Roles and mechanisms of circular RNA in respiratory system cancers.

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) constitute a class of endogenous non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) that lack a 5'-ended cap and 3'-ended poly (A) tail and form a closed ring structure with covalent bonds. Due to its special structure, circRNA is resistant to Exonuclease R (RNaseR), making its distribution in the cytoplasm quite rich. Advanced high-throughput sequencing and bioinformatics methods have revealed that circRNA is highly conserved, stable, and disease- and tissue-specific.

Graph Regulation Network for Point Cloud Segmentation.

In point cloud, some regions typically exist nodes from multiple categories, i.e., these regions have both homophilic and heterophilic nodes.

[Guiqi Yiyuan Ointment protects rat left lung from bystander effect of right lung injury induced by ~(12)C~(6+) beam].

This study observed the effects of Guiqi Yiyuan Ointment(GQYY) on the left lung subjecting to bystander effect of right lung injury induced by ~(12)C~(6+) beam in rats and decipher the underlying mechanism from NOD-like receptor protein 3(NLRP3)/apoptosis-associated speck-like protein containing a CARD(ASC)/cysteinyl aspartate specific proteinase-1(caspase-1) pathway. Wistar rats were randomized into 7 groups: blank, model, inhibitor [200 mg·kg~(-1), N-acetylcysteine(NAC)], western drug [140 mg·kg~(-1) amifostine(AMI)], and high-, medium-, and low-dose(4.8, 2.

Animal Models of Kidney Disease: Challenges and Perspectives.

Kidney disease is highly prevalent and affects approximately 850 million people worldwide. It is also associated with high morbidity and mortality, and current therapies are incurable and often ineffective. Animal models are indispensable for understanding the pathophysiology of various kidney diseases and for preclinically testing novel remedies.

Long and Short-Range Dependency Graph Structure Learning Framework on Point Cloud.

Graph convolutional neural networks can effectively process geometric data and thus have been successfully used in point cloud data representation. However, existing graph-based methods usually adopt the K-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm to construct graphs, which may not be optimal for point cloud analysis tasks, owning to the solution of KNN is independent of network training. In this paper, we propose a novel graph structure learning convolutional neural network (GSLCN) for multiple point cloud analysis tasks.

Protective effect of quercetin on lung epithelial cell bystander-effect in the conditioned medium model of lung cancer metastasis induced by radiation.

To investigate the protective effect of Quercetin (Que) on lung epithelial cells (BEAS-2B) induced bystander effect (RIBE) after heavy ion irradiation of A549 cells. A549 cells were irradiated with 2 Gy X heavy ion rays to obtain a conditioned medium. BEAS-2B was incubated with a conditioned medium or Que.

[Mechanism of heat-clearing prescriptions in alleviating type 2 diabetes mellitus:a review].

Type 2 diabetes mellitus(T2DM), a common chronic metabolic disease, is often accompanied by internal heat syndrome. Heat-clearing prescriptions are widely used to treat different heat syndromes of T2DM from the aspects of clearing stagnant heat, excess heat, damp heat, phlegm heat, and heat toxin, demonstrating remarkable effects. The mechanism of blood sugar-lowering agents has always been a hotspot of research.

Single-cell transcriptomic analysis highlights origin and pathological process of human endometrioid endometrial carcinoma.

Endometrial cancers are complex ecosystems composed of cells with distinct phenotypes, genotypes, and epigenetic states. Current models do not adequately reflect oncogenic origin and pathological progression in patients. Here we use single-cell RNA sequencing to profile cells from normal endometrium, atypical endometrial hyperplasia, and endometrioid endometrial cancer (EEC), which altogether represent the step-by-step development of endometrial cancer.

Modeling Human Organ Development and Diseases With Fetal Tissue-Derived Organoids.

Recent advances in human organoid technology have greatly facilitated the study of organ development and pathology. In most cases, these organoids are derived from either pluripotent stem cells or adult stem cells for the modeling of developmental events and tissue homeostasis. However, due to the lack of human fetal tissue references and research model, it is still challenging to capture early developmental changes and underlying mechanisms in human embryonic development.

GUIDE: Training Deep Graph Neural Networks via Guided Dropout Over Edges.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have made great progress in graph-based semi-supervised learning (GSSL). However, most existing GNNs are confronted with the oversmoothing issue that limits their expressive ability. A key factor that leads to this problem is the excessive aggregation of information from other classes when updating the node representation.

Cell-in-cell structure mediates in-cell killing suppressed by CD44.

Penetration of immune cells into tumor cells was believed to be immune-suppressive via cell-in-cell (CIC) mediated death of the internalized immune cells. We unexpectedly found that CIC formation largely led to the death of the host tumor cells, but not the internalized immune cells, manifesting typical features of death executed by NK cells; we named this "in-cell killing" which displays the efficacy superior to the canonical way of "kiss-killing" from outside. By profiling isogenic cells, CD44 on tumor cells was identified as a negative regulator of "in-cell killing" via inhibiting CIC formation.

Modeling Human Thyroid Development by Fetal Tissue-Derived Organoid Culture.

Euthyroidism is of profound importance for lifetime health. However, the early diagnosis or therapeutics of thyroid developmental defects has not been established, mainly due to limited understanding of human thyroid development and a lack of recapitulating research model. Herein, the authors elaborate the cell atlas and potential regulatory signaling of the evolution of heterogeneous thyrocyte population from 12 to 16 gestational weeks.

Proteomics and Organoid Culture Reveal the Underlying Pathogenesis of Hashimoto's Thyroiditis.

Hashimoto's thyroiditis (HT) is an autoimmune disease, and its incidence continues to rise. Although scientists have studied this disease for many years and discovered the potential effects of various proteins in it, the specific pathogenesis is still not fully comprehended. To understand HT and translate this knowledge to clinical applications, we took the mass spectrometric analysis on thyroid tissue fine-needle puncture from HT patients and healthy people in an attempt to make a further understanding of the pathogenesis of HT.

p53-dependent elimination of aneuploid mitotic offspring by entosis.

Entosis was proposed to promote aneuploidy and genome instability by cell-in-cell mediated engulfment in tumor cells. We reported here, in epithelial cells, that entosis coupled with mitotic arrest functions to counteract genome instability by targeting aneuploid mitotic progenies for engulfment and elimination. We found that the formation of cell-in-cell structures associated with prolonged mitosis, which was sufficient to induce entosis.

Semisupervised Laplace-Regularized Multimodality Metric Learning.

Distance metric learning, which aims at learning an appropriate metric from data automatically, plays a crucial role in the fields of pattern recognition and information retrieval. A tremendous amount of work has been devoted to metric learning in recent years, but much of the work is basically designed for training a linear and global metric with labeled samples. When data are represented with multimodal and high-dimensional features and only limited supervision information is available, these approaches are inevitably confronted with a series of critical problems: 1) naive concatenation of feature vectors can cause the curse of dimensionality in learning metrics and 2) ignorance of utilizing massive unlabeled data may lead to overfitting.

Generation of liver bipotential organoids with a small-molecule cocktail.

Understanding the mechanism of how cholangiocytes (liver ductal cells) are activated upon liver injury and specified to hepatocytes would permit liver regenerative medicine. Here we achieved long-term in vitro expansion of mouse liver organoids by modulating signaling pathways with a combination of three small-molecule compounds. CHIR-99021, blebbistatin, and forskolin together maintained the liver organoids in bipotential stage with both cholangiocyte- and hepatocyte-specific gene expression profiles and enhanced capacity for further hepatocyte differentiation.

Gene manipulation in liver ductal organoids by optimized recombinant adeno-associated virus vectors.

Understanding the mechanism of how liver ductal cells (cholangiocytes) differentiate into hepatocytes would permit liver-regenerative medicine. Emerging liver ductal organoids provide an system to investigate cholangiocyte-to-hepatocyte differentiation. However, as current gene manipulation methods require organoid dissociation into single cells and have only low efficiency, it is difficult to dissect specific gene functions in these organoids.

Weighted Graph Embedding-Based Metric Learning for Kinship Verification.

Given a group photograph, it is interesting and useful to judge whether the characters in it share specific kinship relation, such as father-daughter, father-son, mother-daughter, or mother-son. Recently, facial image-based kinship verification has attracted wide attention in computer vision. Some metric learning algorithms have been developed for improving kinship verification.

Expression profiling identified IL-8 as a regulator of homotypic cell-in-cell formation.

Homotypic cell-in-cell (CIC) structures forming between cancer cells were proposed to promote tumor evolution via entosis, a nonapoptotic cell death process. However, the mechanisms underlying their formation remained poorly understood. We performed a microarray analysis to identify genes associated with homotypic CIC formation.

CDKN2A inhibits formation of homotypic cell-in-cell structures.

Cell-in-cell (CIC) structures, characterized by enclosure of one or more cells within another cell, were extensively documented in human cancers. Although elevated CIC formation was found in cancers with CDKN2A inactivation, a causal link between them remains to be established. We reported here that inhibiting CDKN2A expression effectively promoted homotypic CIC formation, whereas ectopic overexpression of p16INK4a or p14ARF, two proteins encoded by CDKN2A gene, significantly suppressed CIC formation in MCF7 cells.

Design, Synthesis, and Biological Evaluation of Axitinib Derivatives.

Axitinib is an approved kinase inhibitor for the therapy of advanced metastatic renal cell carcinoma (RCC). It prevents angiogenesis, cellular adhesion, and induces apoptosis of cancer cells. Here, nine axitinib derivatives were designed by replacing the C=C moiety with the N=N group, and the substituted benzene or pyrrole analogs were considered to replace the pyridine ring.

Cholesterol inhibits entotic cell-in-cell formation and actomyosin contraction.

Cell-in-cell structure is prevalent in human cancer, and associated with several specific pathophysiological phenomena. Although cell membrane adhesion molecules were found critical for cell-in-cell formation, the roles of other membrane components, such as lipids, remain to be explored. In this study, we attempted to investigate the effects of cholesterol and phospholipids on the formation of cell-in-cell structures by utilizing liposome as a vector.