Prognostic value of APOBEC3A in patients with cervical squamous cell carcinoma in a major urban center in China: a retrospective study.

Background: APOBEC3A (A3A) has been implicated to have vital prognostic value in several common cancers. This study aimed to investigate the prognostic value of A3A expression in cervical squamous cell carcinoma (CESC). Methods: This retrospective study enrolled 59 patients with CESC or cervical squamous intraepithelial neoplasia from January 2014 to January 2017 in Changhai Hospital, Naval Medical University. Then, A3A histoscores (H-scores) using immunohistochemistry (IHC) were analyzed in formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded archival tissue blocks. Moreover, overall survival was analyzed by the Kaplan-Meier method. Results: The H-score of A3A protein expression was relatively higher in CESC than in squamous intraepithelial neoplasia, and the relative expression level of normal cervical tissues was lower than that of cervical squamous intraepithelial neoplasia (P<0.001). Moreover, the H-score of poorly differentiated cases was 6, which was higher than that of moderately differentiated cases (H-score =3), while the H-score of well-differentiated cases was 2, which was lower than that of moderately differentiated cases. Moreover, patients in the A3A low expression group had higher overall survival rates by prognostic analysis (P=0.027). Conclusions: A3A protein expression was increased during CESC progression. Moreover, A3A expression was tightly related to poor prognosis in CESC. Thus, these results showed that A3A overexpression may provide a marker for poor prognosis in CESC.

Detection and Reconstruction of Passion Fruit Branches via CNN and Bidirectional Sector Search.

Accurate detection and reconstruction of branches aid the accuracy of harvesting robots and extraction of plant phenotypic information. However, the complex orchard background and twisting growing branches of vine fruit trees make this challenging. To solve these problems, this study adopted a Mask Region-based convolutional neural network (Mask R-CNN) architecture incorporating deformable convolution to segment branches in complex backgrounds. Based on the growth posture, a branch reconstruction algorithm with bidirectional sector search was proposed to adaptively reconstruct the segmented branches obtained by an improved model. The average precision, average recall, and F1 scores of the improved Mask R-CNN model for passion fruit branch detection were found to be 64.30%, 76.51%, and 69.88%, respectively, and the average running time on the test dataset was 0.75 s per image, which is better than the compared model. We randomly selected 40 images from the test dataset to evaluate the branch reconstruction. The branch reconstruction accuracy, average error, average relative error of reconstructed diameter, and mean intersection-over-union (mIoU) were 88.83%, 1.98 px, 7.98, and 83.44%, respectively. The average reconstruction time for a single image was 0.38 s. This would promise the proposed method to detect and reconstruct plant branches under complex orchard backgrounds.

Exosomal miR-34b inhibits proliferation and the epithelial-mesenchymal transition by targeting Notch2 in ovarian cancer.

Exosomal microRNA (miR) can affect signaling pathways in various physiological and pathological conditions, including ovarian cancer (OC). miR-34b, the first microRNA targeted in a human clinical trial for cancer treatment, exhibited decreased expression in several cancer types. However, the biological function of exosomal miR-34b in OC has not been elucidated. In the present study, using reverse transcription-quantitative PCR, it was reported that exosomal miR-34b is downregulated in OC cells. Exosomal miR-34b reduced cell proliferation and epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) in the OC cell line SKOV3. In addition, it was confirmed that Notch2, which is upregulated in SKOV3 cells, is a target of miR-34b. Moreover, exosomal miR-34b and Notch2 levels were found to be negatively correlated. The present data highlights the importance of exosomal miR-34b-mediated inhibition of cell proliferation and EMT, suggesting that exosomal miR-34b has value as a diagnostic biomarker and a potential molecular target for the treatment of OC.

MicroRNA-135a Regulates VEGFC Expression and Promotes Luteinized Granulosa Cell Apoptosis in Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.

Androgen is known to regulate microRNA-135a (miR-135a) and can be regulated by androgen, suggesting that it may contribute to polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) with hyperandrogenism. However, its roles and mechanisms of action in PCOS are unknown. In this study, the role and molecular mechanisms underlying miR-135a in granulosa cells (GCs) in PCOS were evaluated. miR-135a expression was upregulated in patients with PCOS and in GCs isolated from patients compared with that in the respective controls (P < 0.01), as determined by RT-qPCR. The overexpression of miR-135a inhibited GC proliferation and induced GC apoptosis, as observed by CCK-8 assay and apoptosis assay. Furthermore, miR-135a overexpression increased the expression of double-strand break maker, γH2AX, as confirmed by western blotting. Our results further suggest that these effects were mediated via downregulation of vascular endothelial growth factor C (VEGFC), which was identified as a direct target of miR-135a. Moreover, levels of VEGFC and miR-135a expression showed a negative correlation. These findings indicate that miR-135a promotes apoptosis and the DNA damage response in GCs in PCOS, likely via VEGFC signaling. This study provides novel insights into GC dysregulation in PCOS and suggests that miR-135a is a promising therapeutic target for PCOS treatment.