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Background: Immune-related characteristics can serve as reliable prognostic biomarkers in various cancers. Herein, we aimed to construct an individualized immune prognostic signature in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC)., Methods: This study retrospectively included 455 NPC samples and 39 normal healthy nasopharyngeal tissue specimens. Samples from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) were obtained as discovery cohort to screen candidate prognostic immune-related gene pairs based on relative expression ordering of the genes. Quantitative real-time reverse transcription-PCR was used to detect the selected genes to construct an immune-related gene pair signature in training cohort, which comprised 118 clinical samples, and was then validated in validation cohort 1, comprising 92 clinical samples, and validation cohort 2, comprising 88 samples from GEO., Results: We identified 26 immune-related gene pairs as prognostic candidates in discovery cohort. A prognostic immune signature comprising 11 immune gene pairs was constructed in training cohort. In validation cohort 1, the immune signature could significantly distinguish patients with high or low risk in terms of progression-free survival (PFS) (hazard ratio [HR] 2.66, 95 % confidence interval (CI) 1.17-6.02, P=0.015) and could serve as an independent prognostic factor for PFS in multivariate analysis (HR 2.66, 95 % CI 1.17-6.02, P=0.019). Similar results were obtained using validation cohort 2, in which PFS was significantly worse in high risk group than in low risk group (HR 3.02, 95 % CI 1.12-8.18, P=0.022)., Conclusions: The constructed immune signature showed promise for estimating prognosis in NPC. It has potential for translation into clinical practice after prospective validation., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

As one of the important psychological stress reactions, Micro-expressions (MEs) are spontaneous and subtle facial movements, which usually occur in a high-stake situation and can reveal genuine human feelings and cognition. ME, Recognition (MER) has essential applications in many fields such as lie detection, criminal investigation, and psychological healing. However, due to the challenges of learning discriminative ME features via fleeting facial subtle reactions as well as the shortage of available MEs data, this research topic is still far from well-studied. To this end, in this paper, we propose a deep prototypical learning framework, namely ME-PLAN, with a local attention mechanism for the MER problem. Specifically, ME-PLAN consists of two components, i.e., a 3D residual prototypical network and a local-wise attention module, where the former aims to learn the precise ME feature prototypes through expression-related knowledge transfer and episodic training, and the latter could facilitate the attention to the local facial movements. Furthermore, to alleviate the dilemma that most MER methods need to depend on manually annotated apex frames, we propose an apex frame spotting method with Unimodal Pattern Constrained (UPC) and further extract ME key-frames sequences based on the detected apex frames to train our proposed ME-PLAN in an end-to-end manner. Finally, through extensive experiments and interpretable analysis regarding the apex frame spotting and MER on composite-database, we demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed methods., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Herein, a simple and sensitive Cu 2+ -assisted fluorescence switch biosensor for the detection of coenzyme A (CoA) was proposed by employing nitrogen-doped carbon dots (N-CDs). N-CDs were successfully synthesized by sodium alginate and melatonin via pyrolysis. The as-prepared N-CDs were spherical with an average diameter of 2.8 nm and exhibited blue emission (λ em  = 480 nm, λ ex  = 360 nm) with a high fluorescence quantum yield of 50.2%. The intense blue emission of the N-CDs could be effectively quenched by copper ions through the formation of the N-CDs/Cu 2+ complex. With the introduction of CoA, a more stable CoA/Cu 2+ complex formed, leading to the fluorescence recovery of N-CDs. Based on this strategy, CoA could be sensitively and selectively detected with a good linear relationship in the range of 0.02-5.00 μM and with a detection limit of 12 nM. In addition, this sensor was applied for CoA detection in human serum samples with satisfactory recovery. The results showed great potential towards advancing applications in CoA-dependent bioresearch., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Purpose: Aim of this study was to evaluate the prognostic value of the tumor volume reduction rate (TVRR) of neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT) in patients with locoregional advanced nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC)., Methods: We collected the clinical data of 263 patients with locoregional advanced NPC receiving NACT and subsequent radiotherapy from two hospitals: a training cohort (n = 130) was obtained from one hospital and a validation cohort was obtained the other hospital (n = 133). By follow-up and calculating the TVRR of all patients, the prognostic value of the TVRR was analyzed though a univariate and multivariate Cox regression model. A cut-off point of the TVRR relating to survival was explored by means of the Youden index, and the prognostic value of the TNM stage plus TVRR was measured by creating receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves., Results: 12.6%, a cut-off point of TVRR, was found to best predict DFS. Patients with a TVRR > 12.6% had better DFS (hazard ratio, 0.160, 95% confidence interval 0.072-0.354; P < 0.001), LRRFS (0.064, 0.013-0.310; 0.001) and DMFS (0.274, 0.106-0.711; 0.008) than patients with a TVRR ≤ 12.6%. The TVRR was a significant independent prognostic factor for OS, DFS, LRRFS and DMFS. Combining the TVRR and TNM stage enhanced the ability to predict DFS and LRRFS., Conclusions: The TVRR of NACT is an independent prognostic factor for patients with locoregional advanced NPC receiving radiotherapy. Adding the TVRR to the original TNM staging system improves the prognostic value for locoregional advanced NPC., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Copper (Cu)-transporting P-type ATPase (CTPA) genes have been documented to play an important role in resistance to heavy metals. However, our understanding of roles of CTPA genes of the filamentous fungi was based only on sequence similarity prediction before. In a previous study, we isolated a Penicillum janthinellum strain GXCR of higher tolerance to Cu (200 mM). In this study, we cloned the partial cDNA of CTPA gene, named PcpA, from the strain GXCR. Sequence alignment indicated that the cloned cDNA sequence has the highest identity (94.4%) with a predictive CTPA gene of Aspergillus clavatus. The PcpA-encoded protein, termed PcpA, has classical functional domains of CTPAs, and shows differences from reported CTPAs in some specific sequence motifs and transmembrane regions. Expression of the PcpA was induced by extracellular Cu, cadmium (Cd), and silver (Ag). PcpA RNA interference (RNAi) mutants with a reduced level of PcpA mRNA were more sensitive to Cu, iron, Cd, and Ag than the wild-type (WT) strain GXCR. When grown in the presence of Cu, iron, and Cd, intracellular Cu and iron contents in the PcpA RNAi mutant were significantly (P<0.05) lower than those in the WT; However, intracellular Cd content in the mutant was significantly (P<0.05) higher than that in the WT. Taken together, it can be concluded that the PcpA functions in Cu uptake and homeostasis, iron uptake, and Cd export from the cytosol to the extracytosol.