Research progress of Dexamethasone sustained release in the treatment of diabetic macular edema / 国际眼科杂志(Guoji Yanke Zazhi)

@#Diabetic macular edema(DME)is the foremost cause of vision impairment and even blindness in patients with diabetes mellitus. Nowadays, the approach in the treatment of DME involves laser photocoagulation, intravitreal injections of anti-VEGF agents or triamcinolone acetonide. However, they still have some limitations. In recent years, dexamethasone intravitreal implant, as a new treatment option, has brought therapeutic hope to DME patients who have poor response to other methods. Meanwhile, it has the advantages of good clinical efficacy, long duration, acceptable safety and good patient tolerability. In this paper, the research advances in dexamethasone intravitreal implant for DME are described.

Application of phylogenetic information of ITS2 secondary structure in DNA barcoding of Solanum medicinal plant / 中国中药杂志

Internal transcript spacer 2 (ITS2) is one of the broadly used standard core barcodes and also the only nuclear barcode in identification of Chinese traditional medicine. Although the DNA barcode method based on ITS2 is popular and has been used in Chinese Pharmacopoeia, its low discriminatory efficiency is still a problem to its extensive application. Therefore, further study is still necessary to explore its phylogenetic information for medicinal plants identification. In cells, ITS2 activity is based on its secondary structure. The secondary structures are particularly useful in phylogenetic analysis because they include information not found in the primary sequence. In this study ITS2 secondary structure of 40 samples from 26 species were predicted and used to explore their utility in addressing the identification problems of Chinese traditional medicine in Solanum. The secondary structures were predicted and aligned, and their consensus models were generated using the three different software of LocARNA, MASTR and PicXAA-R. RNAstat software was used to transform the secondary structures into 28 symbol code data for maximum parsimony (MP) analysis. The results showed that the phylogenetic information increased 88.57% after ITS2 secondary structure information has been added, and then the support values above 50%, 75% and 90% in the tree increased 19.05%, 66.67% and 66.67%, respectively, indicating that the identification of Solanum medical plants has been well resolved. Thus, our analysis suggests that ITS2 secondary structure information should be incorporated into the current DNA barcoding analysis as a beneficial supplement of phylogenetic information.