Primary glomus tumor of the thymus in a 66-year-old patient.

We report a unique case of a 66-year-old man who was incidentally identified to have a mass in the thymus region by computerized tomography scan. CT revealed a well-defined 1.6 × 1 × 0.9 cm thymus mass with moderate uniform enhancement. Thoracoscopic thymectomy was performed, and the pathological diagnosis was primary glomus tumor of the thymus. There were no atypia or malignant histological features, and no primary tumors in other sites. To our knowledge, this is the first case of primary thymic glomus tumor reported in the literature.

MicroRNA-374b mediates the initiation of non-small cell lung cancer by regulating ITGB1 and p53 expressions.

BACKGROUND: Previous studies have shown that microRNAs (miRNAs) play important roles in the pathogenesis of human cancers. This study aims to clarify the role of miR-374b in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). METHODS: In this study, RT-qPCR and western blot analysis were used to measure mRNA and protein expression. The regulatory mechanism of miR-374b/ITGB1 was investigated by dual-luciferase reporter, CCK-8, and transwell assays. RESULTS: MiR-374b expression was reduced in NSCLC tissues and associated with lymph node metastasis, tumor stage and prognosis in NSCLC patients. Functionally, overexpression of miR-374b inhibited cell viability and metastasis in NSCLC. In addition, miR-374b blocked EMT and promoted p53 expression in NSCLC. MiR-374b was found to directly target ITGB1. Furthermore, upregulation of ITGB1 weakened the antitumor effect of miR-374b in NSCLC. CONCLUSIONS: MiR-374b inhibits the tumorigenesis of NSCLC by downregulating ITGB1 and upregulating p53.

MiR-449a-5p regulates the proliferation of esophageal carcinoma cell by targeting B-cell lymphoma 2.

BACKGROUND: Esophageal cancer (EC) is a common malignancy that claims millions of lives globally each year. Impairment of esophageal carcinoma cell proliferation could provide a therapeutic approach to treating EC. MiR-449a-5p has been put forward as a crucial tumor suppressor in multiple cancers. In this study, we aimed to determine the mechanism underlying the regulating effect of miR-449a-5p on EC cell proliferation. METHODS: The level of miR-449a-5p in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) tissues and adjacent normal esophageal squamous tissues was detected using real-time polymerase chain reaction. The protein level of B-cell lymphoma 2 (Bcl-2) was measured by western blot. MTT and colony formation assays were carried out to assess Eca-109 cell proliferation. RESULTS: The level of miR-449a-5p in ESCC tissues was reduced in comparison with that in adjacent normal tissues. Down-regulation of miR-449a-5p promoted the proliferation of ESCC cells. Bcl-2 was established as a target gene of miR-449a-5p, and its silencing resulted in the reversal of the effects of miR-449a-5p inhibitor on the proliferation of Eca-109 cells. CONCLUSION: Overexpression of miR-449a-5p inhibited the proliferation of Eca-109 cells via negative regulation of Bcl-2.

Uniport video assisted thoracoscopic surgery (U-VATS) exhibits increased feasibility, non-inferior tolerance, and equal efficiency compared with multiport VATS and open thoracotomy in the elderly non-small cell lung cancer patients at early stage.

This study aimed to compare the feasibility, efficacy and safety among uniport video assisted thoracoscopic surgery (U-VATS), multiport VATS (M-TATS), and open thoracotomy in elderly non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients at early stage.One hundred ninety-one elderly NSCLC patients at early stage underwent U-VATS (N = 73), M-VATS (N = 56) or open thoracotomy (N = 62) were included. Perioperative parameters, short-term outcomes, postoperative complications, and overall survival (OS) were assessed.Three-group analysis disclosed that operational duration, blood loss, drainage duration, hospital stay, pain score on the first day (D1) and D3, patients' global assessment (PGA), lasing air leak, infection, arrhythmia, and cardio-cerebrovascular events incidences were different among U-VATS, M-VATS, and open thoracotomy groups. Subsequently, 2-group analysis revealed that:In addition, there was no difference of OS among 3 groups, nor between any of the 2 groups.U-VATS presents with elevated feasibility, non-inferior tolerance, and similar efficacy compared with M-VATS and open thoracotomy in the elderly NSCLC patients at early stage.

Highly expressed long non-coding RNA FOXD2-AS1 promotes non-small cell lung cancer progression via Wnt/ß-catenin signaling.

Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is one of the most common and aggressive tumors around the world. Long-noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been recently shown to play important roles in regulating numerous biological processes including tumor progression. However, the role of lncRNA FOXD2-AS1 in NSCLC remains unclear. In this study, we found that lncRNA FOXD2-AS1 is significantly up-regulated in NSCLC tissues. Loss- and gain-function assays revealed that FOXD2-AS1 promotes NSCLC cell growth and NSCLC tumor progression. Furthermore, we also revealed that FOXD2-AS1 modulates Wnt/ß-catenin signaling in NSCLC cells. Taken together, we conclude that lncRNA FOXD2-AS1 promotes NSCLC progression though Wnt/ß-catenin signaling. These results suggest that lncRNA FOXD2-AS1 might act as a novel therapeutic target for NSCLC treatment.

RefSelect: a reference sequence selection algorithm for planted (l, d) motif search.

BACKGROUND: The planted (l, d) motif search (PMS) is an important yet challenging problem in computational biology. Pattern-driven PMS algorithms usually use k out of t input sequences as reference sequences to generate candidate motifs, and they can find all the (l, d) motifs in the input sequences. However, most of them simply take the first k sequences in the input as reference sequences without elaborate selection processes, and thus they may exhibit sharp fluctuations in running time, especially for large alphabets. RESULTS: In this paper, we build the reference sequence selection problem and propose a method named RefSelect to quickly solve it by evaluating the number of candidate motifs for the reference sequences. RefSelect can bring a practical time improvement of the state-of-the-art pattern-driven PMS algorithms. Experimental results show that RefSelect (1) makes the tested algorithms solve the PMS problem steadily in an efficient way, (2) particularly, makes them achieve a speedup of up to about 100× on the protein data, and (3) is also suitable for large data sets which contain hundreds or more sequences. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed algorithm RefSelect can be used to solve the problem that many pattern-driven PMS algorithms present execution time instability. RefSelect requires a small amount of storage space and is capable of selecting reference sequences efficiently and effectively. Also, the parallel version of RefSelect is provided for handling large data sets.

A new species of Xorides Latreille (Hymenoptera, Ichneumonidae, Xoridinae) parasitizing Pterolophia alternata (Coleoptera, Cerambycidae) in Robinia pseudoacacia.

A new species is described, Xorides benxicus Sheng, sp. n., reared from the cerambycid twig-boring pest of Robinia pseudoacacia Linnaeus, Pterolophia alternata Gressitt, 1938, in Benxi County, Liaoning Province, China. A key is given to the species similar to Xorides benxicus Sheng, namely Xorides asiasius Sheng & Hilszczanski, 2009, Xorides cinnabarius Sheng & Hilszczanski, 2009 and Xorides sapporensis (Uchida, 1928).