Investigation and identification of a mushroom poisoning in Wuhan

Objective Analyzing on-site disposal process of a mushroom poisoning in Wuhan. Identifying the toxin in the mushrooms and providing references for similar poisoning incidents. Methods Epidemiological investigation, clinical treatment data and suspicious poisonous mushroom sample were collected. Mushroom sample was identified by molecular analysis. Results All patients ate different quantity of fried mushroom. The early clinical symptom were mainly gastrointestinal symptoms, and the liver, kidney and coagulopathy were damaged in the later stage. The mushroom samples were identified as Amanita rimosa. Conclusion According to epidemiological, clinical, morphological and molecular biological evidence, this incident was confirmed to be a mushroom poisoning incident caused by Amanita rimosa

Prognostic Significance of miR-181b and miR-21 in Gastric Cancer Patients Treated with S-1/Oxaliplatin or Doxifluridine/Oxaliplatin

Background: The goal of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of S-1/Oxaliplatin vs. Doxifluridine/Oxaliplatin regimen and to identify miRNAs as potential prognostic biomarkers in gastric cancer patients. The expression of candidate miRNAs was quantified from fifty-five late stage gastric cancer FFPE specimens. Experimental Design: Gastric cancer patients with KPS>70 were recruited for the trial. The control group was treated with 400 mg/twice/day Doxifluridine plus i.v. with Oxaliplatin at 130 mg/m 2/first day/4 week cycle. The testing group was treated with S-1 at 40 mg/twice/day/4 week cycle plus i.v. with Oxaliplatin at 130 mg/m 2/first day/4 week cycle. Total RNAs were extracted from normal and gastric tumor specimens. The levels of miRNAs were quantified using real time qRT-PCR expression analysis. Results: The overall objective response rate (CR+PR) of patients treated with S-1/Oxaliplatin was 33.3% (CR+PR) vs. 17.6% (CR+PR) with Doxifluridine/Oxaliplatin for advanced stage gastric cancer patients. The average overall survival for patients treated with S-1/Oxaliplatin was 7.80 month vs. 7.30 month with patients treated with Doxifluridine/Oxaliplatin. The expression of miR-181b (P = 0.022) and miR-21 (P = 0.0029) was significantly overexpressed in gastric tumors compared to normal gastric tissues. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis revealed that low levels of miR-21 expression (Log rank test, hazard ratio: 0.17, CI = 0.06-0.45; P = 0.0004) and miR-181b (Log rank test, hazard ratio: 0.37, CI = 0.16-0.87; P = 0.018) are closely associated with better patient's overall survival for both S-1 and Doxifluridine based regimens. Conclusion: Patients treated with S-1/Oxaliplatin had a better response than those treated with Doxifluridine/Oxaliplatin. miR-21 and miR-181b hold great potential as prognostic biomarkers in late stage gastric cancer. © 2011 Jiang et al

Minicircle-oriP-IFNγ: A Novel Targeted Gene Therapeutic System for EBV Positive Human Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma

) in which the transgene expression was under the transcriptional regulation of oriP promoter.. Immunohistochemistry was used to detect the expression and the activity of the IFNγ in tumor sections. Our results demonstrated that mc-oriP vectors mediated comparable gene expression and anti-proliferative effect in the EBV-positive NPC cell line C666-1 compared to mc-CMV vectors. Furthermore, mc-oriP vectors exhibited much lower killing effects on EBV-negative cell lines compared to mc-CMV vectors. The targeted expression of mc-oriP vectors was inhibited by EBNA1-siRNA in C666-1. This selective expression was corroborated in EBV-positive and -negative tumor models. as a safe and highly effective targeted gene therapeutic system for the treatment of EBV positive NPC

Factors Influencing Rural Teacher Flow in Yunnan Ethnic Minority Areas

Ethnic minority areas are old revolutionary base areas, areas inhabited by ethnic minorities, remote areas, impoverished areas, and also difficult areas for construction of socialist harmonious society. Studying on factors influencing rural teacher flow in ethnic minority areas is of great significance to improving local teacher team structure and promoting balanced development of urban and rural education. However, it lacks empirical analysis based on field survey for the nonce. In this study, based on interview and questionnaire data of education departments and school leaders in 4 ethnic minority areas of Yunnan Province, it established binary Logistic model, analyzed factors influencing rural teacher flow in ethnic minority areas of Yunnan Province, and finally present policy recommendations

A Recommendation Approach for Rating Prediction Based on User Interest and Trust Value

Collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm is one of the most researched and widely used recommendation algorithms in personalized recommendation systems. Aiming at the problem of data sparsity existing in the traditional collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm, which leads to inaccurate recommendation accuracy and low recommendation efficiency, an improved collaborative filtering algorithm is proposed in this paper. The algorithm is improved in the following three aspects: firstly, considering that the traditional scoring similarity calculation excessively relies on the common scoring items, the Bhattacharyya similarity calculation is introduced into the traditional calculation formula; secondly, the trust weight is added to accurately calculate the direct trust value and the trust transfer mechanism is introduced to calculate the indirect trust value between users; finally, the user similarity and user trust are integrated, and the prediction result is generated by the trust weighting method. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm can effectively improve the prediction accuracy of recommendations

Meteorological constraints on characteristics of daily dustfall in Xi'an

Dust deposition is a crucial link of dust cycle that is less constrained in model studies. This study acquired profiles of flux and size distribution of daily dustfall from 2012 to 2013 in Xi'an on the southern Chinese Loess Plateau. On this basis, we made quantitative estimates of dust contribution from particular sources and processes, which provides important boundary conditions for model studies. Regrouping the data into transport- and source-limited deposition scenarios, we revealed that besides precipitation extreme wind speed and average relative humidity are the primary meteorological constraints in the transport and source-limited scenarios, respectively. Stronger extreme wind speed promotes higher flux and deposition of dust >16 mu m, corroborating previous interpretations of variation of flux and grain size of aeolian deposits. However, higher average relative humidity favors lower flux and deposition of dust <16 mu m, which is a deposition process not recognized before, and is possibly due to hygroscopicity of mineral dust or the influence of water vapor on air convection. Elucidating this process in future studies might substantially improve model performance on dust deposition. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Magnetic signatures of natural and anthropogenic sources of urban dust aerosol

The characteristics of urban dust aerosols and the contributions of their natural and anthropogenic sources are of scientific interest as well as being of substantial sociopolitical and economic concern. Here we present a comprehensive study of dust flux, magnetic parameters, magnetic particulate morphology, and elemental compositions of atmospheric dustfall originating from natural dust sources in East Asia and local anthropogenic sources in Xi'an, China. The results reveal a significant inverse relationship between seasonal variations of dust flux and magnetic susceptibility (chi). By comparing dust flux and chi records, the relative contributions of dust from local anthropogenic sources are estimated. Analyses using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) combined with energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) indicate that magnetic particulate from different sources has distinct morphological and elemental characteristics. Detrital magnetic particles originating from natural sources are characterized by relatively smooth surfaces with Fe and O as the major elements and a minor contribution from Ti. The anthropogenic particles have angular, spherical, aggregate, and porous shapes with distinctive contributions from marker elements, including S, Cr, Cu, Zn, Ni, Mn, and Ca. Our results demonstrate that this multidisciplinary approach is effective in distinguishing dust particles derived from distant natural sources and local anthropogenic sources and for the quantitative assessment of contributions from the two end-members

The Cloning and Characterization of the Enolase2 Gene of Gekko japonicus and Its Polyclonal Antibody Preparation

Abstract: The enolase2 gene is usually expressed in mature neurons and also named neuron specific enolase (NSE). In the present study, we first obtained the NSE gene cDNA sequence by using the RACE method based on the expressed sequence tag (EST) fragment from the cDNA library of Gekko japonicus and identified one transcript of about 2.2 kb in central nervous system of Gekko japonicus by Northern blotting. The open reading frame of NSE is 1305 bp, which encodes a 435 amino-acid protein. We further investigated the multi-tissue expression pattern of NSE by RT-PCR and found that the expression of NSE mRNA was very high in brain, spinal cord and low in heart, while it was not detectable in other tissues. The real-time quantitative PCR was used to investigate the time-dependent change in the expression of the NSE mRNA level after gecko spinal cord transection and found it significantly increased at one day, reaching its highest level three days post-injury and then decreasing at the seventh day of the experiment. The recombinant plasmid of pET-32a-NSE was constructed and induced to express His fused NSE protein. The purified NSE protein was used to immunize rabbits to generate polyclonal antisera. The titer of the antiserum was more than 1:65536 determined by ELISA. Western blotting showed that the prepared antibodyInt. J. Mol. Sci. 2013, 14 878

Identification of QTLs Controlling Radish Root Shape Using Multiple Populations

Root shape is an important characteristic that affects the commodity of radish (Raphanus sativus L.), which can be measured using the ratio of root length (RL) to root diameter (RD). Although it is known that root shape is controlled by quantitative trait loci (QTLs), reliable QTLs for radish root shape are still lacking. In the present study, we used three F2 populations (1902, 1908 and 1909) derived from the crossing of five radish cultivars with highly divergent root shapes to perform QTL-seq. A total of 1282 individuals of the three F2 populations were measured to determine the root length and maximum diameter. High-depth resequencing of six extreme pools and five parents was performed, and QTL-seq was used to detect the QTLs controlling the radish root shape. We identified seven QTLs for root shape distributing on five radish chromosomes (R1, R2, R4, R5 and R7), among which rs7.1 and rs7.2 had an overlap of 1.02 Mb (13.79–14.81 Mb). In addition, two QTLs, rs4.1 and rs4.2, were adjacent to each other on chromosome R4. In conclusion, this study provides an important foundation for the fine mapping and functional analysis of the QTLs controlling the root shape and breeding for root shape in radish

Fabrication of an Ultrastrong Formaldehyde-Free Wood Adhesive with an Organic–Inorganic Cross-Linking Network

The wood industry faces challenges in producing eco-friendly, high-performance, and formaldehyde-free adhesives. In this study, carboxylated styrene–butadiene rubber (XSBR) was blended with polyamidoamine–epichlorohydrin (PAE) resin, and a controlled amount of CaCO3 powder was incorporated to create an adhesive with exceptional strength. The resulting three-layer plywood demonstrated remarkable dry and wet shear strengths of 3.09 and 2.36 MPa, respectively, and of 2.27 MPa after boiling water tests, comparable to that of phenolic resins. Additionally, the adhesive exhibited strong adhesion across various materials including glass, metal, etc. This exceptional performance was due to two primary factors: (1) the high-density chemical cross-linking reaction and the physical entanglement between XSBR and PAE; (2) the organic–inorganic hybrid involving metal ion complexation developed by CaCO3, which fostered molecular chain connections and enhanced the adhesive–material interface. These findings offer valuable references for further research in the field of wood adhesives