Sevelamer reverses liver fibrosis by deactivation of hepatic stellate cells.

Liver fibrosis is a chronic liver disease characterized by a progressive wound healing response caused by chronic liver injury. Currently, there are no approved clinical treatments for liver fibrosis. Sevelamer is used clinically to treat hyperphosphatemia and has shown potential therapeutic effects on liver diseases. However, there have been few studies evaluating the therapeutic effects of sevelamer on liver fibrosis, and the specific mechanisms are still unclear. In this study, we investigated the antifibrotic effects of sevelamer-induced low inorganic phosphate (Pi) stress in vitro and in vivo and analyzed the detailed mechanisms. We found that low Pi stress could inhibit the proliferation of activated hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) by promoting apoptosis, effectively suppressing the migration and epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) of hepatic stellate cells. Additionally, low Pi stress significantly increased the antioxidant stress response. It is worth noting that low Pi stress indirectly inhibited the activation and migration of HSCs by suppressing transforming growth factor ß (TGF-ß) expression in macrophages. In a rat model of liver fibrosis, oral administration of sevelamer significantly decreased blood phosphorus levels, improved liver function, reduced liver inflammation, and increased the antioxidant stress response in the liver. Our study revealed that the key mechanism by which sevelamer inhibited liver fibrosis involved binding to gastrointestinal phosphate, resulting in a decrease in blood phosphorus levels, the downregulation of TGF-ß expression in macrophages, and the inhibition of HSC migration and fibrosis-related protein expression. Therefore, our results suggest that sevelamer-induced low Pi stress can attenuate hepatic stellate cell activation and inhibit the progression of liver fibrosis, making it a potential option for the treatment of liver fibrosis and other refractory chronic liver diseases.

Irreversible repolarization of tumour-associated macrophages by low-Pi stress inhibits the progression of hepatocellular carcinoma.

Numerous studies have shown the positive correlation between high levels of Pi and tumour progression. A critical goal of macrophage-based cancer therapeutics is to reduce anti-inflammatory macrophages (M2) and increase proinflammatory antitumour macrophages (M1). This study aimed to investigate the relationship between macrophage polarization and low-Pi stress. First, the spatial populations of M2 and M1 macrophages in 22 HCC patient specimens were quantified and correlated with the local Pi concentration. The levels of M2 and M1 macrophage markers expressed in the peritumour area were higher than the intratumour levels, and the expression of M2 markers was positively correlated with Pi concentration. Next, monocytes differentiated from THP-1 cells were polarized against different Pi concentrations to investigate the activation or silencing of the expression of p65, IκB-α and STAT3 as well as their phosphorylation. Results showed that low-Pi stress irreversibly repolarizes tumour-associated macrophages (TAMs) towards the M1 phenotype by silencing stat6 and activating p65. Moreover, HepG-2 and SMCC-7721 cells were cultured in conditioned medium to investigate the innate anticancer immune effects on tumour progression. Both cancer cell lines showed reduced proliferation, migration and invasion, as epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) was inactivated. In vivo therapeutic effect on the innate and adaptive immune processes was validated in a subcutaneous liver cancer model by the intratumoural injection of sevelamer. Tumour growth was significantly inhibited by the partial deprivation of intratumoural Pi as the tumour microenvironment under low-Pi stress is more immunostimulatory. The anticancer immune response, activated by low-Pi stress, suggests a new macrophage-based immunotherapeutic modality.

[Mechanism of gigantol in transmembrane transport in human lens epithelial cells].

Gigantol is a phenolic component of precious Chinese medicine Dendrobii Caulis, which has many pharmacological activities such as prevent tumor and diabetic cataract. This paper aimed to investigate the molecular mechanism of gigantol in transmembrane transport in human lens epithelial cells(HLECs). Immortalized HLECs were cultured in vitro and inoculated in the laser scanning confocal microscopy(LSCM) medium at 5 000 cells/mL. The fluorescence distribution and intensity of gigantol marked by fluorescence in HLECs were observed by LSCM, and the absorption and distribution of gigantol were expressed as fluorescence intensity. The transmembrane transport process of gigantol in HLECs were monitored. The effects of time, temperature, concentration, transport inhibitors, and different cell lines on the transmembrane absorption and transport of gigantol were compared. HLECs were inoculated on climbing plates of 6-well culture plates, and the ultrastructure of HLECs was detected by atomic force microscopy(AFM) during the transmembrane absorption of non-fluorescent labeled gigantol. The results showed that the transmembrane absorption of gigantol was in time and concentration-dependent manners, which was also able to specifically target HLECs. Energy and carrier transport inhibitors reduced gigantol absorption by HLECs. During transmembrane process of gigantol, the membrane surface of HLECs became rougher and presented different degrees of pits, indicating that the transmembrane transport of gigantol was achieved by active absorption of energy and carrier-mediated endocytosis.

Augmented reality for stroke rehabilitation during COVID-19.

BACKGROUND: The lack of the rehabilitation professionals is a global issue and it is becoming more serious during COVID-19. An Augmented Reality Rehabilitation System (AR Rehab) was developed for virtual training delivery. The virtual training was integrated into the participants' usual care to reduce the human trainers' effort so that the manpower scarcity can be eased. This also resulted in the reduction of the contact rate in pandemics. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the feasibility of the AR Rehab-based virtual training when integrated into the usual care in a real-world pandemic setting, by answering questions of whether the integrated trials can help fulfill the training goal and whether the trials can be delivered when resources are limited because of COVID-19. METHODS: Chronic stroke participants were randomly assigned to either a centre-based group (AR-Centre) or a home-based group (AR-Home) for a trial consisting of 20 sessions delivered in a human-machine integrated intervention. The trial of the AR-Centre was human training intensive with 3/4 of each session delivered by human trainers (PTs/OTs/Assistants) and 1/4 delivered by the virtual trainer (AR Rehab). The trial of the AR-Home was virtual training intensive with 1/4 and 3/4 of each session delivered by human and virtual trainers, respectively. Functional assessments including Fugl-Meyer Assessment for Upper Extremity (FMA-UE) and Lower Extremity (FMA-LE), Functional Ambulation Category (FAC), Berg Balance Scale (BBS), Barthel Index (BI) of Activities of Daily Living (ADL), and Physical Component Summary (SF-12v2 PCS) and Mental Component Summary (SF-12v2 MCS) of the 12-Item Short Form Health Survey (SF-12v2), were conducted before and after the intervention. User experience (UX) using questionnaires were collected after the intervention. Time and human resources required to deliver the human and virtual training, respectively, and the proportion of participants with clinical significant improvement were also used as supplementary measures. RESULTS: There were 129 patients from 10 rehabilitation centres enrolled in the integrated program with 39 of them were selected for investigation. Significant functional improvement in FMA-UE (AR-Centre: p = 0.0022, AR-Home: p = 0.0043), FMA-LE (AR-Centre: p = 0.0007, AR-Home: p = 0.0052), SF-12v2 PCS (AR-Centre: p = 0.027, AR-Home: p = 0.036) were observed in both groups. Significant improvement in balance ability (BBS: p = 0.0438), and mental components (SF-12v2 MCS: p = 0.017) were found in AR-Centre group, while activities of daily living (BI: p = 0.0007) was found in AR-Home group. Contact rate was reduced by 30.75-72.30% within AR-All, 0.00-60.00% within AR-Centre, and 75.00-90.00% within AR-Home. CONCLUSION: The human-machine integrated mode was effective and efficient to reduce the human rehabilitation professionals' effort while fulfilling the training goals. It eased the scarcity of manpower and reduced the contact rate during the pandemics.

Identifying the kind behind SMILES-anatomical therapeutic chemical classification using structure-only representations.

Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) classification for compounds/drugs plays an important role in drug development and basic research. However, previous methods depend on interactions extracted from STITCH dataset which may make it depend on lab experiments. We present a pilot study to explore the possibility of conducting the ATC prediction solely based on the molecular structures. The motivation is to eliminate the reliance on the costly lab experiments so that the characteristics of a drug can be pre-assessed for better decision-making and effort-saving before the actual development. To this end, we construct a new benchmark consisting of 4545 compounds which is with larger scale than the one used in previous study. A light-weight prediction model is proposed. The model is with better explainability in the sense that it is consists of a straightforward tokenization that extracts and embeds statistically and physicochemically meaningful tokens, and a deep network backed by a set of pyramid kernels to capture multi-resolution chemical structural characteristics. Its efficacy has been validated in the experiments where it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 15.53% in accuracy and by 69.66% in terms of efficiency. We make the benchmark dataset, source code and web server open to ease the reproduction of this study.

NAC Transcription Factor TwNAC01 Positively Regulates Drought Stress Responses in Arabidopsis and Triticale.

The NAC transcription factors play important roles in regulating plant growth, development, and senescence, and responding to biotic and abiotic stressors in plants. A novel coding sequence (1,059 bp) was cloned from hexaploid triticale in this study. The putative protein (352 amino acids) encoded by this sequence was over 95% similar to the amino acid sequence of a NAC protein from Aegilops tauschii (XP020161331), and it formed a clade with Ae. tauschii, durum wheat, and barley. The putative protein contained a conserved nature actomyosin (NAM) domain (129 consecutive amino acids) between the 20th and 148th amino acids at the N-terminus and three transcription activation regions at the C-terminus. The novel gene was identified as a triticale NAC gene localized in the nucleus and designated as TwNAC01 (GenBank accession MG736919). The expression levels of TwNAC01 were the highest in roots, followed by leaves and stems when triticale lines were exposed to drought, polyethylene glycol 6,000 (PEG6000), NaCl, cold, methyl jasmonate (MeJA), and abscisic acid (ABA). Transgenic Arabidopsis thaliana overexpressing TwNAC01 had significantly lower leaf water loss rates and longer roots than wild-type (WT) A. thaliana. Virus-induced silencing of the TwNAC01 gene in triticale delayed root development and decreased length of primary root. Under drought stress, leaves of TwNAC01-silenced triticale had higher levels of malondialdehyde (MDA) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), but lower relative water content (RWC), net photosynthetic rate, stomatal conductance, intercellular CO2 concentration, and transpiration rate than the leaves of the WT. Gene overexpression and silencing experiments suggested that TwNAC01 improves plant stress tolerance by increasing root length, regulating the water content of plant leaves by reducing MDA and H2O2 content, and adjusting respiration rate. The results suggest that TwNAC01 is a novel NAC transcription factor gene that can be exploited for triticale and cereal improvement.

Ten picrotoxane-type sesquiterpenoids from the stems of Dendrobium wardianum Warner.

Ten undescribed picrotoxane-type sesquiterpenoids, dendrowardins A-J, together with two known ones, were isolated from the stems of Dendrobium wardianum Warner (Orchidaceae). Dendrowardins A-D feature the unusual 5,2-δ-lactone and additionally dendrowardins C-D are the first examples containing the 11,10-γ-lactone moiety. The structures were established using spectroscopic methods and by comparison with literature data. Further, dendrowardin E, amotin, and aduncin exhibited significant effects of promoting the proliferation on human lens epithelial cells (HLECs) induced by D-galactose.

Deep Collocative Learning for Immunofixation Electrophoresis Image Analysis.

Immunofixation Electrophoresis (IFE) analysis is of great importance to the diagnosis of Multiple Myeloma, which is among the top-9 cancer killers in the United States, but has rarely been studied in the context of deep learning. Two possible reasons are: 1) the recognition of IFE patterns is dependent on the co-location of bands that forms a binary relation, different from the unary relation (visual features to label) that deep learning is good at modeling; 2) deep classification models may perform with high accuracy for IFE recognition but is not able to provide firm evidence (where the co-location patterns are) for its predictions, rendering difficulty for technicians to validate the results. We propose to address these issues with collocative learning, in which a collocative tensor has been constructed to transform the binary relations into unary relations that are compatible with conventional deep networks, and a location-label-free method that utilizes the Grad-CAM saliency map for evidence backtracking has been proposed for accurate localization. In addition, we have proposed Coached Attention Gates that can regulate the inference of the learning to be more consistent with human logic and thus support the evidence backtracking. The experimental results show that the proposed method has obtained a performance gain over its base model ResNet18 by 741.30% in IoU and also outperformed popular deep networks of DenseNet, CBAM, and Inception-v3.

A systematic in silico prediction of gibberellic acid stimulated GASA family members: A novel small peptide contributes to floral architecture and transcriptomic changes induced by external stimuli in rice.

The GASA (GA-stimulated Arabidopsis) gene family is highly specific to plants, signifying a crucial role in plant growth and development. Herein, we retrieved 119 GASA genes in 10 different plant species in two major lineages (monocots and eudicots). Further, in the phylogenetic tree we classified these genes into four well-conserved subgroups. All the proteins contain a conserved GASA domain with similar characteristics and a highly specific 12-cysteine residue of the C-terminus position. According to the global microarray data and qRT-PCR based analysis, the OsGASA gene family was dominantly expressed in the seedling and transition phase of floral stages. Despite this, OsGASA genes profoundly contribute to rice grain size and length, whereas the highest abundance of transcript level was noticed in stage-2 (Inf 6, 3.0-cm-long spikelet) and stage-3 (Inf 7, 5.0-cm-long spikelet) under GA treatment during panicle formation. Additionally, the maximum expression level of these genes was recorded in response to GA and ABA in young seedlings. Further, in response to abiotic stresses, OsGASA1/8/10 was up- regulated by salt, OsGASA2/5/7 by drought, OsGASA3/6 by cold, and OsGASA4/9 by heat stress. With the exception of OsGASA4, the higher transcription levels of all the other GASA genes were induced by Cd and Cr metal stresses (8-10 fold changes) at various time points. Finally, the GO ontology analysis of GASAs revealed the biological involvement in the GA-mediated signaling pathway and abiotic stresses. Prominently, most of these proteins are localized in cellular components such as the cell wall and extracellular region, where the molecular functions such as ATP binding and protein binding were observed. These results imply that GASAs are significantly involved in rice panicle developmental stages, responses to external stimuli, and hormones.

Characterization of B-BOX gene family and their expression profiles under hormonal, abiotic and metal stresses in Poaceae plants.

BACKGROUND: B-box (BBX) proteins play important roles in plant growth regulation and development including photomorphogenesis, photoperiodic regulation of flowering, and responses to biotic and abiotic stresses. RESULTS: In the present study we retrieved total 131 BBX members from five Poaceae species including 36 from maize, 30 from rice, 24 from sorghum, 22 from stiff brome, and 19 from Millet. All the BBX genes were grouped into five subfamilies on the basis of their phylogenetic relationships and structural features. The expression profiles of 12 OsBBX genes in different tissues were evaluated through qRT-PCR, and we found that most rice BBX members showed high expression level in the heading stage compared to seedling and booting stages. The expression of OsBBX1, OsBBX2, OsBBX8, OsBBX19, and OsBBX24 was strongly induced by abiotic stresses such as drought, cold and salt stresses. Furthermore, the expression of OsBBX2, OsBBX7, OsBBX17, OsBBX19, and OsBBX24 genes was up-regulated under GA, SA and MeJA hormones at different time points. Similarly, the transcripts level of OsBBX1, OsBBX7, OsBBX8, OsBBX17, and OsBBX19 genes were significantly affected by heavy metals such as Fe, Ni, Cr and Cd. CONCLUSION: Change in the expression pattern of BBX members in response to abiotic, hormone and heavy metal stresses signifies their potential roles in plant growth and development and in response to multivariate stresses. The findings suggest that BBX genes could be used as potential genetic markers for the plants, particularly in functional analysis and determining their roles under multivariate stresses.

Genome-Wide Identification and Functional Analysis of NADPH Oxidase Family Genes in Wheat During Development and Environmental Stress Responses.

As the key producers of reactive oxygen species (ROS), NADPH oxidases (NOXs), also known as respiratory burst oxidase homologs (RBOHs), play crucial roles in various biological processes in plants with considerable evolutionary selection and functional diversity in the entire terrestrial plant kingdom. However, only limited resources are available on the phylogenesis and functions of this gene family in wheat. Here, a total of 46 NOX family genes were identified in the wheat genome, and these NOXs could be classified into three subgroups: typical TaNOXs, TaNOX-likes, and ferric reduction oxidases (TaFROs). Phylogenetic analysis indicated that the typical TaNOXs might originate from TaFROs during evolution, and the TaFROs located on Chr 2 might be the most ancient forms of TaNOXs. TaNOXs are highly expressed in wheat with distinct tissue or organ-specificity and stress-inducible diversity. A large-scale expression and/or coexpression analysis demonstrated that TaNOXs can be divided into four functional groups with different expression patterns under a broad range of environmental stresses. Different TaNOXs are coexpressed with different sets of other genes, which widely participate in several important intracellular processes such as cell wall biosynthesis, defence response, and signal transduction, suggesting their vital but diversity of roles in plant growth regulation and stress responses of wheat.

[Mechanism of interaction between chrysin and leptin].

The study of interaction mechanism between chrysin and leptin was investigated by various spectroscopic techniques and atom force microscope. The ultraviolet spectrum presents a red shift in 200-220 nm after chrysin upon. And there is a structure alternative showed in 270 nm when the concentration ratio of chrysin and leptin in 10-15. From the fluorescence spectrum, it was found that chrysin could combine with leptin in physiological condition. The binding constant (Ka) values, at 298 K and 310 K, were (0.41±0.05)×106 and (3.26±0.46)×106 L·mol⁻¹, and the binding site number were 1.02±0.04 and 0.51±0.01, respectively. The atom force microscope results showed that the dimension of leptin molecules became more swollen after binding with chrysin because of the hydrophobicity. These results demonstrate that the mechanism of chrysin and leptin interaction could play a role in leptin adjust in human body, and it could provide a new aspect for the study of obesity treatment.

Contextual Noise Reduction for Domain Adaptive Near-Duplicate Retrieval on Merchandize Images.

In this paper, we have proposed a novel method which utilizes the contextual relationship among visual words for reducing the Quantization errors in near-duplicate image retrieval (NDR). Instead of following the track of conventional NDR techniques which usually search new solutions by borrowing ideas from the text domain, we propose to model the problem back to image domain, which results in a more natural way of solution search. The idea of the proposed method is to construct a context graph that encapsulates the contextual relationship within an image and treat the graph as a pseudo-image, so that classical image filters can be adopted to reduce the mismapped visual words which are contextually inconsistent with others.With these contextual noises reduced, the method provides purified inputs to the subsequent processes in NDR, and improves the overall accuracy. More importantly, the purification further increases the sparsity of the image feature vectors, which thus speeds up the conventional methods by 1662% times and makes NDR practical to online applications on merchandize images where the requirement of response time is critical. The way of considering contextual noise reduction in image domain also makes the problem open to all sophisticated filters. Our study shows the classic anisotropic diffusion filter can be employed to address the cross-domain issue, resulting in the superiority of the method to conventional ones in both effectiveness and efficiency.

The Fundamental Role of NOX Family Proteins in Plant Immunity and Their Regulation.

NADPH oxidases (NOXs), also known as respiratory burst oxidase homologs (RBOHs), are the major source of reactive oxygen species (ROS), and are involved in many important processes in plants such as regulation of acclimatory signaling and programmed cell death (PCD). Increasing evidence shows that NOXs play crucial roles in plant immunity and their functions in plant immune responses are not as separate individuals but with other signal molecules such as kinases, Rac/Rop small GTPases and hormones, mediating a series of signal transmissions. In a similar way, NOX-mediated signaling also participates in abiotic stress response of plants. We summarized here the complex role and regulation mechanism of NOXs in mediating plant immune response, and the viewpoint that abiotic stress response of plants may be a kind of special plant immunity is also proposed.

[Experimental study on Dendrobium candidum polysaccharides on promotion of hair growth].

OBJECTIVE: To observe the effect and mechanism of Dendrobium candidum polysaccharides (DCP) in promoting hair growth, in order to lay a foundation for the development and utilization of D. candidum. METHOD: The water-extraction and alcohol-precipitation method was adopted to extract DCP, and the phenol-sulphuric acid method was used to determine its content. Thirty C57BL6J mice were collected to establish the hair loss model with hair removal cream. They were randomly divided into the control group, the positive control group and the DCP group, and given 0.2 mL of ultra-pure water, minoxidil tincture and DCP (5.0 g x L(-1)) 21 days. The mice hair growth scoring standard was adopted to evaluate the hair growth of C57BL/6J mice at 7, 14 d. The hairs in unit hair-losing areas of treated C57BL/6J mice at 21 d were weighed to evaluate the effect of DCP on the promotion of hair growth. MTT assay and RT-PCR method were used to evaluate the effect of DCP on the proliferatin of HaCaT cells and the mRNA expression of VEGF in HaCaT cells. RESULT: The extraction percent of DCP was 29.87%, and its content was 79.65%. The average scores for the hair growth and weight of C57BL/6J mice of DCP group were much higher than the control group. The survival rate and mRNA expression of VEGF of HaCaT cells were much higher than the control group. CONCLUSION: DCP has the effect in promoting hair growth. Its mechanism may be related to the up-regulation of the mRNA expression of VEGF.

Visual Typo Correction by Collocative Optimization: A Case Study on Merchandize Images.

Near-duplicate retrieval (NDR) in merchandize images is of great importance to a lot of online applications on e-Commerce websites. In those applications where the requirement of response time is critical, however, the conventional techniques developed for a general purpose NDR are limited, because expensive post-processing like spatial verification or hashing is usually employed to compromise the quantization errors among the visual words used for the images. In this paper, we argue that most of the errors are introduced because of the quantization process where the visual words are considered individually, which has ignored the contextual relations among words. We propose a "spelling or phrase correction" like process for NDR, which extends the concept of collocations to visual domain for modeling the contextual relations. Binary quadratic programming is used to enforce the contextual consistency of words selected for an image, so that the errors (typos) are eliminated and the quality of the quantization process is improved. The experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the efficiency of NDR by reducing vocabulary size by 1000% times, and under the scenario of merchandize image NDR, the expensive local interest point feature used in conventional approaches can be replaced by color-moment feature, which reduces the time cost by 9202% while maintaining comparable performance to the state-of-the-art methods.

[Experimental study on preclinical quality control, urgent poison and irritation of Dendrobium aurantiacum eye drops, a class I new drug against diabetic cataract].

To establish a quality control method of Dendrobium aurantiacum eye drops, in order to evaluate acute toxicity, irritation and irritability and lay a foundation for its development and utilization in the future. The content of gigantol and SA in D. aurantiacum eye drops were determined by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The linear ranges of gigantol and SA were 0.040 8-1.530 0 g x L(-1) (r = 0.999 9) and 0.100 8-0.504 0 g x L(-1) (r = 0.999 9), with the average recoveries being 100.8%, 99.84%, and RSD being 1.4%, 1.8% (n = 9) respectively. The sample solution was stable at room temperature within 72 h. The acute toxicity test showed no toxic reaction of D. aurantiacum eye drops in mice. The irritating test for single-dose and multiple-dose administrations of D. aurantiacum eye drops and physiological saline in rabbit eyes and skin, as well as the allergic test in guinea pigs showed no eye irritation and skin irritation and irritability. These findings indicated that D. aurantiacum eye drops are safe and stable, with a good druggability.

Coaching the exploration and exploitation in active learning for interactive video retrieval.

Conventional active learning approaches for interactive video/image retrieval usually assume the query distribution is unknown, as it is difficult to estimate with only a limited number of labeled instances available. Thus, it is easy to put the system in a dilemma whether to explore the feature space in uncertain areas for a better understanding of the query distribution or to harvest in certain areas for more relevant instances. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called coached active learning that makes the query distribution predictable through training and, therefore, avoids the risk of searching on a completely unknown space. The estimated distribution, which provides a more global view of the feature space, can be used to schedule not only the timing but also the step sizes of the exploration and the exploitation in a principled way. The results of the experiments on a large-scale data set from TRECVID 2005-2009 validate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach, which demonstrates an encouraging performance when facing domain-shift, outperforms eight conventional active learning methods, and shows superiority to six state-of-the-art interactive video retrieval systems.

[Application of Qu single abdominal aorta clamping for bloodless hepatectomy and Pringle hepatectomy in 118 cases of liver tumors].

OBJECTIVE: To compare the results of application of Qu single abdominal aorta clamping for bloodless hepatectomy and Pringle hepatectomy in 118 cases of liver tumors. METHODS: The clinical data of 118 patients, including 59 patients undergoing Qu single abdominal aorta clamping for bloodless hepatectomy (Group QG) and 59 patients undergone Pringle first hepatic portal clamping hepatectomy (Group PG) since March 2009 in the Ningbo Tumor Hospital and Jiangxi Provincial Hospital were retrospectively reviewed. The changes of blood pressure, oxygen saturation, urine volume, intravenous fluid volume, amount of bleeding, time of abdominal aorta (or first hepatic portal) clamping, duration of operation and anesthesia, and other intraoperative indexes of the two groups were compared, and the changes of peritoneal drainage, blood tests, liver functions, etc. before operation and 1, 3, 7, 14 days after the hepatectomy in the two groups were also analyzed. RESULTS: After taking appropriate measures for intraoperative blood pressure control, only small fluctuations of blood pressure, which could be safely adjusted and controlled with stable vital signs, was observed in the group QG. The amount of intraoperative bleeding in the group QG was (96.25 ± 18.45) ml, significantly less than (536.25 ± 35.65) ml in the group PG (P < 0.05). In the group QG, both the duration of operation time [(227.58 ± 28.20) min] and duration of anesthesia [(249.48 ± 31.35) min] were significantly shorter than that [(261.46 ± 32.12) min and (286.58 ± 35.62) min, respectively] in the group PG (both P < 0.05). The postoperative liver dysfunction in the group QG was also milder than that in the group PG (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: For liver tumor patients, Qu single abdominal aorta clamping for bloodless hepatectomy can basically achieve the goal of bloodless hepatectomy. This surgical operation is simple and safe, worthy of recommendation to skillful liver surgeons in hospitals there are some difficulties of blood supply.

[Studies on functional genes of Chinese herbal medicine].

In order to establish the foundation for modernization of Chinese herbal medicine, discovery of the functional genes related with the bioactive components of Chinese herbs and the rules of their expression was progressed for determining the regulatory mechanism, obtaining the core metabolic pathway and key regulatory factors of the medicinal components synthesis. In this article, the studies about plant's functional genes at home and abroad was introduced in three aspects: the pattern plants (rice, thaliana, etc.), the main technologic strategy (gene expression differentia, sequential tag of gene expression, DNA microarray technique and gene expression sequential analysis) and bio-informative method (comparative genomics). The current status of researches involving biosynthesis genes of flavonoids compounds and taxol, and the plant P450 genes were introduced. And the study of dendrobium functional genes conducted in authors' lab was also reviewed.