Molecular cloning and characteristic analysis of a thioredoxin from Neobenedenia melleni

Thioredoxin (Trx) can regulate disulfide bond reduction of target proteins to maintain the reduced intracellular state in various organisms. Here, we cloned a cDNA sequence of thioredoxin from Neobenedenia melleni, which is a kind of platyhelminth parasite infecting many fishes of great economic value. The deduced N. melleni Trx (NmTrx) contained 170 amino acid residues with an active site consisting of four amino acid motif CPGC. Sequence comparison and phylogenetic tree analysis confirmed NmTrx as a distinct member of thioredoxin. Real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (PCR) revealed a significantly higher expression of NmTrx transcript in the adult stage compared with the egg and oncomiracidium stages. In the egg and adult stages, the NmTrx transcript level in the 32°C group was higher than those in the 18 and 25°C groups. NmTrx was expressed and purified from Escherichia coli, and antiserum against NmTrx was prepared. Western blot confirmed the higher NmTrx expression of the egg and adult stages in the 32°C group with respect to the other temperature groups. Recombinant NmTrx was able to reduce the disulfide bond in insulin, and its antioxidant capacity was determined to be 5.12 U/mg protein, similar to the classic thioredoxins. Trx activity was lower in the oncomiracidium stage and higher in the adult stage compared with the egg stage. These results indicate that NmTrx could function as an important antioxidant molecule under physiological conditions.Keywords: Thioredoxin, Neobenedenia melleni, redox regulation, mRNA expression, prokaryotic expressio

Regularized Shallow Image Prior for Electrical Impedance Tomography

Untrained Neural Network Prior (UNNP) based algorithms have gained increasing popularity in tomographic imaging, as they offer superior performance compared to hand-crafted priors and do not require training. UNNP-based methods usually rely on deep architectures which are known for their excellent feature extraction ability compared to shallow ones. Contrary to common UNNP-based approaches, we propose a regularized shallow image prior method that combines UNNP with hand-crafted prior for Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT). Our approach employs a 3-layer Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) as the UNNP in regularizing 2D and 3D EIT inversion. We demonstrate the influence of two typical hand-crafted regularizations when representing the conductivity distribution with shallow MLPs. We show considerably improved EIT image quality compared to conventional regularization algorithms, especially in structure preservation. The results suggest that combining the shallow image prior and the hand-crafted regularization can achieve similar performance to the Deep Image Prior (DIP) but with less architectural dependency and complexity of the neural network

A Continuous Dual-Axis Atomic Interferometric Inertial Sensor

We present an interferometric inertial sensor that utilizes two counter-propagating atomic beams with transverse two-dimensional cooling. By employing three parallel and spatially aligned Raman laser beams for Doppler-sensitive Raman transitions, we successfully generate inertia-sensitive Mach-Zehnder interference fringes with an interrogation length of $2L=54\,\rm{cm}$. The measured rotation and acceleration sensitivities are $0.25\,(\mu\rm{rad/s})/\sqrt{Hz}$ and $0.12\,\rm{m}\textit{g}/\rm{\sqrt{Hz}}$, respectively. The sensor's capability to measure rotation and acceleration simultaneously in dynamic environments is validated through comparative analysis with classical sensors under force oscillation in different directions. Additionally, we conduct experiments on a turntable to calibrate the gyroscope's scaling factor and address nonlinearity.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Process of Forensic Medicine in DNA Identification of Aged Human Remains

Skeleton and teeth are important biological samples. Due to their special structure and strong ability to resist degradation, they are ideal biological materials to retain DNA under natural condition. In many cases, such as historical figure identification, aged skeleton and teeth are usually the only biological samples. However, their DNA is in a state of trace, damage and degradation to different degrees, which requires special experimental treatment to achieve identification. This paper reviews the sample selection, DNA extraction, DNA enrichment and analysis approaches based on relevant research reports in recent years, aiming to promote the further development and improvement of the aged skeleton and teeth identification system

Therapeutic evolution in HR+/HER2- breast cancer: from targeted therapy to endocrine therapy

Breast cancer, a complex and varied disease, has four distinct subtypes based on estrogen receptor and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) levels, among which a significant subtype known as HR+/HER2-breast cancer that has spurred numerous research. The prevalence of breast cancer and breast cancer-related death are the most serious threats to women’s health worldwide. Current progress in treatment strategies for HR+/HER2-breast cancer encompasses targeted therapy, endocrine therapy, genomic immunotherapy, and supplementing traditional methods like surgical resection and radiotherapy. This review article summarizes the current epidemiology of HR+/HER2-breast cancer, introduces the classification of HR+/HER2-breast cancer and the commonly used treatment methods. The mechanisms of action of various drugs, including targeted therapy drugs and endocrine hormone therapy drugs, and their potential synergistic effects are deeply discussed. In addition, clinical trials of these drugs that have been completed or are still in progress are included

Myocardin immunohistochemistry index is associated with clinical prognosis in nasopharyngeal carcinoma: a clinical practice-based cohort study

Purpose: Recent findings have implicated the role of myocardin re-expression in carcinogenesisHowever, the clinical functions of myocardin in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is not known yet. The purpose for the cohort research was to investigate whether myocardin re-expression level may predict clinical prognosis in NPC patients.Methods: 148 NPC patients were recruited from September, 2005 to September, 2011 with median follow-up time of 4.5 years in a clinical practice setting. At study entry myocardin re-expression of these patients was determined using immunohistochemistry (IHC) and additional 20 normal nasopharyngeal tissues were included as control. Two-sample t-test was used to compare mean myocardin reexpression levels and Chi-square test was used for comparing tumour recurrence rate. Logistic regression analysis was used for tumour local control rate, and log-rank test, Kaplan-Meier estimates and Cox proportional hazard model for disease-free survival and overall survival.Results: Myocardin IHC index was significantly downregulated in NPC samples than in normalnasopharyngeal tissues (mean ± standard deviation, 61.2 ±31.5 vs. 109.9 ±73.6, P= 0.009). However, among NPC patients was observed a roughly V-shaped change of myocardin IHC index according to Tumour T-stage (P=0.067); meanwhile higher IHC level was associated with more tumour recurrence rate in NPC patients (High vs. Low: 21.6% vs. 8.1%; P=0.021). Logistic regression analysis equally showed high myocardin IHC level was an independent risk factor for local tumour control rate regardless of adjustments [High vs. Low: unadjusted Odds Ratio (OR) 0.320, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.117 to 0.871; P=0.026]. Moreover, higher myocardin IHC level was associated with a marginal but not significant risk increase of disease-free survival [High vs. Low: adjusted Hazard Ratio (HR) 1.760, 95% CI: 0.981 to 3.158; log-rank: P=0.129]. A less obvious trend was observed with regard to overall survival [adjusted HR 1.409, 95% CI: 0.715 to 2.77; log-rank: P=0.745].Conclusion: The study results suggested that high myocardin IHC index level could be a potential clinically prognostic intermediate biomarker for tumour recurrence for NPC patients in routine practice. Large well-designed cohort studies involving IHC re-expression change over time is needed

An Open Unified Addressing System for 6G Communication Networks

With the rapid and continuous development of the Internet, it is foreseeable that current addressing schemes and fixed-length IP addresses would create further bottlenecks and limitations in realizing future 6G networking requirements, such as massive connections, resource-constrained communication, and heterogeneous hyper interconnections and guaranteeing agreement-based services and KPIs. Moreover, the locator-based addressing semantic is unsuitable for mobile and content-oriented networks. Thus, this paper proposes the Open Unified Addressing (OUA) system, a novel, flexible, multi-semantic and hierarchical addressing architecture that better supports the flexibility and extensibility of the Internet protocol framework in the context of 6G Communications. The OUA addresses several limitations in the current IP protocol and improves communication efficiency. According to the evaluation with two typical forwarding models, the results show that the OUA system has almost no impact on forwarding delay. Moreover, it can provide scalable addressing spaces and shorten the route convergence time