Mutations in TOP2B cause autosomal-dominant hereditary hearing loss via inhibition of the PI3K-Akt signalling pathway

Hereditary hearing impairment is a clinically and genetically heterogeneous disease. Whole-exome sequencing was performed on seven affected and six unaffected members in a large Chinese family with autosomal-dominant nonsyndromic hearing loss. The pathogenic variant of the gene encoding human topoisomerase IIβ TOP2B (c.G4837C:p.D1613H) was cosegregated with hearing loss in this pedigree and another two variants of TOP2B were detected in 66 sporadic patients with hearing loss. top2b knockdown led to significant defects in zebrafish inner ears and caused downregulation of akt which resulted in inactivation of PI3K-Akt signalling. As a result, supporting cell and hair cell numbers were reduced through inhibition of the PI3K-Akt pathway. Therefore, we hypothesized that mutations in TOP2B can cause autosomal-dominant nonsyndromic hearing impairment through inhibition of the PI3K-Akt signalling pathway. DATABASE: The whole-exome sequence data in the study are available at the Sequence Read Archive database (NCBI) under the accession numbers SRR9050868, SRR9050867, SRR90508676, SRR90508675, SRR90508674, SRR90508673, SRR90508672, SRR90508671, SRR90508679, SRR90508670, SRR9050859. SRR9050858 and SRR9050857, respectively.

[Study on safety of adjuvant radiotherapy concurrent with weekly chemotherapy for stage ⅡB-ⅣA esophageal carcinoma after radical resection]

Objective: To evaluate the tolerability and short-term efficacy of chemo-radiotherapy in 125 patients with stage ⅡB-ⅣA esophageal carcinoma after radical resection. Methods: We retrospectively evaluated the rate of completion, toxicity and survival of patients undergoing adjuvant concurrent chemo-radiotherapy after radical resection of esophageal carcinoma from January 2004 to December 2014 in our institution. The survival rate was determined by the Kaplan-Meier method and analyzed using the log-rank test. Multivariate prognostic analysis was performed using the Cox proportional hazard model. Results: 122 patients received more than 50 Gy dose (97.6%). A total of 52 patients received more than 5 weeks chemo-radiotherapy (41.6%), while 73 patients underwent only 1-4 weeks (58.4%). The median following up was 48.4 months. 8 patients lost follow up (6.4%). The 1-year and 3-year overall survival rate were 91.6% and 57.0%, respectively, with a median survival time of 64.4 months. The 1-year and 3-year disease free survival rate were 73.2% and 54.3%, respectively, with a median disease free survival time of 59.1 months. The most common acute complications associated with chemo-radiotherapy were myelosuppression, radiation esophagitis and radiation dermatitis, the majority of which were Grade 1-2. Of the 125 patients, there were 59 cases of recurrence, including 23 cases with local regional recurrence, 26 cases with hematogenous metastasis, and 8 cases with mixed recurrence. Univariate analysis showed that the numbers of concurrent chemotherapy was associated with the overall survival (P=0.006). But receiving more than 5 weeks was not the prognostic factor compared to 1 to 4 weeks chemotherapy (P=0.231). Multivariate analysis showed that only the numbers of concurrent chemotherapy was an independent prognostic factor (P=0.010). Conclusions: Postoperative radiotherapy concurrent with weekly chemotherapy could improve the overall survival and decrease the recurrence for stage ⅡB-ⅣA esophageal carcinoma after radical resection. However, the completion rate of chemotherapy was low, so it was necessary to explore reasonable regimens to improve the completion rate and carry out prospective randomized controlled trial.

[The value of the planned neoadjuvant radiotherapy or chemoradiotherapy for the non-radical resection of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma]

Objective: The role of planned neoadjuvant radiotherapy or chemoradiotherapy in the non-radical resection of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma was unclear. The study aimed to evaluate their therapeutic effect and analyze the prognostic factors. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed the clinical data of locally advanced esophageal squamous cell carcinoma who received neoadjuvant radio therapy (33 patients) and concurrent chemoradiotherapy (119 patients) from January 2004 to December 2016 in our single-institution database.The survival rates were calculated by Kaplan-Meier method. The prognostic factors were analyzed by using Log rank test and Cox proportional hazards model. Results: The median follow-up was 29.8 months. One hundred and one patients survived more than 3 years. The rates of overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS) at 3 years were 63.9% and 55.6%, respectively.The rates of complete, partial and minimal pathological response of the primary tumor were 50.3%, 38.4%, 11.3%, the corresponding 3-year OS were 75.5%, 57.4%, 27.3% (P<0.001) and 3-year DFS were 72.0%, 44.7%, 17.6% (P<0.001), respectively.The postoperative lymph node metastasis rate was 27.0%. The 3-year OS and DFS of the lymph node positive group was 45.6% and 32.8%, significantly lower than 70.8% and 63.7% of the negative group (both P<0.001). The 3-year OS and DFS of pathologic stage Ⅰ, Ⅱ, ⅢA, ⅢB and Ⅵ A were 76.2%, 57.4%, 64.7%, 35.0%, 33.3% (P<0.001) and 70.1%, 49.3%, 41.2%, 22.1%, 33.3% (P<0.001), respectively.The operation-related mortality was 3.3%. Multivariate analysis showed that chest pain, postoperative respiratory failure, pathological differentiation, more than 15 lymph node dissection and ypTNM stage were the independent prognostic factors of OS (P<0.05 for all). Conclusions: The planned neoadjuvant radiotherapy or chemoradiotherapy for the non-radical resection of advanced esophageal squamous cell carcinoma could result in favorable survival. The chest pain, postoperative respiratory failure, pathological differentiation, the number of lymph node resection and ypTNM stage are the independent prognostic factors of the prognosis of these patients.

[Effect of CCR1 gene overexpression on the migration of bone marrow - derived mesenchymal stem cells towards hepatocellular carcinoma]

Objective: To evaluate the effect of human CCR1 (hCCR1) gene overexpression on the migration of human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) towards hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), and to examine the application prospects of MSCs as gene delivery vectors in the treatment of HCC. Methods: The hCCR1 gene was subcloned into a lentiviral vector to generate the recombinant plasmid pLV-hCCR1. The pLV-hCCR1 plasmid and two other packaging plasmids were co-transfected into 293T cells using calcium phosphate, and the virus-containing supernatant was collected. hMSCs were then infected with the recombinant lentivirus, and the expression of hCCR1 mRNA and protein was analyzed by RT-PCR and Western blot, respectively. The effect of CCR1 gene overexpression on the in vitro migration of hMSCs was examined using the Transwell migration assay. Orthotopic nude mice models of HCC were established using the MHCC-97H-GFP cell line, and the mice were divided into two groups (n = 8 per group). hMSCs were then intravenously injected via the tail vein into the tumor-bearing nude mice to examine the effect of hCCR1 overexpression on the in vivo migration of hMSCs towards HCC. Unpaired Student's t-test was used for two-group comparisons, and one-way ANOVA was used for multi-group comparisons. Results: Restriction enzyme digestion and DNA sequencing demonstrated that the recombinant plasmid pLV-hCCR1 was constructed successfully. The LV-hCCR1 lentivirus packaged by 293T cells has high infection efficiency in hMSCs, and hCCR1 was overexpressed in hMSCs after LV-hCCR1 infection. Transwell migration assay showed that hCCR1-transfected hMSCs had significantly enhanced migration towards HCC cell line-derived condition medium (CM) compared with the control RFP-hMSCs [(134.8±15.7)/LPF vs (83.5±10.9)/LPF, t = 10.40, P < 0.01]. In vivo migration experiment also demonstrated that there was significantly higher number of hCCR1-hMSCs localized within the MHCC-97H-GFP xenografts than hMSCs-RFP on day 14 following intravenous injection of hMSCs in mice [(86.7±14.1)/HPF vs (54.5±9.6)/HPF, t = -7.32, P < 0.01]. Conclusion: Overexpression of CCR1 gene can significantly enhance the migration capacity of hMSCs towards HCC cells in vitro and in vivo. This study provides evidence for potential clinical application of MSCs as more effective delivery vehicles in cancer gene therapy.

[Multicenter study of human adenovirus infection in pediatric community-acquired pneumonia in China]

Objective: To investigate the predominant genotypes and epidemiological characteristics of human adenovirus (HAdV) in pediatric community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) in China. Methods: This was a repeated cross sectional study. Between November 2014 and November 2016, nasopharyngeal aspirates (NPAs) or throat swabs from each hospitalized pediatric patients diagnosed as CAP in 12 hospitals in Northern and Southern China were collected. Respiratory specimens were screened for 18 respiratory viruses including HAdV by using Luminex xTAG RVP Fast V2 multiplex Assay. Typing of HAdV and analysis for the epidemiological characteristic of HAdV were performed. Results: (1) A total of 2 723 hospitalized pediatric patients with CAP were enrolled in this study and 156 (5.7%, 156/2 723) respiratory specimens were positive for HAdV, and 74 (6.6%, 74/1 128) and 82 (5.1%, 82/1 595) were in Northern and Southern China, respectively. There was no significant difference in the positive detection rate between the Northern and Southern China. (2) In Northern China, the HAdV positive rate of children at the age of <6 months, 6 months-<1 years, 1-<3 years, 3-<5 years and ≥5 years was 5.9%(6/101), 6.7%(7/104), 10.3%(34/331), 4.1%(11/266) and 4.9%(16/326), respectively, and the incidence of HAdV infection peaked in children aged 1-3 years (χ(2)=11.511, P=0.021). While in Southern China the HAdV positive rate of children at the age of <6 months, 6 months-<1 years, 1-<3 years, 3-<5 years and ≥5 years was 2.2% (7/312), 4.6% (12/259), 6.3% (31/494), 7.3% (18/245) and 4.9%(14/285), respectively. There was no significant difference in the positive detection rate among age groups. (3) In 2015, the highest detection rate of HAdV in northern China was 12.5% (25/200) in winter, and in Southern China was 6.7% (35/525) in spring and 5.3% (19/357) in summer. (4) In 108 cases of HAdV positive specimens typing was done and 80 in cases classification was successfully performed.Totally 7 genotypes of HAdV, including HAdV-3 (n=32), HAdV-7 (n=9), HAdV-1 (n=12), HAdV-2 (n=15), HAdV-5 (n=10), HAdV-6 (n=1) and HAdV-4 (n=1), were detected. The predominant HAdV genotypes were HAdV-3 (30.8%, 8/26) and HAdV-7 (26.9%, 7/26) in Northern China, while HAdV-3 (44.4%, 24/54) and HAdV-2 (22.2%, 12/54) were the most prevalent genotypes in Southern China. Conclusions: HAdV is an important viral pathogen in pediatric CAP. The predominant HAdV genotypes and peak seasons of HAdV infections were different between Northern and Southern China. The predominant HAdV genotypes were HAdV-3 and HAdV-7 in Northern China, while HAdV-3 and HAdV-2 in Southern China. The peak season of HAdV infections was winter in Northern China. However, HAdV infections are more common in spring and summer in Southern China.

A comparison of psychosocial care preferences of breast cancer women in Mainland China and Hong Kong

PURPOSE

Despite shared cultural values, Mainland China's health care system differs from that of Hong Kong. We compared preferences for psychosocial care in Mainland breast cancer women with their Hong Kong counterparts to determine core preferences for, and correlates of, clinical psychosocial care implementation.

METHODS

Two hundred eighty breast cancer patients from 23 hospitals located in 15 provinces across Mainland China were recruited to complete the 55-item Chinese version of the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council's National Breast Cancer Centre assessment. Items ranked by proportions of women endorsing them as "essential" for care were compared with similar rankings by Hong Kong Chinese women with breast cancer.

RESULTS

Valid response rate was 83% (231/280). Among 231 breast cancer patients, greater than 40% endorsed 15/55 items as essential for effective psychosocial care. Of the top 10 ranked "repeatable" items, seven items were common to both Chinese and Hong Kong breast cancer women, while of the top 10 ranked "once-only" items, nine were common. Mainland breast cancer women ranked help with anxiety and social roles higher than did their Hong Kong counterparts. Demographic factors significantly associated with psychosocial care needs included ethnicity, age, income source and level, religious beliefs, education level, marital status, residential status, and current therapies.

CONCLUSIONS

Chinese breast cancer patients prioritize both disease and treatment information and psychosocially sensitive care, making these core items in comprehensive psychosocial care implementation by clinicians and nurses.

Identification of ANLN as a new likely pathogenic gene of branchio-otic syndrome in a three-generation Chinese family

BACKGROUND

Branchio-oto-renal (BOR) syndrome is one of the most common autosomal dominant hearing loss syndromes and features clinical and genetic heterogeneity. When there is no renal deformity, this disease can also be called branchio-otic (BO) syndrome. Though many genes have been reported, there are still many BO syndrome-related genes to be identified. To identify a hitherto unknown candidate gene causing BO syndrome in a three-generation Chinese family, clinical, genetic, and functional analyses were employed.

METHODS

Whole-exome sequencing (WES) was conducted in three affected family members and two unaffected family members. PCR-Sanger sequencing was performed in all of the family members for segregation analysis and verification of the candidate variants. PCR-Sanger sequencing was also employed in 150 healthy people to examine the variants. In silico analysis was used to predict possible changes in the protein structure that may affect the phenotype.

RESULTS

We identified a heterozygous missense variant in ANLN: NM_018685.4: c.G1105A; NP_061155.2: p.G369R that segregated in the pedigree with an autosomal dominant pattern. No variant was found in the 150 controls and normal family members at this site. The variant c.G1105A was located in a highly conserved F-actin binding site. The amino acid residue at position 369 in the ANLN protein was highly conserved across different species.

CONCLUSION

In this study, we identified, for the first time, a heterozygous missense variant in ANLN (NM_018685.4: c.G1105A; NP_061155.2: p.G369R) that is likely to be a candidate causative gene of BO syndrome in a specific Chinese family.

Breaking the Energy-Symmetry-Based Propagation Growth Blockade in Magneto-Optical Rotation

The magneto-optical polarization rotation effect has myriad applications in many research areas spanning the scientific spectrum, including space and interstellar research, nanotechnology, material science, biomedical imaging, and subatomic particle research. In the nonlinear magneto-optical rotation (NMOR) effect, the angle of rotation of a linearly polarized optical field in a magnetized medium is dependent upon its intensity. However, typical NMOR signals of conventional single-beam Λ -scheme atomic magnetometers are peculiarly small, requiring sophisticated magnetic shielding and high-frequency phase-sensitive detection. Here, we show the presence of an energy-symmetry-based propagation growth blockade that undermines the NMOR effect in conventional single-beam Λ -scheme atomic magnetometers. We further demonstrate, both experimentally and theoretically, an inelastic wave-mixing technique that breaks this NMOR blockade, resulting in more-than-2-orders-of-magnitude enhancement of the NMOR signal power amplitude that cannot be achieved with conventional single-beam Λ -scheme atomic magnetometers. This technique, demonstrated here with substantially reduced light intensities at near-room temperatures, may lead to many applications, especially in the field of biomagnetism and high-resolution low-field magnetic imaging.

MetaMap: an atlas of metatranscriptomic reads in human disease-related RNA-seq data

Background

With the advent of the age of big data in bioinformatics, large volumes of data and high-performance computing power enable researchers to perform re-analyses of publicly available datasets at an unprecedented scale. Ever more studies imply the microbiome in both normal human physiology and a wide range of diseases. RNA sequencing technology (RNA-seq) is commonly used to infer global eukaryotic gene expression patterns under defined conditions, including human disease-related contexts; however, its generic nature also enables the detection of microbial and viral transcripts.

Findings

We developed a bioinformatic pipeline to screen existing human RNA-seq datasets for the presence of microbial and viral reads by re-inspecting the non-human-mapping read fraction. We validated this approach by recapitulating outcomes from six independent, controlled infection experiments of cell line models and compared them with an alternative metatranscriptomic mapping strategy. We then applied the pipeline to close to 150 terabytes of publicly available raw RNA-seq data from  more than 17,000 samples from more than 400 studies relevant to human disease using state-of-the-art high-performance computing systems. The resulting data from this large-scale re-analysis are made available in the presented MetaMap resource.

Conclusions

Our results demonstrate that common human RNA-seq data, including those archived in public repositories, might contain valuable information to correlate microbial and viral detection patterns with diverse diseases. The presented MetaMap database thus provides a rich resource for hypothesis generation toward the role of the microbiome in human disease. Additionally, codes to process new datasets and perform statistical analyses are made available.

Shock wave propagation, plasticity, and void collapse in open-cell nanoporous Ta

We systematically investigate the wave propagation, plasticity and void collapse, as well as the effects of porosity, specific surface area and impact velocity, in a set of open-cell nanoporous Ta, during shock compression, via performing large-scale non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations. The shock wave propagation presents an impedance, sensitive to porosity, but not to specific surface area. Such surprising phenomena are due to the similar sensitivities in density and stress variations to porosity or specific surface area. Upon impact, shock front shapes change from ramped to steep ones, with increasing porosity, specific surface area or impact velocity, owing to the transition from the heterogeneous to homogeneous plasticity along transverse directions. This transition of plasticity arises by (i) the strong impedance on large deformation bands as porosity increases; and (ii) the transition from deformation twinning to dislocation slips, and to amorphization, as the specific surface area or impact velocity increases. Shock-induced plasticity, including their nucleation, growth and interactions, also facilitates the collapse of voids.

Overexpression of Ecm22 improves ergosterol biosynthesis in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Ergosterol biosynthesis in Saccharomyces cerevisiae is complex and the underlying mechanism of regulation remains unclear. To clarify the influence of transcriptional regulation on the ergosterol content, transcription factor Ecm22 was overexpressed in S. cerevisiae. Results showed that the overexpression of ECM22 led to an increased invasive growth. Fluconazole susceptibility testing indicated that strains overexpressing ECM22 could grow at 20 μg_{(fluconazole)}  ml^-1 . By contrast, the control failed to grow at 16 μg_{(fluconazole)}  ml^-1 . Among truncated ECM22 fragments, only the 1440-bp DNA fragment exerted almost the same impact on ergosterol content as that of the full-length gene. In a 5-l bioreactor, the highest ergosterol yield of the recombinant reached 32∙7 mg g_{(dry cell weight)} ^-1 , which was increased by about 20% compared with that of the control. In this work, a novel approach for enhancing the ergosterol production by overexpressing a transcription factor in S. cerevisiae was developed.