Association between ERCC1 and TS mRNA levels and disease free survival in colorectal cancer patients receiving oxaliplatin and fluorouracil (5-FU) adjuvant chemotherapy

BACKGROUND: Aim was to explore the association of ERCC1 and TS mRNA levels with the disease free survival (DFS) in Chinese colorectal cancer (CRC) patients receiving oxaliplatin and 5-FU based adjuvant chemotherapy. METHODS: Total 112 Chinese stage II-III CRC patients were respectively treated by four different chemotherapy regimens after curative operation. The TS and ERCC1 mRNA levels in primary tumor were measured by real-time RT-PCR. Kaplan–Meier curves and log-rank tests were used for DFS analysis. The Cox proportional hazards model was used for prognostic analysis. RESULTS: In univariate analysis, the hazard ratio (HR) for the mRNA expression levels of TS and ERCC1 (logTS: HR = 0.820, 95% CI = 0.600 - 1.117, P = 0.210; logERCC1: HR = 1.054, 95% CI = 0.852 - 1.304, P = 0.638) indicated no significant association of DFS with the TS and ERCC1 mRNA levels. In multivariate analyses, tumor stage (IIIc: reference, P = 0.083; IIb: HR = 0.240, 95% CI = 0.080 - 0.724, P = 0.011; IIc: HR < 0.0001, P = 0.977; IIIa: HR = 0.179, 95% CI = 0.012 - 2.593, P = 0.207) was confirmed to be the independent prognostic factor for DFS. Moreover, the Kaplan-Meier DFS curves showed that TS and ERCC1 mRNA levels were not significantly associated with the DFS (TS: P = 0.264; ERCC1: P = 0.484). CONCLUSION: The mRNA expression of ERCC1 and TS were not applicable to predict the DFS of Chinese stage II-III CRC patients receiving 5-FU and oxaliplatin based adjuvant chemotherapy

A Chinese expert consensus on thoracic endovascular aortic repair of type B aortic dissection with a single-branched stent graft for revascularization of the left subclavian artery

Thoracic endovascular repair (TEVAR) is currently the recommended and most widely used treatment for type B aortic dissection. A major challenge is revascularization of the left subclavian artery in order to extend the landing zone to zone 2 (Ishimaru classification). Various strategies have been used for revascularization, including branched stent graft, fenestrated stent graft, the chimney technique, the parallel technique, and bypass surgery. Single-branched stent graft is one of the most promising strategies, and several products have recently been reported as potential candidates for use with this approach. The Castor single-branched stent graft is the only off-the-shelf product available; this product has been developed through collaboration between Chinese corporations and clinicians. In this Perspective article, clinical experience and data obtained from TEVAR with the Castor single-branched stent graft are summarized by experienced Chinese experts

RNA-seq analysis revealed considerable genetic diversity and enabled the development of specific KASP markers for Psathyrostachys huashanica

Psathyrostachys huashanica, which grows exclusively in Huashan, China, is an important wild relative of common wheat that has many desirable traits relevant for wheat breeding. However, the poorly characterized interspecific phylogeny and genomic variations and the relative lack of species-specific molecular markers have limited the utility of P. huashanica as a genetic resource for enhancing wheat germplasm. In this study, we sequenced the P. huashanica transcriptome, resulting in 50,337,570 clean reads that were assembled into 65,617 unigenes, of which 38,428 (58.56%) matched at least one sequence in public databases. The phylogenetic analysis of P. huashanica, Triticeae species, and Poaceae species was conducted using 68 putative orthologous gene clusters. The data revealed the distant evolutionary relationship between P. huashanica and common wheat as well as the substantial diversity between the P. huashanica genome and the wheat D genome. By comparing the transcriptomes of P. huashanica and Chinese Spring, 750,759 candidate SNPs between P. huashanica Ns genes and their common wheat orthologs were identified. Among the 90 SNPs in the exon regions with different functional annotations, 58 (64.4%) were validated as Ns genome-specific SNPs in the common wheat background by KASP genotyping assays. Marker validation analyses indicated that six specific markers can discriminate between P. huashanica and the other wheat-related species. In addition, five markers are unique to P. huashanica, P. juncea, and Leymus species, which carry the Ns genome. The Ns genome-specific markers in a wheat background were also validated regarding their specificity and stability for detecting P. huashanica chromosomes in four wheat–P. huashanica addition lines. Four and eight SNP markers were detected in wheat–P. huashanica 2Ns and 7Ns addition lines, respectively, and one marker was specific to both wheat–P. huashanica 3Ns, 4Ns, and 7Ns addition lines. These markers developed using transcriptome data may be used to elucidate the genetic relationships among Psathyrostachys, Leymus, and other closely-related species. They may also facilitate precise introgressions and the high-throughput monitoring of P. huashanica exogenous chromosomes or segments in future crop breeding programs

Influence Factors on Temperature Distribution of Electric Furnace Roof

Electric furnace roof is an important device for electric steel making, whose heat preservation performance and life-span have a direct impact on the economic benefits of iron and steel enterprise. This paper investigates the effect between the temperature level of electric furnace roof and the material parameters. Research indicates that they have a trend to change in the same direction

Simulation of Expansion Joint of Bottom Lining in Ladle and Its Influence on Thermal Stress

Ladle is an important equipment of the metallurgical industry. Distribution of thermal stress in bottom linings has an essential influence on its life, and the size of its life-span affects the economic benefits of the iron and steel enterprise directly. In the process of design and calibration of the large-size ladle, it is of great significance to determine the stress distribution of each part of the ladle for safely and reliably running the device. Expansion joint has an important effect on the thermal stress of ladle composite construction body. The thermal expansion stress is one of important reasons that lead to damage, so it is of great practical value to calculate the thermal expansion stress. Expansion joint question between the inside linings could be summed up as a kind of contact question, whose physical model was set up, and the finite element model of expansion joint of bottom lining in ladle was built. The contact stress of expansion joint in each layer was researched. The results illustrate that setting 2 millimeters expansion joint can reduce the contact stress which is equate to 1/6 ~ 1/5 of crushing strength of the lining

Temperature and Thermal Stress Analysis of Refractory Products

Firstly current status of temperature and thermal stress research of refractory product at home and aboard are analyzed. Finite element model of two classical refractory products is building by using APDL language. Distribution law of temperature and thermal stress of two typical refractory products-ladles and tundish are analyzed and their structures are optimized. Stress of optimal structure is dropped obviously, and operation life is increased effectively

Integrating various resources for gene name normalization.

The recognition and normalization of gene mentions in biomedical literature are crucial steps in biomedical text mining. We present a system for extracting gene names from biomedical literature and normalizing them to gene identifiers in databases. The system consists of four major components: gene name recognition, entity mapping, disambiguation and filtering. The first component is a gene name recognizer based on dictionary matching and semi-supervised learning, which utilizes the co-occurrence information of a large amount of unlabeled MEDLINE abstracts to enhance feature representation of gene named entities. In the stage of entity mapping, we combine the strategies of exact match and approximate match to establish linkage between gene names in the context and the EntrezGene database. For the gene names that map to more than one database identifiers, we develop a disambiguation method based on semantic similarity derived from the Gene Ontology and MEDLINE abstracts. To remove the noise produced in the previous steps, we design a filtering method based on the confidence scores in the dictionary used for NER. The system is able to adjust the trade-off between precision and recall based on the result of filtering. It achieves an F-measure of 83% (precision: 82.5% recall: 83.5%) on BioCreative II Gene Normalization (GN) dataset, which is comparable to the current state-of-the-art

Research on Temperature Distribution Model of Electric Furnace Roof

Electric furnace roof is an important device for electric steel making, whose heat preservation performance and life-span have a direct impact on the economic benefits of iron and steel enterprise. Considered contact behavior between prefabricate block, this paper establishes the complete CAD/CAE model of the electric furnace roof with finite element software based on the theory of transferring heating subject, and respectively calculates the stable temperature and stress field of the firebrick roof and the prefabricate block roof in last melting stage, as is advantageous to analyze the level and the distribution of temperature and stress of electric furnace roof

Coke Oven Intelligent Integrated Control System

In order to improve the level of management and control of coke oven, the research on intelligent integrated control system is carried out. In modern advanced control system of coke oven, the control scheme of feedback combined with feed-forward, and control merged with management are widely utilized. The integrated management and control system of coke oven is introduced systematically, including the system model, production plan and management, heating control system, the model and method of evaluating temperature, intelligent combustion control and the pressure control gas collector of coke oven. It is pointed out that the integration of management and control develops towards the orientation of coke oven control system. Considering the complexity and importance of flue temperature control in coke oven heating process, the control method of combining the stopping heating time control with the heating gas flow adjustment is proposed, hybrid intelligent control models of flue temperature are buil

Intelligent Control of Air Compressor Production Process

The air compressor provides not only the required pressure air for the cooling equipment and refrigeration plant, but also the raw material required for the air separation plant. Utilizing the air compressor is extremely extensive in many significant departments such as the metallurgy, oil and chemical industry. The air compressor production process is a time-varying, delay and nonlinear complex system and gas consumption in the industrial field is irregular. Defects in the traditional control method lead to the pressure instability of the compressed air outputted from the air compressor in volatile gas-consumption situations, sometimes a wide range of fluctuation arising. Therefore, the working state of the air compressor becomes unstable. It results in both a waste of resources and greater energy consumption. Therefore, guaranteeing the output pressure of the air compressor system steady is extraordinarily significant for improving efficiency and saving energy for the overall air separation system. DCS control technology applied to the system, the ECS-700 system of SUPCON was utilized into configuring the air compressor system and monitoring real-time values of important parameters in the various components. According to the working characteristics of the air compressor system, a fuzzy pressure controller and an intelligent control method based on the fuzzy PID were proposed. The simulation results showed that the control effect was extraordinarily satisfactory and effective. It can offer a certain meaning of guidance and reference for the control of other equipment in air separation system