An Efficient Prediction Model for OTC Medicine Effect with the Package Inserts Information

AbstractIn Japan, general public those who are not medical experts usually buy OTC medicine at a pharmacy, depending on their illness condition. In this case, it is difficult for them to consider how much the OTC medicine is effective for their symptom. The components of OTC medicine have been used as ethical medicines for a long period of time.This is because the efficacy and safety of ethical medicine have been confirmed before being employed as OTC medicine. The information of those confirmed medicines is described in package inserts, which is aimed for medical professionals. Therefore, it is difficult for general public to understand what the package insert describes in terms of medical effects.In this study, from the information which appears in the package inserts of prescription medicines, a method for estimating the effect of OTC medicine is investigated. Also, a method of estimating the effects of medicines without directly compared data is proposed, only by using the information of package inserts of ethical medicines

Improved Recovery of Exfoliated Colonocytes from Feces Using Newly Developed Immunomagnetic Beads

We demonstrated the feasibility of a new methodology for isolating colonocytes from feces. To reduce costs and improve the recovery rate of colonocytes from feces, we attempted to develop new immunomagnetic beads. Several sizes of magnetic beads were prepared and tagged with a monoclonal antibody against EpCAM. We made several new monoclonal antibodies against EpCAM, and each monoclonal antibody was tagged to the magnetic beads. In the simulation, the most efficient recovery of HT-29 cells was obtained using the smallest size of beads. Also, beads tagged with a monoclonal antibody with a higher affinity against EpCAM had a higher recovery rate. Similar results were obtained when the smallest size of beads with the highest-affinity monoclonal antibody was applied to clinical samples. The newly developed immunomagnetic beads may be useful for isolating colorectal cancer cells from feces, enabling the cytological or molecular biological diagnosis of CRC

Multiple Translocation of the AVR-Pita Effector Gene among Chromosomes of the Rice Blast Fungus Magnaporthe oryzae and Related Species

Magnaporthe oryzae is the causal agent of rice blast disease, a devastating problem worldwide. This fungus has caused breakdown of resistance conferred by newly developed commercial cultivars. To address how the rice blast fungus adapts itself to new resistance genes so quickly, we examined chromosomal locations of AVR-Pita, a subtelomeric gene family corresponding to the Pita resistance gene, in various isolates of M. oryzae (including wheat and millet pathogens) and its related species. We found that AVR-Pita (AVR-Pita1 and AVR-Pita2) is highly variable in its genome location, occurring in chromosomes 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and supernumerary chromosomes, particularly in rice-infecting isolates. When expressed in M. oryzae, most of the AVR-Pita homologs could elicit Pita-mediated resistance, even those from non-rice isolates. AVR-Pita was flanked by a retrotransposon, which presumably contributed to its multiple translocation across the genome. On the other hand, family member AVR-Pita3, which lacks avirulence activity, was stably located on chromosome 7 in a vast majority of isolates. These results suggest that the diversification in genome location of AVR-Pita in the rice isolates is a consequence of recognition by Pita in rice. We propose a model that the multiple translocation of AVR-Pita may be associated with its frequent loss and recovery mediated by its transfer among individuals in asexual populations. This model implies that the high mobility of AVR-Pita is a key mechanism accounting for the rapid adaptation toward Pita. Dynamic adaptation of some fungal plant pathogens may be achieved by deletion and recovery of avirulence genes using a population as a unit of adaptation

Relationship between duration of illness and cardiac autonomic nervous activity in anorexia nervosa

Background: The mortality rate associated with anorexia nervosa (AN) is high, and death is mainly attributable to cardiac events. A wide range of autonomic nervous system disturbances may be mechanisms underlying the increased cardiovascular mortality and sudden death of patients with AN. Heart rate variability (HRV) has been proven to be a reliable noninvasive method for quantitative assessment of sympathetic and parasympathetic regulation of heart rate (HR). The longer the duration of illness of AN patients, the higher the mortality rate. However, there have been few reports on the relationship between the duration of illness and HRV in AN. Hence, the aims of this study were to compare the cardiac autonomic nervous activity (CANA) of female patients with AN and age-matched female controls and to evaluate the relationship between the duration of illness and the CANA of the AN patients. Methods: We studied 14 female patients with AN and 22 age-matched healthy women. Beat-to-beat heart rate variability, recorded in a supine position, was investigated using power spectral analysis. Result: Mean heart rate was positively correlated with normalized high-frequency (HF: 0.15 to 0.40Hz) power and negatively correlated with the low-frequency (LF: 0.04 to 0.15Hz)/HF power (LF/HF) ratio of the controls. On the other hand, duration of illness was negatively correlated with normalized HF power and positively correlated with the LF/HF ratio of the AN patients. Conclusions: These results suggest that, given that the LF/HF ratio is an estimate of cardiac sympathovagal balance, anorectic patients with a long illness duration display lower vagal tone (parasympathetic withdrawal) and high sympathetic tone

The Extraction Method of the Service Improvement Information from Guests’ Review

AbstractThe online hotel reservation service becomes so popular that the number of transactions has been growing year by year. Before making such reservation, travelers would find it important to refer other guests’ opinions about accomodations. In those reviews, both dissatisfied and satisfied impressions used to appear in the same comments. In order to analyze this tendency, we employ text mining and investigate dissatisfied topic from their expressions. We propose some ways to extract useful information from guest review for accommodation's service improvement

Kinesins are indispensable for interdigitation of phragmoplast microtubules in the moss Physcomitrella patens

Microtubules form arrays with parallel and antiparallel bundles and function in various cellular processes, including subcellular transport and cell division. The antiparallel bundles in phragmoplasts, plant-unique microtubule arrays, are mostly unexplored and potentially offer new cellular insights. Here, we report that the Physcomitrella patens kinesins KINID1a and KINID1b (for kinesin for interdigitated microtubules 1a and 1b), which are specific to land plants and orthologous to Arabidopsis thaliana PAKRP2, are novel factors indispensable for the generation of interdigitated antiparallel microtubules in the phragmoplasts of the moss P. patens. KINID1a and KINID1b are predominantly localized to the putative interdigitated parts of antiparallel microtubules. This interdigitation disappeared in double-deletion mutants of both genes, indicating that both KINID1a and 1b are indispensable for interdigitation of the antiparallel microtubule array. Furthermore, cell plates formed by these phragmoplasts did not reach the plasma membrane in ∼20% of the mutant cells examined. We observed that in the double-deletion mutant lines, chloroplasts remained between the plasma membrane and the expanding margins of the cell plate, while chloroplasts were absent from the margins of the cell plates in the wild type. This suggests that the kinesins, the antiparallel microtubule bundles with interdigitation, or both are necessary for proper progression of cell wall expansion

Molecular cloning and characterization of the AVR-Pia locus from a Japanese field isolate of Magnaporthe oryzae.

In order to clone and analyse the avirulence gene AVR-Pia from Japanese field isolates of Magnaporthe oryzae, a mutant of the M. oryzae strain Ina168 was isolated. This mutant, which was named Ina168m95-1, gained virulence towards the rice cultivar Aichi-asahi, which contains the resistance gene Pia. A DNA fragment (named PM01) that was deleted in the mutant and that co-segregated with avirulence towards Aichi-asahi was isolated. Three cosmid clones that included the regions that flanked PM01 were isolated from a genomic DNA library. One of these clones (46F3) complemented the mutant phenotype, which indicated clearly that this clone contained the avirulence gene AVR-Pia. Clone 46F3 contained insertions of transposable elements. The 46F3 insert was divided into fragments I-VI, and these were cloned individually into a hygromycin-resistant vector for the transformation of the mutant Ina168m95-1. An inoculation assay of the transformants revealed that fragment V (3.5 kb) contained AVR-Pia. By deletion analysis of fragment V, AVR-Pia was localized to an 1199-bp DNA fragment, which included a 255-bp open reading frame with weak homology to a bacterial cytochrome-c-like protein. Restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis of this region revealed that this DNA sequence co-segregated with the AVR-Pia locus in a genetic map that was constructed using Chinese isolates