Search

A highly enantioselective electrophilic selenylation/semipinacol rearrangement of allenols has been developed, which is enabled by the cooperative catalysis of a chiral sulfide and an achiral sulfonic acid. The designed and synthesized chiral sulfide catalyst and selenylating reagent play a crucial role in enhancing both enantioselectivity and reactivity. This approach exhibits excellent regio-, chemo-, and enantioselectivity, providing access to diverse enantioenriched cyclopentanones featuring an arylselenovinyl-substituted quaternary carbon stereocenter. Furthermore, these products can be transformed into synthetically valuable alkyne, vinyl bromide, and aniline derivatives. Mechanistic studies reveal that the combination of a chiral sulfide and an achiral sulfonic acid not only facilitates the formation of catalytically active species, but also governs the enantioselectivity of the reaction. Meanwhile, density functional theory calculations disclose that four hydrogen bond interactions and a π‧‧‧π interaction are responsible for the observed enantioselectivity., Competing Interests: Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests., (© 2025. The Author(s).)

Inherently chiral calixarenes hold great potential for applications in chiral recognition, sensing, and asymmetric catalysis due to their unique structures. However, due to their special structures and relatively large sizes, the catalytic asymmetric synthesis of inherently chiral calixarenes is challenging with very limited examples available. Here, we present an efficient method for the enantioselective synthesis of inherently chiral sulfur-containing calix[4]arenes through the desymmetrizing electrophilic sulfenylation of calix[4]arenes. This catalytic asymmetric reaction is enabled by a chiral 1,1'-binaphthyl-2,2'-diamine-derived sulfide catalyst and hexafluoroisopropanol. Various inherently chiral sulfur-containing calix[4]arenes are obtained in moderate to excellent yields with high enantioselectivities. Control experiments indicate that the thermodynamically favored C-SAr product is formed from the kinetically favored N-SAr product and the combination of the chiral sulfide catalyst and hexafluoroisopropanol is crucially important for both enantioselectivity and reactivity., Competing Interests: Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Environmental high temperature poses a significant threat to human health, however, limited information is available for understanding the relationship between the hot weather and infertility. This study aims to assess the adverse effect of the hot weather to early embryonic cells. Our results indicated that environmental high temperature exposure could cause the decline of early embryo quality and implantation ability. In detail, it led to early embryonic development retardation, embryo degeneration rate increased, the rate of blastocyst and hatching decreased, and reduced the number of implants. And the finding also the impairment of environmental high temperature on early embryonic cells may be due to oxidative damage of DNA caused by ROS, while BER repair ability is decreased, failing to repair oxidative damage of DNA in time, resulting in a large number of early embryonic apoptosis. The work underscored that pregnant women should stay away from high-temperature environments., 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.)

Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) are crucial for understanding organismal molecular mechanisms and processes. Construction of GRN in the epithelioma papulosum cyprini (EPC) cells of cyprinid fish by spring viremia of carp virus (SVCV) infection helps understand the immune regulatory mechanisms that enhance the survival capabilities of cyprinid fish. Although many computational methods have been used to infer GRNs, specialized approaches for predicting the GRN of EPC cells following SVCV infection are lacking. In addition, most existing methods focus primarily on gene expression features, neglecting the valuable network structural information in known GRNs. In this study, we propose a novel supervised deep neural network, named MEFFGRN (Matrix Enhancement- and Feature Fusion-based method for Gene Regulatory Network inference), to accurately predict the GRN of EPC cells following SVCV infection. MEFFGRN considers both gene expression data and network structure information of known GRN and introduces a matrix enhancement method to address the sparsity issue of known GRN, extracting richer network structure information. To optimize the benefits of CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) in image processing, gene expression and enhanced GRN data were transformed into histogram images for each gene pair respectively. Subsequently, these histograms were separately fed into CNNs for training to obtain the corresponding gene expression and network structural features. Furthermore, a feature fusion mechanism was introduced to comprehensively integrate the gene expression and network structural features. This integration considers the specificity of each feature and their interactive information, resulting in a more comprehensive and precise feature representation during the fusion process. Experimental results from both real-world and benchmark datasets demonstrate that MEFFGRN achieves competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art computational methods. Furthermore, study findings from SVCV-infected EPC cells suggest that MEFFGRN can predict novel gene regulatory relationships., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Inferring gene regulatory network (GRN) is one of the important challenges in systems biology, and many outstanding computational methods have been proposed; however there remains some challenges especially in real datasets. In this study, we propose Directed Graph Convolutional neural network-based method for GRN inference (DGCGRN). To better understand and process the directed graph structure data of GRN, a directed graph convolutional neural network is conducted which retains the structural information of the directed graph while also making full use of neighbor node features. The local augmentation strategy is adopted in graph neural network to solve the problem of poor prediction accuracy caused by a large number of low-degree nodes in GRN. In addition, for real data such as E.coli, sequence features are obtained by extracting hidden features using Bi-GRU and calculating the statistical physicochemical characteristics of gene sequence. At the training stage, a dynamic update strategy is used to convert the obtained edge prediction scores into edge weights to guide the subsequent training process of the model. The results on synthetic benchmark datasets and real datasets show that the prediction performance of DGCGRN is significantly better than existing models. Furthermore, the case studies on bladder uroepithelial carcinoma and lung cancer cells also illustrate the performance of the proposed model., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press.)

The inference of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from gene expression profiles has been a key issue in systems biology, prompting many researchers to develop diverse computational methods. However, most of these methods do not reconstruct directed GRNs with regulatory types because of the lack of benchmark datasets or defects in the computational methods. Here, we collect benchmark datasets and propose a deep learning-based model, DeepFGRN, for reconstructing fine gene regulatory networks (FGRNs) with both regulation types and directions. In addition, the GRNs of real species are always large graphs with direction and high sparsity, which impede the advancement of GRN inference. Therefore, DeepFGRN builds a node bidirectional representation module to capture the directed graph embedding representation of the GRN. Specifically, the source and target generators are designed to learn the low-dimensional dense embedding of the source and target neighbors of a gene, respectively. An adversarial learning strategy is applied to iteratively learn the real neighbors of each gene. In addition, because the expression profiles of genes with regulatory associations are correlative, a correlation analysis module is designed. Specifically, this module not only fully extracts gene expression features, but also captures the correlation between regulators and target genes. Experimental results show that DeepFGRN has a competitive capability for both GRN and FGRN inference. Potential biomarkers and therapeutic drugs for breast cancer, liver cancer, lung cancer and coronavirus disease 2019 are identified based on the candidate FGRNs, providing a possible opportunity to advance our knowledge of disease treatments., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press.)

An efficient catalytic asymmetric electrophilic sulfenylation reaction for the synthesis of planar-chiral sulfur-containing cyclophanes has been developed for the first time. This was achieved by using a new Lewis base catalyst and a new ortho-trifluoromethyl-substituted sulfenylating reagent. Using the substrates with low rotational energy barrier, the transformation proceeded through a dynamic kinetic resolution, and the high rotational energy barrier of the substrates allowed the reaction to undergo a kinetic resolution process. Meanwhile, this transformation was compatible with a desymmetrization process when the symmetric substrates were used. Various planar-chiral sulfur-containing cyclophanes were readily obtained in moderate to excellent yields with moderate to excellent enantioselectivities (up to 97 % yield and 95 % ee). This approach was used to synthesize pharmaceutically relevant planar-chiral sulfur-containing molecules. Density functional theory calculations showed that π-π interactions between the sulfenyl group and the aromatic ring in the substrate play a crucial role in enantioinduction in this sulfenylation reaction., (© 2024 Wiley-VCH GmbH.)

Aqueous Zn-based batteries deliver thousands of cycles at high rates but poor recyclability at low rates. Herein, we reveal that this illogical phenomenon is attributed to the reconstructed electrode/electrolyte interface at high rates, wherein the condensed electrical double layer (EDL) and the tightly absorbed Zn 2+ ions on the Zn electrode surface afford compact and corrosion-resistant Zn deposits.

Alkaline Zn-MnO 2 batteries feature high security, low cost, and environmental friendliness while suffering from severe electrochemical irreversibility for both the Zn anode and MnO 2 cathode. Although neutral electrolytes are supposed to improve the reversibility of the Zn anode, the MnO 2 cathode indeed experiences a capacity degradation caused by the Jahn-Teller effect of the Mn 3+ ion, thus shortening the lifespan of the neutral Zn-MnO 2 batteries. Theoretically, the MnO 2 cathode undergoes a highly reversible two-electron redox reaction of the MnO 2 /Mn 2+ couple in strongly acidic electrolytes. However, acidic electrolytes would inevitably accelerate the corrosion of the Zn anode, making long-lived acidic Zn-MnO 2 batteries impossible. Herein, to overcome the challenges faced by Zn-MnO 2 batteries, we propose a hybrid Zn-MnO 2 battery (HZMB) by coupling the neutral Zn anode with the acidic MnO 2 cathode, wherein the neutral anode and acidic cathode are separated by a proton-shuttle-shielding and hydrophobic-ion-conducting membrane. Benefiting from the optimized reaction conditions for both the MnO 2 cathode and Zn anode as well as the well-designed membrane, the HZMB exhibits a high working voltage of 2.05 V and a long lifespan of 2275 h (2000 cycles), breaking through the limitations of Zn-MnO 2 batteries in terms of voltage and cycle life.

Lots of experimental studies have revealed the significant associations between lncRNAs and diseases. Identifying accurate associations will provide a new perspective for disease therapy. Calculation-based methods have been developed to solve these problems, but these methods have some limitations. In this paper, we proposed an accurate method, named MLGCNET, to discover potential lncRNA-disease associations. Firstly, we reconstructed similarity networks for both lncRNAs and diseases using top k similar information, and constructed a lncRNA-disease heterogeneous network (LDN). Then, we applied Multi-Layer Graph Convolutional Network on LDN to obtain latent feature representations of nodes. Finally, the Extra Trees was used to calculate the probability of association between disease and lncRNA. The results of extensive 5-fold cross-validation experiments show that MLGCNET has superior prediction performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Case studies confirm the performance of our model on specific diseases. All the experiment results prove the effectiveness and practicality of MLGCNET in predicting potential lncRNA-disease associations.

An enantioselective selenocyclization of 1,1-disubstituted alkenes was achieved for the first time, which is enabled by a novel combination of a chiral BINAM-derived sulfide and an achiral Lewis acid. Various selenium-containing 4 H -3,1-benzoxazines, which are widely present in a range of medicinally relevant molecules, were readily obtained in moderate to good yields and good to excellent enantioselectivities. A series of tetrasubstituted carbon stereocenters were facilely constructed.

Enantioselective synthesis of axially chiral sulfur-containing biaryl derivatives through the electrophilic sulfenylation of biaryl phenols has been achieved for the first time. This catalytic asymmetric system, which involves sequential desymmetrization and kinetic resolution, is enabled by a combination of a novel 3,3'-disubstituted BINOL-derived selenide catalyst and an achiral sulfonic acid. Control experiments and computational studies suggest that multiple noncovalent interactions between the cocatalysts and substrate, especially a network of hydrogen bond interactions, play a crucial role in determining the enantioselectivity and reactivity.

Background: As one of the deadliest diseases in the world, cancer is driven by a few somatic mutations that disrupt the normal growth of cells, and leads to abnormal proliferation and tumor development. The vast majority of somatic mutations did not affect the occurrence and development of cancer; thus, identifying the mutations responsible for tumor occurrence and development is one of the main targets of current cancer treatments., Results: To effectively identify driver genes, we adopted a semi-local centrality measure and gene mutation effect function to assess the effect of gene mutations on changes in gene expression patterns. Firstly, we calculated the mutation score for each gene. Secondly, we identified differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in the cohort by comparing the expression profiles of tumor samples and normal samples, and then constructed a local network for each mutation gene using DEGs and mutant genes according to the protein-protein interaction network. Finally, we calculated the score of each mutant gene according to the objective function. The top-ranking mutant genes were selected as driver genes. We name the proposed method as mutations effect and network centrality., Conclusions: Four types of cancer data in The Cancer Genome Atlas were tested. The experimental data proved that our method was superior to the existing network-centric method, as it was able to quickly and easily identify driver genes and rare driver factors., (© 2021. The Author(s).)

Background: Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are a class of single-stranded RNA molecules with a closed-loop structure. A growing body of research has shown that circRNAs are closely related to the development of diseases. Because biological experiments to verify circRNA-disease associations are time-consuming and wasteful of resources, it is necessary to propose a reliable computational method to predict the potential candidate circRNA-disease associations for biological experiments to make them more efficient., Results: In this paper, we propose a double matrix completion method (DMCCDA) for predicting potential circRNA-disease associations. First, we constructed a similarity matrix of circRNA and disease according to circRNA sequence information and semantic disease information. We also built a Gauss interaction profile similarity matrix for circRNA and disease based on experimentally verified circRNA-disease associations. Then, the corresponding circRNA sequence similarity and semantic similarity of disease are used to update the association matrix from the perspective of circRNA and disease, respectively, by matrix multiplication. Finally, from the perspective of circRNA and disease, matrix completion is used to update the matrix block, which is formed by splicing the association matrix obtained in the previous step with the corresponding Gaussian similarity matrix. Compared with other approaches, the model of DMCCDA has a relatively good result in leave-one-out cross-validation and five-fold cross-validation. Additionally, the results of the case studies illustrate the effectiveness of the DMCCDA model., Conclusion: The results show that our method works well for recommending the potential circRNAs for a disease for biological experiments.

The prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is increasing, but its etiology remains elusive and hence an effective treatment is not available. Previous research conducted on animal models suggests that microbiota-gut-brain axis may contribute to ASD pathology and more human research is needed. This study was divided into two stages,.At the discovery stage, we compared the differences in gut microbiota profiles (using 16S rRNA sequencing), fecal SCFAs (using GC-MS) and plasma neurotransmitters (using UHPLC-MS/MS) of 26 children with ASD and 24 normal children. All 26 children with ASD participated in the intervention stage, and we measured the gut microbiota profiles, SCFAs and neurotransmitters before and after probiotics + FOS (n = 16) or placebo supplementation (n = 10). We found that gut microbiota was in a state of dysbiosis and significantly lower levels of Bifidobacteriales and Bifidobacterium longum were observed at the discovery stage in children with ASD. An increase in beneficial bacteria (Bifidobacteriales and B. longum) and suppression of suspected pathogenic bacteria (Clostridium) emerged after probiotics + FOS intervention, with significant reduction in the severity of autism and gastrointestinal symptoms. Compared to children in the control group, significantly lower levels of acetic acid, propionic acid and butyric acid were found, and a hyperserotonergic state (increased serotonin) and dopamine metabolism disorder (decreased homovanillic acid) were observed in children with ASD. Interestingly, the above SCFAs in children with autism significantly elevated after probiotics + FOS intervention and approached those in the control group. In addition, our data demonstrated that decreased serotonin and increased homovanillic acid emerged after probiotics + FOS intervention. However, the above-mentioned changes did not appear in the placebo group for ASD children. Probiotics + FOS intervention can modulate gut microbiota, SCFAs and serotonin in association with improved ASD symptoms, including a hyper-serotonergic state and dopamine metabolism disorder., 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 © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Objective: Liver cancer is one of the most common types of cancer. We aimed to use the cancer registration data in 2015 to estimate the incidence and mortality of liver cancer in Henan province., Methods: The data from 37 population-based cancer registries in Henan province were collected for this study. The pooled data were stratified by area, sex, and age group. New cases of liver cancer and deaths due to the disease were estimated using age-specific rates and provincial population in 2015. All incidence and death rates were age standardized to the 2000 Chinese standard population and Segi's population, which were expressed per 100,000 populations., Results: After clearance and assessment, data from 30 population-based cancer registries (5 in urban and 25 in rural areas) were included in the analysis. All 30 cancer registries encompassed a total population of 23,421,609 (3,507,984 in urban and 19,913,625 in rural areas), accounting for 21.84% of the provincial population. The proportion of morphological verification (MV%), percentage of cancer cases identified with death certification only (DCO%), and mortality-to-incidence ratio (M/I) were 38.55%, 2.34%, and 0.81, respectively. Approximately 31,639 new cases of liver cancer were diagnosed and 26,057 deaths from liver cancer occurred in Henan in 2015. The crude incidence rate of liver cancer was 27.05/100,000 (36.24/100,000 in men and 17.35/100,000 in women). Age-standardized incidence rates by Chinese standard population and world standard population were 21.10/100,000 and 20.95/100,000, respectively. Liver cancer was more common in men than in women. The incidence rates in urban (26.31/100,000) and rural (27.18/100,000) areas were similar. The crude mortality rate of liver cancer was 21.98/100,000 (29.33/100,000 in males and 14.22/100,000 in females). Age-standardized mortality rates by Chinese standard population and world standard population were 16.93/100,000 and 16.90/100,000, respectively. There was no distinct difference in mortality rates of liver cancer between urban (22.55/100,000) and rural (21.87/100,000) areas., Conclusions: Liver cancer has posed a heavy burden on people in Henan province. Comprehensive measures should be conducted to prevent the increase in the incidence of liver cancer., (© 2019 Chinese Medical Association. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co., Ltd.)

An enantioselective sulfenylation/semipinacol rearrangement of 1,1-disubstituted and trisubstituted allylic alcohols was accomplished with a chiral Lewis base and a chiral Brønsted acid as cocatalysts, generating various β-arylthio ketones bearing an all-carbon quaternary center in moderate to excellent yields and excellent enantioselectivities. These chiral arylthio ketone products are common intermediates with many applications, for example, in the design of new chiral catalysts/ligands and the total synthesis of natural products. Computational studies (DFT calculations) were carried out to explain the enantioselectivity and the role of the chiral Brønsted acid. Additionally, the synthetic utility of this method was exemplified by an enantioselective total synthesis of (-)-herbertene and a one-pot synthesis of a chiral sulfoxide and sulfone., (© 2019 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.)

Suicide in college students has become an important public health issue in China. The aim of this study was to identify the differences between suicide attempters and suicide ideators based on a cross-sectional survey. Our results indicate that although female gender, positive screening for psychiatric illness, positive family history of suicide, elevated overall impulsivity, and elevated motor impulsivity were correlated with suicidal ideation, only positive family history of suicide and high motor impulsivity could differentiate suicide attempters from suicidal ideators. Future research with a longitudinal and prospective study design should be conducted to confirm these findings., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Objective: To compare the clinical effect of two surgical methods of treating chyluria, namely, retroperitoneal laparoscopic partial dissection of adipose renal capsule plus ligation of renal pedicle lymphatic vessels and retroperitoneal laparoscopic complete dissection of adipose renal capsule plus ligation of renal pedicle lymphatic vessels., Patients and Methods: Thirty-eight cases have been divided into A and B groups. Retroperitoneal laparoscopic partial dissection of adipose renal capsule plus ligation of renal pedicle lymphatic vessels has been performed on Group A patients and retroperitoneal laparoscopic complete dissection of adipose renal capsule plus ligation of renal pedicle lymphatic vessels has been performed on Group B cases, and then their respective clinical efficacy has been compared., Results: All the operations for the 38 cases were successful. The average operation time for Group A was 76.35 ± 23.11 min, and that for Group B was 97.35 ± 16.20 min. The average post-operative length of stay for Group A was 5.43 ± 1.21 days, and that for Group B was 7.22 ± 1.34 days. No complications were found in both groups, and all cases were tested negative for chyluria when discharged. No recurrences were reported., Conclusions: Retroperitoneal laparoscopic ligation of renal pedicle lymphatic vessels is a reliable method of treating chyluria. Compared with complete dissection of adipose renal capsule plus ligation of renal lymphatic vessels, partial dissection of adipose renal capsule plus ligation of renal pedicle lymphatic vessels boasts the advantages of shorter operation time, less bleeding, shorter term of hospitalization, and no renal pedicle torsion.

Objective: In order to observe the relationship between MTHFR promoter and DN, the determinations on MTHFR promoter methylation level and expression of HCY from DN patients have been carried out., Methods: According to the Diabetes diagnosis and classification standard from WHO in 1999, 85 patients with DM diagnosed by Endocrinology and 30 healthy participants from our medical examination center were chosen as control specimen to study in this paper. All this specimen were divided into A, B, C and D four groups , which are corresponding simple diabetes mellitus group (SDM), early diabetic nephropathy group (EDN), clinical diabetic nephropathy group (CDN) and normal control group. And then, all common materials and clinical experiments data have been collected respectively. (1) Extracted the peripheral blood DNA of each group and determinate the methylation status of MTHFR gene promoter by PCR (MSP). (2) Determinated the serum HCY protein expression of each group., Results: (1) The MTHFR promoter methylation of SDM and diabetic nephropathy group are wear off comparied with normal control group. And MTHFR promoter was in demethylation state in normal control group, a slightly weak in SDN, a obviously weak in early diabetic nephropathy group; the MTHFR promoter was in methylation state in clinical diabetic nephropathy group. (2) The HCY protein of simple diabetes mellitus group, early diabetic nephropathy group and clinical diabetic nephropathy group are Pitch with normal control group. HCY protein level of each group are as 7.41±1.61 umol/L, 10.34±2.89 umol/L, 10.95±5.89 umol/L and 13.03±6.14 umol/L corresponding normal control group, simple diabetes mellitus group, early diabetic nephropathy group and clinical diabetic nephropathy group. And there is no statistical significance about the differences among four groups., Conclusion: The demethylation state of MTHFR promoter was obviously weaker in clinical diabetic nephropathy group than in SDM. The level of serum HCY was obviously higher in clinical diabetic nephropathy group than in SDM. It suggested that MTHFR promoter demethylation may be involoed in the pathogenesis of DN.

The distributions of size-segregated particles (PM 10 ) and water-soluble ions (WSIs) in Taiyuan were studied from July 2014 to April 2015 by TE-235 aerosol sampling and ion chromatography analyzing. As the results shown, the daily PM 10 level was 173.7 μg·m -3 , which exceeded the Grade Ⅱ limitation value in the Ambient Air Quality Standard (150 μg·m -3 , GB 3095-2012). PM 10 levels varied seasonally, and its were 199.1 and 194.2 μg·m -3 in winter and spring, respectively, which were much higher than those in summer. The PM 10 size-segregated was bimodal distribution for the range of 0-0.95 and 3.0-7.2 μm. The concentration of WSIs was the highest in winter, followed by summer and spring. SO 4 2- , NO 3 - and NH 4 + were the main water soluble ions and accounted for 66% to 80% of the total WSIs. SO 4 2- , K + , NH 4 + and Cl - showed a unimodal distribution at <0.95 μm in all samples, while Ca 2+ and Mg 2+ showed a bimodal distribution at <0.95 μm and 3.0-7.2 μm. NO 3 - showed a unimodal size distribution at <0.95 μm in winter and spring, compared with a bimodal distribution at <0.95 μm and 3.0-7.2 μm in summer. By the correlation analysis, PM 10 and WSIs decreased with the increase of wind speed in summer and winter other than in spring for the road-dust re-suspension by strong wind. Based on the ratio analysis of NO 3 - /SO 4 2- and Mg 2+ /Ca 2+ , coal combustion was the main source of NO 3 - and SO 4 2- , while Mg 2+ and Ca 2+ were mainly from the dust and coal combustion.

Heat stress stimulates the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS), which cause oxidative damage in the kidney. This study clarifies the mechanism by which saikosaponin-d (SSd), which is extracted from the roots of Bupleurum falcatum L, protects heat-stressed pig kidney proximal tubular (LLC-PK1) cells against oxidative damage. SSd alone is not cytotoxic at concentrations of 1 or 3 μg/mL as demonstrated by a 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) assay. To assess the effects of SSd on heat stress-induced cellular damage, LLC-PK1 cells were pretreated with various concentrations of SSd, heat stressed at 42°C for 1 h, and then returned to 37°C for 9 h. DNA ladder and MTT assays demonstrated that SSd helped to prevent heat stress-induced cellular damage when compared to untreated cells. Additionally, pretreatment with SSd increased the activity of superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), and glutathione peroxidase (GPx) but decreased the concentration of malondialdehyde (MDA) in a dose-dependent manner when compared to controls. Furthermore, real-time PCR and Western blot analysis demonstrated that SSd significantly increased the expression of copper and zinc superoxide dismutase (SOD-1), CAT, GPx-1 and heat shock protein 72 (HSP72) at both the mRNA and protein levels. In conclusion, these results are the first to demonstrate that SSd ameliorates heat stress-induced oxidative damage by modulating the activity of anti-oxidant enzymes and HSP72 in LLC-PK1 cells.

Objective: To investigate the prevalence and predictors of acute stress disorder (ASD) in the victims affected by Wenchuan earthquake in China., Methods: A random clustered sampling method was used. Of 891 victims enrolled in the study, 874 were completely assessed with the ASD constructive questionnaire and diagnosed with DSM-IV criteria. Sociodemographic variables were obtained. Also, the major symptoms of ASD (i.e., general symptoms to a traumatic event; dissociative symptoms; re-experiencing symptoms; hyper-arousal symptoms; avoidance symptoms) were recorded., Results: The incidence rate of ASD was 12.59% (110/874). The incidence rates of ASD for female and male were 15.16% (72/475) and 9.52% (38/399) respectively. There was a significant difference between female and male on the incidence rate of ASD (chi(2) = 6.26, P = 0.01). Logistic regression indicated that the ASD diagnosis was predicted by gender (beta = 0.58, P = 0.01, OR = 1.79), the condition of casualties of family members (beta = 0.60, P = 0.01, OR = 1.82), and the condition of sharp properties loss (beta = 1.02, P = 0.01, OR = 2.76)., Conclusion: The major earthquake should have great influence on mental health of victims. The efforts to reduce casualties and property loss might help to prevent ASD. Further research is needed on gender difference among traumatic events.

Objective: Sepsis and septic shock remain a common problem that results in significant mortality and morbidity in pediatric intensive care units (PICU). According to literature, the use of more physiologic steroid replacement therapy is associated with hemodynamic and survival benefits in adult patients with relative adrenal insufficiency (RAI) and catecholamine-resistant septic shock. But little information is available in children. The aim of the current prospective study was to determine the prevalence of adrenal insufficiency in children with sepsis and septic shock using a low-dose adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) stimulation test (1 microg/1.73 m2) in children., Methods: The authors performed cortisol estimation at baseline and after low-dose (1 microg/1.73 m2) ACTH stimulation at 30 mins in children during the first 24 hours in patients with sepsis or septic shock admitted to our PICU. Adrenal insufficiency was defined as a response < or = 90 microg/L. Absolute adrenal insufficiency (AAI) was further defined as baseline cortisol (T0) < 200 microg/L and RAI insufficiency by T0 > or = 200 microg/L., Results: Sixty-two consecutive cases with sepsis and septic shock admitted to PICU of Shanghai Jiaotong University Affiliated Children's Hospital from April, 2006 to March, 2007. The median age was 37.6 months (range, 2 - 168 months), and their gender distribution was 42 (67.7%) males and 20 (32.3%) females, 53 cases had sepsis (85.5%) and 9 had septic shock (14.5%). The mean pediatric critical illness score (PCIS) was 79.3 +/- 9.2 and median pediatric risk of mortality score (PRMSIII) 11.3 (5 - 19), respectively. Overall mortality of sepsis and septic shock was 27.42%. The evaluation of adrenal insufficiency was conducted as follows. (1) The mean cortisol levels at baseline (T0) and 30 mins after ACTH stimulation (T1) were (318.6 +/- 230.4) microg/L, (452.3 +/- 230.7) microg/L and (454.7 +/- 212.7) microg/L, (579.3 +/- 231.9) microg/L in patients with severe sepsis and septic shock group, respectively. There were no significant difference between the two groups (P > 0.05). (2) The proportion of patients with adrenal insufficiency in the study population was 40.3% as defined by a response < or = 90 microg/L post test. The proportion of patients with adrenal insufficiency in sepsis and septic shock were 39.6% and 44.4%, respectively (chi2) = 0.073, P > 0.05). (3) The serum T0 and T1 levels were (320.5 +/- 223.9) microg/L, (462.3 +/- 212.0) microg/L and (384.3 +/- 258.3) microg/L, (500.7 +/- 470.6) microg/L, respectively, and the proportion of patients with adrenal insufficiency were 37.8% and 47.1% in the survivors and the dead (P > 0.05). The levels of T0 and T1 were related to the PCIS (P < 0.05). The morbidity of adrenal insufficiency was not related to the PCIS, PRISMIII, and number of organ that developed functional insufficiency (P > 0.05)., Conclusions: Adrenal insufficiency may occur in patients with sepsis and septic shock in children. ACTH stimulation test may be helpful to determine whether corticosteroid therapy has a survival benefit in patients with relative adrenal insufficiency. A low-dose ACTH stimulation test can be used to evaluate the adrenal function status of severe sepsis and septic shock in children.

Background & Objective: PTEN is a tumor suppressor gene with phosphatase activity. It had been proved the aberrant expression and mutation of PTEN in diverse types of human cancer; PTEN is closely associated with occurrence and development of malignant tumor. This study was conducted to investigate the expression of PTEN/MMAC1/TEP1 gene product in human renal cell carcinoma (RCC) and the correlation between the expression of PTEN and the biological behaviors of RCC., Methods: The PTEN protein of 44 cases of RCC tissues confirmed by pathology after operation, 15 cases of adjacent normal renal tissues, and 10 cases of non-tumor normal renal tissues were assessed using immunohistochemical technique (SP). Fifteen RCC tissues and 10 normal renal tissues selected respectively from the renal tissues whose PTEN protein expression were positive as well as those from the negative were made to be the cell suspension mingled with paraffin. The proliferative index and the apoptosis incidence were examined by flow cytometry and the correlation between PTEN protein and the proliferation and apoptosis were analyzed., Results: The expression of PTEN protein was mostly located in the renal cell plasma. The positive incidence of expression PTEN protein in RCC was 36.3% which was prominently lower than those in the adjacent normal tissues (77.3%) and the normal tissues (100.00%) (P< 0.01). There was no significant difference between the different sorts of tissues (P >0.05). The expression of PTEN in stage I, II is much higher than that in stage III, IV(P< 0.05). The proliferative index of RCC whose expression of PTEN protein was positive (5.6+/-0.8)% was significantly lower than that of negative (15.6+/-1.6)% (P< 0.01). While the apoptosis incidence was (6.5+/-1.9)%,which was much higher than that of RCC whose expression was (2.9+/-1.6)% (P< 0.01)., Conclusion: The positive expression incidence of PTEN protein significantly decreases in RCC tissues. PTEN protein suppresses carcinoma by inducing the cell cycle to be blocked up in G1 phase and increasing the apoptosis incidence. The assessment of the expression PTEN protein is one of the important indexes of the development and prognosis of RCC.