Craniometric differences between karyotypic races of the common shrew Sorex araneus (Mammalia) as a result of limited hybridization

The contact points of four karyotypic races (St. Petersburg, Moscow, Seliger and West Dvina) of the common shrew Sorex araneus L. were studied at the Valdai Hills (European Russia) in an area unimpeded by geographic barriers. The populations of the races are separated by narrow hybrid zones that represent the most complex heterozygous hybrid karyotypes. At these points of contact, the morphometric differentiation of karyotype races was examined in 12 cranial measurements in 190 shrews of a known karyotype. A comparison of the mean values in studied samples of immature shrews revealed statistically significant differences and the correlation of some measurements which describe the level of musculus temporalis. It has been proposed that morphometric differences in the karyotypic races were preserved and accumulated because of a 50% reduction of the frequencies of hybrids. The deviation from the Hardy-Weinberg ration in the frequencies of the genotype and haploid sets of chromosomes in the hybrid zones can be attributed to a number of fatalities of hybrid embryos or the nonrandom mating of karyotypic races. The ethological isolation might arise in the evolution of some karyotypic races from the reduced fitness of the hybrids.     

LncRNA TP73-AS1 enhances the malignant properties of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma by increasing MMP14 expression through miRNA -200a sponging

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is an invasive and aggressive cancer that remains a major threat to human health across the globe. Despite advances in cancer treatments and diagnosis, the prognosis of PDAC patients remains poor. New and more effective PDAC therapies are therefore urgently required. In this study, we identified a novel host factor, namely the LncRNA TP73-AS1, as overexpressed in PDAC tissues compared to adjacent healthy tissue samples. The overexpression of TP-73-AS1 was found to correlate with both PDAC stage and lymph node metastasis. To reveal its role in PDCA, we targeted TP73-AS1 using LnRNA inhibitors in a range of pancreatic cancer (PC) cell lines. We found that the inhibition of TP73-AS1 led to a loss of MMP14 expression in PC cells and significantly inhibited their migratory and invasive capacity. No effects of TP73-AS1 on cell survival or proliferation were observed. Mechanistically, we found that TP73-AS1 suppressed the expression of the known oncogenic miR-200a. Taken together, these data highlight the prognostic potential of TP73-AS1 for PC patients and highlight it as a potential anti-PDAC therapeutic target.     

Phrasal Paraphrase Based Question Reformulation for Archived Question Retrieval

Lexical gap in cQA search, resulted by the variability of languages, has been recognized as an important and widespread phenomenon. To address the problem, this paper presents a question reformulation scheme to enhance the question retrieval model by fully exploring the intelligence of paraphrase in phrase-level. It compensates for the existing paraphrasing research in a suitable granularity, which either falls into fine-grained lexical-level or coarse-grained sentence-level. Given a question in natural language, our scheme first detects the involved key-phrases by jointly integrating the corpus-dependent knowledge and question-aware cues. Next, it automatically extracts the paraphrases for each identified key-phrase utilizing multiple online translation engines, and then selects the most relevant reformulations from a large group of question rewrites, which is formed by full permutation and combination of the generated paraphrases. Extensive evaluations on a real world data set demonstrate that our model is able to characterize the complex questions and achieves promising performance as compared to the state-of-the-art methods.     

A tandem enzymatic hydrolysis of 3-acetylthio-2-methylpropionic methy ester

Summary Enzymatic hydrolysis of racemic 3-acetylthio-2-methylpropionic methyl ester catalyzed by bovine pancreatic protease and Mucor javanicus lipase showed opposite enantioselecivity. A tandem hydrolysis of the ester catalyzed by these two enzymes gives enantiomerically enriched (S)-3-acetylthio-2-methylpropionic acid, a building block of captopril.     

Structure of vegetation of steppe hills in the Altai piedmont

The phytocenotic diversity of the Altai steppe piedmont is described. Plant communities were ordinated along the moisture gradient. The results were used to analyze the structure of vegetation of steppe hill massifs. Distribution of steppe vegetation over an ideal hill was simulated, and the main patterns of distribution were typified.     

Oculomotor activities in monkeys with N-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine-induced syndrome of parkinsonism

In twoMacaca rhesus monkeys that received repeated N-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP) injections (single dose 0.2 mg/kg, i.m.; cumulative dose 11.2–13.3 mg), changes in characteristics of spontaneous saccadic eye movements and vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) were evaluated. With the development of severe behavioral disturbances, amplitude of spontaneous saccadic eye movements gradually decreased. Pronounced changes in duration of saccadic eye movements, frequency of spontaneous saccades, and their pattern were observed. No changes in parameters of VOR slow component were recorded, but high total MPTP doses suppressed fast phase of the reflex.Neirofiziologiya/Neurophysiology, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 184–190, May–June, 1993.