The distribution of serotonin and serotonin 2B receptor in the small intestines of pigs newborn, 5, 15 and 100 days of age were examined qualitatively and quantitatively by immunohistochemical labeling, microscopic observation and image analysis. The results showed serotonin immunopositive cells distributed diffusely among the epithelial cells of the middle and more basal parts of villi and intestinal glands in all segments of all pigs examined. Serotonin 2B receptor was first localized in the duodenum of 15-day-old pigs, whereas in 100-day-old pigs, serotonin 2B receptor was immunolabeled abundantly in all segments. Serotonin 2B receptor was distributed in the connective tissue of the small intestinal mucosa, lamina propria and in some myenteric neurons. The density of serotonin 2B receptor immunopositive cells in the duodenum of 100-day-old pigs was higher than that of 15-day-old pigs. The density of serotonin 2B receptor immunopositive cells in the duodenum was the highest among the three segments of the 100-day-old pigs. The study indicates that the distribution of serotonin 2B receptor is species different in the pig small intestine and the intensity of serotonin 2B receptor becomes stronger as the small intestine matures.

Gram-positive bacteria of the genus Anoxybacillus have been found in diverse thermophilic habitats, such as geothermal hot springs and manure, and in processed foods such as gelatin and milk powder. Anoxybacillus flavithermus is a facultatively anaerobic bacterium found in super-saturated silica solutions and in opaline silica sinter. The ability of A. flavithermus to grow in super-saturated silica solutions makes it an ideal subject to study the processes of sinter formation, which might be similar to the biomineralization processes that occurred at the dawn of life.

Several lines of evidence suggest that the human 5-HT(7) receptor may be involved in the pharmacodynamics of risperidone and may influence clinical response of the drug. A pharmocogenetics study of this receptor may therefore be useful in developing individualized therapy. But few studies about it have been done. In this study, we genotyped ten single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) distributed throughout the HTR7 gene and analyzed six of them for association with the reduction of Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) scores in drug-naive Chinese schizophrenia patients, following an eight-week period of risperidone monotherapy. The confounding effects of nongenetic factors were estimated and the baseline symptom score as well as the duration of illness were included as covariates for adjustment. No significant correlation of HTR7 with antipsychotic efficacy was detected in either genotype or haplotype analysis. These results demonstrate that variations in the HTR7 gene may not be good genetic markers for predicting the therapeutic efficacy of risperidone.

Genetic factors related to the regulation of apoptosis in schizophrenia patients may be involved in a reduced vulnerability to cancer. XRCC4 is one of the potential candidate genes associated with schizophrenia which might induce colorectal cancer resistance.

The synthesis of brain phosphatidylcholine may utilize three circulating precursors: choline; a pyrimidine (e.g., uridine, converted via UTP to brain CTP); and a PUFA (e.g., docosahexaenoic acid); phosphatidylethanolamine may utilize two of these, a pyrimidine and a PUFA. We observe that consuming these precursors can substantially increase membrane phosphatide and synaptic protein levels in gerbil brains. (Pyrimidine metabolism in gerbils, but not rats, resembles that in humans.) Animals received, daily for 4 weeks, a diet containing choline chloride and UMP (a uridine source) and/or DHA by gavage. Brain phosphatidylcholine rose by 13-22% with uridine and choline alone, or DHA alone, or by 45% with the combination, phosphatidylethanolamine and the other phosphatides increasing by 39-74%. Smaller elevations occurred after 1-3 weeks. The combination also increased the vesicular protein Synapsin-1 by 41%, the postsynaptic protein PSD-95 by 38% and the neurite neurofibrillar proteins NF-70 and NF-M by up to 102% and 48%, respectively. However, it had no effect on the cytoskeletal protein beta-tubulin. Hence, the quantity of synaptic membrane probably increased. The precursors act by enhancing the substrate saturation of enzymes that initiate their incorporation into phosphatidylcholine and phosphatidylethanolamine and by UTP-mediated activation of P2Y receptors. Alzheimer's disease brains contain fewer and smaller synapses and reduced levels of synaptic proteins, membrane phosphatides, choline and DHA. The three phosphatide precursors might thus be useful in treating this disease.

Cone snails are attracting increasing scientific attention due to their unprecedented diversity of invaluable channel-targeted peptides. As arguably the largest and most successful evolutionary genus of invertebrates, Conus also may become the model system to study the evolution of multigene families and biodiversity. Here, a set of 897 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) derived from a Conus litteratus venom duct was analyzed to illuminate the diversity and evolution mechanism of conotoxins. Nearly half of these ESTs represent the coding sequences of conotoxins, which were grouped into 42 novel conotoxin cDNA sequences (seven superfamilies), with T-superfamily conotoxins being the dominant component. The gene expression profile of conotoxin revealed that transcripts are expressed with order-of-magnitude differences, sequence divergence within a superfamily increases from the N to the C terminus of the open reading frame, and even multiple scaffold-different mature peptides exist in a conotoxin gene superfamily. Most excitingly, we identified a novel conotoxin superfamily and three novel cysteine scaffolds. These results give an initial insight into the C. litteratus transcriptome that will contribute to a better understanding of conotoxin evolution and the study of the cone snail genome in the near future.

An outbreak of Streptococcus suis serotype 2 emerged in the summer of 2005 in Sichuan Province, and sporadic infections occurred in 4 additional provinces of China. In total, 99 S. suis strains were isolated and analyzed in this study: 88 isolates from human patients and 11 from diseased pigs. We defined 98 of 99 isolates as pulse type I by using pulsed-field gel electrophoresis analysis of SmaI-digested chromosomal DNA. Furthermore, multilocus sequence typing classified 97 of 98 members of the pulse type I in the same sequence type (ST), ST-7. Isolates of ST-7 were more toxic to peripheral blood mononuclear cells than ST-1 strains. S. suis ST-7, the causative agent, was a single-locus variant of ST-1 with increased virulence. These findings strongly suggest that ST-7 is an emerging, highly virulent S. suis clone that caused the largest S. suis outbreak ever described.

Egg quality is an important aspect in rainbow trout farming. Post-ovulatory aging is one of the most important factors affecting egg quality. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are the major regulators in various biological processes and their expression profiles could serve as reliable biomarkers for various pathological and physiological conditions. The objective of this study was to identify miRNAs that are associated with egg qualities in rainbow trout using post-ovulatory aged eggs.

The Northwestern University Neuroimaging Data Archive (NUNDA), an XNAT-powered data archiving system, aims to facilitate secure data storage; centralized data management; automated, standardized data processing; and simple, intuitive data sharing. NUNDA is a federated data archive, wherein individual project owners regulate access to their data. NUNDA supports multiple methods of data import, enabling data collection in a central repository. Data in NUNDA are available by project to any authorized user, allowing coordinated data management and review across sites. With NUNDA pipelines, users capitalize on existing procedures or standardize custom routines for consistent, automated data processing. NUNDA can be integrated with other research databases to simplify data exploration and discovery. And data on NUNDA can be confidently shared for secure collaboration.

Typically, gene expression biomarkers are being discovered in course of high-throughput experiments, for example, RNAseq or microarray profiling. Analytic pipelines that extract so-called signatures suffer from the "Dimensionality curse": the number of genes expressed exceeds the number of patients we can enroll in the study and use to train the discriminator algorithm. Hence, problems with the reproducibility of gene signatures are more common than not; when the algorithm is executed using a different training set, the resulting diagnostic signature may turn out to be completely different. In this paper we propose an alternative novel approach which takes into account quantifiable expression levels of all genes assayed. In our analysis, the cumulative gene expression pattern of an individual patient is represented as a point in the multidimensional space formed by all gene expression profiles assayed in given system, where the clusters of "normal samples" and "affected samples" and defined. The degree of separation of the given sample from the space occupied by "normal samples" reflects the drift of the sample away from homeostasis in the course of development of the pathophysiological process that underly the disease. The outlined approach was validated using the publicly available glioma dataset deposited in Rembrandt and associated with survival data. Additionally, the applicability of the distance analysis to the classification of non-malignant sampled was tested using psoriatic lesions and non-lesional matched controls as a model.

Renal ischemia and reperfusion (I/R) injury, which commonly occurs in kidney transplantation, is the leading cause of acute kidney injury. Picroside II possesses a wide range of pharmacological effects, including anti-apoptosis effects. In the present study, the ability of picroside II to attenuate apoptosis in a rat model of renal I/R injury was investigated. Sprague-Dawley rats were subjected to 45 min of ischemia followed by 24 h of reperfusion. Prior to reperfusion, the rats were treated with picroside II or an equal volume of phosphate-buffered saline. It was observed that renal function was significantly improved by the treatment with picroside II. Morphological analysis indicated that picroside II markedly reduced tissue damage and the expression of cleaved caspase-3. Reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction and western blotting revealed that the expression levels of Bax and poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase-1 (PARP-1) were upregulated in the I/R group, whereas those of Bcl-2 were downregulated. However, the treatment with picroside II inhibited these changes induced by renal I/R injury. In conclusion, picroside II has potent anti-apoptotic activity against renal I/R injury.

Ischemia-reperfusion is a common injury of clinical ischemic disease and surgical lesions. Ischemic postconditioning (IPO) improves the ability of organs subjected to ischemia to tolerate injury. However, renal IPO studies have been based on animal models. In order to gain insights into IPO-induced alterations at the cellular level, an in vitro model for IPO was designed using the rat proximal tubular cell line NRK-52 E. This model was established by placing NRK-52 E cells in ischemic conditions for 3 h, then exposing cells to three cycles of reperfusion for 10 min and finally to ischemic conditions for 10 min (postconditioning). The cells were cultured further in reperfusion conditions for 3, 6, 12 and 24 h. Flow cytometry and Hoechst were used to assess apoptosis. The protein expression of B-cell lymphoma 2 (Bcl-2), Bcl-2-associated X protein (Bax), caspase-3, cleaved caspase-3 and caspase-8 were analyzed by western blotting. The results demonstrated that apoptosis occurred in cells subjected to ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) alone or with postconditioning following reperfusion for 24 h. Cells subjected to I/R demonstrated increased expression of Bax, cleaved caspase-3 and caspase-8 at the end of reperfusion. However, the levels of Bax, cleaved caspase-3 and caspase-8 were significantly attenuated in cells, which had undergone IPO. In conclusion, apoptosis was observed in cells subjected to 3 h of ischemia-reperfusion injury and IPO was able to inhibit this apoptosis. IPO inhibited apoptosis by inhibiting the caspase pathway thereby exerting protective effects.

The main functions of the abundant polypeptide toxins present in scorpion venoms are the debilitation of arthropod prey or defence against predators. These effects are achieved mainly through the blocking of an array of ion channel types within the membranes of excitable cells. However, while these ion channel-blocking toxins are tightly-folded by multiple disulphide bridges between cysteine residues, there are additional groups of peptides in the venoms that are devoid of cysteine residues. These non-disulphide bridged peptides are the subject of much research interest, and among these are peptides that exhibit antimicrobial activity. Here, we describe two novel non-disulphide-bridged antimicrobial peptides that are present in the venom of the North African scorpion, Androctonus aeneas. The cDNAs encoding the biosynthetic precursors of both peptides were cloned from a venom-derived cDNA library using 3'- and 5'-RACE strategies. Both translated precursors contained open-reading frames of 74 amino acid residues, each encoding one copy of a putative novel nonadecapeptide, whose primary structures were FLFSLIPSVIAGLVSAIRN and FLFSLIPSAIAGLVSAIRN, respectively. Both peptides were C-terminally amidated. Synthetic versions of each natural peptide displayed broad-spectrum antimicrobial activities, but were devoid of antiproliferative activity against human cancer cell lines. However, synthetic analogues of each peptide, engineered for enhanced cationicity and amphipathicity, exhibited increases in antimicrobial potency and acquired antiproliferative activity against a range of human cancer cell lines. These data clearly illustrate the potential that natural peptide templates provide towards the design of synthetic analogues for therapeutic exploitation.

Changes in allele frequencies and the fixation of beneficial mutations are central to evolution. The precise relationship between mutational and phenotypic sweeps is poorly described however, especially when multiple alleles are involved. Here, we investigate these relationships in a bacterial population over 60 days in a glucose-limited chemostat in a large population. High coverage metagenomic analysis revealed a disconnection between smooth phenotypic sweeps and the complexity of genetic changes in the population. Phenotypic adaptation was due to convergent evolution and involved soft sweeps by 7-26 highly represented alleles of several genes in different combinations. Allele combinations spread from undetectably low baselines, indicating that minor subpopulations provide the basis of most innovations. A hard sweep was also observed, involving a single combination of rpoS, mglD, malE, sdhC, and malT mutations sweeping to greater than 95% of the population. Other mutant genes persisted but at lower abundance, including hfq, consistent with its demonstrated frequency-dependent fitness under glucose limitation. Other persistent, newly identified low-frequency mutations were in the aceF, galF, ribD and asm genes, in noncoding regulatory regions, three large indels and a tandem duplication; these were less affected by fluctuations involving more dominant mutations indicating separate evolutionary paths. Our results indicate a dynamic subpopulation structure with a minimum of 42 detectable mutations maintained over 60 days. We also conclude that the massive population-level mutation supply in combination with clonal interference leads to the soft sweeps observed, but not to the exclusion of an occasional hard sweep.

To evaluate microbial eukaryotic diversity and distribution in mesoscale processes, we investigated 18S rDNA diversity in a river plume and cyclonic eddy-influenced ecosystem in the southwestern South China Sea (SCS). Restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis was carried out using multiple primer sets. Relative to a wide range of previous similar studies, we observed a significantly higher proportion of sequences of pigmented taxa. Among the photosynthetic groups, Haptophyta accounted for 27.7% of the sequenced clones, which belonged primarily to Prymnesiophyceae. Unexpectedly, five operational taxonomic units of Cryptophyta were closely related to freshwater species. The Chlorophyta mostly fell within the Prasinophyceae, which was comprised of six clades, including Clade III, which is detected in the SCS for the first time in this study. Among the photosynthetic stramenopiles, Chrysophyceae was the most diverse taxon, which included seven clades. The majority of 18S rDNA sequences affiliated with the Dictyochophyceae, Eustigmatophyceae, and Pelagophyceae were closely related to those of pure cultures. The results of redundancy analysis and the permutation Mantel test based on unweighted UniFrac distances, conducted for spatial analyses of the Haptophyta subclades suggested that the Mekong River plume and cyclonic eddy play important roles in regulating microbial eukaryotic diversity and distribution in the southwestern SCS.

Arsenic is a known carcinogen to humans, and chronic exposure to environmental arsenic is a worldwide health concern. As a dietary factor, ethanol carries a well-established risk for malignancies, but the effects of co-exposure to arsenic and ethanol on tumor development are not well understood. In the present study, we hypothesized that ethanol would enhance the function of an environmental carcinogen such as arsenic through increase in COX-2 expression. Our in vitro results show that ethanol enhanced arsenic-induced COX-2 expression. We also show that the increased COX-2 expression associates with intracellular ROS generation, up-regulated AKT signaling, with activation of both NFAT and NF-κB pathways. We demonstrate that antioxidant enzymes have an inhibitory effect on arsenic/ethanol-induced COX-2 expression, indicating that the responsive signaling pathways from co-exposure to arsenic and ethanol relate to ROS generation. In vivo results also show that co-exposure to arsenic and ethanol increased COX-2 expression in mice. We conclude that ethanol enhances arsenic-induced COX-2 expression in colorectal cancer cells via both the NFAT and NF-κB pathways. These results imply that, as a common dietary factor, ethanol ingestion may be a compounding risk factor for arsenic-induced carcinogenesis/cancer development.

Rotation modulation is an effective method to enhance the accuracy of an inertial navigation system (INS) by modulating the gyroscope drifts and accelerometer bias errors into periodically varying components. The typical RINS drives the inertial measurement unit (IMU) rotation along the vertical axis and the horizontal sensors' errors are modulated, however, the azimuth angle error is closely related to vertical gyro drift, and the vertical gyro drift also should be modulated effectively. In this paper, a new rotation strategy in a dual-axis rotational INS (RINS) is proposed and the drifts of three gyros could be modulated, respectively. Experimental results from a real dual-axis RINS demonstrate that the maximum azimuth angle error is decreased from 0.04° to less than 0.01° during 1 h. Most importantly, the changing of rotation strategy leads to some additional errors in the velocity which is unacceptable in a high-precision INS. Then the paper studies the basic reason underlying horizontal velocity errors in detail and a relevant new calibration method is designed. Experimental results show that after calibration and compensation, the fluctuation and stages in the velocity curve disappear and velocity precision is improved.

Early life stress has been demonstrated to increase the risk of developing depression in adulthood. However, the roles and associated molecular mechanisms of stresses in the onset and relapse of depression have yet to be fully elucidated.

Cancer stem cells (CSCs) play a vital role in tumor initiation, progression, metastasis, chemoresistance, and recurrence. The mechanisms that maintain the stemness of these cells remain largely unknown. Our previous study indicated that MALAT-1 may serve as an oncogenic long noncoding RNA in pancreatic cancer by promoting epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and regulating CSCs markers expression. More significantly, there is emerging evidence that the EMT process may give rise to CSCs, or at least cells with stem cell-like properties. Therefore, we hypothesized that MALAT-1 might enhance stem cell-like phenotypes in pancreatic cancer cells. In this study, our data showed that MALAT-1 could increase the proportion of pancreatic CSCs, maintain self-renewing capacity, decrease the chemosensitivity to anticancer drugs, and accelerate tumor angiogenesis in vitro. In addition, subcutaneous nude mouse xenografts revealed that MALAT-1 could promote tumorigenicity of pancreatic cancer cells in vivo. The underlying mechanisms may involve in increased expression of self-renewal related factors Sox2. Collectively, we for the first time found the potential effects of MALAT-1 on the stem cell-like phenotypes in pancreatic cancer cells, suggesting a novel role of MALAT-1 in tumor stemness, which remains to be fully elucidated.

Diabetes mellitus is an independent risk factor of increased morbidity and mortality in patients with heart failure. Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT), a pacemaker-based therapy for dyssynchronous heart failure, improves cardiac performance and quality of life, but its effect on mortality in patients with diabetes is uncertain.