Morphological and Molecular Changes during Limb Regeneration of the Exopalaemon carinicauda.

With the increase in breeding density of Exopalaemon carinicauda, appendage breakage may occur, which seriously affects survival and economic benefits. To study the limb regeneration process of E. carinicauda, we induced autotomy of the pereopods. After a period of time, wound swelling disappeared, the pigment gradually accumulated, and a tawny film subsequently formed in the wound. The healing period of the wound occurred 24 h after autotomy, and the blastema formation stage occurred 48 h after autotomy. After 4 days of cutting, the limb buds began to differentiate, grow, and expand rapidly, and this process lasted approximately 15 days. Microscopic observations revealed significant changes in the type and number of associated cells including outer epithelial cells, granulocytes, embryonic cells, columnar epidermal cells, elongated cells, and blastoma cells, during the process from limb fracture to regeneration. A comparative transcriptome analysis identified 1415 genes differentially expressed between the J0h (0 h post autotomy) and J18h (18 h post autotomy), and 3952 and 4366 differentially expressed genes for J0 and J14d (14 days post autotomy) and J18h and J14d, respectively. Some of these genes may be related to muscle growth or molting, as indicated by the presence of troponin C, chitinase, actin, innexin, and cathepsin L. As a functional gene involved in epidermal formation, the mRNA expression level of the innexin inx2 in the pereopod of E. carinicauda changed significantly in the experimental groups (p < 0.05). The results of this study contribute to existing knowledge of regeneration mechanisms in crustaceans.

Associations of financial toxicity with symptoms and unplanned healthcare utilization among cancer patients taking oral chemotherapy at home: a prospective observational study.

BACKGROUND: Cancer patients with financial toxicity experience psychological distress and often miss medical appointments and quit treatments early, which could be a barrier to the effective management of oral chemotherapy drugs at home. This study explores whether financial toxicity predicts symptoms and unplanned healthcare utilization among cancer patients taking oral chemotherapy at home, which will contribute to the safe management of oral chemotherapy. METHODS: Data in this study was from a prospective observational study, which was conducted between October 2018 and December 2019. 151 patients completed the Comprehensive Score for Financial Toxicity at discharge and completed the MD Anderson Symptom Inventory and unplanned healthcare utilization questionnaires after finishing one cycle of oral chemotherapy at home. Regression analyses were conducted to explore the associations of financial toxicity with symptoms and unplanned healthcare utilization. RESULTS: Among 151participants, 88.08% reported severe or moderate financial toxicity, 43.05% reported symptom interference, and 31.79% reported unplanned healthcare utilization while taking oral chemotherapy at home. Patients between the age of 45-60y (p = 0.042) have higher financial toxicity, while those living in urban areas (p = 0.016) have lower financial toxicity. Patients with worse financial toxicity suffered increased symptoms of fatigue, emotional distress, disturbed sleep, and lack of appetite. Consequently, their mood and personal relation with other significant suffered. However, no statistical differences in unplanned healthcare utilization were found among patients with different levels of financial toxicity. CONCLUSION: Middle-aged adults and those living in suburban or rural areas experienced worse financial toxicity than other groups. Patients with worse financial toxicity experienced more severe psychological symptoms (e.g., fatigue, distress, disturbed sleep, and lack of appetite) and affective interference (e.g., mood and relations with others). Identifying at-risk patients is necessary to offer tailored support for psychological symptom management.

Intra-graph and Inter-graph joint information propagation network with third-order text graph tensor for fake news detection.

Although the Internet and social media provide people with a range of opportunities and benefits in a variety of ways, the proliferation of fake news has negatively affected society and individuals. Many efforts have been invested to detect the fake news. However, to learn the representation of fake news by context information, it has brought many challenges for fake news detection due to the feature sparsity and ineffectively capturing the non-consecutive and long-range context. In this paper, we have proposed Intra-graph and Inter-graph Joint Information Propagation Network (abbreviated as IIJIPN) with Third-order Text Graph Tensor for fake news detection. Specifically, data augmentation is firstly utilized to solve the data imbalance and strengthen the small corpus. In the stage of feature extraction, Third-order Text Graph Tensor with sequential, syntactic, and semantic features is proposed to describe contextual information at different language properties. After constructing the text graphs for each text feature, Intra-graph and Inter-graph Joint Information Propagation is used for encoding the text: intra-graph information propagation is performed in each graph to realize homogeneous information interaction, and high-order homogeneous information interaction in each graph can be achieved by stacking propagation layer; inter-graph information propagation is performed among text graphs to realize heterogeneous information interaction by connecting the nodes across the graphs. Finally, news representations are generated by attention mechanism consisting of graph-level attention and node-level attention mechanism, and then news representations are fed into a fake news classifier. The experimental results on four public datasets indicate that our model has outperformed state-of-the-art methods. Our source code is available at https://github.com/cuibenkuan/IIJIPN.

DC-CNN: Dual-channel Convolutional Neural Networks with attention-pooling for fake news detection.

Fake news detection mainly relies on the extraction of article content features with neural networks. However, it has brought some challenges to reduce the noisy data and redundant features, and learn the long-distance dependencies. To solve the above problems, Dual-channel Convolutional Neural Networks with Attention-pooling for Fake News Detection (abbreviated as DC-CNN) is proposed. This model benefits from Skip-Gram and Fasttext. It can effectively reduce noisy data and improve the learning ability of the model for non-derived words. A parallel dual-channel pooling layer was proposed to replace the traditional CNN pooling layer in DC-CNN. The Max-pooling layer, as one of the channels, maintains the advantages in learning local information between adjacent words. The Attention-pooling layer with multi-head attention mechanism serves as another pooling channel to enhance the learning of context semantics and global dependencies. This model benefits from the learning advantages of the two channels and solves the problem that pooling layer is easy to lose local-global feature correlation. This model is tested on two different COVID-19 fake news datasets, and the experimental results show that our model has the optimal performance in dealing with noisy data and balancing the correlation between local features and global features.

Effects of Variable Resistance Training Within Complex Training on Neuromuscular Adaptations in Collegiate Basketball Players.

The aim of this study was to investigate the differences in neuromuscular performance between variable resistance training and constant resistance training within complex training. Twenty-one well-trained collegiate basketball players were randomly assigned to either an experimental group (variable resistance training) or a control group (constant resistance training) and completed a twice weekly training program over an 8-week period. Training programs were the same except that the experimental group included variable resistance via elastic bands (40% of the total load). Maximum strength, vertical jump, horizontal jump, and sprint performance were assessed pre- and post-intervention. Both groups demonstrated significant increases in the back squat 1RM (experimental group +36.5% and control group +32.3%, both p < 0.001), countermovement jump (experimental group +12.9%, p = 0.002 and control group +5.6%, p = 0.02), and squat jump performance (experimental group +21.4% and control group +12.9%, both p < 0.001), whereas standing broad jump performance improved only in the experimental group (+2.9%, p = 0.029). Additionally, the experimental group showed significant improvement in the squat jump (p = 0.014) compared with the control group. However, no statistically significant differences were found between groups for countermovement jump (p = 0.06) and sprint performance at 10 m (p = 0.153) and 20 m (p = 0.076). We may conclude that both training modalities showed similar improvements in maximum strength. Performing variable resistance training within a complex training program is more efficient to enhance selective power performance in well-trained collegiate basketball players.

Clinical significance of circulating tumor cells in predicating the outcomes of patients with colorectal cancer.

BACKGROUND: Relapse and metastasis of patients with Colorectal Cancer (CRC) is the major obstacle to the long-term life of patients. Its mechanisms remain defined. METHODS: A total of 48 CRC patients were enrolled and 68 samples were obtained from the peripheral blood of patients before or after treatments in this study. Twenty non-cancer patients were also detected as a negative control. Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs), including Epithelial CTCs (eCTCs), Mesenchymal (MCTCs), and epithelial/mesenchymal mixed phenotypes (mixed CTCs), were identified by CanPatrolTM CTC enrichment and RNA in situ hybridization. The relationship between CTCs number and Progression-Free Survival (PFS) or Overall Survival (OS) was evaluated. RESULTS: Thirty-four of 48 patients (70.8%) were found to have positive CTCs. Total CTCs and MCTCs in the post-treatment had a significant correlation PFS and OS. When total CTCs or MCTCs in 5 mL blood of patients were more than 6 CTCs or 5 MCTCs, PFS of the patients was significantly shorter (p < 0.05) than that in patients with less than 6 CTCs or 5 MCTCs. The patients with > 5 CTCs count changes were found to exhibit poor PFS and OS rates (p < 0.05). CONCLUSION: Total CTCs and MCTCs number detection in patients with colorectal cancer was very useful biomarker for predicting the prognosis of patients. Higher CTCs or MCTCs had poorer PFS and OS rates.

In silico-guided metabolic engineering of Bacillus subtilis for efficient biosynthesis of purine nucleosides by blocking the key backflow nodes.

BACKGROUND: Purine nucleosides play essential roles in cellular physiological processes and have a wide range of applications in the fields of antitumor/antiviral drugs and food. However, microbial overproduction of purine nucleosides by de novo metabolic engineering remains a great challenge due to their strict and complex regulatory machinery involved in biosynthetic pathways. RESULTS: In this study, we designed an in silico-guided strategy for overproducing purine nucleosides based on a genome-scale metabolic network model in Bacillus subtilis. The metabolic flux was analyzed to predict two key backflow nodes, Drm (purine nucleotides toward PPP) and YwjH (PPP-EMP), to resolve the competitive relationship between biomass and purine nucleotide synthesis. In terms of the purine synthesis pathway, the first backflow node Drm was inactivated to block the degradation of purine nucleotides, which greatly increased the inosine production to 13.98-14.47 g/L without affecting cell growth. Furthermore, releasing feedback inhibition of the purine operon by promoter replacement enhanced the accumulation of purine nucleotides. In terms of the central carbon metabolic pathways, the deletion of the second backflow node YwjH and overexpression of Zwf were combined to increase inosine production to 22.01 ± 1.18 g/L by enhancing the metabolic flow of PPP. By switching on the flux node of the glucose-6-phosphate to PPP or EMP, the final inosine engineered strain produced up to 25.81 ± 1.23 g/L inosine by a pgi-based metabolic switch with a yield of 0.126 mol/mol glucose, a productivity of 0.358 g/L/h and a synthesis rate of 0.088 mmol/gDW/h, representing the highest yield in de novo engineered inosine bacteria. Under the guidance of this in silico-designed strategy, a general chassis bacterium was generated, for the first time, to efficiently synthesize inosine, adenosine, guanosine, IMP and GMP, which provides sufficient precursors for the synthesis of various purine intermediates. CONCLUSIONS: Our study reveals that in silico-guided metabolic engineering successfully optimized the purine synthesis pathway by exploring efficient targets, which could be applied as a superior strategy for efficient biosynthesis of biotechnological products.

Zeolitic imidazolate framework-based nanoparticles for the cascade enhancement of cancer chemodynamic therapy by targeting glutamine metabolism.

The reprogrammed amino acid metabolism maintains the powerful antioxidant defense and DNA damage repair capacity of cancer cells, which could promote their escape from reactive oxygen species (ROS)-induced damage and inevitably diminish the efficacy of ROS-based therapies. Herein, we propose a strategy to enhance the effect of chemodynamic therapy (CDT) via glutaminolysis-targeted inhibition for cancer cells dependent on abnormal glutamine metabolism. To screen optimum drugs targeting glutamine metabolism, transcriptomic analysis is performed to identify predictive biomarkers. Eventually, telaglenastat (CB-839) is used to block mitochondrial glutaminase 1 (GLS 1) in basal-like breast cancer and loaded into the developed iron-doped zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIF(Fe) NPs) to form ZIF(Fe)&CB nanoparticles, which are able to co-deliver Fe2+ and CB-839 into the tumor. CB-839 induced-glutaminolysis inhibition not only reduces intracellular antioxidants (glutathione, taurine) to amplify Fe2+-induced oxidative stress, but also decreases nucleotide pools (e.g., adenosine, dihydroorotate) to incur the deficiency of building blocks for DNA damage repair, thereby promoting the cell-killing effect of CDT. In vivo assessments further confirm the enhanced anticancer performance and good biocompatibility of ZIF(Fe)&CB nanoparticles. This study provides a promising strategy for the development and improvement of ROS-based anticancer nanosystems.

Intention and Perceived Control: International Migrants' Assimilation in China.

Using the unique Survey of Foreigner Residents in China from 2018 to 2019, this study examines the assimilation of international migrants in China by considering how migrants' intention to assimilate and perceptions of local control affect their behavior, which in turn affects their assimilation outcomes. The main behavior upon which we focus on is the formation of a host social network. Regression analyses and formal mediation analyses are performed to explore how intention and perceived control serve as motivators or barriers that facilitate or restrict international migrants' acculturation and structural assimilation via host social network formation or other behaviors. Our results show that migrants' intention to assimilate has significant effects on their acculturation and structural assimilation outcomes via the establishment of a host social network and via other behaviors. As a result, it has a strong total impact on migrants' assimilation outcomes, as tested with a formal Sobel test. Migrants' perceptions of local control, in contrast, have negative direct effects on both acculturation and structural assimilation, but no significant indirect effects are identified, which suggests that perceived local control may not affect migrants' formation of a host social network but may influence other behaviors. From the Sobel test, we find no evidence of total effects from the perceptions of local control. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12134-021-00925-y.

Mechanisms Underlying Abnormal Expression of lncRNA H19 in Neonatal Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy.

OBJECTIVE: Hypoxic-ischemic (HI)-related brain injury, especially HI encephalopathy (HIE) is a leading cause of morbidity and disability in newborns. Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are implicated in the progress of HI brain damage. However, the mechanisms underlying the regulatory effects of lncRNA H19 on autophagy in HIE remain unknown. This study was designed to identify the potential mechanisms involving lncRNA H19 in HIE. STUDY DESIGN: We selected three HIE newborns and three healthy newborns for neonatal behavioral neurological assessment and screened the differentially expressed lncRNAs by microarray analysis and detected H19 expression in serum. After that, neonatal HIE rats were established and injected with H19 overexpression lentivirus vector or autophagy activator Rapa. The structure and apoptotic levels of brain tissue were observed, and righting reflex and geotaxis reflex were utilized to evaluate the short-term neurological function of HIE rats. The Morris water maze was performed to measure the long-term neurological functions of HIE rats. The binding relationships among H19/miR-19b/protein kinase B3 (Akt3) were verified. Levels of Akt3- and autophagy-related proteins were measured. RESULTS: H19 was upregulated in HIE newborns and rat models. The areas of cerebral infarction and apoptosis in neonatal HIE rats were increased, and the nerve functions were compromised. The overexpression of H19 alleviated nerve damage of neonatal HIE rats, and reduced autophagy of brain tissue. H19 upregulated Akt3 as a miR-29b sponge. The protective effects of overexpression of H19 on brain tissue and nerve functions of neonatal HIE rats were partially reversed by autophagy activator. CONCLUSION: H19 improved the brain tissue and alleviated nerve damage of neonatal HIE rats by upregulating the Akt3/mTOR pathway as a miR-29b sponge. KEY POINTS: · H19 overexpression reduces the nerve damage in neonatal HIE rats.. · H19 reduces autophagy in neonatal HIE rats by the miR-29b/Akt3/mTOR axis.. · Autophagy activator reverses the protection of H19 in neonatal HIE..

Improvement of Neural-Network Classifiers Using Fuzzy Floating Centroids.

In this article, a fuzzy floating centroids method (FFCM) is proposed, which uses a fuzzy strategy and the concept of floating centroids to enhance the performance of the neural-network classifier. The decision boundaries in the traditional floating centroids neural-network (FCM) classifier are "hard." These hard boundaries force a point, such as noisy or boundary point, to be assigned to a class exclusively, thereby frequently resulting in misclassification and influencing the performance of optimization methods to train the neural network. A fuzzy strategy combined with floating centroids is introduced to produce "soft" boundaries to handle noisy and boundary points, which increases the chance of discovering the optimal neural network during optimization. In addition, the FFCM adopts a weighted target function to correct the preference to majority classes for imbalanced data. The performance of FFCM is compared with ten classification methods on 32 benchmark datasets by using indicators: average F -measure (Avg.FM) and generalization accuracy. Also, the proposed FFCM is applied to nondestructively estimate the strength grade of cement specimens based on microstructural images. In the experimental results, FFCM achieves the optimal generalization accuracy and Avg.FM on 17 datasets and 21 datasets, respectively; FFCM balances precision and recall better than its competitors for the estimation of cement strength grade.

Clinical significance of circulating tumor cells in predicating the outcomes of patients with colorectal cancer

Abstract Background: Relapse and metastasis of patients with Colorectal Cancer (CRC) is the major obstacle to the long-term life of patients. Its mechanisms remain defined. Methods: A total of 48 CRC patients were enrolled and 68 samples were obtained from the peripheral blood of patients before or after treatments in this study. Twenty non-cancer patients were also detected as a negative control. Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs), including Epithelial CTCs (eCTCs), Mesenchymal (MCTCs), and epithelial/ mesenchymal mixed phenotypes (mixed CTCs), were identified by CanPatrolTM CTC enrichment and RNA in situ hybridization. The relationship between CTCs number and Progression-Free Survival (PFS) or Overall Survival (OS) was evaluated. Results: Thirty-four of 48 patients (70.8%) were found to have positive CTCs. Total CTCs and MCTCs in the post-treatment had a significant correlation PFS and OS. When total CTCs or MCTCs in 5 mL blood of patients were more than 6 CTCs or 5 MCTCs, PFS of the patients was significantly shorter (p < 0.05) than that in patients with less than 6 CTCs or 5 MCTCs. The patients with > 5 CTCs count changes were found to exhibit poor PFS and OS rates (p < 0.05). Conclusion: Total CTCs and MCTCs number detection in patients with colorectal cancer was very useful biomarker for predicting the prognosis of patients. Higher CTCs or MCTCs had poorer PFS and OS rates.

Comparative Evaluation of Bandage Contact Lenses and Eye Patching after Bilateral Cataract Surgery.

PURPOSE: To comparatively evaluate the safety and satisfaction of bandage contact lens (BCL) and eye patching in patients after cataract surgery. METHODS: Sixteen (32 eyes) patients who planned to undergo bilateral cataract surgery were recruited. The two eyes of each patient were randomly divided into 2 groups. Group A and Group B were instructed to wear BCLs immediately at the end of the surgery until one week and eye patch immediately after surgery until one day, respectively. Visual analog scales of ten specific symptoms, Visual Function Index (VF-14) questionnaire, and best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) were conducted on the first day before the surgery and Day 1 and Day 7 after surgery. Oculus keratography was conducted on the first day before surgery and on Day 7. Patient satisfaction was determined on Day 1. Moreover, bacterial species in the conjunctival sac, meibomian gland secretions, and BCLs were subsequently identified using 16S rRNA gene sequencing. RESULTS: The patient satisfaction scores of Group A were higher than Group B. Group A were more motivated to choose the same treatment and were more likely to recommend BCLs to others. No statistically significant differences were found in bacterial culture positivity between the groups. The differences in ocular signs and symptoms between the two groups were not statistically significant. There were no significant differences in the BCVA and VF-14 between the groups at any time point. CONCLUSIONS: BCLs could be safely and effectively used in patients after cataract surgery.

MicroRNA-135a-5p Promotes the Functional Recovery of Spinal Cord Injury by Targeting SP1 and ROCK.

Emerging evidence indicates that microRNAs play a pivotal role in neural remodeling after spinal cord injury (SCI). This study aimed to investigate the mechanisms of miR-135a-5p in regulating the functional recovery of SCI by impacting its target genes and downstream signaling. The gene transfection assay and luciferase reporter assay confirmed the target relationship between miR-135a-5p and its target genes (specificity protein 1 [SP1] and Rho-associated kinase [ROCK]1/2). By establishing the H2O2-induced injury model, miR-135a-5p transfection was found to inhibit the apoptosis of PC12 cells by downregulating the SP1 gene, which subsequently induced downregulation of pro-apoptotic proteins (Bax, cleaved caspase-3) and upregulation of anti-apoptotic protein Bcl-2. By measuring the neurite lengths of PC12 cells, miR-135a-5p transfection was found to promote axon outgrowth by downregulating the ROCK1/2 gene, which subsequently caused upregulation of phosphate protein kinase B (AKT) and phosphate glycogen synthase kinase 3ß (GSK3ß). Use of the rat SCI models showed that miR-135a-5p could increase the Basso, Beattie, and Bresnahan (BBB) scores, indicating neurological function recovery. In conclusion, the miR-135a-5p-SP1-Bax/Bcl-2/caspase-3 and miR-135a-5p-ROCK-AKT/GSK3ß axes are involved in functional recovery of SCI by regulating neural apoptosis and axon regeneration, respectively, and thus can be promising effective therapeutic strategies in SCI.

Healthchain: A novel framework on privacy preservation of electronic health records using blockchain technology.

The privacy of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is facing a major hurdle with outsourcing private health data in the cloud as there exists danger of leaking health information to unauthorized parties. In fact, EHRs are stored on centralized databases that increases the security risk footprint and requires trust in a single authority which cannot effectively protect data from internal attacks. This research focuses on ensuring the patient privacy and data security while sharing the sensitive data across same or different organisations as well as healthcare providers in a distributed environment. This research develops a privacy-preserving framework viz Healthchain based on Blockchain technology that maintains security, privacy, scalability and integrity of the e-health data. The Blockchain is built on Hyperledger fabric, a permissioned distributed ledger solutions by using Hyperledger composer and stores EHRs by utilizing InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to build this healthchain framework. Moreover, the data stored in the IPFS is encrypted by using a unique cryptographic public key encryption algorithm to create a robust blockchain solution for electronic health data. The objective of the research is to provide a foundation for developing security solutions against cyber-attacks by exploiting the inherent features of the blockchain, and thus contribute to the robustness of healthcare information sharing environments. Through the results, the proposed model shows that the healthcare records are not traceable to unauthorized access as the model stores only the encrypted hash of the records that proves effectiveness in terms of data security, enhanced data privacy, improved data scalability, interoperability and data integrity while sharing and accessing medical records among stakeholders across the healthchain network.

Six1 is negatively correlated with poor prognosis and reduces 5-fluorouracil sensitivity via attenuating the stemness of hepatocellular carcinoma cells.

The promoting roles of transcriptional factor six1 have been shown in various tumors, such as breast cancer and colorectal Cancer. However, its roles in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cell stemness and chemotherapeutic sensitivity are never been revealed. In the present study, we showed that six1 expression was negatively correlated the overall survival of HCC patients and significantly increased in HCC tissues. Analysis on normal hepatic cells and HCC cells obtained the consistent result. Functional experiments revealed that six1 knockdown enhanced 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) sensitivity and reduced the stemness of HCC cells. Additionally, six1 knockdown partially reversed 5-FU resistance and attenuated the stemness in 5-FU-resistant HCC cells. Furthermore, we demonstrated that six1 directly bound to sox2 (a stemness master regulator) promoter, enhanced its transcription and expression. Overexpression of sox2 rescued the inhibitory effects of six1 knockdown on the stemness and 5-FU sensitivity of HCC cells. Thus, our work identified a novel six1/sox2 axis in regulating the stemness of HCC cells.

Large-Area Structural Color Filtering Capitalizing on Nanoporous Metal-Dielectric-Metal Configuration.

We present a highly efficient structural color filtering approach for large-area application, using a nanoporous anodic alumina (NAA) film overlaid with an aluminum (Al) layer on top of an optically thick Al substrate. The NAA film, consisting of a self-assembled nanopore array in a hexagonal lattice, is equivalent to a quasi-homogeneous medium according to effective medium theory. The proposed structure enables strong absorption at resonance owing to the Fabry-Perot resonance supported by the metal-dielectric-metal configuration and the plasmonic effect mediated by the top nanoporous Al layer. The reflection colors can be readily tuned by altering the NAA thickness that is determined by anodization time, thereby allowing the flexible creation of complicated color images on a single platform. By fabricating three samples with different NAA thicknesses in a large area of 2 cm × 2 cm, it is confirmed that the proposed color filtering scheme exhibits highly enhanced color purity and high reflection efficiency of up to 73%, which is superior to that generated by previously reported NAA-based approaches. The presented strategy can pave the way for the efficient fabrication of large-area color filtering devices for various potential applications, including color display devices, imaging sensors, structural color printing, and photovoltaic cells.

Interaction of iPSC-derived neural stem cells on poly(L-lactic acid) nanofibrous scaffolds for possible use in neural tissue engineering.

Tissue engineering is a rapidly growing technological area for the regeneration and reconstruction of damage to the central nervous system. By combining seed cells with appropriate biomaterial scaffolds, tissue engineering has the ability to improve nerve regeneration and functional recovery. In the present study, mouse induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) were generated from mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) with the non-integrating episomal vectors pCEP4-EO2S-ET2K and pCEP4-miR-302-367 cluster, and differentiated into neural stem cells (NSCs) as transplanting cells. Electrospinning was then used to fabricate randomly oriented poly(L-lactic acid) (PLLA) nanofibers and aligned PLLA nanofibers and assessed their cytocompatibility and neurite guidance effect with iPSC-derived NSCs (iNSCs). The results demonstrated that non-integrated iPSCs were effectively generated and differentiated into iNSCs. PLLA nanofiber scaffolds were able to promote the adhesion, growth, survival and proliferation of the iNSCs. Furthermore, comp-ared with randomly oriented PLLA nanofibers, the aligned PLLA nanofibers greatly directed neurite outgrowth from the iNSCs and significantly promoted neurite growth along the nanofibrous alignment. Overall, these findings indicate the feasibility of using PLLA nanofiber scaffolds in combination with iNSCs in vitro and support their potential for use in nerve tissue engineering.

[Docosahexaenoic acid inhibits aflatoxin B1-induced migration and invasion in hepatocellular carcinoma cells in vitro].

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the effect of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) on invasiveness of aflatoxin B1 (AFB1)-induced hepatocellular carcinoma cells in vitro. METHODS: HepG2.2.15 cells were exposed to different concentrations of AFB1 and DHA plus AFB1. The cell migration and invasion were assessed using wound-healing and Transwell assay, and flow cytometry was used to analyze the cell cycle changes. The ultrastructural changes of the cells were observed by transmission electron microscopy. RESULTS: Compared with the control group, the cells exposed to2 µmol/L AFB1 showed obviously enhanced migration and invasion with decreased cell ratio in G1/G1 phase and increased cell ratio in G2/M phase but no changes in S phase cells; transmission electron microscopy revealed the presence of multiple nucleoli and significantly increased mitochondria and Golgi apparatus in the exposed cells. Compared with AFB1-exposed cells, the cells treated with DHA and AFB1 showed decreased migration and invasion abilities, and the G1/G1 phase cells increased and G2/M phase cells decreased significantly; ultrastructurally, the cells contained single nucleoli with decreased mitochondria and vacuolization occurred in the cytoplasm. CONCLUSION: DHA can significantly inhibit AFB1-induced enhancement of cell migration and invasion in hepatocellular carcinoma cells in vitro.