Abstract:MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play important roles in cell division, development, maintenance of normal physiological function, occurrence, development and outcome of the diseases in metazoan animals, plants. The miRNA sequences stored in miRBase are usually taken as the only known miRNA sequences. In fact, people often ignore the varieties of the miRNA sequences and underestimate the diversities and importance of the functions of miRNA expressed in non-primary forms. Due to the rapid development and a wideranged application of sequencing technology, the variations in sequences and expression levels of mature miRNAs could be easily detected from the data obtained by the use of second-generation sequencing technology. This review intends to summarize the progress on 5′ -end, 3′ -end, or internal variants of miRNAs, the expression differences of miRNA variants in different developmental stages and different tissues, and dominant arm switch of miRNAs in recent years.

Abstract:Due to the unique advantages (e.g., nanometer spatial resolution, picoNewton force sensitivity, label-free, can work in aqueous conditions), atomic force microscopy(AFM) has become an important instrument in cell biology. AFM can not only visualize the ultra-microstructures on the surface of living cells, but also can quantify the cellular mechanical properties (such as Young's modulus) by indenting technique, opening the doors to in situ explore the dynamical physiological activities and mechanical behaviors of single living cells at the nanoscale. In the past decades, researchers have carried out extensive investigations in imaging the cellular ultra-microstructures and measuring the cellular mechanical properties using AFM, yielding novel insights into our understanding of cellular physiological activities and providing a new idea to solve the related issues in the field of biomedicine. The AFM's own performances have also been steadily improved, which further promote its applications in biology. In this paper, based on our own research in investigating the killing effects of targeted cancer drugs at the nanoscale using AFM, the principle of AFM imaging and measuring the cellular mechanical properties was presented, the progress in visualizing the cellular ultra-microstructures and quantifying the cellular mechanical properties using AFM was summarized, the challenges facing AFM single-cell assay and its future directions were discussed.

Abstract:The biomedical effects of molecular hydrogen have aroused public and academic interest in recent years. Because of its high diffusivity and very small structure, hydrogen has the ability not only to cross the blood brain barrier, but also to infiltrate through the cytomembrane to the cytoplasm, mitochondria, nuclei, endoplasmic reticulum and other subcellular structures, even to interact inner motif of biomacromolecules. It has been proven that hydrogen shows effects on the prevention and treatment of cardiac injury induced by radiation, ischemia-reperfusion, cardiac allografts, cardiopulmonary resuscitation and cardiopulmonary bypass nearly without side effects. These effects have been suggested to be associated with its antioxidant activity, anti-inflammatory effect, anti-apoptosis and role in regulating of mitochondrial metabolism, but further studies are greatly needed for better and deeper understanding of the protective effects of hydrogen in cardiac injury.

Abstract:Apelin is the endogenous ligand of apelin-angiotensin receptor-like 1(APJ). Apelin/APJ system widely distributed in the body, with high expression level in the vascular system, such as cardiovascular system, pulmonary vascular system. The study found that apelin can regulate vascular tone and inducevascular smooth muscle cell proliferation, promote retinal neovascularization, mononuclear cell adhesion to endothelial cells and hepatic portal vein and coronary collateral formation. In this review, we summarized the actions of apelin regulating blood vessel function and the related diseases (hypertension, pulmonary hypertension, atherosclerosis, glioma, lung cancer, portal hypertension and diabetic angiopathy). Moreover, we revealed the inner connection of apelin with vascular and its related diseases, and show that apelin/APJ can be used as therapeutic targets of vascular disease.

Abstract:IκB family consists of a group of proteins that regulate the activity of transcription factor NF-κB by directly binding to NF-κB. The common structural feature of IκBs is the ankyrin repeats that are involved in NF-κB binding. IκBL contains ankyrin repeats and regulates LPS stimulated NF-κB activation. However, it is still unclear whether IκBL can bind to NF-κB directly. Here we reviewed structures and functions of IκB family proteins, and analyzed whether IκBL should be considered as a member of IκB family.

Abstract:Unsaturated fatty acids play important roles in Sinorhizobium meliloti adaptation to external environment stress and symbiotic nodulation. The symbiotic plasmid A of S. meliloti encodes a DesA homologue, which has 44% identity to Bacillus subtilis DesA. However, whether S. meliloti DesA is able to play functions in fatty acid synthesis was not determined. We report that though SmdesA gene could not restore the growth of E. coli fabA temperature sensitive mutant CY57 under non-permissive conditions, argentation thin layer chromatography assay show that CY57 carrying desA encoded plasmid could produce palmitoleic acid and octadecadienoic acid. This indicate that SmdesA encodes acyl-lipid desaturase. In addition, deletion of SmdesA gene have led to a little effects on the fatty acid composition of S. meliloti, but show a significant impact on growth rate in low temperature and high salt conditions, and the ability of alfalfa symbiotic nodulation. DesA is not the key enzyme of unsaturated fatty acid synthesis of S. meliloti, but it plays important biological roles in S. meliloti dealing with environment stress and nodular process.

Abstract:Caste determination in the honeybee has been demonstrated to be decided by the royalactin in the royal jelly. And the differentially expressed coding genes in caste determination of the worker and queen larvae have also been well studied. Our experiments identified that lncRNAs are also differentially expressed in the caste determination of the larvae, which indicates that lncRNAs are involved in the caste determination. Detailed analysis showed that in the early development of the larvae, lncRNAs play a regulatory role in multicellular organismal development, nervous system development and regulation of transcription by affecting the expression and function of the nearby coding genes.

Abstract:In previous researches we have found that the 50 Hz magnetic field (MF) had significant effects on depressing the content and the assembly rate of cellular actin cytoskeleton, and the morphology of cells also was changed. In this study, the relationship between the frequency of extremely low frequency (ELF) MF and the field-induced-cytoskeleton effects was investigated. Since G-actin is charged particle, the electromagnetic field may affect the velocity and orientation of G-actin's movement, and then finally disturb F-actin assembly process. With various frequencies, the field exposure may cause different interference results. In this study, we exposed five specific frequencies (35 Hz, 50 Hz, 70 Hz, 110 Hz, and 140 Hz) of 0.4 mT MF to FL cells and monomer actin protein for 30 min, and by using immunofluorescence technique we detected the changes of microfilament content in FL cells corresponding to the five frequencies, to see if any specific frequency MF exert stronger effect on the skeleton than others. Furthermore, fluorescence resonance energy transfer technology (FRET)was employed to verify if this possible frequency window had a remarkable effect on the efficiency of F-actin assembly in vitro. The results showed that within cells, the 50 Hz MF-exposed group had the lowest F-actin content, with a reduction of (34.66±3.14)% compared to the Sham group, followed by the 110 Hz group, while the 35 Hz, 70 Hz, 140 Hz groups had no significant differences comparing with the Sham. In the FRET experiment, after exposing to the 0.4 mT 50 Hz MF, the FRET efficiency reduced significantly compared with the sham, 35 Hz, 70 Hz groups. The theoretical analysis showed that with exposed to the MF, F-actin assembly was mainly interfered by the induced-electric field force and the corresponding Lorentz force, under which the efficiency of the microfilament assembly decreased with a MF frequency dependent manner. Due to the coincidence that the time cycles of 50 Hz MF varying in its direction/strength is similar to that of actins binding to actin-microfilaments, we propose that 50 Hz is likely to be one of the MF frequency windows for the MF-induced-interference to cytoskeleton.

Abstract:The causes and progressions of cancers have close associations with the mutations of genes in our body, which lead to abnormal symptoms and detection indicators. Therefore, providing clinical decision support for early diagnosis and precise treatment of cancers is very urgent and necessary, which can be achieved by mining the associations between genes and clinical behaviors from conclusive biomedical literature data. A MeSH-based (Medical Subject Headings, MeSH) method was proposed for biomedical objects association mining in this paper. By using MeSH (which is provided in PubMed) to represent each object as a vector in the Vector Space Model and taking the citations between articles into consideration, we translated the associations mining into mathematical operating successfully. We finally obtained 203 genes and 462 associations related to colorectal cancer (CRC) after applying our method in the associations mining between genes and clinical behaviors of CRC. In order to analyze and verify the mining results, some bioinformatics tools, such as g:Profiler and KEGG were used for functions and pathway analysis of genes. The results show that this MeSH-based method works robust in the association mining. Besides removing the restriction of co-occurrence for the indirect associations mining, our proposed method also avoid complex grammatical analysis which lead to massive calculation.