Evidence suggests that intervertebral disc degeneration (IVDD) can be induced by Propionibacterium acnes (P. acnes), although the underlying mechanisms are unclear. In this study, we analyzed the pathological changes in degenerated human intervertebral discs (IVDs) infected with P. acnes. Compared with P. acnes-negative samples, P. acnes-positive IVDs showed increased apoptosis of nucleus pulposus cells (NPCs) concomitant with severe IVDD. Then, a P. acnes-inoculated IVD animal model was established, and severe IVDD was induced by P. acnes infection by promoting NPC apoptosis. The results suggested that P.acnes-induced apoptosis of NPCs via the Toll-like receptor 2 (TLR2)/c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) pathway and mitochondrial-mediated cell death. In addition, P. acnes was found to activate autophagy, which likely plays a role in apoptosis of NPCs. Overall, these findings further validated the involvement of P. acnes in the pathology of IVDD and provided evidence that P. acnes-induced apoptosis of NPCs via the TLR2/JNK pathway is likely responsible for the pathology of IVDD.

Currently, algorithms and softwares for genetic analysis of diploid organisms with bi-allelic markers are well-established, while those for polyploids are limited. Here, we present SHEsisPlus, the online algorithm toolset for both dichotomous and quantitative trait genetic analysis on polyploid species (compatible with haploids and diploids, too). SHEsisPlus is also optimized for handling multiple-allele datasets. It’s free, open source and also designed to perform a range of analyses, including haplotype inference, linkage disequilibrium analysis, epistasis detection, Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium and single locus association tests. Meanwhile, we developed an accurate and efficient haplotype inference algorithm for polyploids and proposed an entropy-based algorithm to detect epistasis in the context of quantitative traits. A study of both simulated and real datasets showed that our haplotype inference algorithm was much faster and more accurate than existing ones. Our epistasis detection algorithm was the first try to apply information theory to characterizing the gene interactions in quantitative trait datasets. Results showed that its statistical power was significantly higher than conventional approaches. SHEsisPlus is freely available on the web at http://shesisplus.bio-x.cn/. Source code is freely available for download at https://github.com/celaoforever/SHEsisPlus.

There is a skyrocket trend of robotic surgery in medical research over the last two decades, and countries with high GDP tend to make more contributions to the medical field of robotic surgery.