Gemcitabine Inhibits the Progression of Pancreatic Cancer by Restraining the WTAP/MYC Chain in an m6A-Dependent Manner

Pei Cao,Weigang Zhang,Junyi Qiu,Zuxiong Tang,Xiaofeng Xue,Tingting Feng 대한암학회 2024 Cancer Research and Treatment Vol.56 No.1

Purpose Pancreatic cancer (PC) is a common malignant tumor of the digestive system, and its 5-year survival rate is only 4%. N6-methyladenosine (m6A) RNA methylation is the most common post-transcriptional modification and dynamically regulates cancer development, while its role in PC treatment remains unclear.Materials and Methods We treated PC cells with gemcitabine and quantified the overall m6A level with m6A methylation quantification. Real-time quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction and Western blot analyses were used to detect expression changes of m6A regulators. We verified the m6A modification on the target genes through m6A-immunoprecipitation (IP), and further <i>in vivo</i> experiments and immunofluorescence (IF) assays were applied to verify regulation of gemcitabine on Wilms’ tumor 1–associated protein (WTAP) and MYC.Results Gemcitabine inhibited the proliferation and migration of PC cells and reduced the overall level of m6A modification. Additionally, the expression of the “writer” WTAP was significantly downregulated after gemcitabine treatment. We knocked down WTAP in cells and found target gene MYC expression was significantly downregulated, m6A-IP also confirmed the m6A modification on MYC. Our experiments showed that m6A-MYC may be recognized by the “reader” IGF2BP1. <i>In vivo</i> experiments revealed gemcitabine inhibited the tumorigenic ability of PC cells. IF analysis also showed that gemcitabine inhibited the expression of WTAP and MYC, which displayed a significant trend of co-expression.Conclusion Our study confirmed that gemcitabine interferes with WTAP protein expression in PC, reduces m6A modification on MYC and RNA stability, thereby inhibiting the downstream pathway of MYC, and inhibits the progression of PC.

Possible Epithelial Ovarian Cancer Association with HPV18 or HPV33 Infection

Zhang, Pei-Pei,Zhou, Lei,Cao, Jia-Shi,Li, Yi-Ping,Zeng, Zhi,Sun, Ni,Shen, Li,Zhu, Hao-Yue,Ruan, Yang,Zha, Wen-Ting,Wang, Xin-Yu,Zhang, Ke-Qiang,Zhang, Ran Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention 2016 Asian Pacific journal of cancer prevention Vol.17 No.6

The present study was conducted to investigate the prevalence of HPV infection in epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) in Hunan province. DNA samples were collected from paraffin embedded ovarian tissue from 322 patients with EOC, 99 with ovarian benign tumors and 199 normal persons. The polymerase chain reaction and direct sequencing were used to identify the HPV types in the samples. The relationship between the infection of human papillomavirus (HPV) and the epithelial ovarian carcinoma (EOC) was investigated combined with clinical data. The prevalence of HPV18 and HPV33 in EOC group and benign group was higher than in the normal group. HPV18 and HPV33 may play a role in the development of both EOC and ovarian benign tumor and may participate in the development of EOC with traditional risk factors, family history and abortion, possibly exerting synergistic effects.

Improved Multi-target Tracking Algorithm Based on Gaussian Mixture Particle PHD Filter

Qing Lin,Pei Cao,Dingan Liao,Yongzhao Zhan,Yaping Yang 보안공학연구지원센터 2015 International Journal of Multimedia and Ubiquitous Vol.10 No.2

The paper proposes Gaussian mixture particle probability hypothesis density filter(PHD) algorithm ,which can effectively solve the problem that the object number is changing or unknown, based on particle PHD filter. This algorithm calculates the object number and state by recursive procedure, avoiding the uncertainty of target state estimation caused by particle sampling and clustering. Gaussian mixture particle is introduced to effectively maintain the multi-modal distribution of each target,reducing the complexity of calculation.

SARSEvaluation of CRISPR-Based Assays for Rapid Detection of SARS-CoV-2: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Pei-Ying Huang,Xin Yin,Yue-Ting Huang,Qi-Qing Ye,Si-Qing Chen,Xun-Jie Cao,Tian-Ao Xie,Xu-Guang Guo 연세대학교의과대학 2022 Yonsei medical journal Vol.63 No.5

Purpose: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the pathogen of coronavirus disease 2019. Diagnosticmethods based on the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) have been developed to detect SARSCoV-2 rapidly. Therefore, a systematic review and meta-analysis were performed to assess the diagnostic accuracy of CRISPR fordetecting SARS-CoV-2 infection. Materials and Methods: Studies published before August 2021 were retrieved from four databases, using the keywords “SARS-CoV-2”and “CRISPR.” Data were collected from these publications, and the sensitivity, specificity, negative likelihood ratio (NLR), positivelikelihood ratio (PLR), and diagnostic odds ratio (DOR) were calculated. The summary receiver operating characteristic curve wasplotted for analysis with MetaDiSc 1.4. The Stata 15.0 software was used to draw Deeks’ funnel plots to evaluate publication bias. Results: We performed a pooled analysis of 38 independent studies shown in 30 publications. The reference standard was reversetranscription-quantitative PCR. The results indicated that the sensitivity of CRISPR-based methods for diagnosis was 0.94 (95% CI0.93–0.95), the specificity was 0.98 (95% CI 0.97–0.99), the PLR was 34.03 (95% CI 20.81–55.66), the NLR was 0.08 (95% CI 0.06–0.10), and the DOR was 575.74 (95% CI 382.36–866.95). The area under the curve was 0.9894. Conclusion: Studies indicate that a diagnostic method based on CRISPR has high sensitivity and specificity. Therefore, this wouldbe a potential diagnostic tool to improve the accuracy of SARS-CoV-2 detection.

Development of a self-centering tension-only brace for seismic protection of frame structures

Pei Chi,Tong Guo,Yang Peng,Dafu Cao,Jun Dong 국제구조공학회 2018 Steel and Composite Structures, An International J Vol.26 No.5

This study develops and numerically verifies an innovative seismically resilient bracing system. The proposed selfcentering tension-only brace (SC-TOB) is composed of a tensioning system to provide a self-centering response, a frictional device for energy dissipation, and a high-strength steel cable as a bracing element. It is considered to be an improvement over the traditional self-centering braces in terms of lightness, high bearing capacity, load relief, and double-elongation capacity. In this paper, the mechanics of the system are first described. Governing equations deduced from the developed analytical model to predict the behavior of the system are then provided. The results from a finite element validation confirm that the SC-TOB performs as analytically predicted. Key parameters including the activation displacement and load, the self-centering parameter, and equivalent viscous damping are investigated, and their influences on the system behavior are discussed. Finally, a design procedure considering controlled softening behavior is developed and illustrated through a design example.

Elevated Serum Levels of Visfatin in Patients with Henoch-Schonlein Purpura

( Na Cao ),( Tao Chen ),( Zai Pei Guo ),( Meng Meng Li ),( Xiao Yan Jiao ) 대한피부과학회 2014 Annals of Dermatology Vol.26 No.3

Background: Henoch-Schonlein purpura (HSP) is an immune complex-mediated disease predominantly characterized by the deposition of circulating immune complexes containing immunoglobulin A (IgA) on the walls of small vessels. Although the pathogenesis of HSP is not yet fully understood, some researchers proposed that B-cell activation might play a critical role in the development of this disease. Objective: To investigate the serum levels of visfatin (pre-B-cell colony- enhancing factor), B-cell-activating factor (BAFF), and CXCL13, and to analyze their association with disease severity. Methods: The serum levels of visfatin, BAFF, and CXCL13 were measured by using a double-antibody sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) in 43 patients with HSP and 45 controls. The serum levels of IgA anticardiolipin antibodies (ACA) were detected by using a double-antigen sandwich ELISA. Results: Levels of visfatin but not BAFF and CXCL13 were significantly elevated in the sera of patients with HSP in the acute stage, and restored to normal levels in the convalescent stage. Furthermore, serum levels of visfatin were significantly higher in patients with HSP having renal involvement than in those without renal involvement. Serum levels of visfatin were correlated with the severity of HSP and serum concentration of ACA-IgA. Conclusion: We show for the first time that the serum levels of visfatin are abnormally elevated in patients with HSP. Visfatin may be associated with the pathogenesis of HSP. (Ann Dermatol 26(3) 303∼307, 2014)

Spectral Clustering with Sparse Graph Construction Based on Markov Random Walk

( Jiangzhong Cao ),( Pei Chen ),( Bingo Wing-kuen Ling ),( Zhijing Yang ),( Qingyun Dai ) 한국인터넷정보학회 2015 KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Syst Vol.9 No.7

Spectral clustering has become one of the most popular clustering approaches in recent years. Similarity graph constructed on the data is one of the key factors that influence the performance of spectral clustering. However, the similarity graphs constructed by existing methods usually contain some unreliable edges. To construct reliable similarity graph for spectral clustering, an efficient method based on Markov random walk (MRW) is proposed in this paper. In the proposed method, theMRW model is defined on the raw k-NN graph and the neighbors of each sample are determined by the probability of the MRW. Since the high order transition probabilities carry complex relationships among data, the neighbors in the graph determined by our proposed method are more reliable than those of the existing methods. Experiments are performed on the synthetic and real-world datasets for performance evaluation and comparison. The results show that the graph obtained by our proposed method reflects the structure of the data better than those of the state-of-the-art methods and can effectively improve the performance of spectral clustering.

A Max-Flow-Based Similarity Measure for Spectral Clustering

Jiangzhong Cao,Pei Chen,Yun Zheng,Qingyun Dai 한국전자통신연구원 2013 ETRI Journal Vol.35 No.2

In most spectral clustering approaches, the Gaussian kernel-based similarity measure is used to construct the affinity matrix. However, such a similarity measure does not work well on a dataset with a nonlinear and elongated structure. In this paper, we present a new similarity measure to deal with the nonlinearity issue. The maximum flow between data points is computed as the new similarity, which can satisfy the requirement for similarity in the clustering method. Additionally, the new similarity carries the global and local relations between data. We apply it to spectral clustering and compare the proposed similarity measure with other state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world data. The experiment results show the superiority of the new similarity: 1) The max-flow-based similarity measure can significantly improve the performance of spectral clustering; 2) It is robust and not sensitive to the parameters.

Salt-Free and Alkali-Free Fixing Method of Wool Fabric Dyeing in Non-Aqueous Media Dyeing System

Liujun Pei,Jingyuan Yi,Jingru Chen,Wenhua Shi,Wenzhao Cao,Hongjuan Zhang,Jiping Wang 한국섬유공학회 2023 Fibers and polymers Vol.24 No.1

Non-aqueous media dyeing is an important water-saving and salt-free dyeing technology in the textile dyeing industry. In thisinvestigation, a salt-free and alkaline-free dyeing technology was developed for wool fabrics. After padding with reactivedye solution, wool fabric was fixed in a non-aqueous medium at 90 °C for 90 s. After washing, the fixation of reactive dyecan achieve more than 98% in a salt-free and alkali-free dyeing environment. The effect of fixing method on the physicalproperties of wool fabrics was analyzed by TGA, DSC, and XRD. Compared with steam and cold batch fixing method, thefixing process in non-aqueous medium has little effect on the mechanical properties of wool fabrics. The final decompositiontemperature of wool fabric dyed with non-aqueous medium was about 46 °C, which was higher than that of the fabric samplesdyed by other methods. Moreover, the crystallinity of wool fiber was increased after non-aqueous fixation process. And nonaqueousmedium had no influence on the surface morphology of wool fabrics. For non-aqueous medium and steaming fixingmethods, there were only hydrolyzed dyes, but some hetero-bifunctional dyes were detected in the cold batching system,indicating that reactive dyes could effectively react with wool fibers in non-aqueous medium and steaming fixing system.

Processing and Characterization of Laser Sintered Hydroxyapatite Scaffold for Tissue Engineering

CIJUN SHUAI,Pei Feng,Chengde Cao,SHUPING PENG 한국생물공학회 2013 Biotechnology and Bioprocess Engineering Vol.18 No.3

The sintering processing of hydroxyapatite (HAP) powder was studied using selective laser sintering for bone tissue engineering. The effect of laser energy density on the microstructure, phase composition and mechanical properties of the sintered samples was investigated. The results indicate that the average grain size increases from 0.211 ± 0.039 to 0.979 ± 0.133 μm with increasing the laser energy density from 2.0 to 5.0 J/mm2. The maximum value of Vickers hardness and fracture toughness were 4.0± 0.13 Gpa and 1.28 ± 0.033 MPam1/2, respectively, when the laser energy density was 4.0 J/mm2. The XRD results indicated that the nano-HAP was decomposed into TCP with the laser energy density of above 4.0 J/mm2. In vitro bioactivity after soaking in simulated body fluid (SBF) for 3 ~ 12 days showed that a bone-like apatite layer on the surface of the sintered samples. It indicated that the HAP scaffold possesses favorable mechanical properties and bioactivity, and may be used for bone tissue engineering.