Expression and Clinical Significance of Antiapoptotic Gene (Survivin) in NB4 and Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia Cells

To study survivin gene expression in APL cells and to explore its correlation with clinical manifestations. PML/RARα and survivin mRNA expression were analysed using RT-PCR. By treatment of ATRA, the survivin mRNA expression in NB4 cells gradually decreased with time and was almost undetectable in the 72th hour. Survivin was expressed in 67% of the 36 APL cases (de novo and relapse patients) with PML/RARα fusion gene expression. However, in 22 cases of remission stage patients without PML/RARα fusion gene expression, survivin was expressed in 36%. The survivin mRNA expression positive rate in de novo and relapse groups, and PML/RARα fusion gene L-type positive groups, was obviously higher than those in remission period groups and was significantly lower than those in acute leukemia groups. In 36 cases of de novo and relapse APL patients, all cases could obtain complete remission, irrespective of the survivin expression. APL patients expressed with survivin mRNA had DIC and serious infection (one patient died). The clinical symptom included slight skin or mucosa bleeding, fever, and asthenic for patients without the survivin mRNA expression. Later, two cases of APL patients with the survivin mRNA expression were treated by ATRA, induction differentiation sign in their peripheral blood and bone marrow figure was not obvious. It was concluded that the survive gene expression was lower in APL than those in any other types of leukemia, thus closely associated with clinical manifestation

Dynamics of macrozoobenthos assemblages in the Fubao Bay of Lake Dianchi and their relation to organic pollutants

A two-year-long investigation on the dynamics of the structure and biodiversity of macrozoobenthos was conducted in the Fubao Bay of Dianchi Lake, Southwest China. A high level of organic pollution has been detected in this Bay for the last 10 years. In all, 31 benthic taxa belonging to eight families and 20 genera were identified. Oligochaeta dominated this ecosystem, comprising 53 to 99% of the total abundance and 75 to 99% of the total wet biomass. The standing crop of the solely dominant species Limnodrilus hoffmeisteri rose sharply in the two-year period: It increased from 46% of the total abundance to 73% and from 73% of the wet biomass to 99% in second year. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed that there was no significant difference (p > 0.05) in the richness value for all and the most predominant groups between the two years. However, significant differences were detected between the total and oligochaete abundances (p < 0.05). The standing crop was the lowest (188.72 ind/m2 and 0.20 g/m2) in October, 2006 and the highest (14931.7 ind/m2 and 39.33 g/m2) in January, 2008. The annual mean standing crop increased nearly 10 times in density and eight times in wet biomass between the two years, and this increase was mainly contributed by oligochaetes. Analyses of three diversity indices and the K-dominance curve revealed that there was a significant difference between the two years. Multiple regression analysis indicated that the dynamics of the biomass of macrozoobenthos could be largely attributed to nitrate nitrogen.Key words: Macrozoobenthos, structure, biodiversity, Dianchi Lake, organic pollution

Digital Loop-Mediated Isothermal Amplification on a Commercial Membrane

In this work, we report digital loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) or reverse-transcription LAMP (RT-LAMP) on a commercial membrane, without the need for complex chip fabrication or use of specialized equipment. Due to the pore size distribution, the theoretical error for digital LAMP on these membranes was analyzed, using a combination of Random Distribution Model and Multi-volume Theory. A facile peel-off process was developed for effective droplets formation on the commercial track-etched polycarbonate (PCTE) membrane. Each pore functions as an individual nanoreactor for single DNA amplification. Absolute quantification of bacteria genomic DNA was realized with a dynamic range from 11 to 1.1 105 copies/µL. One-step digital RT-LAMP was also successfully performed on the membrane for the quantification of MS2 virus in wastewater. With the introduction of new probes, the positive pores can be easily distinguished from negative ones with 100 times difference in fluorescence intensities. Finally, the cost of a disposable membrane is less than $0.1/piece, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the most inexpensive way to perform digital LAMP. The membrane system offers opportunities for point-of-care users or common laboratories to perform digital quantification, single cell analysis, or other bioassays in an inexpensive, flexible and simplified way

Why Is Web-based Supply Chain Management Popular in China? A Factor Endowment’s Perspective

Web-based system-to-human integration and direct system-to-system integration are alternative information technologies for supply chain management. Although the system-to-system mode is known to be more effective than the Web-based mode for data sharing, the web-based mode is dominant in the supply chain of Chinese firms. Is it a suboptimal or the most appropriate choice? We develop an analytical model to investigate how a manufacturer selects an optimal mode from competing technologies, including manual mode, Web-based mode and system-to-system mode. The contribution of this study is three-fold. First, the expected degree of information sharing influences the manufacturer’s selection. Manual mode is the optimal selection when the expected degree of information sharing is low, whereas system-to-system mode is the optimal choice when the expected degree is high. When the expected degree of information sharing is intermediate, Web-based mode is the optimal choice. Second, based on factor endowment theory, we find that labor endowment and technology endowment can influence the adoption intervals of these three modes. And third, when labor endowment is on the decline and technology endowment is on the rise in the early stage, the Web-based mode is the optimal choice than manual mode or system-to-system mode. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed

Confirming the 115.5-day periodicity in the X-ray light curve of ULX NGC 5408 X-1

The Swift/XRT light curve of the ultraluminous X-ray (ULX) source NGC 5408 X-1 was re-analyzed with two new numerical approaches, Weighted Wavelet $Z$-transform (WWZ) and CLEANest, that are different from previous studies. Both techniques detected a prominent periodicity with a time scale of $115.5\pm1.5$ days, in excellent agreement with the detection of the same periodicity first reported by Strohmayer (2009). Monte Carlo simulation was employed to test the statisiticak confidence of the 115.5-day periodicity, yielding a statistical significance of $> 99.98$ (or $>3.8\sigma$). The robust detection of the 115.5-day quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs), if it is due to the orbital motion of the binary, would infer a mass of a few thousand $M_\odot$ for the central black hole, implying an intermediate-mass black hole in NGC 5408 X-1.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, submitted to Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics (RAA

Polyostotic feet acrometastases from breast carcinoma demonstrated on [18F]FDG PET/CT imaging

Acrometastases are rare. Less than 0.01% of patients have metastasis in the foot bone. Polyostotic metastasis in the foot is extremely rare. We report a 50-year-old woman who complained of progressive pain and swelling in the right foot after radical right mastectomy for 4 years. [18F]FDG PET/CT demonstrated multiple mixed bone destruction in the right foot with intense [18F]FDG PET/CT uptake. CT-guided calcaneus biopsy confirmed the diagnosis of metastatic breast carcinoma

Denoising Relation Extraction from Document-level Distant Supervision

Distant supervision (DS) has been widely used to generate auto-labeled data for sentence-level relation extraction (RE), which improves RE performance. However, the existing success of DS cannot be directly transferred to the more challenging document-level relation extraction (DocRE), since the inherent noise in DS may be even multiplied in document level and significantly harm the performance of RE. To address this challenge, we propose a novel pre-trained model for DocRE, which denoises the document-level DS data via multiple pre-training tasks. Experimental results on the large-scale DocRE benchmark show that our model can capture useful information from noisy DS data and achieve promising results.Comment: EMNLP 2020 short pape