Vibrio parahaemolyticus is a leading cause of food-borne gastroenteritis worldwide. Although this bacterium has been the subject of much research, the population structure of clinical strains from worldwide collections remains largely undescribed, and the recorded outbreaks of V. parahaemolyticus gastroenteritis highlight the need for the subtyping of this species. We present a broad phylogenetic analysis of 490 clinical V. parahaemolyticus isolates from 17 coastal countries through multilocus sequence analysis (MLST). The 490 tested isolates fell into 161 sequence types (STs). The eBURST algorithm revealed that the 161 clinically relevant STs belonged to 8 clonal complexes, 11 doublets, and 94 singletons, showing a high level of genetic diversity. CC3 was found to be a global epidemic clone of V. parahaemolyticus, and ST-3 was the only ST with an international distribution. recA was observed to be evolving more rapidly, exhibiting the highest degree of nucleotide diversity (0.028) and the largest number of polymorphic nucleotide sites (177). We also found that the high variability of recA was an important cause of differences between the results of the eBURST and ME tree analyses, suggesting that recA has a much greater influence on the apparent evolutionary classification of V. parahaemolyticus based on the current MLST scheme. In conclusion, it is evident that a high degree of genetic diversity within the V. parahaemolyticus population and multiple sequence types are contributing to the burden of disease around the world. MLST, with a fully extractable database, is a powerful system for analysis of the clonal relationships of strains at a global scale. With the addition of more strains, the pubMLST database will provide more detailed and accurate information, which will be conducive to our future research on the population structure of V. parahaemolyticus.

Background Pulmonary pleomorphic carcinoma (PPC) is a rare tumor, and it usually has an aggressive clinical course and poor prognosis. We aim to analyze the clinicopathological features, management and prognostic factors of pulmonary pleomorphic carcinoma. Patients and methods Using the surveillance, epidemiology, and end results (SEER) database, we identified 461 patients of pulmonary pleomorphic carcinoma from 2004 to 2014 including clinicopathological characteristics, treatment modalities and outcome data. Results The mean age of all PPC patients was 66 years and 58% of the patients were male. Most patients (80%) were white people, 53% were found in the right lung, and lesions were mostly observed in upper lobe (56%). The median overall survival was 9 months and overall 1-, 3- and 5-year survival rate was 45%, 29%, 23%. In Kaplan–Meier analysis, age, marital status, tumor primary site, gender, laterality, SEER summary stage, chemotherapy and surgery were associated with overall survival. Patients received surgery or chemotherapy had a better OS for patients with PPC. Multivariate Cox analysis revealed that SEER summary stage, age, surgery and chemotherapy were found to be independently associated with the OS. Surgery could significantly prolong survival in patients with localized stage and regional stage (HR = 0.120, 95% CI 0.038–0.383, p < 0.001; HR = 0.351, 95% CI 0.212–0.582, p < 0.001) while it did not have great impact on survival in patients with distant stage (p = 0.192). Chemotherapy decreased risk of death by 46% (HR = 0.544, 95% CI 0.393–0.752, p < 0.001) for patients with distant stage, whereas chemotherapy did not confer survival benefits to patients with localized stage and regional stage. But radiation did not have great impact on survival of patients with different stages in this study. Conclusions PPC mostly occurred in white people, with a median age of 66 years, and men were more susceptible to this disease. The SEER summary stage, age, surgery and chemotherapy were independently associated with prognosis. Surgery should be considered for the PPC patients with localized stage or regional stage, and chemotherapy should be recommended for the treatment of patients with distant stage.

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Background: Genome-wide association studies of lung cancer have shown a common variation at 15q24-25.1 as a determinant of risk, but the role of specific genes has not been proven. This study aims to explore the expression of mutations and the prognostic significance of 15q25 (CHRNA5 and PSMA4) mRNA in lung adenocarcinoma (LAC) based on immunohistochemistry, TCGA and bioinformatics. Methods: The expression of mutations on chromosome 15q25 of 576 primary LAC patients was selected and survival and gene expression data were extracted from TCGA. The relationship between expression of genes on 15q25 and clinical and prognostic Significance of LAC. An experiment with Beas-2b, A549 and H1299 cell lines was performed to further prove the difference in CHRNA5 and PSMA4 expression between lung cancer and normal cells. Immunohistochemistry data of CHRNA5 and PSMA4 were detected in LAC and normal tissues from 122 patients. Finally, Gene enrichment analysis (GSEA) was conducted to predict the regulatory genes of CHRNA5 and PSMA4. Results: CHRNA5 and PSMA4 are frequently mutated in TCGA (CHRNA5, 1.7%; PSMA4, 1.3%). Besides, the expression of CHRNA5 and PSMA4 was obviously higher in A549 and H1299 cells. And the immunohistochemical staining revealed that the levels of CHRNA5 and PSMA4 were considerably higher in the LAC group than in the normal group. Meanwhile, there was a significant association between high CHRNA5 expression and smoking history (P=0.011), smoking history pack year value (P=0.010). Furthermore, there was a significant correlation between CHRNA5 and PSMA4 expression levels and prognosis (P=0.003; P=0.008), and between higher expression and worse prognosis. GSEA results suggested that between samples with high CHRNA5 and PSMA4 expression were respectively enriched to cell cycle, base excision repair, oxidative phosphorylation, protein export, and aminoacyl tRNA biosynthesis, among others. Conclusions: CHRNA5 and PSMA4 mRNA expression has a significant impact on the clinical and survival of LAC, and they may be a potential target for treating patients with lung adenocarcinoma.