Description: Author(s): Jun Jiang, Xing-Gang Wu, Qi-Li Liao, Xu-Chang Zheng, and Zhen-Yun Fang Within the framework of nonrelativistic QCD, we present a detailed discussion on doubly heavy baryon production through the e + e - annihilation channel, e + e - → γ / Z 0 → Ξ Q Q ′ + Q ̅ + Q ̅ ′ , at a high luminosity e + e - collider. Here Q (′) stands for the heavy b or c quark. In addition to the channel th... [Phys. Rev. D 86, 054021] Published Tue Sep 25, 2012

Description: Population surveys and animal experiments have shown that rare earth elements (REEs) cause neurological defects. However, the detailed mechanisms underlying these effects are still unclear. Given that lanthanum is commonly used for investigating into REEs-induced neurological defects, this study chose lanthanum chloride (LaCl 3 ) to show that LaCl 3 promotes mitochondrial apoptotic pathway in primary cultured rat astrocytes by regulating expression of Bcl-2 family proteins. The main findings of this study are (1) LaCl 3 treatment (0.25, 0.5, and 1.0 mM for 12–48 h) induced the astrocytes damages with a concentration-dependent manner, which were confirmed with methyl thiazolyl tetrazolium and lactate dehydrogenase release assays, and morphological examination. (2) A 24 h treatment of LaCl 3 concentration-dependently decreased mitochondrial membrane potential, increased cytochrome c release from mitochondria into cytosol, elevated caspase 9 and 3 expression, and promoted astrocyte apoptosis. (3) LaCl 3 treatment increased the ratio of pro-apoptotic Bax and antiapoptotic Bcl-2 proteins, which in turn broke the balance among pro-apoptotic and antiapoptotic Bcl-2 family proteins, leading to astrocyte apoptosis. Our results indicate that LaCl 3 alters Bcl-2 family protein expressions, which in turn promote mitochondrial apoptotic pathway, and thus astrocytic damage. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Environ Toxicol, 2011.

Description: Background: The major medicinal alkaloids isolated from Uncaria rhynchophylla (gouteng in chinese) capsules are rhynchophylline (RIN) and isorhynchophylline (IRN). Extracts containing these terpene indole alkaloids (TIAs) can inhibit the formation and destabilize preformed fibrils of amyloid beta protein (a pathological marker of Alzheimer's disease), and have been shown to improve the cognitive function of mice with Alzheimer-like symptoms. The biosynthetic pathways of RIN and IRN are largely unknown. Results: In this study, RNA-sequencing of pooled Uncaria capsules RNA samples taken at three developmental stages that accumulate different amount of RIN and IRN was performed. More than 50 million high-quality reads from a cDNA library were generated and de novo assembled. Sequences for all of the known enzymes involved in TIAs synthesis were identified. Additionally, 193 cytochrome P450 (CYP450), 280 methyltransferase and 144 isomerase genes were identified, that are potential candidates for enzymes involved in RIN and IRN synthesis. Digital gene expression profile (DGE) analysis was performed on the three capsule developmental stages, and based on genes possessing expression profiles consistent with RIN and IRN levels; four CYP450s, three methyltransferases and three isomerases were identified as the candidates most likely to be involved in the later steps of RIN and IRN biosynthesis. Conclusion: A combination of de novo transcriptome assembly and DGE analysis was shown to be a powerful method for identifying genes encoding enzymes potentially involved in the biosynthesis of important secondary metabolites in a non-model plant. The transcriptome data from this study provides an important resource for understanding the formation of major bioactive constituents in the capsule extract from Uncaria, and provides information that may aid in metabolic engineering to increase yields of these important alkaloids.

Description: Ytterbium complexes supported by a linked bis(β-ketoiminato) ligand, N , N ′-ethylenebis(benzoylacetoimine) (H 2 L), were synthesized and their catalytic behavior was explored. The reaction of YbCl 3 with 1 equiv. of LLi 2 afforded the mononuclear ytterbium chloride LYbCl(THF) 2 ( 1 ) in high yield. Complex 1 can be used as starting material to prepare β-ketoiminate-ytterbium derivatives. Treatment of complex 1 with NaN(SiMe 3 ) 2 produced the dimeric ytterbium amide {LYb[N(SiMe 3 ) 2 ]} 2 ( 2 ), while the similar reaction of complex 1 with NaOAr (ArO = 2, 6- t Bu-4-MeC 6 H 2 O) led to the mononuclear ytterbium aryloxide LYbOAr(THF) ( 3 ). The three complexes were well detected by elemental analysis and single-crystal X-ray analysis. It was found that complexes 2 and 3 can initiate the ring-opening polymerization of ϵ-caprolactone with moderate activity.

Description: Background: Abnormal proliferation and differentiation of hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells, which reflect the malignant nature of clonal cells in myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), can be detected by flow cytometry (FCM) and potentially applied to assist diagnosis and evaluate prognosis in MDS. Methods: In this study, a series of immunophenotypes such as CD34, CD19, CD38, CD117, and CD7, which are related to proliferation and differentiation of HSCs, were determined by FCM in the patients with nonclonal cytopenias diseases and MDS. Based on the expression pattern of these immunophenotypes, a FCM progress scoring (FPS) system was constructed and evaluated. Results: The FPS system showed good sensitivity and specificity (63.6% and 100.0%) in distinguishing MDS from nonclonal cytopenias diseases. Validation analysis of FPS system indicated comparable sensitivity and specificity (73.7% and 97.1%) and high agreement rate (82.6%) of FCM diagnosis with morphological diagnosis. The high-grade MDS had higher FPS score compared to low-grade MDS ( P 〈 0.001). Noticeably, hypocellular MDS had lower FPS score ( P 〈 0.001), most of which could not be diagnosed by FPS system. Besides, FPS score showed obvious positive correlation with WHO classification, IPSS score, percentage of marrow blasts, and cytogenetic prognosis scoring. Elevated FPS score predicted higher disease progression and shorter survival in MDS. Conclusion: The FPS system based on immunophenotyping in CD34+ blasts is a useful and simple tool for diagnosis and prognosis evaluation in MDS. © 2013 International Clinical Cytometry Society

Description: NOD2 deletion promotes cardiac hypertrophy and fibrosis induced by pressure overload Laboratory Investigation 93, 1128 (October 2013). doi:10.1038/labinvest.2013.99 Authors: Jing Zong, Mohamed Salim, Heng Zhou, Zhou-yan Bian, Jia Dai, Yuan Yuan, Wei Deng, Jie-yu Zhang, Rui Zhang, Qing-qing Wu & Qi-zhu Tang

Description: We propose the Tensorial Kernel Principal Component Analysis (TKPCA) for dimensionality reduction and feature extraction from tensor objects, which extends the conventional Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in two perspectives: working directly with multidimensional data (tensors) in their native state and generalizing an existing linear technique to its nonlinear version by applying the kernel trick. Our method aims to remedy the shortcomings of multilinear subspace learning (tensorial PCA) developed recently in modelling the nonlinear manifold of tensor objects and brings together the desirable properties of kernel methods and tensor decompositions for significant performance gain when the data are multidimensional and nonlinear dependencies do exist. Our approach begins by formulating TKPCA as an optimization problem. Then, we develop a kernel function based on Grassmann Manifold that can directly take tensorial representation as parameters instead of traditional vectorized representation. Furthermore, a TKPCA-based tensor object recognition is also proposed for application of the action recognition. Experiments with real action datasets show that the proposed method is insensitive to both noise and occlusion and performs well compared with state-of-the-art algorithms.

Description: Analyses of the mitochondrial mutations in the Chinese patients with sporadic Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease European Journal of Human Genetics advance online publication, March 26 2014. doi:10.1038/ejhg.2014.52 Authors: Jin Zhang, Zhi-Xia Zhang, Peng-Chen Du, Wei Zhou, Su-Dong Wu, Qi-Ling Wang, Cao Chen, Qi Shi, Chen Chen, Chen Gao, Chan Tian & Xiao-Ping Dong

Description: Background: Drought stress is one of the major limiting factors for maize production. With the availability of maize B73 reference genome and whole-genome resequencing of 15 maize inbreds, common variants (CV) and clustering analyses were applied to identify non-synonymous SNPs (nsSNPs) and corresponding candidate genes for drought tolerance. Results: A total of 524 nsSNPs that were associated with 271 candidate genes involved in plant hormone regulation, carbohydrate and sugar metabolism, signaling molecules regulation, redox reaction and acclimation of photosynthesis to environment were detected by CV and cluster analyses. Most of the nsSNPs identified were clustered in bin 1.07 region that harbored six previously reported QTL with relatively high phenotypic variation explained for drought tolerance. Genes Ontology (GO) analysis of candidate genes revealed that there were 35 GO terms related to biotic stimulus and membrane-bounded organelle, showing significant differences between the candidate genes and the reference B73 background. Changes of expression level in these candidate genes for drought tolerance were detected using RNA sequencing for fertilized ovary, basal leaf meristem tissue and roots collected under drought stressed and well-watered conditions. The results indicated that 70% of candidate genes showed significantly expression changes under two water treatments and our strategies for mining candidate genes are feasible and relatively efficient. Conclusions: Our results successfully revealed candidate nsSNPs and associated genes for drought tolerance by comparative sequence analysis of 16 maize inbred lines. Both methods we applied were proved to be efficient for identifying candidate genes for complex traits through the next-generation sequencing technologies (NGS). These selected genes will not only facilitate understanding of genetic basis of drought stress response, but also accelerate genetic improvement through marker-assisted selection in maize.

Description: Population surveys and animal experiments have shown that rare earth elements (REEs) cause neurological defects. However, the detailed mechanisms underlying these effects are still unclear. Given that lanthanum is commonly used for investigating into REEs-induced neurological defects, this study chose lanthanum chloride (LaCl 3 ) to show that LaCl 3 promotes mitochondrial apoptotic pathway in primary cultured rat astrocytes by regulating expression of Bcl-2 family proteins. The main findings of this study are (1) LaCl 3 treatment (0.25, 0.5, and 1.0 mM for 12–48 h) induced the astrocytes damages with a concentration-dependent manner, which were confirmed with methyl thiazolyl tetrazolium and lactate dehydrogenase release assays, and morphological examination. (2) A 24 h treatment of LaCl 3 concentration-dependently decreased mitochondrial membrane potential, increased cytochrome c release from mitochondria into cytosol, elevated caspase 9 and 3 expression, and promoted astrocyte apoptosis. (3) LaCl 3 treatment increased the ratio of pro-apoptotic Bax and antiapoptotic Bcl-2 proteins, which in turn broke the balance among pro-apoptotic and antiapoptotic Bcl-2 family proteins, leading to astrocyte apoptosis. Our results indicate that LaCl 3 alters Bcl-2 family protein expressions, which in turn promote mitochondrial apoptotic pathway, and thus astrocytic damage. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Environ Toxicol, 2011.