Spatial Patterns and Composition Traits of Soil Microbial Nitrogen-Metabolism Genes in the Robinia pseudoacacia Forests at a Regional Scale.

Microbial-driven processes related to the nitrogen-metabolism (N-metabolism) in soil are critical for ecosystem functioning and stability. There are spatial patterns of microbial-mediated nitrogen processes, but we still lack an overview of the soil N-metabolism genes of single nitrogen-fixing tree species pure forests at a regional scale. Here, we investigated the spatial variation and drivers of microbial N-metabolism genes in the rhizosphere soil of Robinia pseudoacacia on the Loess Plateau by metagenomic technology. We found that the distance-decay of soil N functional gene similarities in Robinia pseudoacacia forests on the Loess Plateau spanning a geographic distance of 230 km was significant (p < 0.001). The gene composition and co-occurrence patterns in the process of soil microbial N-metabolism were very different, and they were mainly driven by soil pH and MAP (mean annual precipitation). The proportion of positive links and edges co-occurrence networks between N functional genes increased with increasing pH, suggesting that increasing pH promoted connections between functional genes. The relative frequencies of N-metabolism pathways were consistent on the Loess Plateau, the abundance of ammonia assimilation pathway was highest, and the abundance of the nitrogen fixation pathway was the lowest; only the abundance of the nitrogen fixation pathway was not significantly different. The bacterial and archaeal communities involved in soil nitrogen metabolism were significantly different. Structural equation modeling showed that decreases in soil pH and MAP mainly affected the increase in nitrogen functional gene abundance through an increase in the diversity of N-metabolism microorganisms. In conclusion, this study provides a baseline for biogeographic studies of soil microbe functional genes.

Deep Symmetric Adaptation Network for Cross-Modality Medical Image Segmentation.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods have shown their promising performance in the cross-modality medical image segmentation tasks. These typical methods usually utilize a translation network to transform images from the source domain to target domain or train the pixel-level classifier merely using translated source images and original target images. However, when there exists a large domain shift between source and target domains, we argue that this asymmetric structure, to some extent, could not fully eliminate the domain gap. In this paper, we present a novel deep symmetric architecture of UDA for medical image segmentation, which consists of a segmentation sub-network, and two symmetric source and target domain translation sub-networks. To be specific, based on two translation sub-networks, we introduce a bidirectional alignment scheme via a shared encoder and two private decoders to simultaneously align features 1) from source to target domain and 2) from target to source domain, which is able to effectively mitigate the discrepancy between domains. Furthermore, for the segmentation sub-network, we train a pixel-level classifier using not only original target images and translated source images, but also original source images and translated target images, which could sufficiently leverage the semantic information from the images with different styles. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method has remarkable advantages compared to the state-of-the-art methods in three segmentation tasks, such as cross-modality cardiac, BraTS, and abdominal multi-organ segmentation.

Efficacy of albumin-bound paclitaxel in the treatment of advanced refractory breast cancer and its effect on serum resistin.

PURPOSE: This study aimed to investigate the efficacy of albumin-bound paclitaxel (nab-paclitaxel) in the treatment of advanced refractory breast cancer (BC) and its effect on serum resistin. METHODS: A retrospective study was performed based on the clinical records of 95 patients with advanced refractory BC admitted to Weihai Central Hospital from March 2012 to May 2015. Thirty-four patients were treated with traditional paclitaxel and enrolled in the control group, while the other 61 patients were treated with nab-paclitaxel and enrolled in the study group. The efficacy, toxicity and side effects, quality of life, and serum resistin levels were compared between the two groups. RESULTS: The total response rate (RR) of the study group was much higher than that of the control group (p<0.05). The leukopenia level of the study group during the treatment was significantly lower than that of the control group (p<0.05). The level of serum resistin in the study group after treatment was significantly lower than in the control group (p<0.05). The improvement rate of quality of life in the study group was significantly higher than in the control group (p<0.05). CONCLUSION: The results indicated that nab-paclitaxel is very effective in treating advanced refractory BC and reduces the level of serum resistin. It can improve the quality of life of patients and is worthy of clinical promotion.

Clinical significance of breast-conserving surgery for early breast cancer and its impact on patient life quality of life.

PURPOSE: To explore the clinical significance of breast-conserving surgery for early breast cancer and its impact on patient's life quality. METHODS: We retrospectively analyzed 156 patients with early breast cancer who were admitted to Weihai Municipal Hospital between August 2013 and January 2015. Among them, there were 82 cases of breast-conserving surgery (the experiment group) and 74 cases of conventional radical surgery (the control group). Hospitalization time, survival rate, metastasis rate, recurrence rate, complications, and life quality within two years were compared between the two groups. RESULTS: There were no significant differences in the survival rate, recurrence rate, and metastasis rate within 2 years between the two groups (p>0.05). However, the cosmetic effect, the amount of intraoperative blood loss average drainage flow volume, time of surgery, period of hospitalization, length of incision and incision infection rate after surgery were all lower in the experiment group. Patients in the experiment group had better life quality and a lower rate of anxiety. CONCLUSIONS: The breast-conserving surgery had a positive impact on patients with early breast cancer. Patient who received this surgery had a lower rate of blood loss and smaller incision. The surgery duration was shorter and postoperative recovery time was shorter. Moreover, breast-conserving surgery had a better cosmetic effect. The Breast-conserving surgery is worthy of further application in the treatment of early breast cancer.

MicroRNA-937 inhibits the malignant phenotypes of breast cancer by directly targeting and downregulating forkhead box Q1.

Purpose: Numerous microRNAs (miRNAs) are aberrantly expressed in breast cancer, and the dysregulation of miRNAs may affect the aggressiveness of this cancer. Aberrant expression of miRNA-937 (miR-937) in gastric and lung cancers has been reported, which plays tumor-suppressive or oncogenic roles in carcinogenesis including cancer progression. Our purpose was to investigate the involvement of miR-937 in breast cancer progression. Patients and methods: The expression profile of miR-937 in breast cancer was assessed by reverse-transcription quantitative PCR. Biological effects of miR-937 upregulation on the malignant characteristics of breast cancer cells were determined in a series of functional experiments. The direct target of miR-937 in breast cancer cells was also identified. Results: Herein, the expression levels of miR-937 were notably lower in breast cancer, and its underexpression was significantly correlated with lymph node metastasis and TNM stage. Patients with breast cancer underexpressing miR-937 showed shorter overall survival than did patients with breast cancer overexpressing miR-937. Proliferation, migration, and invasiveness of breast cancer cells were evidently suppressed by miR-937 upregulation. In addition, ectopic miR-937 expression hindered breast cancer tumor growth in vivo. Forkhead box Q1 (FOXQ1) mRNA was found to be a direct target of miR-937 in breast cancer. FOXQ1 turned out to be overexpressed in breast cancer tissues, and its overexpression negatively correlated with miR-937 expression. Moreover, silencing of FOXQ1 recapitulated the tumor-suppressive effects of miR-937 overexpression on breast cancer cells. Notably, FOXQ1 restoration abrogated the miR-937-mediated suppression of proliferation, migration, and invasiveness of breast cancer cells. Conclusion: These results collectively revealed that miR-937 acts as a tumor suppressor in breast cancer and restrains cancer progression by directly targeting FOXQ1 mRNA. These data suggest that targeting of the novel miR-937-FOXQ1 axis is an attractive therapeutic method against breast cancer.

Long non-coding RNA NKILA serves as a biomarker in the early diagnosis and prognosis of patients with colorectal cancer.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the leading causes of cancer-associated mortality worldwide. The prognosis of patients with CRC at an advanced stage is poor. Biomarkers currently used in clinical practice, including carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) and cancer antigen (CA) 19-9, lack sufficient sensitivity and specificity for early diagnosis and prediction, therefore there remains a requirement to improve the prognosis of patients with CRC. Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been revealed to serve fundamental roles in various pathophysiological processes, including cancer initiation and progression. The present study investigated the expression and clinical significance of the lncRNA nuclear factor-κB interacting long non-coding RNA (NKILA) in CRC. It was identified that NKILA was downregulated in six CRC cell lines and tissues (n=173). Low NKILA expression was significantly associated with a poor differentiation grade, larger tumor size and advanced Tumor-Node-Metastases stages. Further statistical analyses revealed that low NKILA expression predicted poor overall survival (OS) rate and progression-free survival (PFS) rate. In addition, low NKILA expression was determined as an independent risk factor for poor OS and PFS. Furthermore, NKILA exhibited a relatively high sensitivity and specificity compared with CEA and CA19-9 in the early diagnosis of CRC. The serum level of NKILA was positively correlated with the level in tissues. In addition, a decreased NKILA level in serum was revealed to be partially restored post-operatively. In conclusion, low NKILA expression has been demonstrated to accelerate CRC progression and NKILA may be a potential novel biomarker in early diagnosis and prognosis of patients with CRC.

Removal of Cr(VI) from aqueous solution by flocculant with the capacity of reduction and chelation.

A novel agent polyethyleneimine-sodium xanthogenate (PEX) with the multifunction of reduction, chelation, flocculation and precipitation was synthesized by using polyethyleneimine (PEI), carbon disulfide (CS2), and sodium hydroxide (NaOH). The effects of different important parameters, such as pH value, initial Cr(VI) concentration, coexisting ions and turbidity etc., on the removal of chromium from aqueous solution by PEX were investigated in flocculation experiments. The experiments results demonstrated that PEX could efficiently remove Cr(VI) and total Cr (Cr(VI)+Cr(III)) in strongly acidic media. It was proved that the presence of coexisting ions (Na(+), Ca(2+), F(-), Cl(-), and SO4(2-)) in the solution had a little influence on the removal of chromium. Furthermore, it was conformed that Cr(VI) ions and turbidity could be simultaneously removed when water samples contained both Cr(VI) ions and turbidity. Finally, the mechanism of interaction between chromium and PEX was further confirmed by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The results reveal that dithiocarboxylic acid groups on PEX macromolecule play a major role in Cr(VI) reduction and Cr(III) chelation, and the flocs formation is attributed to the interparticle bridging mechanism of PEX.