Thermal comfort and energy performance of public rental housing under typical and near-extreme weather conditions in Hong Kong

© 2017 Elsevier B.V. Building performance evaluation is crucial for sustainable urban developments. In high-density cities, occupants suffer from poor living conditions due to building overheating, especially during increasingly frequent near-extreme summer conditions caused by climate change. To represent this situation, the summer reference year weather data was employed for building simulations using DesignBuilder. This study aims to evaluate the thermal comfort and energy consumption of four typical public rental housing (PRH) building types in Hong Kong. For free-running flats, results show generally higher air temperatures in the oldest PRH type (Slab) with a compact linear building form and the most sensitive response to outdoor temperature changes for another older PRH type (Trident) with a Y-shaped design, possibly owing to its high wall conductivity. Occupants in all building types experience a ???10% increase in the proportion of discomfort hours when compared to results for typical summer conditions, but overheating is the most severe in Slab type PRH. Following an initial assessment of the cooling energy usage, a simple sensitivity test was conducted to explore the potential energy savings by various passive design strategies, including shading and reducing the exposed cooled space. A cross-shaped building form also appears to be more energy efficient. These findings, complemented by further parametric analyses, may prove useful when designing buildings for climate change

Carboxyl-terminal truncated HBx regulates a distinct microRNA transcription program in Hepatocellular carcinoma development

Background: The biological pathways and functional properties by which misexpressed microRNAs (miRNAs) contribute to liver carcinogenesis have been intensively investigated. However, little is known about the upstream mechanisms that deregulate miRNA expressions in this process. In hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), hepatitis B virus (HBV) X protein (HBx), a transcriptional trans-activator, is frequently expressed in truncated form without carboxyl-terminus but its role in miRNA expression and HCC development is unclear. Methods: Human non-tumorigenic hepatocytes were infected with lentivirus-expressing full-length and carboxyl-terminal truncated HBx (Ct-HBx) for cell growth assay and miRNA profiling. Chromatin immunoprecipitation microarray was performed to identify the miRNA promoters directly associated with HBx. Direct transcriptional control was verified by luciferase reporter assay. The differential miRNA expressions were further validated in a cohort of HBV-associated HCC tissues using real-time PCR. Results: Hepatocytes expressing Ct-HBx grew significantly faster than the full-length HBx counterparts. Ct-HBx decreased while full-length HBx increased the expression of a set of miRNAs with growth-suppressive functions. Interestingly, Ct-HBx bound to and inhibited the transcriptional activity of some of these miRNA promoters. Notably, some of the examined repressed-miRNAs (miR-26a, -29c, -146a and -190) were also significantly down-regulated in a subset of HCC tissues with carboxyl-terminal HBx truncation compared to their matching non-tumor tissues, highlighting the clinical relevance of our data. Conclusion: Our results suggest that Ct-HBx directly regulates miRNA transcription and in turn promotes hepatocellular proliferation, thus revealing a viral contribution of miRNA deregulation during hepatocarcinogenesis. © 2011 Yip et al.published_or_final_versio

Genome-Wide Association Study of Hepatocellular Carcinoma in Southern Chinese Patients with Chronic Hepatitis B Virus Infection

One of the most relevant risk factors for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) development is chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection, but only a fraction of chronic HBV carriers develop HCC, indicating that complex interactions among viral, environmental and genetic factors lead to HCC in HBV-infected patients. So far, host genetic factors have incompletely been characterized. Therefore, we performed a genome-wide association (GWA) study in a Southern Chinese cohort consisting of 95 HBV-infected HCC patients (cases) and 97 HBV-infected patients without HCC (controls) using the Illumina Human610-Quad BeadChips. The top single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were then validated in an independent cohort of 500 cases and 728 controls. 4 SNPs (rs12682266, rs7821974, rs2275959, rs1573266) at chromosome 8p12 showed consistent association in both the GWA and replication phases (ORcombined = 1.31–1.39; pcombined = 2.71×10−5–5.19×10−4; PARcombined = 26–31%). We found a 2.3-kb expressed sequence tag (EST) in the region using in-silico data mining and verified the existence of the full-length EST experimentally. The expression level of the EST was significantly reduced in human HCC tumors in comparison to the corresponding non-tumorous liver tissues (P<0.001). Results from sequence analysis and in-vitro protein translation study suggest that the transcript might function as a long non-coding RNA. In summary, our study suggests that variations at chromosome 8p12 may promote HCC in patients with HBV. Further functional studies of this region may help understand HBV-associated hepatocarcinogenesis

A comparative study on the indoor thermal comfort and energy consumption of typical public rental housing types under near-extreme summer conditions in Hong Kong

© 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Residents of the dense urban environment in Hong Kong suffer from poor living conditions due to building overheating, especially during near-extreme summer conditions. In this study, the thermal comfort and energy performance of typical public rental housing (PRH) building types were simulated using DesignBuilder. Results show that the oldest Slab type PRH, which has a compact building form, has the highest indoor air temperature, yet the lowest cooling energy demand. On the other hand, the Trident type PRH, with the largest external wall U-value, performs the worst overall and is the most responsive to outdoor temperature changes

A novel Hsp90 inhibitor AT13387 induces senescence in EBV-positive nasopharyngeal carcinoma cells and suppresses tumor formation

Background: Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is an epithelial malignancy strongly associated with Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). AT13387 is a novel heat shock protein 90 (Hsp90) inhibitor, which inhibits the chaperone function of Hsp90 and reduces expression of Hsp90-dependent client oncoproteins. This study aimed to evaluate both the in vitro and in vivo antitumor effects of AT13387 in the EBV-positive NPC cell line C666-1.Results: Our results showed that AT13387 inhibited C666-1 cell growth and induced cellular senescence with the downregulation of multiple Hsp90 client oncoproteins EGFR, AKT, CDK4, and restored the protein expression of negative cell cycle regulator p27. We also studied the ability of AT13387 to restore p27 expression by downregulation of AKT and the p27 ubiquitin mediator, Skp2, using AKT inhibitor and Skp2 siRNA. In the functional study, AT13387 inhibited cell migration with downregulation of a cell migration regulator, HDAC6, and increased the acetylation and stabilization of α-tubulin. We also examined the effect of AT13387 on putative cancer stem cells (CSC) by 3-D tumor sphere formation assay. AT13387 effectively reduced both the number and size of C666-1 tumor spheres with decreased expression of NPC CSC-like markers CD44 and SOX2. In the in vivo study, AT13387 significantly suppressed tumor formation in C666-1 NPC xenografts.Conclusion: AT13387 suppressed cell growth, cell migration, tumor sphere formation and induced cellular senescence on EBV-positive NPC cell line C666-1. Also, the antitumor effect of AT13387 was demonstrated in an in vivo model. This study provided experimental evidence for the preclinical value of using AT13387 as an effective antitumor agent in treatment of NPC. © 2013 Chan et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.published_or_final_versio

MicroRNA profiling study reveals MIR-150 in association with metastasis in nasopharyngeal carcinoma

© 2017 The Author(s). MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs that play a crucial role in pathogenesis of human cancers. Several miRNAs have been shown to involve in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) pathogenesis through alteration of gene networks. A global view of the miRNA expression profile of clinical specimens would be the best way to screen out the possible miRNA candidates that may be involved in disease pathogenesis. In this study, we investigated the expression profiles of miRNA in formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissues from patients with undifferentiated NPC versus non-NPC controls using a miRNA real-time PCR platform, which covered a total of 95 cancer-related miRNAs. Hierarchical cluster analysis revealed that NPC and non-NPC controls were clearly segregated. Promisingly, 10 miRNA candidates were differentially expressed. Among them, 9 miRNAs were significantly up-regulated of which miR-205 and miR-196a showed the most up-regulated in NPC with the highest incidence percentage of 94.1% and 88.2%, respectively, while the unique down-regulated miR-150 was further validated in patient sera. Finally, the in vitro gain-of-function and loss-of-function assays revealed that miR-150 can modulate the epithelial-mesenchymal-transition property in NPC/HK-1 cells and led to the cell motility and invasion. miR-150 may be a potential biomarker for NPC and plays a critical role in NPC tumourigenesis.Link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Rationalisation and Validation of an Acrylamide-Free Procedure in Three-Dimensional Histological Imaging

201810_a bcmapublished_fina

Milk Consumption Across Life Periods in Relation to Lower Risk of Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma: A Multicentre Case-Control Study

Background: The much higher incidence of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) in men suggests sex hormones as a risk factor, and dairy products contain measurable amounts of steroid hormones. Milk consumption has greatly increased in endemic regions of NPC. We investigated the association between NPC and milk consumption across life periods in Hong Kong.Methods: A multicentre case-control study included 815 histologically confirmed NPC incident cases and 1,502 controls who were frequency-matched on age and sex at five major hospitals in Hong Kong in 2014–2017. Odds ratios (ORs) of NPC (cases vs. controls) for milk consumption at different life periods were estimated by unconditional logistic regression, adjusting for sex, age, socioeconomic status score, smoking and alcohol drinking status, exposure to occupational hazards, family history of cancer, IgA against Epstein-Barr virus viral capsid antigen, and total energy intake.Results: Compared with abstainers, lower risks of NPC were consistently observed in regular users (consuming ≥5 glasses of milk [fresh and powdered combined] per month) across four life periods of age 6–12 (adjusted OR 0.74, 95% CI 0.54–0.86), 13–18 (0.68, 0.55–0.84), 19–30 (0.68, 0.55–0.84), and 10 years before recruitment (0.72, 0.59–0.87). Long-term average milk consumption of ≤2.5, &gt;2.5, and ≤12.5, &gt;12.5 glasses per month yielded adjusted OR (95% CI) of 1.00 (0.80–1.26), 0.98 (0.81–1.18), 0.95 (0.76–1.18), and 0.55 (0.43–0.70), respectively (all P-values for trend &lt; 0.05).Conclusion: Consumption of milk across life periods was associated with lower risks of NPC. If confirmed to be causal, this has important implications for dairy product consumption and prevention of NPC

The association of RANTES polymorphism with severe acute respiratory syndrome in Hong Kong and Beijing Chinese

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Chemokines play important roles in inflammation and antiviral action. We examined whether polymorphisms of <it>RANTES, IP-10 </it>and <it>Mig </it>affect the susceptibility to and outcome of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We tested the polymorphisms of <it>RANTES, IP-10 </it>and <it>Mig </it>for their associations with SARS in 495 Hong Kong Chinese SARS patients and 578 controls. Then we tried to confirm the results in 356 Beijing Chinese SARS patients and 367 controls.</p> <p>Results</p> <p><it>RANTES </it>-28 G allele was associated with SARS susceptibility in Hong Kong Chinese (<it>P </it>< 0.0001, OR = 2.80, 95%CI:2.11–3.71). Individuals with <it>RANTES </it>-28 CG and GG genotypes had a 3.28-fold (95%CI:2.32–4.64) and 3.06-fold (95%CI:1.47–6.39) increased risk of developing SARS respectively (<it>P </it>< 0.0001). This -28 G allele conferred risk of death in a gene-dosage dependent manner (<it>P </it>= 0.014) with CG and GG individuals having a 2.12-fold (95% CI: 1.11–4.06) and 4.01-fold (95% CI: 1.30–12.4) increased risk. For the replication of <it>RANTES </it>data in Beijing Chinese, the -28 G allele was not associated with susceptibility to SARS. However, -28 CG (OR = 4.27, 95%CI:1.64–11.1) and GG (OR = 3.34, 95%CI:0.37–30.7) were associated with admission to intensive care units or death due to SARS (<it>P </it>= 0.011).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p><it>RANTES </it>-28 G allele plays a role in the pathogenesis of SARS.</p