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Laryngeal cancer (LC) is the second most common head and neck cancer and has a decreasing 5-year survival rate worldwide. Circular RNAs (circRNAs) regulate cancer development in diverse ways based on their distinct biogenesis mechanisms and expansive regulatory roles. However, currently, there is little research on how exosomal circRNAs are involved in the development of LC. Here, we demonstrated that circPVT1, a circRNA derived from the well-studied long noncoding RNA PVT1, is correlated with disease progression in LC and promotes angiogenesis both in vivo and in vitro. Mechanistically, circPVT1 is loaded into LC cell-secreted exosomes and taken up by vascular epithelium cells. By sponging miR-30c-5p, exosomal circPVT1 promotes Rap1b expression, which dramatically enhances vascular endothelial growth factor receptor 2 and the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K)/AKT pathway activation, ultimately resulting in the induction of angiogenesis. Furthermore, our xenograft models demonstrated that the combination of short hairpin RNA-circPVT1 and cetuximab showed high efficacy in inhibiting tumor growth and angiogenesis. Collectively, these findings uncover a novel mechanism of exosomal circRNA-mediated angiogenesis modulation and provide a preclinical rationale for testing this analogous combination in patients with LC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both bipolar and unipolar resistive switching (RS) characteristics have been demonstrated based on p+-Si/ZnO:Al/Ni heterojunction device. Here, the Al nanoparticles are introduced at the p+-Si/n-ZnO interface by sputtering deposition and thermal annealing. The p+-Si/ZnO:Al/Ni device, especially for the negative RS process, shows smaller resistive voltages and more concentrated resistance distributions than the device without Al nanoparticles. For the device with Al nanoparticles, the Al nanoparticles can eliminate the potential barrier of p+-Si/n-ZnO interface and act as tip electrodes for RS, while the location without Al nanoparticles at the interface is not easy to form the conducting filaments (CFs) due to the existence of interface potential barrier. The electric field can be enhanced and concentrated and lead to a simplified-CFs structure along the Al nanoparticles. Thus, p+-Si/ZnO:Al/Ni heterojunction device can effectively improve the RS uniformity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2008.06.048 Byline: Gabriela Alexandru (1), Johannes Graumann (1), Geoffrey T. Smith (1), Natalie J. Kolawa (1), Ruihua Fang (1), Raymond J. Deshaies (1) Keywords: PROTEINS Abstract: p97 is an ATP-dependent chaperone that plays an important role in endoplasmic reticulum-associated degradation but whose connections to turnover of soluble proteins remain sparse. Binding of p97 to substrates is mediated by cofactors that contain ubiquitin-binding domains. We employed 'network proteomics' to show that p97 assembles with all of the 13 mammalian UBX-domain proteins. The UBX proteins that bind ubiquitin conjugates also interact with dozens of E3 ubiquitin ligases, only one of which had been previously linked to p97. In particular, UBXD7 links p97 to the ubiquitin ligase CUL2/VHL and its substrate hypoxia-inducible factor 1[alpha] (HIF1[alpha]). Depletion of p97 leads to accumulation of endogenous HIF1[alpha] and increased expression of a HIF1[alpha] target gene. The large number of ubiquitin ligases found associated with UBX proteins suggests that p97 plays a far broader role than previously anticipated in the global regulation of protein turnover. Author Affiliation: (1) Division of Biology, California Institute of Technology, 1200 East California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA Article History: Received 2 November 2007; Revised 9 April 2008; Accepted 25 June 2008 Article Note: (miscellaneous) Published: September 4, 2008

High-efficiency nanoscale reversed-phase liquid chromatography (chromatographic peak capacities of ~1000: Shen, Y.; Zhao, R.; Berger, S. J.; Anderson, G. A.; Rodrignez, N.; Smith, R. D. Anal. Chem. 2002, 74, 4235. Shen, Y.; Moore, R. J.; Zhao, R.; Blonder, J.; Auberry, D. L.; Masselon, C.; Pasa-Tolic, L.; Hixson, K. K.; Auberry, K. J.; Smith, R. D. Anal. Chem. 2003, 75, 3596.) and strong cation exchange LC was used to obtain ultra-high-efficiency separations (combined chromatographic peak capacities of >[10.sup.4]) in conjunction with tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) for characterization of the human plasma proteome. Using conservative SEQUEST peptide identification criteria (i.e., without considering chymotryptic or elastic peptides) and peptide LC normalized elution time constraints, the separation quality enabled the identification of proteins over a dynamic range of greater than 8 orders of magnitude in relative abundance using ion trap MS/MS instrumentation. Between 800 and 1682 human proteins were identified, depending on the criteria used for identification, from a total of 365 [micro]g of human plasma. The analyses identified relatively low-level (~pg/mL) proteins (e.g., cytokines) coexisting with high-abundance proteins (e.g., mg/mL-level serum albumin).

Memristive behaviors are demonstrated in the single-layer oxide-based devices. The conduction states can be continually modulated with different pulses or voltage sweeps. Here, the p-CuAlO2- and n-ZnO-based memristors show the opposite bias polarity dependence with the help of tip electrode. It is well known that the conductivity of p-type and n-type semiconductor materials has the opposite oxygen concentration dependence. Thus, the memristive behaviors may attribute to the oxygen ion migration in the dielectric layers for the single-layer oxide based memristors. Further, based on the redox, the model of compressing dielectric layer thickness has been proposed to explain the memristive behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Background Curation of information from bioscience literature into biological knowledge databases is a crucial way of capturing experimental information in a computable form. During the biocuration process, a critical first step is to identify from all published literature the papers that contain results for a specific data type the curator is interested in annotating. This step normally requires curators to manually examine many papers to ascertain which few contain information of interest and thus, is usually time consuming. We developed an automatic method for identifying papers containing these curation data types among a large pool of published scientific papers based on the machine learning method Support Vector Machine (SVM). This classification system is completely automatic and can be readily applied to diverse experimental data types. It has been in use in production for automatic categorization of 10 different experimental datatypes in the biocuration process at WormBase for the past two years and it is in the process of being adopted in the biocuration process at FlyBase and the Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD). We anticipate that this method can be readily adopted by various databases in the biocuration community and thereby greatly reducing time spent on an otherwise laborious and demanding task. We also developed a simple, readily automated procedure to utilize training papers of similar data types from different bodies of literature such as C. elegans and D. melanogaster to identify papers with any of these data types for a single database. This approach has great significance because for some data types, especially those of low occurrence, a single corpus often does not have enough training papers to achieve satisfactory performance. Results We successfully tested the method on ten data types from WormBase, fifteen data types from FlyBase and three data types from Mouse Genomics Informatics (MGI). It is being used in the curation work flow at WormBase for automatic association of newly published papers with ten data types including RNAi, antibody, phenotype, gene regulation, mutant allele sequence, gene expression, gene product interaction, overexpression phenotype, gene interaction, and gene structure correction. Conclusions Our methods are applicable to a variety of data types with training set containing several hundreds to a few thousand documents. It is completely automatic and, thus can be readily incorporated to different workflow at different literature-based databases. We believe that the work presented here can contribute greatly to the tremendous task of automating the important yet labor-intensive biocuration effort.

Background: The survival benefit of clinically negative cervical lymph nodes (cN0) in patients with T1–2 supraglottic cancer (SC) remains unclear. This study aimed to comprehensively evaluate the prognostic value of lymph node dissection (LND) in patients with T1–2, cN0 SC. Methods: We included 1036 confirmed T1–2, cN0 SC patients with clinicopathological characteristics between 2004 and 2015, based on the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results program (SEER) database. The association between LND and overall survival (OS) was investigated by the Kaplan–Meier method. Results: Before propensity score matching (PSM), patients selected for LND had better OS, compared to patients did not receive LND (5‐year OS: 62.6% vs 51.2%, respectively; p = 0.011). After PSM, the LND group also present significant improvement in prognosis (5‐year OS: 64.3% vs 51.7%, respectively; p < 0.01). Conclusions: LND was significantly associated with a more favorable prognosis compared with non‐LND in patients with T1–2, cN0 SC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study demonstrated that hair follicle stem cells (HFSc) have multidirectional differentiation potential and participate in skin wound healing processes. Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are defined as non-protein coding transcripts longer than 200 nucleotides, which are important in the proliferation and differentiation of cells. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the role of PlncRNA-1 in the proliferation and differentiation of HFSc. Results revealed that PlncRNA-1, transforming growth factor (TGF)-β1, Wnt and β-catenin expression levels were significantly downregulated in HFSc. PlncRNA-1 transfection promoted proliferation and differentiation of HFSc. TGF-β1, Wnt and β-catenin expression levels were upregulated in HFSc following transfection of PlncRNA-1. Results demonstrated that TGF-β1 inhibitor LY2109761 blocked proliferation and differentiation of HFSc promoted by PlncRNA-1 transfection. In addition, TGF-β1 inhibitor LY2109761 led to decreased Wnt and β-catenin expression levels in HFSc. Furthermore, PlncRNA-1 transfection stimulated the cell cycle of HFSc, whereas TGF-β1 inhibitor LY2109761 inhibited the cell cycle of HFSc and decreased the acceleration of the cell cycle induced by PlncRNA-1 transfection. In conclusion, these findings suggest that PlncRNA-1 may promote proliferation and differentiation of HFSc through upregulation of TGF-β1-mediated Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]