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Natural rubber (NR) latex is considered as a “green material” because of its natural origin and a sustainable choice as well as it minimizes environmental impacts so that it has become an integral part of our daily lives. However, natural latex may contain allergenic proteins that need to be removed and this process affects the properties of vulcanized materials. In this study, an attempt has been made to incorporate cerium oxide (CeO2) into low-protein NR latex and effect of CeO2 content on the mechanical properties of the CeO2/ vulcanized rubber composite films such as tensile modulus 100% (M100), tensile modulus 300% (M300), tensile strength, tear strength was investigated. The results show that the properties of low-protein NR films were stable after 48 hrs of incubation. In particular, the mechanical properties were remarkably improved while increasing CeO2 content from 2 to 4 phr. In addition, aging resistance (AR) ability by evidence of thermal degradation and Q-sun environment test in the presence of CeO2 (4 phr) is excellent whilst AR coefficient is closest to zero. This research has provided an initial prospect of the use of rare earth oxide to produce commercially valuable products from the natural rubber resources in Vietnam.

Oligodeoxynucleotides containing 5-carboxyvinyl-2'-deoxyuridine ((CV) U-containing ODNs) for successful site-specific transition of cytosine to uridine by photo-cross-linking have three parts: the complementary sequence, hairpin loop and the 5'-terminal photoresponsive nucleobase (CV) U. Photo-cross-linking with (CV) U-containing ODNs was performed using UV (366 nm) irradiation, followed by heat treatment for deamination. The cross-linked nucleotide was cleaved by photosplitting (UV, 312 nm). The products were analyzed using restriction fragment length polymorphism and fluorescence measurements. In previous studies, we have successfully performed site-directed photochemical base substitution toward a synthetic single-stranded 100-mer ODN target (ss100-nt) and in vitro-synthesized full-length blue fluorescent protein mRNA as targets. Although the efficiency of C-to-U site-specific transition strongly depends on the sequence and structure of (CV) U-containing ODNs, the relationship between (CV) U-containing ODNs and the deamination efficiency of targeted editing remains unclear. Therefore, in this study, we attempted to identify the optimal sequence and primary structure of (CV) U-containing ODNs for site-directed specific transition. To evaluate the structure-deamination efficiency relationship, a series of eight (CV) U-containing ODNs were designed and studied. We showed that the optimal deamination efficiency was achieved with ODNs having a complementary sequence length slightly more than 14 nt and a hairpin length of 9 nt.

Introduction: Breast cancer is the one of the most common types of cancer as well as the second leading cause of cancer death in women in the world. In recent studies, microRNAs (miRNAs) have been demonstrated to play a crucial role as a new potential biomarker in the association with breast cancer. Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) located on specific miRNA may result in breast cancer. Among the SNPs, SNP rs353291 has shown to be associated with breast cancer in individuals of Caucasian background. Furthermore, this SNP is observed in a high percentage of mutant alleles in the Vietnamese population. Thus, SNP rs353291 was selected as a candidate SNP for investigation in this study. The frequency of SNP rs353291 was evaluated by High Resolution Melting (HRM) method, which is a highly powerful method to detect variants in DNA sequence, especially for SNP genotyping. Methods: In this study, the association between this SNP and risk of breast cancer in the Vietnamese population was evaluated in 90 cases and 96 healthy controls via genotyping using an optimized HRM protocol. Result: The genotyping results revealed that SNP rs353291 is a polymorphism in the Vietnamese population. We have successfully identified frequencies of AA, AG and GG to be 40%, 42.2% and 17.8%, respectively. In particular, the calculated frequencies of allele G was 61.1% while risk allele A was 38.9%. The association between this SNP and breast cancer in Vietnam revealed that there is an obvious decreased risk of breast cancer among Vietnamese population when comparing G allele to A allele (G vs A: OR=0.92, 95% CI: 0.62-1.36, p= 0.677); the results also showed that heterozygote model had a reduced risk of breast cancer compared to dominant model (GA+GG vs AA: OR=0.94, 95% CI: 0.52-1.70, p=0.839). Conclusion: However, since the p-values were >0.05, our results only show a correlation rather than a significant association between SNP rs353291 and breast cancer risk in the Vietnamese population.

Breast cancer is one of the most common malignancies among women worldwide. GWASs have found several potential breast cancer associated SNPs in some populations. Among them, rs13281615, rs889312, rs10941679 and rs3803662 have been found to have strong relationship with breast cancer risk in different populations. Rs3803662 were statisti¬cally significantly associated with breast cancer risk in Asian population, while three others SNPs were showed to have stronger association with breast cancer in American, European and Australian than Asian. In this study, focusing on Vietnamese people only, four these SNPs were investigated to understand more about the association between these variations with breast cancer disease. An optimized genotyping method was used to genotype 600 samples including 300 controls and 300 cases. The result showed that rs13281615, rs889312, and rs10941679 were not associated with Vietnamese breast cancer patients (P>0.05). However, rs3803662 has strong association with breast cancer risk in Vietnamese population (P = 0.00122, OR = 1.454, 95%CI = 1.159-1.826). Allele A plays the role of increasing the risk of breast cancer and the genotype AA shows strongly affecting to increase breast cancer risk. Rs3803662 may involve in the list of markers using for diagnosis breast cancer in Vietnamese people in the future. A further study on larger sample size is certainly required to increase the reliability of the study. We also suggest doing more association studies for other SNPs and analyzing the haplotype to identify multiple breast cancer risk prediction markers for Vietnamese population

In this paper, Ag-Au alloy nanoparticles (NPs) were fabricated by dewetting process to enhance the broadband antireflection performance of textured silicon surfaces. The alloy NPs presented a large range of shapes and sizes, which provided an average reflectance (AR) below 4% over the spectral range of 300~1200 nm, a decrease of ~50% and ~90% as compared to the corresponding monometallic NPs and the original flat Si surfaces, respectively. The superior broadband antireflection demonstrated by the alloy NPs are attributed to the enhanced light trapping by alloy nanoparticle plasmon resonance.