Bioinformatic Prediction of SNPs within miRNA Binding Sites of Inflammatory Genes Associated with Gastric Cancer

Song, Chuan-Qing,Zhang, Jun-Hui,Shi, Jia-Chen,Cao, Xiao-Qin,Song, Chun-Hua,Hassan, Adil,Wang, Peng,Dai, Li-Ping,Zhang, Jian-Ying,Wang, Kai-Juan Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention 2014 Asian Pacific journal of cancer prevention Vol.15 No.2

Polymorphisms in miRNA binding sites have been shown to affect miRNA binding to target genes, resulting in differential mRNA and protein expression and susceptibility to common diseases. Our purpose was to predict SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) within miRNA binding sites of inflammatory genes in relation to gastric cancer. A complete list of SNPs in the 3'UTR regions of all inflammatory genes associated with gastric cancer was obtained from Pubmed. miRNA target prediction databases (MirSNP, Targetscan Human 6.2, PolymiRTS 3.0, miRNASNP 2.0, and Patrocles) were used to predict miRNA target sites. There were 99 SNPs with MAF>0.05 within the miRNA binding sites of 41 genes among 72 inflammation-related genes associated with gastric cancer. NF-${\kappa}B$ and JAK-STAT are the two most important signaling pathways. 47 SNPs of 25 genes with 95 miRNAs were predicted. CCL2 and IL1F5 were found to be the shared target genes of hsa-miRNA-624-3p. Bioinformatic methods could identify a set of SNPs within miRNA binding sites of inflammatory genes, and provide data and direction for subsequent functional verification research.

An Enhanced Password Authentication Scheme Providing Password Updating without Smart Cards

Chin-Chen Chang,Hao-Chuan Tsai,Yi-Hui Chen 보안공학연구지원센터 2007 International Journal of Security and Its Applicat Vol.1 No.2

In 2003, Yang, Chang, and Hwang proposed an enhanced scheme of Peyravivan-Zunic’s password authentication scheme by using the Diffie-Hellman scheme. Later, Yoon, Ryu, and Yoo demonstrated that Yang-Chang-Hwang’s scheme is vulnerable to a stolen-verifier attack and a denial-of-service attack, and then proposed an improved scheme. In this paper, we show that Yoon-Ryu-Yoo’s scheme is still vulnerable to a stolen-verifier attack and a server spoofing attack under some reasonable assumption. In addition, we propose an improved scheme to eliminate such security flaws.

Sharing a Large Secret Image Using Meaningful Shadows Based on VQ and Inpainting

( Zhi-hui Wang ),( Kuo-nan Chen ),( Chin-chen Chang ),( Chuan Qin ) 한국인터넷정보학회 2015 KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Syst Vol.9 No.12

This paper proposes a novel progressive secret image-hiding scheme based on the inpainting technique, the vector quantization technique (VQ) and the exploiting modification direction (EMD) technique. The proposed scheme first divides the secret image into non-overlapping blocks and categorizes the blocks into two groups: complex and smooth. The blocks in the complex group are compressed by VQ with PCA sorted codebook to obtain the VQ index table. Instead of embedding the original secret image, the proposed method progressively embeds the VQ index table into the cover images by using the EMD technique. After the receiver recovers the complex parts of the secret image by decoding the VQ index table from the shadow images, the smooth parts can be reconstructed by using the inpainting technique based on the content of the complex parts. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme not only has the advantage of progressive data hiding, which involves more shadow images joining to recover the secret image so as to produce a higher quality steganography image, but also can achieve high hiding capacity with acceptable recovered image quality.

Differential Protein Expression Profile Between CD20 Positive and Negative Cells of the NCI-H929 Cell Line

Geng, Chuan-Ying,Liu, Nian,Yang, Guang-Zhong,Liu, Ai-Jun,Leng, Yun,Wang, Hui-Juan,Li, Li-Hong,Wu, Yin,Li, Yan-Chen,Chen, Wen-Ming Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention 2012 Asian Pacific journal of cancer prevention Vol.13 No.11

At present, multiple myeloma (MM) remains an incurable disease and cologenic cells may be responsible for disease relapse. It has been proposed that CD20+/CD138- NCI-H929 cells could be hallmarks of MM clonogenic cells. Here, the immunology phenotype of NCI-H929 cells is described. Only a small population of CD20+/CD138- cells (<1%) was found in the NCI-H929 cell line, but CD20+/CD138- cells were not detected. We found that CD20+/CD138+ cells were able to exhibit cologenic capacity by colony formation assay and continuous passage culture. Proteins were analyzed by 1D-SDS-PAGE and TMT based quantitative differential liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). 1,082 non-redundant proteins were identified, 658 of which were differentially expressed with at least a 1.5-fold difference. 205 proteins in CD20+ cells were expressed at higher levels and 453 proteins were at lower levels compared with CD20- cells. Most proteins had catalytic and binding activity and mainly participated in metabolic processes, cell communication and molecular transport. These results proved that there are different biological features and protein expression profile between CD20+ and CD20- cells in the NCI-H929 cell line.

A Corpus-Based Study on Language Features and Literary Themes in the Yellow Wall-Paper and Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Lu, Hui-Chuan,Liu, Kai-Ling,Yeh, Chien-Ting,Chen, Ya-Jie Institute for Corpus Research 2022 Asia pacific journal of corpus research Vol.3 No.1

This study aims to apply corpus-based approach to analyze The Yellow Wall-Paper and Herland written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a women's rights activist in the late nineteenth-century America. Although both works have attracted feminists' attention to the woman question that concerned Gilman, discussion on her language features and their relation to the literary themes of these two works is still in need. In this corpus-based analysis, we argue that the main themes of different literary works can be revealed through linguistic patterns identified by number and gender features of nouns and pronouns in the contrast of two works and a balanced corpus. The linguistic features (number and gender) have been related with two themes, the 'group and individual' and the 'feminine and masculine', and are further interpreted in terms of mothering and feminine consciousness. By adopting linguistic approach, our study provides quantitative and qualitative evidence to verify the established themes and arguments of these literary texts.

Living Experiences of Male Spouses of Patients with Metastatic Cancer in Taiwan

Lin, Hui-Chen,Lin, Wen-Chuan,Lee, Tzu-Ying,Lin, Hung-Ru Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention 2013 Asian Pacific journal of cancer prevention Vol.14 No.1

Background: Cancer is the leading cause of death in Taiwan. Spouses are generally the main caregivers of affectyed patients but previous studies have seldom investigated the needs of male spouses of patients with metastatic cancer. Purpose: To explore the lived experiences of such male spouses. Methods: A qualitative design using in-depth interviewswasconducted with male spouses of patients with metastatic cancer being treated at the oncology outpatient department in a teaching hospital in northern Taiwan. Results: Nine participants aged 31-78 were interviewed. Content analysis of the interviews revealed five themes: suffering and struggling, difficulty in focusing on communication and interaction, shouldering responsibility, cherishing the love between husband and wife, and enabling each other to live better. This study demonstrated how male spousse experienced physical and psychological suffering when their wives suffered from metastatic cancer. They had to bear the pain of their wife's suffering, and also had to shoulder the responsibility for everything. All their efforts were put towards enabling each other to live a better life. They cherished the rest of the time they could spend with their wives, even though they had to live a hard life. As the male spouses of patients with metastatic cancer, the participants exhibited both the masculinity of men and the ability to express care and tenderness. Conclusions: The results showed that male spouses need more attention in terms of communication and bearing with suffering. Health care professionals should more actively understand the needs and provide assistance when facing the male spouse of patients with cancer, so as make sure that they possess the ability to take care of their wives. Health care professionals should also assist and properly act as a bridge of communication between husbands and wives.

Evaluation of the YOLO models for discrimination of the alfalfa pollinating bee species

Zhang Chuan-Jie,Liu Teng,Wang Jinxu,Zhai Danlan,Zhang Youxin,Gao Yang,Wu Hui-Zhen,Yu Jialin,Chen Min 한국응용곤충학회 2024 Journal of Asia-Pacific Entomology Vol.27 No.1

Identifying insect pollinators and their roles in mediating pollen flow is critical to understand the potential gene flow risks of insect pollination-dependent crop species, such as alfalfa. This study was conducted to evaluate and compare the feasibility of You Only Look Once (YOLO) version 3 (YOLOv3), YOLOv5, YOLOv7, and YOLO Representation (YOLOR) to discriminate the three most common alfalfa pollinating bee species, including honeybee, bumblebee, and leafcutting bee. The metrics comparison results showed YOLOv3 and YOLOv5 out performed YOLOv7 and YOLOR regarding model precision, recall, F 1 score, and mAP50 values. YOLOv3 and YOLOv5 could successfully discriminate the three different bee species with an accuracy of almost 100% (99.9%, 99.8%, and 100% accuracy for honeybee, bumblebee, and leafcutting bee for the two models, respectively). Comparatively, YOLOv7 could discriminate honeybee with an accuracy of 95% but was more likely to mistakenly discriminate bumblebee and leafcutting bee due to the relatively lower discriminating accuracy (87.3% and 66.2%, respectively). While the values of determined parameters for YOLOR were lower than YOLOv3 and YOLOv5, the higher precision (0.99680) along with recall (0.98721), F 1 (0.99198), mAP50 (0.99323), and mAP50-100 (0.89076) values indicate that this model could be able to obtain a favorable performance in discriminating the three bee species. In summary, the proposed method in this study has the potential for identifying the alfalfa pollinating bee species, studying the bees’ flower-visiting behaviors, evaluating the risks of insect-mediated pollen flow, and thus contributing to the management of genetically engineered (GE) alfalfa transgene flow.

Roles of mTOR and p-mTOR in Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumors

Li, Jun-Chuan,Zhu, Hong-Yu,Chen, Ting-Xuan,Zou, Lan-Ying,Wang, Xiao-Yan,Zhao, Hui-Chuan,Xu, Jun Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention 2013 Asian Pacific journal of cancer prevention Vol.14 No.10

Objective: This study aimed to examine the relationship between expression of mammal target of rapamycin (mTOR) and phosphorylation of mTOR (p-mTOR) protein in the PI3K/Akt/mTOR signaling pathways in gastrointestinal stromal tumors and relatiuonships with clinical factors. Methods: Immunohistochemistry was used to detect the expression of the associated proteins mTOR, p-mTOR, and phosphorylation of the tumor suppressor genes PTEN, P27, VEGF, and EGFR in 40 cases of gastrointestinal stromal tumors, with division into a very low and low risk group as well as a moderate and high risk group. Results: The positive rate of mTOR and p-mTOR was significantly increased in the moderate and high risk group compared with the very low and low risk group. The difference was statistically significant (P<0.05). When grouped according to size, the positive mTOR expression rate exhibited a statistical difference (P<0.05), which was significantly increased in the group of tumors larger than 5 cm. The difference in the positive mTOR and p-mTOR expression rate exhibit no statistical significance among the PTEN, P27, VEGF, and EGFR expression subgroups (P>0.05). Conclusion: The different expressions of mTOR and p-mTOR in the signal transduction pathway of gastrointestinal stromal tumor in the different degree-of-risk groups suggested that the mTOR and p-mTOR of the signal transduction pathway serve an important function in the occurrence and development of gastrointestinal stromal tumors.

Appropriate nitrogen application enhances saponin synthesis and growth mediated by optimizing root nutrient uptake ability

Wei, Wei,Ye, Chen,Huang, Hui-Chuan,Yang, Min,Mei, Xin-Yue,Du, Fei,He, Xia-Hong,Zhu, Shu-Sheng,Liu, Yi-Xiang The Korean Society of Ginseng 2020 Journal of Ginseng Research Vol.44 No.4

Background: Cultivation of medicinal crops, which synthesize hundreds of substances for curative functions, was focused on the synthesis of secondary metabolites rather than biomass accumulation. Nutrition is an important restrict factor for plant growth and secondary metabolites, but little attention has been given to the plasticity of nutrient uptake and secondary metabolites synthesis response to soil nitrogen (N) change. Methods: Two year-field experiments of Sanqi (Panax notoginseng), which can synthesize a high level of saponin in cells, were conducted to study the effects of N application on the temporal dynamics of biomass, nutrient absorption, root architecture and the relationships between these parameters and saponin synthesis. Results: Increasing N fertilizer rates could improve the dry matter yields and nutrient absorption ability through increasing the maximum daily growth (or nutrient uptake) rate. Under suitable N level (225 kg/ha N), Sanqi restricted the root length and surface and enhanced the root diameter and N uptake rate per root length (NURI) to promote nutrient absorption, but the opposite status of Sanqi root architecture and NURI was found when soil N was deficient. Furthermore, increasing N rates could promote the accumulation of saponin in roots through improving the NURI, which showed a significant positive relationship with the content of saponin in the taproots. Conclusion: Appropriate N fertilizer rates could optimize both root architecture and nutrient uptake efficiency, then promote both the accumulation of dry matter and the synthesis of saponins.

Occupational Stress on Quality of Life of Female Nursing Teachers in Taiwan

Chuang Chao-Hua,Chen Hui-Chuan,Cheng Ching-Yu,Hsieh Hui-I,Wu Tung-Pi,Wang Yu-Wen 한국간호과학회 2009 한국간호과학회 학술대회 Vol.2009 No.10