A case of hepatocellular carcinoma with skin injury of the upper abdominal wall after transcatheter arterial chemoembolization: a case report

Introduction Transcatheter arterial chemoembolization has been widely used to treat advanced hepatocellular carcinoma that cannot be treated by local ablation therapies or surgical resection. The effectiveness of transcatheter arterial chemoembolization in prolonging survival has been well established, and approximately one third of newly discovered hepatocellular carcinoma patients were repeatedly treated by transcatheter arterial chemoembolization in Japan. Various kinds of complications have been reported, and many of which are general complications such as hepatic coma, jaundice, fever-up, ascites, and bile duct injury. The hepatic falciform artery is found frequently during postmortem anatomic dissection and the incidence of hepatic falciform artery is reported to be over 60%. Hepatic falciform artery is known to be the responsible artery for supraumbilical skin rash development after arterial chemo infusion therapy; however, skin complications after transcatheter arterial chemoembolization are rare. Case presentation A 70-year-old female with chronic hepatitis C infection was diagnosed as having hepatocellular carcinoma (S4, 20 mm in diameter). Transcatheter arterial chemoembolization was performed via the left hepatic artery, which was a feeding artery of the hepatocellular carcinoma. Two days after that, supraumbilical skin rash with local tenderness and redness appeared. Retrospective analysis revealed that occlusion of the hepatic falciform artery branching from the left hepatic artery with micromaterials caused the skin lesion. Conclusion We should keep in mind that anticancer drugs or embolic materials can flow into the HFA and may cause abdominal wall injury after transcatheter arterial chemoembolization

A genome-wide gain-of-function analysis of rice genes using the FOX-hunting system

Funding Information: Acknowledgements This work was supported by a grant from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of Japan (Green Technology Project EF-1004). We are grateful to Dr. Takuji Sasaki for his encouragement throughout the project and his excellent advice on the improvement of this manuscript, and to Dr. Shoshi Kikuchi for providing useful information on rice FL-cDNAs. We thank Professors Kokichi Hinata, Atsushi Hirai, Hiroshi Kamada and Masashi Ugaki for their encouragement, critical comments and helpful suggestions, and Drs. Hisato Okuizumi and Hiroyuki Kawahigashi for their administrative support throughout the project. We also thank Mayumi Akagawa, Hiroko Abe, Keiko Mori, Etsuko Sugai, Yumiko Nakane, Ken-ichi Watanabe, Mayumi Takeya, and Kana Miyata for their technical assistance; the members of the Technical Support Section of the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences for their help in the care of the FOX-rice plants; Haruko Onodera and Kazuko Ono for their technical assistance and advice on rice transformation; Inplanta Innovations Inc. for their technical help on the construction of theThe latest report has estimated the number of rice genes to be ∼32 000. To elucidate the functions of a large population of rice genes and to search efficiently for agriculturally useful genes, we have been taking advantage of the Full-length cDNA Over-eXpresser (FOX) gene-hunting system. This system is very useful for analyzing various gain-of-function phenotypes from large populations of transgenic plants overexpressing cDNAs of interest and others with unknown or important functions. We collected the plasmid DNAs of 13 980 independent full-length cDNA (FL-cDNA) clones to produce a FOX library by placing individual cDNAs under the control of the maize Ubiquitin-1 promoter. The FOX library was transformed into rice by Agrobacterium-mediated high-speed transformation. So far, we have generated approximately 12 000 FOX-rice lines. Genomic PCR analysis indicated that the average number of FL-cDNAs introduced into individual lines was 1.04. Sequencing analysis of the PCR fragments carrying FL-cDNAs from 8615 FOX-rice lines identified FL-cDNAs in 8225 lines, and a database search classified the cDNAs into 5462 independent ones. Approximately 16.6% of FOX-rice lines examined showed altered growth or morphological characteristics. Three super-dwarf mutants overexpressed a novel gibberellin 2-oxidase gene, confirming the importance of this system. We also show here the other morphological alterations caused by individual FL-cDNA expression. These dominant phenotypes should be valuable indicators for gene discovery and functional analysis.publishersversionPeer reviewe

CO Multi-line Imaging of Nearby Galaxies (COMING). III. Dynamical effect on molecular gas density and star formation in the barred spiral galaxy NGC 4303

We present the results of $^{12}$CO($J$=1-0) and $^{13}$CO($J$=1-0) simultaneous mappings toward the nearby barred spiral galaxy NGC 4303 as a part of the CO Multi-line Imaging of Nearby Galaxies (COMING) project. Barred spiral galaxies often show lower star-formation efficiency (SFE) in their bar region compared to the spiral arms. In this paper, we examine the relation between the SFEs and the volume densities of molecular gas $n(\rm{H}_2)$ in the eight different regions within the galactic disk with CO data combined with archival far-ultraviolet and 24 $\mu$m data. We confirmed that SFE in the bar region is lower by 39% than that in the spiral arms. Moreover, velocity-alignment stacking analysis was performed for the spectra in the individual regions. The integrated intensity ratios of $^{12}$CO to $^{13}$CO ($R_{12/13}$) range from 10 to 17 as the results of stacking. Fixing a kinetic temperature of molecular gas, $n(\rm{H}_2)$ was derived from $R_{12/13}$ via non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (non-LTE) analysis. The density $n(\rm{H}_2)$ in the bar is lower by 31-37% than that in the arms and there is a rather tight positive correlation between SFEs and $n(\rm{H}_2)$, with a correlation coefficient of $\sim 0.8$. Furthermore, we found a dependence of $n(\rm{H}_2)$ on the velocity dispersion of inter-molecular clouds ($\Delta V/ \sin i$). Specifically, $n(\rm{H}_2)$ increases as $\Delta V/ \sin i$ increases when $\Delta V/ \sin i < 100$ km s$^{-1}$. On the other hand, $n(\rm{H}_2)$ decreases as $\Delta V/ \sin i$ increases when $\Delta V/ \sin i > 100$ km s$^{-1}$. These relations indicate that the variations of SFE could be caused by the volume densities of molecular gas, and the volume densities could be governed by the dynamical influence such as cloud-cloud collisions, shear and enhanced inner-cloud turbulence.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in PAS

CO Multi-line Imaging of Nearby Galaxies (COMING) IV. Overview of the Project

Observations of the molecular gas in galaxies are vital to understanding the evolution and star-forming histories of galaxies. However, galaxies with molecular gas maps of their whole discs having sufficient resolution to distinguish galactic structures are severely lacking. Millimeter wavelength studies at a high angular resolution across multiple lines and transitions are particularly needed, severely limiting our ability to infer the universal properties of molecular gas in galaxies. Hence, we conducted a legacy project with the 45 m telescope of the Nobeyama Radio Observatory, called the CO Multi-line Imaging of Nearby Galaxies (COMING), which simultaneously observed 147 galaxies with high far-infrared flux in $^{12}$CO, $^{13}$CO, and C$^{18}$O $J=1-0$ lines. The total molecular gas mass was derived using the standard CO-to-H$_2$ conversion factor and found to be positively correlated with the total stellar mass derived from the WISE $3.4 \mu$m band data. The fraction of the total molecular gas mass to the total stellar mass in galaxies does not depend on their Hubble types nor the existence of a galactic bar, although when galaxies in individual morphological types are investigated separately, the fraction seems to decrease with the total stellar mass in early-type galaxies and vice versa in late-type galaxies. No differences in the distribution of the total molecular gas mass, stellar mass, and the total molecular gas to stellar mass ratio was observed between barred and non-barred galaxies, which is likely the result of our sample selection criteria, in that we prioritized observing FIR bright (and thus molecular gas-rich) galaxies.Comment: Accepted for publication in PASJ; 47 pages, 5 tables, 29 figures. On-line supplementary images are available at this URL (https://astro3.sci.hokudai.ac.jp/~radio/coming/publications/). CO data is available at the Japanese Virtual Observatory (JVO) website (https://jvo.nao.ac.jp/portal/nobeyama/coming.do) and the project website (https://astro3.sci.hokudai.ac.jp/~radio/coming/data/

Overexpression of TIFY genes promotes plant growth in rice through jasmonate signaling

<p>Because environmental stress can reduce crop growth and yield, the identification of genes that enhance agronomic traits is increasingly important. Previous screening of full-length cDNA overexpressing (FOX) rice lines revealed that OsTIFY11b, one of 20 TIFY proteins in rice, affects plant size, grain weight, and grain size. Therefore, we analyzed the effect of <i>OsTIFY11b</i> and nine other TIFY genes on the growth and yield of corresponding TIFY-FOX lines. Regardless of temperature, grain weight and culm length were enhanced in lines overexpressing TIFY11 subfamily genes, except <i>OsTIFY11e.</i> The TIFY-FOX plants exhibited increased floret number and reduced days to flowering, as well as reduced spikelet fertility, and <i>OsTIFY10b</i>, in particular, enhanced grain yield by minimizing decreases in fertility. We suggest that the enhanced growth of TIFY-transgenic rice is related to regulation of the jasmonate signaling pathway, as in <i>Arabidopsis.</i> Moreover, we discuss the potential application of TIFY overexpression for improving crop yield.</p