Parameritannin A-2 from Urceola huaitingii enhances doxorubicin-induced mitochondria-dependent apoptosis by inhibiting the PI3K/Akt, ERK1/2 and p38 pathways in gastric cancer cells.

Parameritannin A-2 (PA-2) is a natural product extracted from the stems of the plant Urceola huaitingii. Our previous studies have shown that PA-2 exhibits significant synergistic anticancer effects with doxorubicin (DOX) in HGC27 gastric cancer cell lines. Here we report that our isobolographic analysis confirms the synergistic cytotoxic effects of PA-2 and DOX in HGC27 cells.

Identification of molecular biomarkers for the diagnosis of gastric cancer and lymph-node metastasis.

Background And Objective: Biomarkers are important tools for prompt diagnosis of cancer. This study aimed to identify reliable biomarkers for clinical applications in the diagnosis of gastric cancer and lymph-node (LN) metastasis.

Methods: Between 1 December 2014 and 31 December 2015, we prospectively collected samples of gastric-cancer tissues, corresponding matched-pair normal gastric mucosa, and their peri-gastric metastatic and non-metastatic LNs to identify quantitatively reliable genes using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction.

Local structural alignment of RNA with affine gap model.

Background: Predicting new non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) of a family can be done by aligning the potential candidate with a member of the family with known sequence and secondary structure. Existing tools either only consider the sequence similarity or cannot handle local alignment with gaps.

Results: In this paper, we consider the problem of finding the optimal local structural alignment between a query RNA sequence (with known secondary structure) and a target sequence (with unknown secondary structure) with the affine gap penalty model.