Synergistic Effects of APOE and CLU May Increase the Risk of Alzheimer's Disease: Acceleration of Atrophy in the Volumes and Shapes of the Hippocampus and Amygdala.

Background: The volume loss of the hippocampus and amygdala in non-demented individuals has been reported to increase the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD). Many neuroimaging genetics studies mainly focused on the individual effects of APOE and CLU on neuroimaging to understand their neural mechanisms, whereas their synergistic effects have been rarely studied.

Objective: To assess whether APOE and CLU have synergetic effects, we investigated the epistatic interaction and combined effects of the two genetic variants on morphological degeneration of hippocampus and amygdala in the non-demented elderly at baseline and 2-year follow-up.

[Impacts of climate and land use change on water and sediment load in the Northwest arid region, China: With Xiaonanchuan River Basin as a case.].

Understanding regional water and sediment transport patterns and their responses to climate and land use changes can provide a theoretical basis for the prevention and control of soil erosion, and is an important prerequisite for the integrated development of land and water resources. Based on monthly monitoring meteorological, runoff, and sediment data from 1963 to 2013, combined with the land use data in the 1980s and 2000 and NDVI data, using the Mann-Kendall trend analysis and abrupt change test method, we systematically analyzed the long-term variations of the climate, runoff and sediment transport, with the changes of land use and vegetation coverage being identified in the Xiaonanchuan (XNC) River basin, a typical watershed in the Northwest arid region. Based on the analysis of single element change, the impacts of climate and land use change on water and sediment transport were quantified by the multiple linear regression analysis.

[Toxoplasma gondii Infection in HIV-infected Individuals in Henan Province].

Genomic DNA was extracted from 1 038 peripheral blood samples from HIV-infected individuals in Henan Province. One-step single-tube nested PCR was performed to amplify the 529 bp repeating sequences of Toxoplasma gondii. Of the 1 038 samples （762 from males and 276 from females）, 66 showed positive PCR results, with a positive rate of 6.

Cancer stem cell-like side population cells in clear cell renal cell carcinoma cell line 769P.

Although cancers are widely considered to be maintained by stem cells, the existence of stem cells in renal cell carcinoma (RCC) has seldom been reported, in part due to the lack of unique surface markers. We here identified cancer stem cell-like cells with side population (SP) phenotype in five human RCC cell lines. Flow cytometry analysis revealed that 769P, a human clear cell RCC cell line, contained the largest amount of SP cells as compared with other four cell lines.