Enhanced maternal behaviors in a mouse model of congenital blindness.

In mammals, mothering is one of the most important prosocial female behavior to promote survival, proper sensorimotor, and emotional development of the offspring. Different intrinsic and extrinsic factors can initiate and maintain these behaviors, such as hormonal, cerebral, and sensory changes. Infant cues also stimulate multisensory systems and orchestrate complex maternal responsiveness. To understand the maternal behavior driven by complex sensory interactions, it is necessary to comprehend the individual sensory systems by taking out other senses. An excellent model for investigating sensory regulation of maternal behavior is a murine model of congenital blindness, the ZRDBA mice, where both an anophthalmic and sighted mice are generated from the same litter. Therefore, this study aims to assess whether visual inputs are essential to driving maternal behaviors in mice. Maternal behaviors were assessed using three behavioral tests, including the pup retrieval test, the home cage maternal behavior test, and the maternal aggression test. Our results show that blind mothers (1) took less time to retrieve their offspring inside the nest, (2) spent more time nursing and licking their offspring in the second- and third-week postpartum, and (3) exhibited faster aggressive behaviors when exposed to an intruder male, compared to the sighted counterparts. This study provides evidence that congenitally blind mothers show more motivation to retrieve the pups, care, and protection towards their pups than sighted ones, likely due to a phenomenon of sensory compensation.

EmDL: Extracting miRNA-Drug Interactions from Literature.

The microRNAs (miRNAs), regulators of post-transcriptional processes, have been found to affect the efficacy of drugs by regulating the biological processes in which the target proteins of drugs may be involved. For example, some drugs develop resistance when certain miRNAs are overexpressed. Therefore, identifying miRNAs that affect drug effects can help understand the mechanisms of drug actions and design more efficient drugs. Although some computational approaches have been developed to predict miRNA-drug associations, such associations rarely provide explicit information about which miRNAs and how they affect drug efficacy. On the other hand, there are rich information about which miRNAs affect the efficacy of which drugs in the literature. In this paper, we present a novel text mining approach, named as EmDL (Extracting miRNA-Drug interactions from Literature), to extract the relationships of miRNAs affecting drug efficacy from literature. Benchmarking on the drug-miRNA interactions manually extracted from MEDLINE and PubMed Central, EmDL outperforms traditional text mining approaches as well as other popular methods for predicting drug-miRNA associations. Specifically, EmDL can effectively identify the sentences that describe the relationships of miRNAs affecting drug effects. The drug-miRNA interactome presented here can help understand how miRNAs affect drug effects and provide insights into the mechanisms of drug actions. In addition, with the information about drug-miRNA interactions, more effective drugs or combinatorial strategies can be designed in the future. The data used here can be accessed at http://mtd.comp-sysbio.org/.

GEAR: A database of Genomic Elements Associated with drug Resistance.

Drug resistance is becoming a serious problem that leads to the failure of standard treatments, which is generally developed because of genetic mutations of certain molecules. Here, we present GEAR (A database of Genomic Elements Associated with drug Resistance) that aims to provide comprehensive information about genomic elements (including genes, single-nucleotide polymorphisms and microRNAs) that are responsible for drug resistance. Right now, GEAR contains 1631 associations between 201 human drugs and 758 genes, 106 associations between 29 human drugs and 66 miRNAs, and 44 associations between 17 human drugs and 22 SNPs. These relationships are firstly extracted from primary literature with text mining and then manually curated. The drug resistome deposited in GEAR provides insights into the genetic factors underlying drug resistance. In addition, new indications and potential drug combinations can be identified based on the resistome. The GEAR database can be freely accessed through http://gear.comp-sysbio.org.

[Study on single-walled carbon nanotube thin film photoelectric device].

The single-walled carbon nanotube film photoelectric device was invented, and it can generate net photocurrent under bias voltage when it is illuminated by the laser. The influences of bias voltage, laser power and illuminating position on the net photocurrent were investigated. The experimental results showed that when the center of the film was illuminated, the photocurrent increased with the applied bias, but tended to saturate as the laser power increased. As the voltage and the laser power reached 0. 2 V and 22. 7 mW respectively, the photocurrent reached 0. 24 µA. When the voltage was removed, the photocurrent varied with the laser illuminating position on the film and its value was distributed symmetrically about the center of the device. The photocurrent reached maximum and almost zero respectively when the laser illuminated on two ends and the center of the film. Analysis proposes that the net photocurrent can be generated due to internal photoelectric effect when the device is under voltage and the laser illuminates on the center of the film. It can be also generated due to photo-thermoelectric effect when the device is under no voltage and the laser illuminates on the film, and the relation between the net photocurrent and the illuminating position was derived according to the nature of thermoelectric power of single-walled carbon nanotubes with the established temperature model, which coincides with experimental result. Two effects are the reasons for the generation and variety of the net photocurrent and they superimpose to form the result of the net photocurrent when the device is under general conditions of voltage and laser illuminating position. The device has potential applications in the areas of photovoltaic device and optical sensor for its characteristic.