1950-MHz TD-SCDMA may not promote the tumor formation, but continuous exposure damaged the mitochondria of astrocytes and induce apoptosis through a caspase-3-dependent pathway with the involvement of bax and bcl-2.     

Identification of miRNAs and their targets from Brassica napus by high-throughput sequencing and degradome analysis

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are endogenous regulators of a broad range of physiological processes and act by either degrading mRNA or blocking its translation. Oilseed rape (Brassica napus) is one of the most important crops in China, Europe and other Asian countries with publicly available expressed sequence tags (ESTs) and genomic survey sequence (GSS) databases, but little is known about its miRNAs and their targets. To date, only 46 miRNAs have been identified in B. napus. RESULTS: Forty-one conserved and 62 brassica-specific candidate B. napus miRNAs, including 20 miRNA* sequences, were identified using Solexa sequencing technology. Furthermore, 33 non-redundant mRNA targets of conserved brassica miRNAs and 19 new non-redundant mRNA targets of novel brassica-specific miRNAs were identified by genome-scale sequencing of mRNA degradome. CONCLUSIONS: This study describes large scale cloning and characterization of B. napus miRNAs and their potential targets, providing the foundation for further characterization of miRNA function in the regulation of diverse physiological processes in B. napus.     

A corpus of full-text journal articles is a robust evaluation tool for revealing differences in performance of biomedical natural language processing tools

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: We introduce the linguistic annotation of a corpus of 97 full-text biomedical publications, known as the Colorado Richly Annotated Full Text (CRAFT) corpus. We further assess the performance of existing tools for performing sentence splitting, tokenization, syntactic parsing, and named entity recognition on this corpus. RESULTS: Many biomedical natural language processing systems demonstrated large differences between their previously published results and their performance on the CRAFT corpus when tested with the publicly available models or rule sets. Trainable systems differed widely with respect to their ability to build high-performing models based on this data. CONCLUSIONS: The finding that some systems were able to train high-performing models based on this corpus is additional evidence, beyond high inter-annotator agreement, that the quality of the CRAFT corpus is high. The overall poor performance of various systems indicates that considerable work needs to be done to enable natural language processing systems to work well when the input is full-text journal articles. The CRAFT corpus provides avaluable resource to the biomedical natural language processing community for evaluation and training of new models for biomedical full text publications.     

不同老化程度的不结球白菜种子活力指标变化及其相关分析

以不结球白菜品种‘高梗白’种子为材料,采用高温(42℃)高湿(相对湿度100%)人工加速老化处理,研究不同老化程度下种子活力指标的变化及其相关性。结果显示:(1)发芽指标(除不正常苗率)和出苗指标均随种子老化程度的加深而显著下降,不正常苗率显著上升。(2)随老化程度的加深,种子中超氧化物歧化酶(SOD)、过氧化物酶(POD)、过氧化氢酶(CAT)活性显著下降;种子的超氧阴离子(O2.-)产生速率先增高后降低,过氧化氢(H2O2)含量逐渐增加,丙二醛(MDA)含量下降,种子浸出液相对电导率升高;种子的可溶性糖含量、可溶性蛋白含量和脱氢酶活性下降,α-淀粉酶活性先升高后降低。(3)老化种子的发芽势、发芽率、SOD活性、H2O2含量、相对电导率和可溶性糖含量与出苗指标间均存在极显著相关性。研究表明,不结球白菜种子的发芽势、发芽率、SOD活性、H2O2含量和可溶性糖含量随老化程度加深的变化规律一致,且指标间以及与出苗指标均有极显著相关性,可以作为检验不结球白菜种子活力的候选指标。     

石竹属植物叶表皮特征及其系统学意义

用光学显微镜和扫描电镜,对石竹属12个种的植物叶表皮特征进行观察,统计并测量叶表皮气孔大小、气孔密度及气孔指数。结果表明,石竹属植物叶表皮细胞形态(表面观)为长方形和不规则多边形。乳突只存在于针叶石竹、高石竹和细茎石竹中。按气孔形状可将其分为了3个类型:椭圆形、卵圆形和长方形。研究结果对石竹属的系统分类和种间亲缘关系研究具有一定的参考价值。     

微小RNA-499的表达特征及生物学作用

微小RNA-499（mieroRNA-499,miR-499）是近年来发现的肌球蛋白基因编码的miRNA（miRNA encoded by myosingene,myo—miR）家族新成员,目前发现它主要在人和动物的心肌和骨骼肌中表达,同时在其它多种组织中也可以被检测到。miR-499在心肌细胞的分化中起着至关重要的调控作用。在成人心肌和骨骼肌中,miR-499通过促进β-肌球蛋白重链（β—myosin heavy chain,p-MHC）的表达,使肌细胞的氧代谢和耐受力增强。miR-499可能通过不同的信号转导通路,参与了不同的心肌病理过程。此外,miR-499的血清／血浆水平在多种疾病患者中有显著变化,miR-499前体（pre—miR-499）的多态性也与人体对多种疾病的易感性相关,这些使其有望成为某些疾病临床检验的生物学标志物之一。     

Arabidopsis phosphatidylinositol monophosphate 5-kinase 2 is involved in root gravitropism through regulation of polar auxin transport by affecting the cycling of PIN proteins

Phosphatidylinositol monophosphate 5-kinase (PIP5K) catalyzes the synthesis of PI-4,5-bisphosphate (PtdIns(4,5)P(2)) by phosphorylation of PI-4-phosphate at the 5 position of the inositol ring, and is involved in regulating multiple developmental processes and stress responses. We here report on the functional characterization of Arabidopsis PIP5K2, which is expressed during lateral root initiation and elongation, and whose expression is enhanced by exogenous auxin. The knockout mutant pip5k2 shows reduced lateral root formation, which could be recovered with exogenous auxin, and interestingly, delayed root gravity response that could not be recovered with exogenous auxin. Crossing with the DR5-GUS marker line and measurement of free IAA content confirmed the reduced auxin accumulation in pip5k2. In addition, analysis using the membrane-selective dye FM4-64 revealed the decelerated vesicle trafficking caused by PtdIns(4,5)P(2) reduction, which hence results in suppressed cycling of PIN proteins (PIN2 and 3), and delayed redistribution of PIN2 and auxin under gravistimulation in pip5k2 roots. On the contrary, PtdIns(4,5)P(2) significantly enhanced the vesicle trafficking and cycling of PIN proteins. These results demonstrate that PIP5K2 is involved in regulating lateral root formation and root gravity response, and reveal a critical role of PIP5K2/PtdIns(4,5)P(2) in root development through regulation of PIN proteins, providing direct evidence of crosstalk between the phosphatidylinositol signaling pathway and auxin response, and new insights into the control of polar auxin transport.     

山楂酸减少L02细胞脂质累积作用的研究(英文)

非酒精性脂肪性肝在发达国家和发展中国家中是一种常见的肝脏疾病。引起非酒精性脂肪性肝病的最常见原因有肥胖、糖尿病和高胆固醇。尽管非酒精性脂肪性肝病的发病率日益升高,事实上至今尚未发现可以用于治疗的药物。山楂酸是一种五环三萜化合物,已报道具有多种药理特性,包括抗炎、抗氧化以及免疫调节作用。我们的前期研究表明,山楂酸能够抑制高脂饲料诱导大鼠非酒精性脂肪性肝病的生成。本研究中,我们将探讨山楂酸体外对肝细胞(LO2)脂质累积的抑制作用。结果表明,山楂酸可抑制游离脂肪酸(FFA)诱导的LO2细胞脂质累积,进一步研究表明,山楂酸可抑制LO2细胞的SCAP mRNA水平和蛋白水平的表达。     

Molecular mechanism of the enhanced virulence of 2009 pandemic Influenza A (H1N1) virus from D222G mutation in the hemagglutinin: a molecular modeling study

D222G mutation of the hemagglutinin (HA) is of special interest because of its close association with the enhanced virulence of 2009 pandemic influenza A (H1N1) virus through the increased binding affinity to α2,3-linked sialylated glycan receptors. However, there is still a lack of detailed understanding about the molecular mechanism of this enhanced virulence. Here, molecular dynamics simulation and binding free energy calculation were performed to explore the altered glycan receptor binding mechanism of HA upon the D222G mutation by studying the interaction of one α2,3-linked sialylglycan (sequence: SIA-GAL-NAG) with the wild type and D222G mutated HA. The binding free energy calculation based on the molecular mechanics generalized Born surface area (MM-GBSA) method indicates that the D222G mutated HA has a much stronger binding affinity with the studied α2,3-linked glycan than the wild type. This is consistent with the experimental result. The increased binding free energy of D222G mutant mainly comes from the increased energy contribution of Gln223. The structural analysis proves that the altered electrostatic potential of receptor binding domain (RBD) and the increased flexibility of 220-loop are the essential reasons leading to the increased affinity of HA to α2,3-linked sialic acid glycans. The obtained results of this study have allowed a deeper understanding of the receptor recognition mechanism and the pathogenicity of influenza virus, which will be valuable to the structure-based inhibitors design targeting influenza virus entry process.