Local hyperthermia decreases the expression of CCL-20 in condyloma acuminatum

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Local hyperthermia has been successfully used in the treatment of viral warts. However, the mechanism of action has largely remained unclear. CCL-20 (also known as MIP-3α) is the most potent chemokine for recruitment of Langerhans cell (LC) precursors into the skin. CCL-20 expression can be increased by TNF-α and IL-1α. The effects of local hyperthermia on the mRNA expressions of CCL-20, TNF-α, IL-1α have been investigated in both condyloma acuminata (CA) and normal skin. Under an organotypic culture condition, fresh CA and normal skin were subjected to surface heating at 37°C, 42°C and 45°C for 30 mins, respectively.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The mRNA expressions of CCL-20 and IL-1α in CA specimen were significantly higher than those in normal skin. Local hyperthermia at 42°C and 45°C significantly decreased the mRNA levels of CCL-20 and IL-1α, as compared with the control groups (p < 0.01). The decrease of CCL-20 was well correlated with that of IL-1α. The expression of TNF-α in CA remained unchanged in spite of the temperature variation. Local hyperthermia at 45°C concomitantly increased the mRNA expression of CCL-20 and IL-1α in normal skin.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our study suggests that hyperthermia decreases the expression of CCL-20 with concomitant decrease in IL-1α, and reduce the number of Langerhans cells in HPV infected skin.</p

Information filtering based on transferring similarity

In this Brief Report, we propose a new index of user similarity, namely the transferring similarity, which involves all high-order similarities between users. Accordingly, we design a modified collaborative filtering algorithm, which provides remarkably higher accurate predictions than the standard collaborative filtering. More interestingly, we find that the algorithmic performance will approach its optimal value when the parameter, contained in the definition of transferring similarity, gets close to its critical value, before which the series expansion of transferring similarity is convergent and after which it is divergent. Our study is complementary to the one reported in [E. A. Leicht, P. Holme, and M. E. J. Newman, Phys. Rev. E {\bf 73} 026120 (2006)], and is relevant to the missing link prediction problem.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Regulation of subcellular location and activity of Cdc2-cyclinb1 is involved in bendamustine-induced G2 arrest

Bendamustine is a multifunctional alkylating agent for the treatment of multiple myeloma, with the G2/M arrest-induction ability in human multiple myeloma RPMI-8226 cells, but the mechanism remains ambiguous. In this study, we found bendamustine caused the G2 arrest in 24 h, regulated the phosphorylation status of Cdc2, and blocked the nuclear import of Cdc2-CyclinB1 complex. Pretreatment with ATM/ATR inhibitor caffeine or p38 MAPK inhibitor SB203580 suppressed the phosphorylation of Cdc2 at Thr14/Tyr15 or attenuate the blockade of nuclear import, respectively; however, neither of these two inhibitors nor the combination imposed significant effects on Bendamustine-triggered G2 arrest. Bendamustine-induced blockade of the nuclear translocation dissipated after 48 h, after which, the G2 arrest was maintained through the inhibitory phosphorylation of Cdc2. Taken together, our research suggested that two or more pathways and mechanisms which regulated the cell cycle in a time-dependent manner were involved in the G2 arrest invoked by bendamustine.Colegio de Farmacéuticos de la Provincia de Buenos Aire

4,4′-(Anthracene-9,10-di­yl)dibenzoic acid dimethyl­formamide disolvate

In the title compound, C28H18O4·2C3H7NO, the dihedral angle between the benzene rings and the anthracene system is 74.05 (12)°. A crystallographic inversion centre is located in the middle of the anthracene unit. The dimethyl­formamide solvent mol­ecules are partially disordered over two positions of approximately equal occupancy [0.529 (6):0.471 (6)]. Inter­molecular O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds with the major occupancy formamide O atom as acceptor result in the formation of 2:1 solvate–complex aggregates, which are alternately linked to shorter solvate units via weak inter­molecular C—H⋯O contacts generated from the rotational disorder of the formamide O atom (minor occupancy component). Weak C—H⋯π inter­actions between the solvent mol­ecules as the donor and the outer anthracene rings support these contacts in the crystal structure for both disorder components

Personal Recommendation via Modified Collaborative Filtering

In this paper, we propose a novel method to compute the similarity between congeneric nodes in bipartite networks. Different from the standard Person correlation, we take into account the influence of node's degree. Substituting this new definition of similarity for the standard Person correlation, we propose a modified collaborative filtering (MCF). Based on a benchmark database, we demonstrate the great improvement of algorithmic accuracy for both user-based MCF and object-based MCF.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures and 1 tabl

Lattice and QR decomposition-based algorithms for recursive least squares adaptive nonlinear filters

Journal ArticleThis paper presents a lattice structure for adaptive Volterra systems. The stucture is applicable to arbitrary planes of support of the Volterra kernels. A fast least squares lattice and a fast QR-lattice adaptive nonlinear filtering algorithms based on the lattice structure are also presented. These algorithms share the fast convergence property of fast least squares transversal Volterra filters; however, unlike the transversal filters they do not suffer from numerical instability

Serum metabolomics profiles in response to n-3 fatty acids in Chinese patients with type 2 diabetes: a double-blind randomised controlled trial.

We aimed to investigate the change of serum metabolomics in response to n-3 fatty acid supplements in Chinese patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D). In a double-blind parallel randomised controlled trial, 59 Chinese T2D patients were randomised to receive either fish oil (FO), flaxseed oil (FSO) or corn oil capsules (CO, served as a control group) and followed up for 180 days. An additional 17 healthy non-T2D participants were recruited at baseline for cross-sectional comparison between cases and non-cases. A total of 296 serum metabolites were measured among healthy controls and T2D patients before and after the intervention. Serum 3-carboxy-4-methyl-5-propyl-2-furanpropanoate (CMPF) (P-interaction = 1.8 × 10(-7)) was the most significant metabolite identified by repeated-measures ANOVA, followed by eicosapentaenoate (P-interaction = 4.6 × 10(-6)), 1-eicosapentaenoylglycerophosphocholine (P-interaction = 3.4 × 10(-4)), docosahexaenoate (P-interaction = 0.001), linolenate (n-3 or n-6, P-interaction = 0.005) and docosapentaenoate (n-3, P-interaction = 0.021). CMPF level was lower in T2D patients than in the healthy controls (P = 0.014) and it was significantly increased in the FO compared with CO group (P = 1.17 × 10(-7)). Furthermore, change of CMPF during the intervention was negatively correlated with change of serum triglycerides (P = 0.016). In conclusion, furan fatty acid metabolite CMPF was the strongest biomarker of fish oil intake. The association of CMPF with metabolic markers warrants further investigation.This study was funded by the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program: 2015CB553604); by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC: 81273054); and by the Ph.D. Programs Foundation of Ministry of Education of China (20120101110107). J.-S.Z. acknowledges support from MRC Epidemiology Unit (MC_UU_12015/5) and the Cambridge Initiative – Nutrition (RG71466, SJAH/004). F.I. acknowledges support from the MRC Epidemiology Unit (MC_UU_12015/5).This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Nature Publishing Group via http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep2952

Neural network fusion: a novel CT-MR Aortic Aneurysm image segmentation method.

Medical imaging examination on patients usually involves more than one imaging modalities, such as Computed Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance (MR) and Positron Emission Tomography(PET) imaging. Multimodal imaging allows examiners to benefit from the advantage of each modalities. For example, for Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm, CT imaging shows calcium deposits in the aorta clearly while MR imaging distinguishes thrombus and soft tissues better.1 Analysing and segmenting both CT and MR images to combine the results will greatly help radiologists and doctors to treat the disease. In this work, we present methods on using deep neural network models to perform such multi-modal medical image segmentation. As CT image and MR image of the abdominal area cannot be well registered due to non-affine deformations, a naive approach is to train CT and MR segmentation network separately. However, such approach is time-consuming and resource-inefficient. We propose a new approach to fuse the high-level part of the CT and MR network together, hypothesizing that neurons recognizing the high level concepts of Aortic Aneurysm can be shared across multiple modalities. Such network is able to be trained end-to-end with non-registered CT and MR image using shorter training time. Moreover network fusion allows a shared representation of Aorta in both CT and MR images to be learnt. Through experiments we discovered that for parts of Aorta showing similar aneurysm conditions, their neural presentations in neural network has shorter distances. Such distances on the feature level is helpful for registering CT and MR image