CDKL3 is a promising biomarker for diagnosis and prognosis prediction in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma.

Cyclin-dependent kinase-like 3 (CDKL3) has been identified as an oncogene in certain types of tumors. Nonetheless, its function in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is poorly understood. In this study, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of CDKL3 based on data from the HCC cohort of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Our analysis included gene expression, diagnosis, prognosis, functional enrichment, tumor microenvironment and metabolic characteristics, tumor burden, mRNA expression-based stemness, alternative splicing, and prediction of therapy response. Additionally, we performed a cell counting kit-8 assay, TdT-mediated dUTP nick-end Labeling staining, migration assay, wound healing assay, colony formation assay, and nude mouse experiments to confirm the functional relevance of CDKL3 in HCC. Our findings showed that CDKL3 was significantly upregulated in HCC patients compared to controls. Various bioinformatic analyses suggested that CDKL3 could serve as a potential marker for HCC diagnosis and prognosis. Furthermore, CDKL3 was found to be involved in various mechanisms linked to the development of HCC, including copy number variation, tumor burden, genomic heterogeneity, cancer stemness, and alternative splicing of CDKL3. Notably, CDKL3 was also closely correlated with tumor immune cell infiltration and the expression of immune checkpoint markers. Additionally, CDKL3 was shown to independently function as a risk predictor for overall survival in HCC patients by multivariate Cox regression analysis. Furthermore, the knockdown of CDKL3 significantly inhibited cell proliferation in vitro and in vivo, indicating its role as an oncogene in HCC. Taken together, our findings suggest that CDKL3 shows promise as a biomarker for the detection and treatment outcome prediction of HCC patients.

Summertime Urban Ammonia Emissions May Be Substantially Underestimated in Beijing, China.

Ammonia (NH3) is critical to the nitrogen cycle and PM2.5 formation, yet a great deal of uncertainty exists in its urban emission quantifications. Model-underestimated NH3 concentrations have been reported for cities, yet few studies have provided an explanation. Here, we explore reasons for severe WRF-Chem model underestimations of NH3 concentrations in Beijing in August 2018, including simulated gas-particle partitioning, meteorology, regional transport, and emissions, using spatially refined (3 km resolution) NH3 emission estimates in the agricultural sector for Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and in the traffic sector for Beijing. We find that simulated NH3 concentrations are significantly lower than ground-based and satellite observations during August in Beijing, while wintertime underestimations are much more moderate. Further analyses and sensitivity experiments show that such discrepancies cannot be attributed to factors other than biases in NH3 emissions. Using site measurements as constraints, we estimate that both agricultural and non-agricultural NH3 emission totals in Beijing shall increase by ∼5 times to match the observations. Future research should be performed to allocate underestimations to urban fertilizer, power, traffic, or residential sources. Dense and regular urban NH3 observations are necessary to constrain and validate bottom-up inventories and NHx simulation.

Therapy of empagliflozin plus metformin on T2DM mice shows no higher amelioration for glucose and lipid metabolism than empagliflozin monotherapy.

AIMS: This study was designed to compare the effects of empagliflozin monotherapy and its combination with metformin on glucose and lipid modulations in T2DM mice. MAIN METHODS: Nine-week-old male C57BLKS/J db/db mice (n = 32) were used as T2DM model, and their age-matched C57BLKS/J db/m mice (n = 8) were used as normal control. A total of 32 db/db mice were randomly divided into four groups (n = 8/group): the DMT1 group, treated with metformin (250 mg/kg/day); the DMT2 group, treated with metformin (250 mg/kg/day) plus empagliflozin (10 mg/kg/day); the DMT3 group, treated with empagliflozin (10 mg/kg/day); the T2DM control group (DM), received 0.5% Natrosol. The db/m mice received same administration as DM group. KEY FINDINGS: After four-week treatments, compared with T2DM control (DM), the empagliflozin or its combination with metformin dramatically increased the levels of plasma HDL-C (139.6% and 154.9%, respectively), with significant decrease in plasma TC (22.9% and 13.7%, respectively) and plasma TG (26% and 19.7%, respectively) and in hepatic TG (30.3% and 28.6%, respectively). The protein expressions of SREBP1c (75.3% and 54.0%, respectively) and APOC-III (51.2% and 50.2%, respectively) were reduced, while CPT1A (304.0% and 221.4%, respectively) and ApoA1 levels (90.0% and 85.3%, respectively) were enhanced. Although both interventions improve above-mentioned lipid homeostasis, there were no statistic differences between two groups (p > 0.05). SIGNIFICANCE: Our study demonstrated that current dose of combination therapy may have no higher amelioration than empagliflozin monotherapy for glucose and lipid metabolism in male T2DM mice when it followed a treatment shorter than that expected during clinical treatment.