[S100A10 promotes proliferation and invasion of lung adenocarcinoma cells by activating the Akt-mTOR signaling pathway]

OBJECTIVE

To investigate the effects of expression levels of S100 calcium-binding protein A10 (S100A10) in lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) on patient prognosis and the regulatory role of S100A10 in lung cancer cell proliferation and metastasis.

METHODS

Immunohistochemistry was used to detect the expression levels of S100A10 in LUAD and adjacent tissues, and the relationship between S100A10 expression and clinicopathological parameters and prognosis of the patients was statistically analyzed. The lung adenocarcinoma expression dataset in TCGA database was analyzed using gene enrichment analysis (GSEA) to predict the possible regulatory pathways of S100A10 in the development of lung adenocarcinoma. Lactate production and glucose consumption of lung cancer cells with S100A10 knockdown or overexpression were analyzed to assess the level of glycolysis. Western blotting, CCK-8 assay, EdU-594 assay, and Transwell assays were performed to determine the expression level of S100A10 protein, proliferation and invasion ability of lung cancer cells. A549 cells with S100A10 knockdown and H1299 cells with S100A10 overexpression were injected subcutaneously in nude mice, and tumor growth was observed.

RESULTS

The expression level of S100A10 was significantly upregulated in LUAD tissues as compared with the adjacent tissues, and an elevated S100A10 expression level was associated with lymph node metastasis, advanced tumor stage and distant organ metastasis (P < 0.05), but not with tumor differentiation or the patients' age or gender (P > 0.05). Survival analysis showed that elevated S100A10 expressions in the tumor tissue was associated with a poor outcome of the patients (P < 0.001). In the lung cancer cells, S100A10 overexpression significantly promoted cell proliferation and invasion in vitro (P < 0.001). GSEA showed that the gene sets of glucose metabolism, glycolysis and mTOR signaling pathway were significantly enriched in high expressions of S100A10. In the tumor-bearing nude mice, S100A10 overexpression significantly promoted tumor growth, while S100A10 knockdown obviously suppressed tumor cell proliferation (P < 0.001).

CONCLUSION

S100A10 overexpression promotes glycolysis by activating the Akt-mTOR signaling pathway to promote proliferation and invasion of lung adenocarcinoma cells.

Tracking Adaptive Pathways of Invasive Insects: Novel Insight from Genomics

Despite the huge human and economic costs of invasive insects, which are the main group of invasive species, their environmental impacts through various mechanisms remain inadequately explained in databases and much of the invasion biology literature. High-throughput sequencing technology, especially whole-genome sequencing, has been used as a powerful method to study the mechanisms through which insects achieve invasion. In this study, we reviewed whole-genome sequencing-based advances in revealing several important invasion mechanisms of invasive insects, including (1) the rapid genetic variation and evolution of invasive populations, (2) invasion history and dispersal paths, (3) rapid adaptation to different host plant ranges, (4) strong environmental adaptation, (5) the development of insecticide resistance, and (6) the synergistic damage caused by invasive insects and endosymbiotic bacteria. We also discussed prevention and control technologies based on whole-genome sequencing and their prospects.

Synergistic effects of electroacupuncture and bone marrow stromal cells transplantation therapy in ischemic stroke

OBJECTIVE

Animal studies and clinical trials demonstrated the effectiveness of a combination of transplanted bone marrow stromal cells (BMSC) and electroacupuncture (EA) treatment in improving neurological deficits. However, the ability of the BMSC-EA treatment to enhance brain repair processes or the neuronal plasticity of BMSC in ischemic stroke model is unclear. The purpose of this study was to investigate the neuroprotective effects and neuronal plasticity of BMSC transplantation combined with EA in ischemic stroke.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

A male Sprague-Dawley (SD) rat middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) model was used. Intracerebral transplantation of BMSC, transfected with lentiviral vectors expressing green fluorescent protein (GFP), was performed using a stereotactic apparatus after modeling. MCAO rats were treated with BMSC injection alone or in combination with EA. After the treatment, proliferation and migration of BMSC were observed in different groups by fluorescence microscopy. Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR), Western blotting, and immunohistochemistry were performed to examine changes in the levels of neuron-specific enolase (NSE) and nestin in the injured striatum.

RESULTS

Epifluorescence microscopy revealed that most BMSC in the cerebrum were lysed; few transplanted BMSC survived, and some living cells migrated to areas around the lesion site. NSE was overexpressed in the striatum of MCAO rats, illustrating the neurological deficits caused by cerebral ischemia-reperfusion. The combination of BMSC transplantation and EA attenuated the expression of NSE, indicating nerve injury repair. Although the qRT-PCR results showed that BMSC-EA treatment elevated nestin RNA expression, less robust responses were observed in other tests.

CONCLUSIONS

Our results show that the combination treatment significantly improved restoration of neurological deficits in the animal stroke model. However, further studies are required to see if EA could promote the rapid differentiation of BMSC into neural stem cells in the short term.

Enough Waiting for the Couriers — Learning to Estimate Package Pick-up Arrival Time from Couriers’ Spatial-Temporal Behaviors

In intelligent logistics systems, predicting the Estimated Time of Pick-up Arrival (ETPA) of packages is a crucial task, which aims to predict the courier’s arrival time to all the unpicked-up packages at any time. Accurate prediction of ETPA can help systems to alleviate customers’ waiting anxiety and improve their experience. We identify three main challenges of this problem: i) Unlike the travel time estimation problem in other fields like ride-hailing, the ETPA task is distinctively a multi-destination and path-free prediction problem. ii) An intuitive idea for solving ETPA is to predict the pick-up route then the time in two stages. However, it is difficult to accurately and efficiently predict couriers’ future routes in the route prediction step since their behaviors are affected by multiple complex factors. iii) Furthermore, in the time prediction step, the requirement for providing a courier’s all unpicked-up packages’ ETPA at once in real-time makes the problem even more challenging. To tackle the above challenges, we propose RankETPA, which integrates the route inference into the ETPA prediction. First, a learning-based pick-up route predictor is designed to learn the route-ranking strategies of couriers from their massive spatial-temporal behaviors. Then, a spatial-temporal attention-based arrival time predictor is designed for real-time ETPA inference via capturing the spatial-temporal correlations between the unpicked-up packages. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets and a synthetic dataset demonstrate that RankETPA achieves significant performance improvement against the baseline models.

Enhancing Recommendation with Search Data in a Causal Learning Manner

Recommender systems are currently widely used in various applications helping people filter information. Existing models always embed the rich information for recommendation, such as items, users, and contexts in real-value vectors, and make predictions based on these vectors. In the view of causal inference, the associations between representation vectors and user feedback are inevitably a mixture of the causal part that describes why a user prefers an item, and the non-causal part that merely reflects the statistical dependencies, for example, the display ranking position and sales promotion. However, most recommender systems assume the user-item interactions are only affected by user preferences, neglecting the striking differences between these two associations. To address this problem, we propose a model-agnostic causal learning framework called IV4Rec+ that can effectively decompose the embedding vectors into these two parts. Moreover, two strategies are proposed to utilize search queries as instrumental variables: IV4Rec+(I) only decomposes the item embeddings, while IV4Rec+(UI) decomposes both user and item embeddings. IV4Rec+ is a model-agnostic design that can be applied to many existing recommender systems, e.g., DIN, NRHUB, and SRGNN. Extensive experiments on three datasets show that IV4Rec+ significantly facilitates the performance of recommender systems and outperforms state-of-the-art frameworks.

Association of intraplacental oxygenation patterns on dual-contrast MRI with placental abnormality and fetal brain oxygenation

OBJECTIVES

Most human in-vivo placental imaging techniques are unable to distinguish and characterize various placental compartments, such as the intervillous space (IVS), placental vessels (PV) and placental tissue (PT), limiting their specificity. We describe a method that employs T2* and diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data to differentiate automatically placental compartments, quantify their oxygenation properties and identify placental lesions (PL) in vivo. We also investigate the association between placental oxygenation patterns and fetal brain oxygenation.

METHODS

This was a prospective study conducted between 2018 and 2021 in which dual-contrast clinical MRI data (T2* and diffusion-weighted MRI) were acquired from patients between 20 and 38 weeks' gestation. We trained a fuzzy clustering method to analyze T2* and diffusion-weighted MRI data and assign placental voxels to one of four clusters, based on their distinct imaging domain features. The new method divided automatically the placenta into IVS, PV, PT and PL compartments and characterized their oxygenation changes throughout pregnancy.

RESULTS

A total of 27 patients were recruited, of whom five developed pregnancy complications. Total placental oxygenation level and T2* did not demonstrate a statistically significant temporal correlation with gestational age (GA) (R²  = 0.060, P = 0.27). In contrast, the oxygenation level reflected by T2* values in the placental IVS (R²  = 0.51, P = 0.0002) and PV (R²  = 0.76, P = 1.1 × 10^-7 ) decreased significantly with advancing GA. Oxygenation levels in the PT did not show any temporal change during pregnancy (R²  = 0.00044, P = 0.93). A strong spatial-dependent correlation between PV oxygenation level and GA was observed. The strongest negative correlation between PV oxygenation and GA (R²  = 0.73, P = 4.5 × 10^-7 ) was found at the fetal-vessel-dominated region close to the chorionic plate. The location and extent of the placental abnormality were automatically delineated and quantified in the five women with clinically confirmed placental pathology. Compared to the averaged total placental oxygenation, placental IVS oxygenation level best reflected fetal brain oxygenation level during fetal development.

CONCLUSION

Based on clinically feasible dual-MRI, our method enables accurate spatiotemporal quantification of placental compartment and fetal brain oxygenation across different GAs. This information should improve our knowledge of human placenta development and its relationship with normal and abnormal pregnancy. © 2022 The Authors. Ultrasound in Obstetrics & Gynecology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Society of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Assessment on Potential Suitable Habitats of the Grasshopper Oedaleus decorus asiaticus in North China based on MaxEnt Modeling and Remote Sensing Data

Grasshopper populations can quickly grow to catastrophic levels, causing a huge amount of damage in a short time. Oedaleus decorus asiaticus (Bey-Bienko) (O. d. asiaticus) is the most serious species in Xilingol League of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The region is not only an important grassland but also a site of agricultural heritage systems in China. Therefore, projecting the potential geographic distribution of O. d. asiaticus to provide an early warning is vital. Here, we combined temperature, precipitation, soil, vegetation, and topography with remote sensing data to screen the predictors that best characterize the current geographical distribution of O. d. asiaticus. A MaxEnt model approach was applied to project the potential suitable distribution of O. d. asiaticus in Xilingol League (the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China) combined with a set of optimized parameters. The modeling results indicated that there were six main habitat factors that determined the suitable distribution of O. d. asiaticus such as the soil type (ST), grassland type (GT), elevation, precipitation during the growing period (GP), precipitation during the spawning period (SP), and normalized difference vegetation index during the overwintering period (ONDVI). The simulated result was good, with average AUC and TSS values of 0.875 and 0.812, respectively. The potential inhabitable areas of grasshoppers were 198,527 km², distributed mainly in West Urumqi, Xilinhot City, East Urumqi, Abaga Banner, and Xianghuang Banner of Xilingol League. This study is valuable to guide managers and decision-makers to prevent and control the occurrence of O. d. asiaticus early on and this study may facilitate meaningful reductions in pesticide application.

[Predictive value of MRI pelvic measurements for "difficult pelvis" during total mesorectal excision]

Objective: Total mesorectal resection (TME) is difficult to perform for rectal cancer patients with anatomical confines of the pelvis or thick mesorectal fat. This study aimed to evaluate the ability of pelvic dimensions to predict the difficulty of TME, and establish a nomogram for predicting its difficulty. Methods: The inclusion criteria for this retrospective study were as follows: (1) tumor within 15 cm of the anal verge; (2) rectal cancer confirmed by preoperative pathological examination; (3) adequate preoperative MRI data; (4) depth of tumor invasion T1-4a; and (5) grade of surgical difficulty available. Patients who had undergone non-TME surgery were excluded. A total of 88 patients with rectal cancer who underwent TME between March 2019 and November 2021 were eligible for this study. The system for scaling difficulty was as follows: Grade I, easy procedure, no difficulties; Grade II, difficult procedure, but no impact on specimen quality (complete TME); Grade III, difficult procedure, with a slight impact on specimen quality (near-complete TME); Grade IV: very difficult procedure, with remarkable impact on specimen quality (incomplete TME). We classified Grades I-II as no surgical difficulty and grades III-IV as surgical difficulty. Pelvic parameters included pelvic inlet length, anteroposterior length of the mid-pelvis, pelvic outlet length, pubic tubercle height, sacral length, sacral depth, distance from the pubis to the pelvic floor, anterior pelvic depth, interspinous distance, and inter-tuberosity distance. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were performed to identify the factors associated with the difficulty of TME, and a nomogram predicting the difficulty of the procedure was established. Results: The study cohort comprised 88 patients, 30 (34.1%) of whom were classified as having undergone difficult procedures and 58 (65.9%) non-difficult procedures. The median age was 64 years (56-70), 51 patients were male and 64 received neoadjuvant therapy. The median pelvic inlet length, anteroposterior length of the mid-pelvis, pelvic outlet length, pubic tubercle height, sacral length, sacral depth, distance from the pubis to the pelvic floor, anterior pelvic depth, interspinous distance, and inter-tuberosity distance were 12.0 cm, 11.0 cm, 8.6 cm, 4.9 cm, 12.6 cm, 3.7 cm, 3.0 cm, 13.3 cm, 10.2 cm, and 12.2 cm, respectively. Multivariable analyses showed that preoperative chemoradiotherapy (OR=4.97,95% CI: 1.25-19.71, P=0.023), distance between the tumor and the anal verge (OR=1.31, 95% CI: 1.02-1.67, P=0.035) and pubic tubercle height (OR=3.36, 95% CI: 1.56-7.25, P=0.002) were associated with surgical difficulty. We then built and validated a predictive nomogram based on the above three variables (AUC = 0.795, 95%CI: 0.696-0.895). Conclusion: Our research demonstrated that our system for scaling surgical difficulty of TME is useful and practical. Preoperative chemoradiotherapy, distance between tumor and anal verge, and pubic tubercle height are risk factors for surgical difficulty. These data may aid surgeons in planning appropriate surgical procedures.

Thrombectomy Using the EmboTrap Clot-Retrieving Device for the Treatment of Acute Ischemic Stroke: A Glimpse of Clinical Evidence

BACKGROUND

The EmboTrap Recanalization Device is a novel stent retriever for thrombectomy in the setting of acute ischemic stroke due to large-vessel occlusion.

PURPOSE

Our aim was to summarize the safety and efficacy of the EmboTrap Recanalization Device in acute ischemic stroke-large-vessel occlusion through a systematic review and meta-analysis.

DATA SOURCES

Medline, EMBASE, the Cochrane Library, Web of Science, and Google Scholar were searched up to April 2022.

STUDY SELECTION

Nine observational studies using the EmboTrap Recanalization Device were selected.

DATA ANALYSIS

We adapted effect size with 95% CIs for dichotomous data. P value <.05 was statistically significant.

DATA SYNTHESIS

The estimated rate of successful recanalization (modified TICI 2b-3) was 90% (95% CI, 86%-95%; I ² = 82.4%); 90-day favorable outcome (mRS 0-2), 53% (95% CI, 42%-63%; I ² = 88.6%); modified first-pass effect, 43% (95% CI, 35%-51%; I ² = 63.7%); and first-pass effect, 36% (95% CI, 29%-46%; I ² = 10.7%). The rate of any intracerebral hemorrhage was 19% (95% CI, 16%-22%; I ² = 0.0%); symptomatic intracerebral hemorrhage, 5% (95% CI, 1%-8%; I ² = 84.6%); and 90-day mortality, 14% (95% CI, 9%-19%; I ² = 79.3%). Subgroup analysis showed higher rates of complete recanalization for EmboTrap II than for the EmboTrap System.

LIMITATIONS

The included studies are single-arm without direct comparison with other stent retrievers. Some of the studies recruited had a small sample size and were limited by the retrospective study design. In addition, the uncertain heterogeneity among studies was high.

CONCLUSIONS

The EmboTrap Recanalization Device is safe and efficient in treating acute ischemic stroke due to large-vessel occlusion.

Effects of Elevated CO2 Concentration on Host Adaptability and Chlorantraniliprole Susceptibility in Spodoptera frugiperda

Elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations (eCO₂) can affect both herbivorous insects and their host plants. The fall armyworm (FAW), Spodoptera frugiperda, is a highly polyphagous agricultural pest that may attack more than 350 host plant species and has developed resistance to both conventional and novel-action insecticides. However, the effects of eCO₂ on host adaptability and insecticide resistance of FAW are unclear. We hypothesized that eCO₂ might affect insecticide resistance of FAW by affecting its host plants. To test this hypothesis, we investigated the effect of eCO₂ on (1) FAW's susceptibility to chlorantraniliprole after feeding on wheat, (2) FAW's population performance traits (including the growth and reproduction), and (3) changes in gene expression in the FAW by transcriptome sequencing. The toxicity of chlorantraniliprole against the FAW under eCO₂ (800 µL/L) stress showed that the LC₅₀ values were 2.40, 2.06, and 1.46 times the values at the ambient CO₂ concentration (400 µL/L, aCO₂) for the three generations, respectively. Under eCO₂, the life span of pupae and adults and the total number of generations were significantly shorter than the FAW under aCO₂. Compared to the aCO₂ treatment, the weights of the 3rd and 4th instar larvae and pupae of FAW under eCO₂ were significantly heavier. Transcriptome sequencing results showed that more than 79 detoxification enzyme genes in FAW were upregulated under eCO₂ treatment, including 40 P450, 5 CarE, 17 ABC, and 7 UGT genes. Our results showed that eCO₂ increased the population performance of FAW on wheat and reduced its susceptibility to chlorantraniliprole by inducing the expression of detoxification enzyme genes. This study has important implications for assessing the damage of FAW in the future under the environment of increasing atmospheric CO₂ concentration.

Effect of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi on the responses of Ageratina adenophora to Aphis gossypii herbivory

The invasive weed Ageratina adenophora can form a positive symbiotic relationship with native arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) to promote its invasion ability. However, the function of AMF during the feeding of Aphis gossypii in A. adenophora was poorly understand. This study aimed to investigate the effects of two dominant AMF (Claroideoglomus etunicatum and Septoglomus constrictum) on A. adenophora in response to the feeding of the generalist herbivore A. gossypii. The results showed that A. gossypii infestation could significantly reduce the biomass, nutrient and proline contents of A. adenophora, and increase the antioxidant enzyme activities, defense hormone and secondary metabolite contents of the weed. Compared with the A. gossypii infested A. adenophora, inoculation C. etunicatum and S. constrictum could significantly promote the growth ability and enhanced the resistance of A. adenophora to A. gossypii infestation, and the aboveground biomass of A. adenophora increased by 317.21% and 114.73%, the root biomass increased by 347.33% and 120.58%, the polyphenol oxidase activity heightened by 57.85% and 12.62%, the jasmonic acid content raised by 13.49% and 4.92%, the flavonoid content increased by 27.29% and 11.92%, respectively. The survival rate of A. gossypii and density of nymphs were significantly inhibited by AMF inoculation, and the effect of C. etunicatum was significantly greater than that of S. constrictum. This study provides clarified evidence that AMF in the rhizosphere of A. adenophora are effective in the development of tolerance and chemical defense under the feeding pressure of insect herbivory, and offer references for the management of the A. adenophora from the perspective of soil microorganisms.

The metabolic resistance of Nilaparvata lugens to chlorpyrifos is mainly driven by the carboxylesterase CarE17

The involvement of carboxylesterases (CarEs) in resistance to chlorpyrifos has been confirmed by the synergism analysis in Nilaparvata lugens. However, the function of specific CarE gene in chlorpyrifos resistance and the transcriptional regulatory mechanism are obscure. Herein, the expression patterns of 29 CarE genes in the susceptible and chlorpyrifos-resistant strains were analyzed. Among them, CarE3, CarE17 and CarE19 were overexpressed in the resistant strain, and knockdown of either CarE gene by RNA interference significantly increased the susceptibility to chlorpyrifos. Remarkably, knockdown of CarE17 reduced the enzymatic activity of CarE by 88.63 % and showed a much greater effect on increasing chlorpyrifos toxicity than silencing other two CarE genes. Overexpression of CarE17 in Drosophila melanogaster decreased the toxicity of chlorpyrifos to transgenic fruit flies. Furthermore, the region between - 205 to + 256 of CarE17 promoter sequence showed the highest promoter activity, and 16 transcription factors (TFs) were predicted from this region. Among these TFs, Lim1β and C15 were overexpressed in the resistant strain. Knockdown of either TF resulted in reduced CarE17 expression and a decrease in resistance of N. lugens to chlorpyrifos. These results indicate that the constitutive overexpression of Lim1β and C15 induces CarE17 expression thus conferring chlorpyrifos resistance in N. lugens.