Publications by authors named "Fang Xiaoxia"

The bromodomain (BRD) represents a highly conserved structural module that provides BRD proteins with fundamental functionality in modulating protein-protein interactions involved in diverse biological processes such as chromatin-mediated gene transcription, DNA recombination, replication and repair. Consequently, dysregulation of BRD proteins has been implicated in the pathogenesis of numerous human diseases. In recent years, considerable scientific endeavors have focused on unraveling the molecular mechanisms underlying BRDs and developing inhibitors that target these domains.

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Parkinson' s disease (PD) is a chronic neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progressive loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra (SN). Our research has demonstrated that the levels of interleukin (IL)-17A are elevated in the SN of rodent models of PD, and that IL-17A accelerates neurodegeneration in PD depending on microglial activation. Furthermore, existing studies indicate that exosomes released by activated microglia may play a significant role as mediators of neurodegeneration in PD.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to investigate the relationship between changes in retinal microvascular structure and carotid artery stenosis (CAS) identified through fundus photography.
  • It involved 715 patients, categorizing them into control and CAS groups (with and without plaques), and used deep learning to assess various retinal indicators like arteriole-to-venule ratio and vascular density.
  • The results showed significant differences in retinal indicators between groups, indicating lower values in CAS patients, and highlighted the potential of using fundus photography for screening CAS.
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Background: Enhancing the emergency competencies of healthcare professionals is essential for ensuring patient safety, optimizing emergency response efficiency, and fostering effective team collaboration. However, traditional simulation-based methods often struggle to accurately replicate real-life emergencies, resulting in outcomes that may not fully reflect actual performance, thereby undermining their effectiveness in training and developing the critical skills needed for emergency situations.

Objective: This study evaluated the effectiveness of using murder mystery games (MMGs) as a gamified learning method to enhance the emergency competencies of healthcare professionals.

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Chronic pain is a refractory health disease worldwide causing an enormous economic burden on individuals and society. Accumulating evidence suggests that inflammation in the peripheral nervous system (PNS) and central nervous system (CNS) is the major factor in the pathogenesis of chronic pain. The inflammation in the early- and late phase may have distinctive effects on the initiation and resolution of pain, which can be viewed as friend or foe.

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In Parkinson's disease (PD), reduced dopamine levels in the basal ganglia have been associated with altered neuronal firing and motor dysfunction. It remains unclear whether the altered firing rate or pattern of basal ganglia neurons leads to parkinsonism-associated motor dysfunction. In the present study, we show that increased histaminergic innervation of the entopeduncular nucleus (EPN) in the mouse model of PD leads to activation of EPN parvalbumin (PV) neurons projecting to the thalamic motor nucleus via hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels coupled to postsynaptic HR.

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Background And Purpose: Parvalbumin (PV)-positive neurons are a type of neuron in the lateral globus pallidus (LGP) which plays an important role in motor control. The present study investigated the effect of histamine on LGP neurons and motor behaviour.

Experimental Approach: Histamine levels in LGP as well as its histaminergic innervation were determined through brain stimulation, microdialysis, anterograde tracing and immunostaining.

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The dorsolateral striatum (DLS) is the critical neural substrate that plays a role in motor control and motor learning. Our past study revealed a direct histaminergic projection from the tuberomammillary nucleus (TMN) of the hypothalamus to the rat striatum. However, the afferent of histaminergic fibers in the mouse DLS, the effect of histamine on DLS neurons, and the underlying receptor and ionic mechanisms remain unclear.

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Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a global epidemic with increasing incidence, which results in diverse complications, seriously affects the patient quality of life, and brings huge economic burdens to society. Diabetic neuropathy is the most common chronic complication of DM, resulting in neuropathic pain and chronic itch. The precise mechanisms of diabetic neuropathy have not been fully clarified, hindering the exploration of novel therapies for diabetic neuropathy and its terrible symptoms such as diabetic pain and itch.

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Interleukin 17A (IL-17A) was previously shown to be a key pro-inflammatory factor in diabetes mellitus and associated complications. However, the role of IL-17A in diabetic encephalopathy remains poorly understood. In this study, we established a mouse model of diabetic encephalopathy that was deficient in IL-17A by crossing Il17a mice with spontaneously diabetic Ins2 (Akita) mice.

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Droplet encapsulation of a single cell or bead is widely used in digital detection, single-cell sequencing, and drug screening. However, the encapsulation of particles is totally random restricted by the Poisson distribution. The theoretical possibility of single-particle encapsulation is usually only approximately 10%.

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Article Synopsis
  • Zebrafish serve as an important model organism for studying human diseases due to their genetic similarities with humans and their utility in gene function research.
  • The study highlights the challenge of limited antibodies for costaining in zebrafish, making immunohistochemistry more difficult to apply.
  • The protocol outlined combines in situ hybridization and immunohistochemistry to effectively visualize both mRNA and protein expression patterns in zebrafish embryo sections, facilitating the analysis of two genes within the same tissue sample.
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In this work, a laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) detection system built in a modular assembling mode was developed based on commercial LEGO blocks and 3D printed blocks. We designed and fabricated a variety of 3D printed building blocks fixed with optical components, including laser light source, filters, lens, dichroic mirror, photodiode detector, and control circuits. Utilizing the relatively high positioning precision of the plug-in blocks, a modular construction strategy was adopted using the flexible plug-in combination of the blocks to build a highly sensitive laser-induced fluorescence detection system, LIFGO.

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An animal model of collagen-induced arthritis (CIA) was used to investigate the effects of norepinephrine (NE) and α1-adrenoreceptor (α1-AR) on Treg cells in CIA. Thirty-two male DBA/1 mice were randomly divided into control group and CIA model group. CIA was prepared by intradermal injection of collagen type II (CII, 100 μl) at the tail base of DBA/1 mice.

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Background: An emerging body of evidence indicates that puerarin (PUE) plays an important role in the treatment of angina pectoris, myocardial ischemia-reperfusion injury, hypertension and other cardiovascular diseases, but how PUE affects the vascular remodeling of hypertensive rats has not been reported yet. This study aimed to investigate the effect and mechanism of PUE on carotid arteries of spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) to provide the basis for the clinical application of PUE.

Methods: Thirty male SHR and six male Wistar Kyoto rats (WKY) aged 3 months were used in this study, SHR rats were randomly divided into 5 groups, PUE(40 or 80 mg/kg/d, ip) and telmisartan (TELMI) (30 mg/kg/d, ig) were administrated for 3 months.

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With the rapid development of suspension array technology, microbeads-based barcodes as the core element with sufficient encoding capacity are urgently required for high-throughput multiplexed detection. Here, a novel structure-fluorescence combinational encoding strategy is proposed for the first time to establish a barcode library with ultrahigh encoding capacities. Based on the never revealed transformability of the structural parameters (e.

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Aim: To explore the relationship between emotional intelligence and job well-being among Chinese Registered Nurses, and the mediating role of communication satisfaction in the relationship.

Design: A descriptive cross-sectional study design was employed.

Methods: Random sampling was adopted.

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Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are membrane-encapsulated particles with critical biomedical functions, including mediating intercellular communication, assisting tumor metastasis, and carrying protein and microRNA biomarkers. The downstream applications of EVs are greatly influenced by the quality of the isolated EVs. However, almost none of the separation methods can simultaneously achieve both high yield and high purity of the isolated EVs, thus making the isolation of EVs an essential challenge in EV research.

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Background/aims: Neuroendocrine dysregulation has been associated with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Tyrosine hydroxylase (TH), a rate-limiting enzyme for synthesis of neuroendocrine hormones such as epinephrine, is also expressed in T lymphocytes and regulates balance between helper T (Th) 17 cells and regulatory T (Treg) cells. Herein, we aimed to show that TH expression in joints alleviates joint inflammation and Th17/Treg imbalance in collagen-induced arthritis (CIA), an animal model of RA, and these effects may be implemented by the mechanism of epinephrine action on α1-adrenoreceptor (α1-AR) in T cells.

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An emerging body of evidence indicates that transient receptor potential TRP channels act as important mediators for a wide variety of physiological functions and are potential targets for drug discovery. Our previous study has identified transient receptor potential channel 3 (TRPC3) and TRPC6 as cation channels through which most of the damaging calcium enters, aggravates pathological changes in vivo and increases ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury in mice. This study aimed to verify the effects of TRPC3 inhibitor Pyr3 on myocardial I/R injury in mice.

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Ultrasensitive determination of some ultra-low abundance biological molecules closely related to diseases is currently a wide concern and urgent issue to be addressed. Here, a spherical poly(acrylic acid)-alkaline phosphatase (SP-AKP) signal amplification block using spherical poly(acrylic acid) brush nanoparticles (SP) as the immobilized carriers was designed and synthesized optimally first. The results show that a single SP-AKP with high enzyme binding capacity and high catalytic ability (up to about 4800 effective free AKP per SP-AKP) has much greater fluorescence signal amplification ability than a single free AKP or SiO-COOH-AKP.

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Ultrabright fluorescent particles (UFPs) have attracted increasing attention because of their outstanding signal amplification functions. However, there is still an urgent demand for designing novel UFPs with new components or structures as the existing ones can not satisfy the practical requirements due to their inherent disadvantages. Here we propose a novel ultrabright fluorescent particle platform by doping dyes of 5-aminofluorescein (5-AF) into silica core-based spherical poly (acrylic acid) brushes (SiO@PAA@5-AF) and discuss their fundamental structure-fluorescence tuning principles.

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Objective: To investigate the neuroprotective effects of transforming growth factor beta 1(TGF-β1) on the expression and secretion of cytokines induced by Aβ in hippocampal neurons and microglial co-cultures.

Methods: Hippocampal neurons and microglia obtained from SD rat were co-cultured. TGF-β1 was applied on day 5 after the neurons and microglia co-cultures were incubated at the concentrations of 5 or 20 ng/ml, Aβ was added 1 h following TGF-β1 application at a concentration of 5 μmol/L.

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In this work, we developed a miniaturized palmtop high-speed capillary electrophoresis (CE) system integrating whole modules, including picoliter-scale sample injection, short capillary-based fast CE, high-voltage power supply, orthogonal laser induced fluorescence (LIF) detection, battery, system control, on-line data acquisition, processing, storage, and display modules. A strategy of minimalist miniaturization combining minimal system design and low-cost system construction was adopted to achieve the instrument miniaturization with extremely low cost, which is differing from the current microfabrication strategy used in most reported miniaturized CE systems. With such a strategy, the total size of the bioanalyzer was minimized to 90 × 75 × 77 mm (length × width × height) and the instrument cost was reduced to ca.

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