Prognostic Significance of microRNA-7 and its Roles in the Regulation of Cisplatin Resistance in Lung Adenocarcinoma.

BACKGROUND: Previously, microRNA (miR)-7 has been reported to function as a tumor suppressor in human cancers, but the correlations of miR-7 expression with prognosis and cisplatin (CDDP) resistance in lung adenocarcinoma (LA) are unclear. Here, our aim is to determine the prognostic significance of miR-7 and its roles in the regulation of CDDP resistance in LA. METHODS: Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) assay was performed to determine miR-7 expression in 108 paired of LA tissues and analyze its correlations with clinicopathological factors of patients. The patient survival data were collected retrospectively by Kaplan-Meier analyses, and multivariate analysis was performed using the Cox proportional hazards model to determine the prognostic significance of miR-7 expression. The effects of miR-7 expression on the chemosensitivity of LA cells to CDDP and its possible mechanisms were evaluated by MTT, flow cytometry, Western blot and luciferase assays. RESULTS: It was observed that the relative expression level of miR-7 in LA tissues was significantly lower than that in the adjacent normal tissues and low miR-7 expression level was closely associated with poorer tumor differentiation, advanced pathological T-factor, higher incidence of lymph node metastasis and advanced p-TNM stage. Also, patients with low miR-7 expression showed a shorter overall survival than those with high miR-7 expression, and multivariate analysis indicated that status of miR-7 expression was an independent molecular biomarker for predicting the overall survival (OS) of LA patients. In addition, upregulation of miR-7 increases the sensitivity of LA cells to CDDP via induction of apoptosis by targeting Bcl-2. CONCLUSIONS: Our finding for the first time demonstrates that low miR-7 expression may be an independent poor prognostic factor and targeting miR-7 may be a potential strategy for the reversal of CDDP resistance in LA.

Expression of microRNA-218 and its clinicopathological and prognostic significance in human glioma cases.

BACKGROUND: MicroRNAs are a class of noncoding RNAs which regulate multiple cellular processes during tumor development. The purpose of this report is to investigate the clinicopathological and prognostic significance of miR-218 in human gliomas. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Quantitative RT-PCR (qRT-PCR) was conducted to detect the expression of miR-218 in primary normal human astrocytes, three glioma cell lines and 98 paired glioma and adjacent normal brain tissues.Associations of miR-218 with clinicopathological variables of glioma patients were statistically analyzed. Finally, a survival analysis was performed using the Kaplan-Meier method and Cox's proportional hazards model. RESULTS: The expression level of miR-218 in primary normal human astrocytes was significantly higher than that in glioma cell lines (p<0.01). Also, the expression level of miR-218 in glioma tissues was significantly downregulated in comparison with that in the adjacent normal brain tissues (p<0.001). Statistical analyses demonstrated that low miR-218 expression was closely associated with advanced WHO grade (p=0.002) and low Karnofsky performance score (p=0.010) of glioma patients. Kaplan-Meier analysis with the log-rank test showed that patients with low-miR-218 expression had poorer disease-free survival and overall survival (p=0.0045 and 0.0124, respectively). Multivariate analysis revealed that miR-218 expression was independently associated with the disease-free survival (p=0.009) and overall survival (p=0.004) of glioma patients. CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that miR-218 is downregulated in gliomas and that its status might be a potential valuable biomarker for glioma patients.

Polybrominated diphenyl ethers in human hair from the college environment: comparison with indoor dust.

Eight Polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) congeners (BDE 28, 47, 99, 100, 153, 154, 183 and 209) were determined to examine the hair burden at low concentrations, and the relationship between PBDE concentrations in human hair and indoor dust from a college environment (Shanghai University campus). Chemical analyses showed that the total concentrations of PBDEs in hair ranged from 4.04 to 99 ng/g dw, and were found to be fourfold higher in females than in males (p < 0.05). The total PBDEs concentrations in indoor dust samples ranged from 170 to 1,360 ng/g dw. Significantly positive correlations were observed between human hair and indoor dust for BDE 47 (r = 0.44, p = 0.048) and BDE 99 (r = 0.68, p = 0.025). However, no significant association was noted between other PBDE congeners in human hair and indoor dust in the present study.

Application of uncertainty reasoning based on cloud model in time series prediction.

Time series prediction has been successfully used in several application areas, such as meteorological forecasting, market prediction, network traffic forecasting, etc., and a number of techniques have been developed for modeling and predicting time series. In the traditional exponential smoothing method, a fixed weight is assigned to data history, and the trend changes of time series are ignored. In this paper, an uncertainty reasoning method, based on cloud model, is employed in time series prediction, which uses cloud logic controller to adjust the smoothing coefficient of the simple exponential smoothing method dynamically to fit the current trend of the time series. The validity of this solution was proved by experiments on various data sets.