Extracting Noun Phrases from Large-Scale Texts: A Hybrid Approach and Its Automatic Evaluation

To acquire noun phrases from running texts is useful for many applications, such as word grouping,terminology indexing, etc. The reported literatures adopt pure probabilistic approach, or pure rule-based noun phrases grammar to tackle this problem. In this paper, we apply a probabilistic chunker to deciding the implicit boundaries of constituents and utilize the linguistic knowledge to extract the noun phrases by a finite state mechanism. The test texts are SUSANNE Corpus and the results are evaluated by comparing the parse field of SUSANNE Corpus automatically. The results of this preliminary experiment are encouraging.Comment: 8 pages, Postscript file, Unix compressed, uuencode

Effects of Salvianolic Acid B on Protein Expression in Human Umbilical Vein Endothelial Cells

Salvianolic acid B (Sal B), a pure water-soluble compound extracted from Radix Salviae miltiorrhizae, has been reported to possess potential cardioprotective efficacy. To identify proteins or pathways by which Sal B might exert its protective activities on the cardiovascular system, two-dimensional gel electrophoresis-based comparative proteomics was performed, and proteins altered in their expression level after Sal B treatment were identified by MALDI-TOF MS/MS. Human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) were incubated at Sal B concentrations that can be reached in human plasma by pharmacological intervention. Results indicated that caldesmon, an actin-stabilizing protein, was downregulated in Sal B-exposed HUVECs. Proteins that showed increased expression levels upon Sal B treatment were vimentin, T-complex protein 1, protein disulfide isomerase, tropomyosin alpha, heat shock protein beta-1, UBX domain-containing protein 1, alpha enolase, and peroxiredoxin-2. Additionally, Sal B leads to increased phosphorylation of nucleophosmin in a dose-dependent manner and promotes proliferation of HUVECs. We found that Sal B exhibited a coordinated regulation of enzymes and proteins involved in cytoskeletal reorganization, oxidative stress, and cell growth. Our investigation would provide understanding to the endothelium protection information of Sal B

The Association Between the Sedative Loads and Clinical Severity Indicators in the First-Onset Major Depressive Disorder

Background: High sedative use in a major depressive episode may imply specific clinical features. This study aims to examine the correlation between sedative use and clinical severity indicators in the initial treatment phase of first-onset major depressive disorder.Methods: A study cohort in the first episode of major depressive disorder was used to conduct pharmacological dissection. All participants had at least a 2-year follow-up period with a complete treatment record. The defined daily dose of antidepressants and augmentation agents were calculated as the antidepressant load and augmentation load, respectively. Sedative use, which was calculated as the equivalent dosage of lorazepam, were defined as the sedative load. These psychotropic loads were measured monthly and the averaged psychotropic loads for each day were obtained.Results: A total of 106 individuals (75.5% female) were included. The mean duration of disease course in participants was 5.5 ± 3.5 years. In the multiple regression analysis, after controlling for other classes of psychotropics and comorbid anxiety disorders, the sedative load independently correlated with higher number of antidepressants used, higher number of antidepressant used with an adequate dose and duration, more psychiatric emergency and outpatient visits within 2 years of disease onset.Conclusion: High loading of sedatives correlated with several indicators of clinical severity in major depressive disorder. The sedative load may be used as a specifier to identify subgroups in patients with major depressive disorder

High yield expression in a recombinant E. coli of a codon optimized chicken anemia virus capsid protein VP1 useful for vaccine development

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Chicken anemia virus (CAV), the causative agent chicken anemia, is the only member of the genus <it>Gyrovirus </it>of the <it>Circoviridae </it>family. CAV is an immune suppressive virus and causes anemia, lymph organ atrophy and immunodeficiency. The production and biochemical characterization of VP1 protein and its use in a subunit vaccine or as part of a diagnostic kit would be useful to CAV infection prevention.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Significantly increased expression of the recombinant full-length VP1 capsid protein from chicken anemia virus was demonstrated using an <it>E. coli </it>expression system. The VP1 gene was cloned into various different expression vectors and then these were expressed in a number of different <it>E. coli </it>strains. The expression of CAV VP1 in <it>E. coli </it>was significantly increased when VP1 was fused with GST protein rather than a His-tag. By optimizing the various rare amino acid codons within the N-terminus of the VP1 protein, the expression level of the VP1 protein in <it>E. coli </it>BL21(DE3)-pLysS was further increased significantly. The highest protein expression level obtained was 17.5 g/L per liter of bacterial culture after induction with 0.1 mM IPTG for 2 h. After purification by GST affinity chromatography, the purified full-length VP1 protein produced in this way was demonstrated to have good antigenicity and was able to be recognized by CAV-positive chicken serum in an ELISA assay.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Purified recombinant VP1 protein with the gene's codons optimized in the N-terminal region has potential as chimeric protein that, when expressed in <it>E. coli</it>, may be useful in the future for the development of subunit vaccines and diagnostic tests.</p

Enhanced Differentiation of Three-Gene-Reprogrammed Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells into Adipocytes via Adenoviral-Mediated PGC-1α Overexpression

Induced pluripotent stem cells formed by the introduction of only three factors, Oct4/Sox2/Klf4 (3-gene iPSCs), may provide a safer option for stem cell-based therapy than iPSCs conventionally introduced with four-gene iPSCs. Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma coactivator-1α (PGC-1α) plays an important role during brown fat development. However, the potential roles of PGC-1α in regulating mitochondrial biogenesis and the differentiation of iPSCs are still unclear. Here, we investigated the effects of adenovirus-mediated PGC-1α overexpression in 3-gene iPSCs. PGC-1α overexpression resulted in increased mitochondrial mass, reactive oxygen species production, and oxygen consumption. Microarray-based bioinformatics showed that the gene expression pattern of PGC-1α-overexpressing 3-gene iPSCs resembled the expression pattern observed in adipocytes. Furthermore, PGC-1α overexpression enhanced adipogenic differentiation and the expression of several brown fat markers, including uncoupling protein-1, cytochrome C, and nuclear respiratory factor-1, whereas it inhibited the expression of the white fat marker uncoupling protein-2. Furthermore, PGC-1α overexpression significantly suppressed osteogenic differentiation. These data demonstrate that PGC-1α directs the differentiation of 3-gene iPSCs into adipocyte-like cells with features of brown fat cells. This may provide a therapeutic strategy for the treatment of mitochondrial disorders and obesity

Women with endometriosis have higher comorbidities: Analysis of domestic data in Taiwan

AbstractEndometriosis, defined by the presence of viable extrauterine endometrial glands and stroma, can grow or bleed cyclically, and possesses characteristics including a destructive, invasive, and metastatic nature. Since endometriosis may result in pelvic inflammation, adhesion, chronic pain, and infertility, and can progress to biologically malignant tumors, it is a long-term major health issue in women of reproductive age. In this review, we analyze the Taiwan domestic research addressing associations between endometriosis and other diseases. Concerning malignant tumors, we identified four studies on the links between endometriosis and ovarian cancer, one on breast cancer, two on endometrial cancer, one on colorectal cancer, and one on other malignancies, as well as one on associations between endometriosis and irritable bowel syndrome, one on links with migraine headache, three on links with pelvic inflammatory diseases, four on links with infertility, four on links with obesity, four on links with chronic liver disease, four on links with rheumatoid arthritis, four on links with chronic renal disease, five on links with diabetes mellitus, and five on links with cardiovascular diseases (hypertension, hyperlipidemia, etc.). The data available to date support that women with endometriosis might be at risk of some chronic illnesses and certain malignancies, although we consider the evidence for some comorbidities to be of low quality, for example, the association between colon cancer and adenomyosis/endometriosis. We still believe that the risk of comorbidity might be higher in women with endometriosis than that we supposed before. More research is needed to determine whether women with endometriosis are really at risk of these comorbidities

A part-of-speech-based alignment algorithm

To align bilingual texts becomes a crucial issue recently. Rather than using length-based or translation-based criterion, a part-of-speech-based criterion is proposed. We postulate that source texts and target texts should share the same concepts, ideas, entities, and events. Simulated annealing approach is used to implement this alignment algorithm. The preliminary experiments show good performance. Most importantly, the experimental objects are Chinese-English texts, which are selected from different language families. 1