Circular RNAs:Biogenesis, Mechanism, and Function in Human Cancers

CircRNAs are a class of noncoding RNA species with a circular configuration that is formed by either typical spliceosome-mediated or lariat-type splicing. The expression of circRNAs is usually abnormal in many cancers. Several circRNAs have been demonstrated to play important roles in carcinogenesis. In this review, we will first provide an introduction of circRNAs biogenesis, especially the regulation of circRNA by RNA-binding proteins, then we will focus on the recent findings of circRNA molecular mechanisms and functions in cancer development. Finally, some open questions are also discussed

A Coaxially Integrated Photonic Orbital Angular Momentum Beam Multiplexer

We demonstrate an integrated photonic orbital angular momentum beam multiplexer consisting of four nested arc waveguide gratings. Well-defined OAM mode emissions over wide bandwidth of 1-nm enables simultaneous wavelength division multiplexing and OAM multiplexing

Biosynthesis of Putrescine from L-arginine Using Engineered Escherichia coli Whole Cells

Putrescine, a biogenic amine, is a highly valued compound in medicine, industry, and agriculture. In this study, we report a whole-cell biocatalytic method in Escherichia coli for the production of putrescine, using L-arginine as the substrate. L-arginine decarboxylase and agmatine ureohydrolase were co-expressed to produce putrescine from L-arginine. Ten plasmids with different copy numbers and ordering of genes were constructed to balance the expression of the two enzymes, and the best strain was pACYCDuet-speB-speA. The optimal concentration of L-arginine was determined to be 20 mM for this strain. The optimum pH of the biotransformation was 9.5, and the optimum temperature was 45 °C; under these conditions, the yield of putrescine was 98%. This whole-cell biocatalytic method appeared to have great potential for the production of putrescine.</jats:p

Risk Prediction of Renal Failure for Chronic Disease Population Based on Electronic Health Record Big Data

Abstract Renal failure is a fatal disease raising global concerns. Previous risk models for renal failure mostly rely on the diagnosis of chronic kidney disease, which lacks obvious clinical symptoms and thus is mostly undiagnosed, causing significant omission of high-risk patients. In this paper, we proposed a framework to predict the risk of renal failure directly from a big data repository of chronic disease population without prerequisite diagnosis of chronic kidney disease. The electronic health records of 42,256 patients with hypertension or diabetes in Shenzhen Health Information Big Data Platform were collected, with 398 suffered from renal failure during a 3-year follow-up. Five state-of-the-art machine learning methods are utilized to build risk prediction models of renal failure for chronic disease population. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves quite well performance. Particularly, the XGBoost obtains the best performance with an area under receiving-operating-characteristics curve (AUC) of 0.9139. By analyzing the effect of risk factors, we identified that serum creatine, age, urine acid, systolic blood pressure, and blood urea nitrogen are the top five factors associated with renal failure risk. Compared with existing models, our model can be deployed into routine chronic disease management procedures and enable more preemptive, widely-covered screening of renal risks, which would in turn reduce the damage caused by the disease through timely intervention

Workplaces during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond: insights from strategic human resource management in Mainland China

We show the relevance of strategic human resource management (SHRM) to addressing the challenges the COVID-19 pandemic has posed to the workplace in the context of Mainland China. In particular, we discuss the insights of prevalent areas of SHRM for navigating the pandemic at the organizational and individual levels. We explore the contextual factors that have affected the relationship between human resource (HR) practices and work outcomes in organizations and the development of HR practices during the pandemic. Looking forward to a future with uncertainties and other possible crises, we discuss research directions for SHRM in the post-pandemic reality. These include resilience-oriented high-performance work systems (HPWSs), contextualized SHRM, and the horizontal fit of SHRM in the ‘new normal’

Information filtering based on corrected redundancy-eliminating mass diffusion

Methods used in information filtering and recommendation often rely on quantifying the similarity between objects or users. The used similarity metrics often suffer from similarity redundancies arising from correlations between objects’ attributes. Based on an unweighted undirected object-user bipartite network, we propose a Corrected Redundancy-Eliminating similarity index (CRE) which is based on a spreading process on the network. Extensive experiments on three benchmark data sets— Movilens, Netflix and Amazon—show that when used in recommendation, the CRE yields significant improvements in terms of recommendation accuracy and diversity. A detailed analysis is presented to unveil the origins of the observed differences between the CRE and mainstream similarity indices

TRA2A Binds With LncRNA MALAT1 To Promote Esophageal Cancer Progression By Regulating EZH2/beta-catenin Pathway

The RNA binding protein TRA2A, a member of the transformer 2 homolog family, plays a crucial role in the alternative splicing of pre-mRNA. However, it remains unclear whether TRA2A is involved in non-coding RNA regulation and, if so, what are the functional consequences. By analyzing expression profiling data, we found that TRA2A is highly expressed in esophageal cancer and is associated with disease-free survival and overall survival time. Subsequent gain- and loss-of-function studies demonstrated that TRA2A promotes proliferation and migration of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma and adenocarcinoma cells. RNA immunoprecipitation and RNA pull-down assay indicated that TRA2A can directly bind specific sites on MALAT1 in cells. In addition, ectopic expression or depletion of TRA2A leads to MALAT expression changes accordingly, thus modulates EZH2/β-catenin pathway. Together, these findings elucidated that TRA2A triggers carcinogenesis via MALAT1 mediated EZH2/β-catenin axis in esophageal cancer cells

The Effect of Volunteer Human Performance Work System on Service Performance: An Empirical Study of Beijing Olympic Volunteers

This study examines the key human resources factors that affect volunteers&amp;#39; service performance from the perspectives of volunteers and managers in the Beijing Summer Olympic Games of 2008.Survey data were collected from 1,727 volunteers and 243 managers at the Beijing Olympics test events held at 10 venues between November 2007 and April 2008.Regression analyses and a moderation test were combined to test the hypotheses.A set of high performance work systems (HPWS) for volunteers in the Beijing Summer Olympic Games were developed which include performance management,training,recognition,teamwork and volunteer participation.Volunteer HPWS were positively related to psychological empowerment,which was in turn positively related to service recovery performance.Moreover,transformational leadership moderates the relationship between volunteer HPWS and psychological empowerment in such a way that the relationship is stronger when transformational leadership is at a higher level than when it is at a lower level.Implications and limitations were also discussed.We acknowledge the support of Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities,Jiangsu Philosophy &amp;amp; Social Sciences Research Funding Programme; National Natural Science Foundation of China; CEIBS Research Grant4605-6351