Gastric cancer is the fourth most common malignancy and the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Advanced gastric cancer patients can notably benefit from chemotherapy including adriamycin, platinum drugs, 5-fluorouracil, vincristine, and paclitaxel as well as targeted therapy drugs. Nevertheless, primary drug resistance or acquisition drug resistance eventually lead to treatment failure and poor outcomes of the gastric cancer patients. The detailed mechanisms involved in gastric cancer drug resistance have been revealed. Interestingly, different noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs), such as microRNAs (miRNAs), long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) and circular RNAs (circRNAs), are critically involved in gastric cancer development. Multiple lines of evidences demonstrated that ncRNAs play a vital role in gastric cancer resistance to chemotherapy reagents and targeted therapy drugs. In this review, we systematically summarized the emerging role and detailed molecular mechanisms of ncRNAs impact drug resistance of gastric cancer. Additionally, we propose the potential clinical implications of ncRNAs as novel therapeutic targets and prognostic biomarkers for gastric cancer.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the fifth most common malignancy worldwide and the second most lethal human cancer. A portion of patients with advanced HCC can significantly benefit from treatments with sorafenib, adriamycin, 5-fluorouracil and platinum drugs. However, most HCC patients eventually develop drug resistance, resulting in a poor prognosis. The mechanisms involved in HCC drug resistance are complex and inconclusive. Human transcripts without protein-coding potential are known as noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs), including microRNAs (miRNAs), small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs), long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) and circular RNA (circRNA). Accumulated evidences demonstrate that several deregulated miRNAs and lncRNAs are important regulators in the development of HCC drug resistance which elucidates their potential clinical implications. In this review, we summarized the detailed mechanisms by which miRNAs and lncRNAs affect HCC drug resistance. Multiple tumorspecific miRNAs and lncRNAs may serve as novel therapeutic targets and prognostic biomarkers for HCC.

We newly genotyped 6,483 cases and 5,488 controls using the Illumina Global Screening Array (GSA), which included two studies (East-GWAS: 4,872 cases and 3,397 controls from Jiangsu province and Shanghai; North-GWAS: 1,611 cases and 2,091 controls from Shandong province, Hebei province and Tianjin). We consecutively recruited histopathologically confirmed gastric cancer cases from hospitals. Cancer-free controls were selected from individuals receiving routine physical examination at hospitals or those participating in community screening for non-communicable diseases. Demographic characteristics of all participants were displayed in Table S1. Onco-GWAS:Histopathologically confirmed gastric cancer cases were consecutively recruited from hospitals in Jiangsu province, China. The cancer-free control subjects were selected from individuals receiving routine physical examination at hospitals or those participating in community screening for non-communicable diseases in Jiangsu province. A total of 1,140 cases and 345 controls were genotyped using the Illumina OncoArray, and 708 controls were genotyped using the Illumina OmniZhongHua chips (Table S1). Detailed study design and genotype calling was provided previously. 1 NJ-GWAS and BJ-GWAS:For the NJ-GWAS and BJ-GWAS, individuals were derived from separate casecontrol studies conducted in Nanjing (565 cases and 1,162 controls) and Beijing (468 cases and 1,123 controls) (Table S1). Individuals were genotyped using the Affymetrix Genome-Wide Human SNP Array (V.6.0), which consisting ~ 900,000 markers. The details of study design and relevant data were reported previously. 2 1.4 SX-GWAS: A total of 1625 gastric cancer cases and 2100 controls were from the Shanxi Upper Gastrointestinal Cancer Genetics Project and the Linxian Nutrition Intervention Trial (Table S1). All participants were genotyped using the Illumina 660W Quad chip. The study was reported elsewhere 3 and the genotype data was downloaded from dbGap (study accession: phs00361.v1.p1). Quality control.The same protocol of quality control procedures on genotyping data was applied for all six GWAS datasets. The genotyped variants were excluded if they had a call rate of <95%, a P value for Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium (HWE) in controls ≤1.0×10 −6 or a minor allele frequency (MAF) of <1% in controls; and samples were removed if they were with call rates of <95%, outliers (>6 s.d. from the mean) in population stratification analysis and heterozygosity analysis, or duplicated or related individuals (PI_HAT > 0.25).A total of 100,641 samples in the CKB cohort were genotyped with a customized Affymetrix Axiom® CKB array. Samples with call rate < 98% or gender discrepancy, or samples with extreme heterozygosity (F statistic S.D. score <5) were excluded. Variants with call rate <95% were excluded. Variants with call rate ≥ 95% and < 98%, or deviation from the expected frequency as observed in the 1000 Genomes project (the Phase III integrated variant set release, 504 East Asians), or deviation from Hardy-Weinberg disequil...

microRNAs (miRNAs) are a novel class of small non-coding RNAs that negatively regulate gene expression at the post-transcriptional level. miRNAs can modulate gene expression and thus play important roles in diverse neurobiological processes, such as cell differentiation, growth, proliferation and neural activity, as well as the pathogenic processes of spinal cord injury (SCI) like inflammation, oxidation, demyelination and apoptosis. Results from animal studies have revealed the temporal alterations in the expression of a large set of miRNAs following SCI in adult rats, and the expressional changes in miRNAs following SCI is bidirectional (increase or decrease). In addition, several miRNAs have distinct roles in prognosis of SCI (protective, detrimental and varied). Taken together, the existing evidence suggests that abnormal miRNA expression following SCI contributes to the pathogenesis of SCI, and miRNAs may become potential targets for the therapy of SCI.

Rhodiola spp. are rare and endangered alpine plants widely used as medicines and food additives by many civilizations since ancient times. Their main effective ingredients (such as salidroside and p-tyrosol) are praised to exhibit pharmacologic effects on high-altitude sickness and possess anti-aging and other adaptogenic capacities based on their antioxidant properties. In this study, 347 endophytic fungi were isolated from R. crenulata, R. angusta, and R. sachalinensis, and the molecular diversity and antioxidant activities of these fungi were investigated for the first time. These fungi were categorized into 180 morphotypes based on cultural characteristics, and their rRNA gene ITS sequences were analyzed by BLAST search in the GenBank database. Except for 12 unidentified fungi (6.67%), all others were affiliated to at least 57 genera in 20 orders of four phyla, namely, Ascomycota (88.89%), Basidiomycota (2.78%), Zygomycota (1.11%), and Glomeromycota (0.56%), which exhibited high abundance and diversity. Antioxidant assay showed that the DPPH radical-scavenging rates of 114 isolates (63.33%) were >50%, and those of five isolates (Rct45, Rct63, Rct64, Rac76, and Rsc57) were >90%. The EC50 values of five antioxidant assays suggested significant potential of these fungi on scavenging DPPH•, O2−•, and OH• radicals, as well as scavenging nitrite and chelating Fe2+, which showed preference and selection between endophytic fungi and their hosts. Further research also provided the first evidence that Rac12 could produce salidrosides and p-tyrosol. Results suggested that versatile endophytic fungi associated with Rhodiola known as antioxidants could be exploited as potential sources of novel antioxidant products.

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Gene editing is a crucial and effective strategy to treat genetic diseases. Safe and effective delivery vectors are specially required for efficient gene editing in vivo of CRISPR/Cas9 system. Interestingly, lactose, a natural saccharide, can specifically bind to asialoglycoprotein receptors, highly expressed on the surface of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cells. Herein, a lactose‐derived branched cationic biopolymer (LBP) with plentiful reducible disulfide linkages and hydroxyl groups is proposed as a potential delivery vector of CRISPR/Cas9 system for efficient genome editing in vivo to treat orthotopic HCC. LBP is synthesized via a facile one‐pot ring‐opening reaction. LBP possesses excellent compacting ability, degradability, biocompatibility, gene transfection performances, and HCC‐targeting ability. LBP‐mediated delivery of classical pCas9‐survivin, which can target and knockout survivin oncogene, produces efficient gene editing performances, and superb anti‐cancer activities in orthotopic HCC mouse models. This study provides an attractive and safe strategy for the rational design of CRISPR/Cas9 delivery system.

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