Bilateral synchronous multiple lung nodules: Surgical experience from two cases

Synchronous multiple lung cancer (SMPLC) has been increasingly detected as a result of improved imaging techniques, though the incidence of SMPLC is rare. Surgery is currently the only treatment offering potential cure and long-term survival in patients with SMPLC, and complete resection is widely accepted as the first choice of procedure for this type. However, due to the rarity of this clinical scenario, many surgeons lack experience in surgical treatment of SMPLC. Here, we present two cases whose SMPLC was successfully managed with aggressive surgical therapy through video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery.     

Cerebral Metabolic Changes in a Depression-like Rat Model of Chronic Forced Swimming Studied by Ex vivo High Resolution 1H Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy

Many previous in vivo ¹H magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) studies have shown that patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) are associated with perturbations of cerebral metabolism of neurotransmitters glutamate (Glu) and γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA). In this study, we investigated the changes of cerebral metabolism in a depression-like rat model of chronic forced swimming stress (CFSS). The aims are to further understand the pathophysiological mechanisms underlying CFSS treatment, and to further establish the face and predictive validity of the CFSS model. The results showed that, relative to control, the CFSS rats had significantly reduced Glu, taurine and glutamate + glutamine (Glx) levels in the PFC, and significantly reduced N-acetyl aspartate (NAA) level, Glu level and Glu/GABA ratio in the hippocampus. Taking together, these results suggest that CFSS treatment can induce region-specific changes in the metabolism of Glu. The CFSS model might be used to study antidepressants specifically targeting the central glutamatergic system. Chun-Xia Li and Yaqiang Wang contributed equally to this work.     

稻属多倍体的研究历史及存在问题

稻属Oryza隶属于禾本科Poaceae稻亚科Oryzoideae稻族Oryzeae, 包括20多个种, 其中近1/2的种类为异源多倍体植物。这些多倍体不但数量多而且涉及BC、CD、HJ和HK等多种染色体组构成, 广泛分布于热带亚洲、非洲、大洋洲和拉丁美洲。由于具有重要的经济和理论研究价值, 稻属植物一直在植物学研究中备受瞩目。相应地, 稻属多倍体植物的研究也积累了丰富的资料。本文通过回顾以往对稻属植物的研究历史, 特别关注有关多倍体的研究, 结合我们最近的研究总结了稻属多倍体分类和系统发育关系研究的最新进展, 同时对稻属多倍体研究中存在的问题及未来研究方向进行了讨论。     

Intrasexual selection and group spawning in quacking frogs (Crinia georgiana)

In the Australian frog Crinia georgiana, matings frequentlyinvolve a single female and multiple males (group spawning).The aim of the present study was to demonstrate a connectionbetween variation in the intensity of intrasexual competition,measured by using male density and operational sex ratio (OSR),and the incidence of group spawning. Over a 3-month breedingperiod, male density and OSR varied substantially and were significantlyinfluenced by climatic conditions. The frequency of agonisticinteractions between males was higher in denser choruses. Fightswere typically over the possession of sites used to broadcastadvertisement calls and were almost always won by larger males.At higher densities, males allocated significantly less timeto calling to attract females and spent more time as nonmovingsatellites or roaming through an aggregation (searching). However,large males always called more than did small males. The numberof males involved in a spawning correlated positively with variationin both male density and OSR. Observation of group spawningsrevealed that they generally arose when a satellite male joineda mating pair after a female chose to mate with a calling maleor when a female was seized by a searching male and the pairwas joined by other searching males. These findings, coupledwith past research documenting costs but no benefits of multiplepaternity to females, suggest that competitively inferior malesforce group spawns.     

Transnational Sacralizations: When Daoist Monks meet Global Spiritual Tourists

This article examines the production of sacrality in the context of globalization, through the case of encounters between international spiritual tourists and Chinese monks. The sacred mountain of Huashan has historically been localized in the context of Daoist cosmology, Chinese imperial civilizing, socialist nation-building and, now, global capitalism. While the monks experience Huashan as a gateway for embeddedness into Daoist lineage, ritual, and cosmology, the spiritual tourists approach it as a fountain of raw, consumable energy on a path of disembedding and individuation. But encounters between the two groups lead to the mutual interference and interpenetration of both trajectories. Undermining dichotomist concepts of the sacred which define it as either essentially Other or as socially constructed and contested, the sacrality of Huashan serves as both an anchor for multiple centralizing projects and forces, and as a catalyst and node for the formation of interconnecting and expanding horizontal networks.     

A model of subjective report and objective discrimination as categorical decisions in a vast representational space

Subliminal perception studies have shown that one can objectively discriminate a stimulus without subjectively perceiving it. We show how a minimalist framework based on Signal Detection Theory and Bayesian inference can account for this dissociation, by describing subjective and objective tasks with similar decision-theoretic mechanisms. Each of these tasks relies on distinct response classes, and therefore distinct priors and decision boundaries. As a result, they may reach different conclusions. By formalizing, within the same framework, forced-choice discrimination responses, subjective visibility reports and confidence ratings, we show that this decision model suffices to account for several classical characteristics of conscious and unconscious perception. Furthermore, the model provides a set of original predictions on the nonlinear profiles of discrimination performance obtained at various levels of visibility. We successfully test one such prediction in a novel experiment: when varying continuously the degree of perceptual ambiguity between two visual symbols presented at perceptual threshold, identification performance varies quasi-linearly when the stimulus is unseen and in an ‘all-or-none’ manner when it is seen. The present model highlights how conscious and non-conscious decisions may correspond to distinct categorizations of the same stimulus encoded by a high-dimensional neuronal population vector.     

中药银杏制剂的心血管药理效应:机制与展望

银杏是传统的活血化瘀中药,银杏制剂是现代科技开发的植物药中最为成功的案例之一.目前研究较多的银杏制剂是银杏酮酯,其主要活性成分为银杏黄酮、银杏内酯等,具有较为广泛的心血管药理效应,对多种心血管疾病具有较好的预防和治疗效果.本文对中药银杏制剂的主要活性成分、心血管药理效应及其机制、研究展望做一述评.     

Clothing of Piety,Clothing of Poverty: Object Lessons in a Convent School

This paper focuses on the ways in which memories of the religious habits worn by Catholic teaching sisters prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) came to circulate in Atlantic Canada in the 1990s. At that time, people living in an impoverished rural settlement in northern New Brunswick recalled ominous dark and shrouded figures when discussing the religious past. However, the significance attached to the clothing of piety diverged considerably when the teaching sisters who once worked in that settlement recalled their past. They focused on the very materiality of their clothing as an object that had sensuous properties, constricting and enveloping, limiting and enabling their work. But they also recalled the clothing of others, the clothing of poverty in which their students came to school. One's deictic perspective, as either perceiver or wearer, altered the significance attached to the religious clothing of piety, or the threadbare clothing of poverty. This paper examines the ways in which the memories of objects from the past came to articulate broader grievances.     

Deamidation and isomerization liability analysis of 131 clinical-stage antibodies

Contemporary in vivo and in vitro discovery platform technologies greatly increase the odds of identifying high-affinity monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) towards essentially any desired biologically relevant epitope. Lagging discovery throughput is the ability to select for highly developable mAbs with drug-like properties early in the process. Upstream consideration of developability metrics should reduce the frequency of failures in later development stages. As the field moves towards incorporating biophysical screening assays in parallel to discovery processes, similar approaches should also be used to ensure robust chemical stability. Optimization of chemical stability in the early stages of discovery has the potential to reduce complications in formulation development and improve the potential for successful liquid formulations. However, at present, our knowledge of the chemical stability characteristics of clinical-stage therapeutic mAbs is fragmented and lacks comprehensive comparative assessment. To address this knowledge gap, we produced 131 mAbs with amino acid sequences corresponding to the variable regions of clinical-stage mAbs, subjected these to low and high pH stresses and identified the resulting modifications at amino acid-level resolution via tryptic peptide mapping. Among this large set of mAbs, relatively high frequencies of asparagine deamidation events were observed in CDRs H2 and L1, while CDRs H3, H2 and L1 contained relatively high frequencies of instances of aspartate isomerization.