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Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is one of the most common histological types of esophageal cancers. It can seriously affect public health, particularly in Eastern Asia. Early diagnosis and effective therapy of ESCC can significantly help improve patient prognoses. The visualization of intrapapillary capillary loops (IPCLs) under magnification endoscopy (ME) can greatly support the identification of ESCC occurrences by endoscopists. This paper proposes an artificial-intelligence-assisted endoscopic diagnosis approach using deep learning for localizing and identifying IPCLs to diagnose early-stage ESCC. An improved Faster region-based convolutional network (R-CNN) with a polarized self-attention (PSA)-HRNetV2p backbone was employed to automatically detect IPCLs in ME images. In our study, 2887 ME with blue laser imaging (ME-BLI) images of 246 patients and 493 ME with narrow-band imaging (ME-NBI) images of 81 patients were collected from multiple hospitals and used to train and test our detection model. The ME-NBI images were used as the external testing set to verify the generalizability of the model. The experimental evaluation revealed that the proposed method achieved a recall of 79.25%, precision of 75.54%, F1-score of 0.764 and mean average precision (mAP) of 74.95%. Our method outperformed other existing approaches in our evaluation. It can effectively improve the accuracy of ESCC detection and provide a useful adjunct to the assessment of early-stage ESCC for endoscopists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plant fermentation extracts (PFEs) produced from fermenting various fruits and vegetables by microorganisms have traditionally been consumed as healthy beverages in Asia. Herein, the immunomodulatory activities of a novel polysaccharide (AP) isolated from PFE were examined in RAW264.7 cells. The results showed that AP was composed of Rha, Xyl, Man and Glu in a molar ratio of 9.7:27.6:8.81:53.85 and the average molecular weight was 4.81 × 105 Da. Our data showed that AP could significantly enhance the phagocytic activity of RAW264.7 cells and their ability to release NO, TNF-α, IL-6 and IL-10. Furthermore, AP could significantly up-regulate the mRNA expression of iNOS, cytokines (TNF-α, IL-6, IL-10) and pattern recognition receptors (TLR2, MR, GR, CR3 and SR). Western blotting demonstrated that the regulation of NO and TNF-α were mediated through the NF-κB and MAPK signalling pathways. These findings helped to elucidate the immunomodulatory properties of the polysaccharide AP and PFE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asian cultivated rice (Oryza sativa L.) consists of two main subspecies, indica and japonica. Indica has higher nitrate-absorption activity than japonica, but the molecular mechanisms underlying that activity remain elusive. Here we show that variation in a nitrate-transporter gene, NRT1.1B (OsNPF6.5), may contribute to this divergence in nitrate use. Phylogenetic analysis revealed that NRT1.1B diverges between indica and japonica. NRT1.1B-indica variation was associated with enhanced nitrate uptake and root-to-shoot transport and upregulated expression of nitrate-responsive genes. The selection signature of NRT1.1B-indica suggests that nitrate-use divergence occurred during rice domestication. Notably, field tests with near-isogenic and transgenic lines confirmed that the japonica variety carrying the NRT1.1B-indica allele had significantly improved grain yield and nitrogen-use efficiency (NUE) compared to the variety without that allele. Our results show that variation in NRT1.1B largely explains nitrate-use divergence between indica and japonica and that NRT1.1B-indica can potentially improve the NUE of japonica. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The results from previous studies on association of TLR9 polymorphisms with the risk of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) remained contradictory. Therefore, a meta-analysis was performed to assess the association between TLR9 polymorphisms and SLE susceptibility. A literature-based search was conducted to identify all relevant studies. Pooled data were estimated by fixed- and random-effects models when appropriate. We examined seven publications, showing that there were only three polymorphisms (−1486C/T, +1174A/G and +1635C/T) existing in Asian populations. The meta-analysis indicated that none of these three polymorphisms showed any significant association with SLE risk in Asian populations. In conclusion, the present study indicates that TLR9 polymorphisms are not candidates for susceptibility to SLE, at least, in eastern Asian population. Furthermore, a large number of studies should be performed to explore the association of TLR9 polymorphisms with the risk of SLE in other populations, such as Europeans, Americans and Africans. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]