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Bisphenol A (BPA) is an environmental endocrine disruptor which has been detected in human bodies. Many studies have implied that BPA exposure is harmful to human health. Previous studies mainly focused on BPA effects on estrogen receptor (ER)-positive cells. Genome-wide impacts of BPA on gene expression in ER-negative cells is unclear. In this study, we performed RNA-seq to characterize BPA-induced cellular and molecular impacts on ER-negative HEK293 cells. The microscopic observation showed that low-dose BPA exposure did not affect cell viability and morphology. Gene expression profiling analysis identified a list of differentially expressed genes in response to BPA exposure in HEK293 cells. These genes were involved in variable important biological processes including ion transport, cysteine metabolic process, apoptosis, DNA damage repair, etc. Notably, BPA up-regulated the expression of ERCC5 encoding a DNA endonuclease for nucleotide-excision repair. Further electrochemical experiment showed that BPA induced significant DNA damage in ER-positive MCF-7 cells but not in ER-negative HEK293 cells. Collectively, our study revealed that ER-negative HEK293 cells employed mechanisms in response to BPA exposure different from ER-positive cells.

A sensitive LC-MS/MS method was developed for the determination of bergapten in dog plasma. The chromatographic separation was carried out on a Hypersil ODS column with a mobile phase consisting of methanol-water. The plasma sample was precipitated with methanol and prepare for injecting onto the LC-MS/MS system. The detection was performed on a triple quadrupole tandem mass spectrometer by MRM via electro spray ionization source. The standard curve for bergapten was linear over the concentration range of 0.5―500 ng/mL with a lower limit of quantification of 0.5 ng/mL. The inter-day and intra-day precision (R.S.D.%) for bergapten varied between 3.4 and 11.5. The corresponding inter-day and intra-day accuracy (Bias%) ranged between ― 3.8 and 6.9. For the pharmacokinetic analysis of serum, the mean (SD) values obtained for the bergapten were as follows: C max , 228.5 (14.3) ng/ml; T max , 4.2 (0.4) h; t 1/2 , 6.9 (2.3) h; AUC 0-t h, 2507.2 (168.5) ng·h/mL and AUC 0―∞ , 3219.2 (211.4) ng·h/mL, respectively.

Trypanosoma brucei is a unicellular flagellated eukaryotic parasite that causes African trypanosomiasis in human and domestic animals with devastating health and economic consequences. Recent studies have revealed the important roles of the single flagellum of T. brucei in many aspects, especially that the flagellar motility is required for the viability of the bloodstream form T. brucei, suggesting that impairment of the flagellar function may provide a promising cure for African sleeping sickness. Knowing the flagellum proteome is crucial to study the molecular mechanism of the flagellar functions. Here we present a novel computational method for identifying flagellar proteins in T. brucei, called trypanosome flagellar protein predictor (TFPP). TFPP was developed based on a list of selected discriminating features derived from protein sequences, and could predict flagellar proteins with ∼92% specificity at a ∼84% sensitivity rate. Applied to the whole T. brucei proteome, TFPP reveals 811 more flagellar proteins with high confidence, suggesting that the flagellar proteome covers ∼10% of the whole proteome. Comparison of the expression profiles of the whole T. brucei proteome at three typical life cycle stages found that ∼45% of the flagellar proteins were significantly changed in expression levels between the three life cycle stages, indicating life cycle stage-specific regulation of flagellar functions in T. brucei. Overall, our study demonstrated that TFPP is highly effective in identifying flagellar proteins and could provide opportunities to study the trypanosome flagellar proteome systematically. Furthermore, the web server for TFPP can be freely accessed at http:/wukong.tongji.edu.cn/tfpp.

Because of the fluctuation and intermittence of solar light, output generation of photovoltaic power system keeps continuous change. this determines it can not to be used as main source of frequency regulation like traditional thermal and hydro units. the output generation will be fluctuated rapidly in a large scale when sunlight intensity changes quickly. to make photovoltaic generation better utilized, photovoltaic plants always configure certain energy storage equipment. another effective way is to dispatch photovoltaic generation in cooperation with traditional energy of the operation area, which can further weaken the negative effects of photovoltaic generation. based on unit coordination control and flexible target setting, this paper has proposed a new dispatch method of multi-source power supply to meet the requirement when large scale photovoltaic generation connected to power grid.

microDoR Human is a web server tool based on machine learning algorithm to predict Human miRNA-mediated gene silencing: mRNA degradation or translational repression. For a miRNA-mRNA interaction, microDoR Human identifies whether the target mRNA is cleaved or translationally inhibite. microDoR Human is expected to serve as a useful tool for understanding of miRNA-mediated gene regulation. The microDoR Human 1.0 can be available in http://reprod.njmu.edu.cn/microdor /.

Computational analysis of microarray data has provided an effective way to identify disease-related genes. Traditional disease gene selection methods from microarray data such as statistical test always focus on differentially expressed genes in different samples by individual gene prioritization. These traditional methods might miss differentially coexpressed (DCE) gene subsets because they ignore the interaction between genes. In this paper, MIClique algorithm is proposed to identify DEC gene subsets based on mutual information and clique analysis. Mutual information is used to measure the coexpression relationship between each pair of genes in two different kinds of samples. Clique analysis is a commonly used method in biological network, which generally represents biological module of similar function. By applying the MIClique algorithm to real gene expression data, some DEC gene subsets which correlated under one experimental condition but uncorrelated under another condition are detected from the graph of colon dataset and leukemia dataset.

Inquiring into the interrelated factors of complications of functional endoscopic sinus surgery (FESS).The complications of 1,207 FESS were reported. The complications were discussed within the fixed indication and the resection extent.The over/all complications rate was 3.0%. Bleeding and periorbital ecchyosis were the common complications, and 1 temporary diplopia, 2 fever of undetermined origin were found in this group.The lower rate of complication of FESS is related to limited resection. FESS are a safe procedure in experienced hands.

Protein turnover metabolism plays important roles in cell cycle progression, signal transduction, and differentiation. Those proteins with short half-lives are involved in various regulatory processes. To better understand the regulation of cell process, it is important to study the key sequence-derived factors affecting short-lived protein degradation. Until now, most of protein half-lives are still unknown due to the difficulties of traditional experimental methods in measuring protein half-lives in human cells. To investigate the molecular determinants that affect short-lived proteins, a computational method was proposed in this work to recognize short-lived proteins based on sequence-derived features in human cells. In this study, we have systematically analyzed many features that perhaps correlated with short-lived protein degradation. It is found that a large fraction of proteins with signal peptides and transmembrane regions in human cells are of short half-lives. We have constructed an SVM-based classifier to recognize short-lived proteins, due to the fact that short-lived proteins play pivotal roles in the control of various cellular processes. By employing the SVM model on human dataset, we achieved 80.8% average sensitivity and 79.8% average specificity, respectively, on ten testing dataset (TE1-TE10). We also obtained 89.9%, 99% and 83.9% of average accuracy on an independent validation datasets iTE1, iTE2 and iTE3 respectively. The approach proposed in this paper provides a valuable alternative for recognizing the short-lived proteins in human cells, and is more accurate than the traditional N-end rule. Furthermore, the web server SProtP (http://reprod.njmu.edu.cn/sprotp) has been developed and is freely available for users.

Background Nucleosome organization determines the chromatin state, which in turn controls gene expression or silencing. Nucleosome remodeling occurs during somatic cell reprogramming, but it is still unclear to what degree the re-established nucleosome organization of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) resembles embryonic stem cells (ESCs), and whether the iPSCs inherit some residual gene expression from the parental fibroblast cells. Results We generated genome-wide nucleosome maps in mouse ESCs and in iPSCs reprogrammed from somatic cells belonging to three different germ layers using a secondary reprogramming system. Pairwise comparisons showed that the nucleosome organizations in the iPSCs, regardless of the iPSCs’ tissue of origin, were nearly identical to the ESCs, but distinct from mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEF). There is a canonical nucleosome arrangement of -1, nucleosome depletion region, +1, +2, +3, and so on nucleosomes around the transcription start sites of active genes whereas only a nucleosome occupies silent transcriptional units. Transcription factor binding sites possessed characteristic nucleosomal architecture, such that their access was governed by the rotational and translational settings of the nucleosome. Interestingly, the tissue-specific genes were highly expressed only in the parental somatic cells of the corresponding iPS cell line before reprogramming, but had a similar expression level in all the resultant iPSCs and ESCs. Conclusions The re-established nucleosome landscape during nuclear reprogramming provides a conserved setting for accessibility of DNA sequences in mouse pluripotent stem cells. No persistent residual expression program or nucleosome positioning of the parental somatic cells that reflected their tissue of origin was passed on to the resulting mouse iPSCs. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12915-014-0109-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.