We investigated the expression of the mRNA encoding the oxytocin receptor (OTR) in rat myometrium throughout gestation and its regulation by progesterone and mechanical stretch. Using a semiquantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction approach, OTR mRNA was found to increase abruptly at the onset of spontaneous labor at term. Progesterone (4 mg/day) starting on Day 20 of gestation blocked this increase. Ovariectomy on Day 17 induced preterm labor 96 h after surgery and a significant increase in myometrial OTR mRNA levels 48 and 96 h after surgery. Both preterm labor and the rise in myometrial OTR expression were blocked by progesterone. To investigate the effects of stretch on myometrial OTR mRNA expression, unilaterally pregnant rats underwent either sham operation or placement of a tube in the nongravid uterine horn to distend the myometrium. On Day 20, stretch had no effect on OTR expression in the nongravid horns. During labor, OTR mRNA was highly expressed in the gravid horns as well as the nongravid stretched horns. In contrast, the level remained low in the nongravid unstretched horns. These results indicate that expression of rat myometrial OTR mRNA during pregnancy and labor is regulated by coordinated interactions between mechanical and endocrine signals.

To evaluate the changes in extreme climatic events in the Feilaixia catchment in South China, the spatial and temporal distributions of extreme climate indices trends during 1969-2011 were investigated. With quality control and homogeneity assessment, daily maximum and minimum surface air temperature from 11 meteorological stations and daily precipitation from 24 rainfall stations were used. Eight indices of extreme temperature and six indices of extreme precipitation were chosen. Trends were calculated using Sen's slope estimator. Statistical significance of trends was checked with the Mann-Kendall method. High correlations were found between the mean annual temperature and temperature extremes, as well as between the annual total precipitation and precipitation extremes in most cases. The analyses of extreme temperature indices detected significant and stable trends in the majority of the stations. The strongly stable downward trends in cold extremes and the strongly stable upward trends in hot extremes were recorded in the whole region, except for in some small areas primarily located in the central part of the region. In contrast, significant and stable positive trends were sporadically recorded for precipitation extremes in the study area during 1969-2011, which predominantly occurred in the northern part of the region. Furthermore, the positive trends were much more frequent than the negative trends in most extreme precipitation indices. There were significant and stable trends recorded in most of the average temperature extremes, whereas insignificant and unstable trends were found for most of the average precipitation extremes.

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Ganoderma lucidum (G. lucidum Reishi), a traditional Chinese medical fungus, has been used as a health-promoting supplement due to its anti-tumor and immuno-modulating effects. The major bioactive components in G. lucidum are reported to be polysaccharide [1][2][3] and gonoderic acid. 4)Traditionally, the fruiting body has been the only part of G. lucidum that is used for medical purposes. Recently, Sliva et al. have reported the extract of G. lucidum using boiling water suppresses the mobility of breast and prostate cancers by inhibiting nuclear factor (NF)-kB. 5,6) As G. lucidum is available as a dietary supplement in various forms (mushroom powder, purified whole spores, broken spores, or mixtures), they compared their biological activity on cell migration and inhibition of NF-kB in human cancer cells and concluded the spores also show strong activity against human cancer cell.6) The possible role of mushrooms to prevent cancer has been summarized in several reviews. 7,8) Cancer inhibition by mushrooms or mushrooms polysaccharides was generally achieved through activating the immune response of the host rather than by directly inhibiting tumor cell growth. However, in medical mushroom research, polysaccharide and polysaccharide-peptides are known active anticancer compounds isolated from medicinal mushrooms such as maitake (Grifola frondosa), shiitake (Lentinula edodes), turkey tail (Coriolus versicolor) and reishi (G. lucidum). 9,10)The polysaccharides and polysaccharide-peptides are generally thought to exert their anti-tumor effects via a systemic effect on immunity. There is an evidence that the glucanprotein complex induces biological responses by binding to membrane compartment receptor three (CR3, or CD11b/CD18) on immune effectors cells such as macrophages.11) Furthermore, recent research has demonstrated that some of these mushroom-derived materials can produce direct cytotoxic effects on cancer cells. 12,13) A purified fraction by HPLC from the spores of G. lucidum guided by the inhibitory activity on HL-60 cell proliferation showed biological activity contains a mixture of long chain fatty acids with molecular weights in the range of m/z 250.0 to m/z 296.4, although as yet these could not be unambiguously authenticated. Therefore, in this study, using several authentic fatty acids predicted from our analytical data, we have compared the effect of the spore extract of G. lucidum with those of several authentic fatty acids on the inhibitory activity of HL-60 cell proliferation and the production of tumor necrosis factor (TNF) production induced by lipopolysaccharide (LPS) in a mouse macrophage preparation. MATERIALS AND METHODSThe spores (100 g) of G. lucidum, cultured at the area of Dabieshan, Anhui, China from October 2003 to July 2004 (Lot AFA), kindly supplied from Isukura Co., Ltd. (Tokyo) were dissolved in five volumes of 95% ethanol in a sealed bag, shaken gently at room temperature for 24 h and centrifuged at 10000ϫg for 20 min. The solution was evaporated to dryness on a rotary evaporator. T...

N6-methyladenosine (m6A) methylation is the most prevalent internal modification of post-transcriptional modifications in mRNA, tRNA, miRNA, and long non-coding RNA in eukaryotes. m6A methylation has been proven to be involved in plant resistance to pathogens. However, there are no reports on wheat (Triticum aestivum) m6A transcriptome-wide map and its potential biological function in wheat resistance to wheat yellow mosaic virus (WYMV). To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to determine the transcriptome-wide m6A profile of two wheat varieties with different resistances to WYMV. By analyzing m6A-sequencing (m6A-seq) data, we identified 25,752 common m6A peaks and 30,582 common m6A genes in two groups [WYMV-infected resistant wheat variety (WRV) and WYMV-infected sensitive wheat variety (WSV)], and all these peaks were mainly enriched in 3′ untranslated regions and stop codons of coding sequences. Gene Ontology analysis of m6A-seq and RNA-sequencing data revealed that genes that showed significant changes in both m6A and mRNA levels were associated with plant defense responses. Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes analysis revealed that these selected genes were enriched in the plant–pathogen interaction pathway. We further verified these changes in m6A and mRNA levels through gene-specific m6A real-time quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) and normal RT-qPCR. This study highlights the role of m6A methylation in wheat resistance to WYMV, providing a solid basis for the potential functional role of m6A RNA methylation in wheat resistance to infection by RNA viruses.

Background: As one of the majorcomplications of diabetes, diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leadingcause of visual impairment and blindness due to delayed diagnosisand intervention. Microaneurysms appear as the earliest symptom ofDR. Accurate and reliable detection of microaneurysms in colorfundus images has great importance for DR screening.Methods: A microaneurysms' detection methodusing machine learning based on directional local contrast (DLC) isproposed for the early diagnosis of DR. First, blood vessels wereenhanced and segmented using improved enhancement function based onanalyzing eigenvalues of Hessian matrix. Next, with blood vesselsexcluded, microaneurysm candidate regions were obtained using shapecharacteristics and connected components analysis. After imagesegmented to patches, the features of each microaneurysm candidatepatch were extracted, and each candidate patch was classified intomicroaneurysm or non-microaneurysm. The main contributions of ourstudy are (1) making use of directional local contrast inmicroaneurysms' detection for the first time, which does make sensefor better microaneurysms' classification.(2) Applying threedifferent machine learning techniques for classification andcomparing their performance for microaneurysms' detection. Theproposed algorithm was trained and tested on e-ophtha MA database,and further tested on another independent DIARETDB1 database.Results of microaneurysms' detection on the two databases wereevaluated on lesion level and compared with existing algorithms. Results:The proposed method has achieved better performance compared with existing algorithms on accuracy and computation time. On e-ophtha MA and DIARETDB1 databases, the area under curve (AUC) of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was 0.87 and 0.86, respectively. The free-response ROC (FROC) score on the two databases was 0.374 and 0.210, respectively. The computation time per image with resolution of 2544×1969, 1400×960 and 1500×1152 is 29 s, 3 s and 2.6 s, respectively. Conclusions:The proposed methodusing machine learning based on directional local contrast of imagepatches can effectively detect microaneurysms in color fundus imagesand provide an effective scientific basis for early clinical DRdiagnosis.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is one of the most common causes of visual impairment. Automatic detection of hard exudates (HE) from retinal photographs is an important step for detection of DR. However, most of existing algorithms for HE detection are complex and inefficient. We have developed and evaluated an automatic retinal image processing algorithm for HE detection using dynamic threshold and fuzzy C-means clustering (FCM) followed by support vector machine (SVM) for classification. The proposed algorithm consisted of four main stages: (i) imaging preprocessing; (ii) localization of optic disc (OD); (iii) determination of candidate HE using dynamic threshold in combination with global threshold based on FCM; and (iv) extraction of eight texture features from the candidate HE region, which were then fed into an SVM classifier for automatic HE classification. The proposed algorithm was trained and cross-validated (10 fold) on a publicly available e-ophtha EX database (47 images) on pixel-level, achieving the overall average sensitivity, PPV, and F-score of 76.5%, 82.7%, and 76.7%. It was tested on another independent DIARETDB1 database (89 images) with the overall average sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of 97.5%, 97.8%, and 97.7%, respectively. In summary, the satisfactory evaluation results on both retinal imaging databases demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm for automatic HE detection, by using dynamic threshold and FCM followed by an SVM for classification.

Purpose. To investigate the prevalence and characteristics of focal choroidal excavation (FCE) concurrent with central serous chorioretinopathy (CSC) using multimodal imaging. Methods. This was a retrospective single-institution study. Clinical features and multimodal imaging findings were analyzed in eyes with CSC and FCEs, using imaging methods including optical coherence tomography (OCT), OCT angiography (OCTA), fluorescein angiography (FA), indocyanine green angiography (ICGA), fundus autofluorescence (FAF), and multispectral imaging. Results. Seventeen patients (4.8%) with 21 FCEs (19 eyes) were found among 351 consecutive Chinese patients with CSC. Chronic CSC represented 47.1% of those cases. Window defects in 12 lesions identified through FA and hypoautofluorescence in 13 lesions identified through FAF revealed retinal pigment epithelial attenuation. Choroidal hemodynamic disturbances characterized by localized filling defects at the excavation and circumferential hyperperfusion were validated by both ICGA and OCTA, which were similar to the angiographic features of normal chronic CSC. The hyperreflective tissue beneath FCE, observed on B-scan OCT, presented as intensive choroidal flow signals on OCTA. Conclusions. FCE is not uncommon in patients with CSC. Multimodal imaging suggested that the aberrant choroidal circulation might be a contribution factor for leakage from the dysfunctional retinal pigment epithelium at the area of excavation.