Cellular Stiffness Measurement for 3D Biological Printing

During 3D biological printing, cells can sense their environment and change their own properties accordingly. In order to understand how cells modulate their stiffness with resp ect to their environmental stiffness, micropipette aspiration method was used to measure the aspiration lengths of porcine mesenchymal stem cells (pMSCs), which were cultured on polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrates with different stiffness for different time periods, under certain pressure. After the measurem ents, both elastic and viscoelastic models were used to analyze the elasticity of the cell. Clear relationship between PDMS stiffness and cell stiffness could not be obtained with elastic model. However, from viscoelastic model, it gives that cells cultured on softest PDMS had the largest elastic modulus while on stiffest PDMS had lowest elastic modulus.Published versio

Transcription factor families identified in alfalfa leaf transcriptome.

<p>Transcription factors were identified using BLASTX with an E-value threshold of ≤ 1E-05 against the PlnTFDB. A total of 1,541 transcription factors were identified in 81 transcription factor families.</p

Effects of dietary alfalfa saponins on laying performance, egg cholesterol concentration, and ATP-binding cassette transporters G5 and G8 expression in laying hens

This experiment was designed to evaluate the potential for dietary alfalfa saponins (AS) to influence cholesterol (Ch) concentrations and the mRNA expressions of the ATP-binding cassette (ABC) that concludes transporters G5 (ABCG5) and G8 (ABCG8) in the livers of laying hens. Hundred and fifty laying hens (27 weeks old) were divided into five treatment groups randomly. Five replicates were assigned to each treatment group consisting of six birds per replicate. The same basic diet was used for all groups with supplementation of 0 (control), 60, 120, 240, and 480 mg/kg of AS, which was given ad libitum to hens for 60 days. The results showed that AS in the diets of laying hens could effectively reduce egg Ch concentrations, and increase the excretion of bile acid by the liver with the expression levels of ABCG5 and ABCG8 improving. Our study found that dietary AS could effect cholesterol metabolism by up-regulating the expression of G5 and G8 in hens, and that AS is a potential agent for reducing Ch concentrations and 120 mg/kg of AS in the diet was suitable and effective for laying hens

Sequence length distribution of alfalfa leaf transcriptome.

<p>Lenth of the 192,875 transcripts in the alfalfa leaf transcriptome were illustrated. The length ranges from 200 bp to more than or equal to 3,000 bp.</p

<i>De Novo</i> Characterization of Fall Dormant and Nondormant Alfalfa (<i>Medicago sativa L</i>.) Leaf Transcriptome and Identification of Candidate Genes Related to Fall Dormancy

<div><p>Alfalfa (<i>Medicago sativa</i> L.) is one of the most widely cultivated perennial forage legumes worldwide. Fall dormancy is an adaptive character related to the biomass production and winter survival in alfalfa. The physiological, biochemical and molecular mechanisms causing fall dormancy and the related genes have not been well studied. In this study, we sequenced two standard varieties of alfalfa (dormant and non-dormant) at two time points and generated approximately 160 million high quality paired-end sequence reads using sequencing by synthesis (SBS) technology. The <i>de novo</i> transcriptome assembly generated a set of 192,875 transcripts with an average length of 856 bp representing about 165.1 Mb of the alfalfa leaf transcriptome. After assembly, 111,062 (57.6%) transcripts were annotated against the NCBI non-redundant database. A total of 30,165 (15.6%) transcripts were mapped to 323 Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathways. We also identified 41,973 simple sequence repeats, which can be used to generate markers for alfalfa, and 1,541 transcription factors were identified across 1,350 transcripts. Gene expression between dormant and non-dormant alfalfa at different time points were performed, and we identified several differentially expressed genes potentially related to fall dormancy. The Gene Ontology and pathways information were also identified. We sequenced and assembled the leaf transcriptome of alfalfa related to fall dormancy, and also identified some genes of interest involved in the fall dormancy mechanism. Thus, our research focused on studying fall dormancy in alfalfa through transcriptome sequencing. The sequencing and gene expression data generated in this study may be used further to elucidate the complete mechanisms governing fall dormancy in alfalfa.</p></div

Gene Ontology (GO) distribution of alfalfa leaf transcripts at level 2.

<p>GO Slim terms were assigned to 77,307 transcripts and categorized into three groups: biological process (58,412), molecular function (63,602) and cellular component (42,472).</p

qPCR validation.

<p>Differential expressed genes detected through NGS sequencing in our study were validated using qPCR. Twenty-two DE genes were randomly selected for validation. The correlation between NGS sequencing and qPCR was shown.</p