Acute Diallyl Disulfide Administration Prevents and Reveres Lipopolysaccharide-Induced Depression-Like Behaviors in Mice via Regulating Neuroinflammation and Oxido-Nitrosative Stress.

Neuroinflammation and oxidative stress play critical roles in pathogenesis of depression. Diallyl disulfide (DADS), an active compound in garlic oil, has been shown to exhibit obvious anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidative activities. Preliminary evidence indicates that depression is associated with high levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines and oxidative markers, suggesting that inhibition of neuroinflammatory response and oxidative stress may be beneficial for depression interruption.

Effects of Metformin on the Gut Microbiota in Obesity and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus.

Metformin is a first-line treatment for type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM); however, its underlying mechanism is not fully understood. Gut microbiota affect the development and progression of T2DM. In recent years, an increasing number of studies has focused on the relationship between metformin and gut microbiota, suggesting that metformin might exert part of its hypoglycemic effect through these microbes.

miR-219a-1 inhibits colon cancer cells proliferation and invasion by targeting .

Colon cancer is the third most common cancer worldwide. Many miRNAs have been reported to be involved in colon cancer progression. However, there are only a few studies on the role of miR-219a-1 in colon cancer, and the molecular mechanisms involved remain unclear.

Methylation-Mediated Silencing of MicroRNA-497 Promotes Breast Cancer Progression Through Up-Regulation of Mucin1.

Background: Potential anti-tumor effects of microRNA-497 (miR-497) have been highlighted in various malignancies including breast cancer. However, little is known about the function of miR-497 and its putative target mucin1 (MUC1) in breast cancer. The present study explored how miR-497 regulates breast cancer progression in a MUC1-dependent manner.

Elevating microRNA-1-3p shuttled by cancer-associated fibroblasts-derived extracellular vesicles suppresses breast cancer progression and metastasis by inhibiting GLIS1.

Cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) play supporting roles in tumor progression by releasing microvesicles that transmit oncogenic cargoes. Indeed, extracellular vesicles (EVs) have emerged as important vehicles to deliver proteins, messenger RNAs (mRNAs), and microRNAs (miRs) between cells. In this study, we aimed to outline the role and function of CAFs-derived EVs carrying miR-1-3p in breast cancer.

Facile synthesis of Ca-crosslinked sodium alginate/graphene oxide hybrids as electro- and pH-responsive drug carrier.

The design of stimuli-responsive drug carrier for controlled drug release is of significant importance in pharmaceutics, medicine and biology. Here, sodium alginate (SA) was integrated with graphene oxide (GO) by using Ca as the crosslinker. The resultant SA-Ca-GO composites were freeze-dried to produce SA-Ca-GO hybrids, which were then examined by Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectrometry, field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM).

Potential toxicity of nanopolystyrene on lifespan and aging process of nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.

In the environment, nanoplastic particles, such as nanopolystyrene, potentially cause toxicity on organisms at various aspects. We here employed endpoints of lifespan and aging-related phenotypes to further investigate the possible long-term effects of nanopolystyrene (100 nm) in Caenorhabditis elegans. After exposure from L1-larvae to adult day-3, nanopolystyrene at high concentrations (100 and 1000 μg/L) reduced the lifespan.

Nanopolystyrene-induced microRNAs response in Caenorhabditis elegans after long-term and lose-dose exposure.

microRNAs (miRNAs) usually act post-transcriptionally to suppress the expression of many targeted genes. However, the response of miRNAs to nanoplastics is still unclear. We here employed Caenorhabditis elegans to investigate the response of miRNAs to 100 nm nanopolystyrene at a predicted environmental concentration (1 μg/L).

LncRNA HIF1A-AS1 contributes to ventricular remodeling after myocardial ischemia/reperfusion injury by adsorption of microRNA-204 to regulating SOCS2 expression.

: Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) serve pivotal roles in heart disease, while the role of lncRNA hypoxia-inducible factor 1α-antisense RNA 1 (HIF1A-AS1) is rarely mentioned. Therefore, the objective of this study was to investigate the mechanism of lncRNA HIF1A-AS1 regulating suppressor of cytokine signaling 2 (SOCS2) expression by adsorption of microRNA-204 (miR-204) on ventricular remodeling after myocardial ischemia-reperfusion (I/R) injury in mice. : The mouse model of I/R was established by left coronary artery occlusion.

Synergistic antitumor effect of combined paclitaxel with FEN1 inhibitor in cervical cancer cells.

Studies on cervical cancer are urgently required to improve clinical outcomes. As a major anticancer drug for cervical cancer, paclitaxel has been used for many years in clinical therapy but its therapeutic efficacy is limited by common obstacle from cancer cells. The enhanced DNA repair pathways of cancer cells have been proved to survive DNA damage induced by chemotherapeutic drug.

CPredictor3.0: detecting protein complexes from PPI networks with expression data and functional annotations.

Background: Effectively predicting protein complexes not only helps to understand the structures and functions of proteins and their complexes, but also is useful for diagnosing disease and developing new drugs. Up to now, many methods have been developed to detect complexes by mining dense subgraphs from static protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks, while ignoring the value of other biological information and the dynamic properties of cellular systems.

Results: In this paper, based on our previous works CPredictor and CPredictor2.

A new method for enhancer prediction based on deep belief network.

Background: Studies have shown that enhancers are significant regulatory elements to play crucial roles in gene expression regulation. Since enhancers are unrelated to the orientation and distance to their target genes, it is a challenging mission for scholars and researchers to accurately predicting distal enhancers. In the past years, with the high-throughout ChiP-seq technologies development, several computational techniques emerge to predict enhancers using epigenetic or genomic features.

Fusing multiple protein-protein similarity networks to effectively predict lncRNA-protein interactions.

Background: Long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) plays important roles in many biological and pathological processes, including transcriptional regulation and gene regulation. As lncRNA interacts with multiple proteins, predicting lncRNA-protein interactions (lncRPIs) is an important way to study the functions of lncRNA. Up to now, there have been a few works that exploit protein-protein interactions (PPIs) to help the prediction of new lncRPIs.

An effective approach to detecting both small and large complexes from protein-protein interaction networks.

Background: Predicting protein complexes from protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks has been studied for decade. Various methods have been proposed to address some challenging issues of this problem, including overlapping clusters, high false positive/negative rates of PPI data and diverse complex structures. It is well known that most current methods can detect effectively only complexes of size ≥3, which account for only about half of the total existing complexes.

Stem cell therapy for enhancement of bone consolidation in distraction osteogenesis: A contemporary review of experimental studies.

Objectives: Distraction osteogenesis (DO) mobilises bone regenerative potential and avoids the complications of other treatments such as bone graft. The major disadvantage of DO is the length of time required for bone consolidation. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have been used to promote bone formation with some good results.

pH-Controlled drug delivery with hybrid aerogel of chitosan, carboxymethyl cellulose and graphene oxide as the carrier.

Hybrid aerogels of chitosan (CS), carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) and graphene oxide (GO) are successfully prepared by using calcium ion (Ca) as the crosslinker. The resultant hybrid aerogels, CS/CMC/Ca/GO, are characterized by field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) and Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy. Due to the pH sensitivity of CS and CMC, pH-controlled drug delivery with CS/CMC/Ca/GO as the carrier is investigated using 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), an effective chemotherapeutic agent in the treatment of cancers, as the model drug.

Icariin protects against glucocorticoid induced osteoporosis, increases the expression of the bone enhancer DEC1 and modulates the PI3K/Akt/GSK3β/β-catenin integrated signaling pathway.

Osteoporosis is a serious public health concern worldwide. Herba epimedii has been used for centuries and even thousands of years to treat osteoporotic conditions. Icariin, a flavonol glycoside, is one of the major active ingredients.

FEN1 promotes tumor progression and confers cisplatin resistance in non-small-cell lung cancer.

Lung cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer mortality worldwide. The therapeutic effect of chemotherapy is limited due to the resistance of cancer cells, which remains a challenge in cancer therapeutics. In this work, we found that flap endonuclease 1 (FEN1) is overexpressed in lung cancer cells.

Selecting high-quality negative samples for effectively predicting protein-RNA interactions.

Background: The identification of Protein-RNA Interactions (PRIs) is important to understanding cell activities. Recently, several machine learning-based methods have been developed for identifying PRIs. However, the performance of these methods is unsatisfactory.

Screening lifespan-extending drugs in Caenorhabditis elegans via label propagation on drug-protein networks.

Background: One of the most challenging tasks in the exploration of anti-aging is to discover drugs that can promote longevity and delay the incidence of age-associated diseases of human. Up to date, a number of drugs, including some antioxidants, metabolites and synthetic compounds, have been found to effectively delay the aging of nematodes and insects.

Results: We proposed a label propagation algorithm on drug-protein network to infer drugs that can extend the lifespan of C.

Inferring new indications for approved drugs via random walk on drug-disease heterogenous networks.

Background: Since traditional drug research and development is often time-consuming and high-risk, there is an increasing interest in establishing new medical indications for approved drugs, referred to as drug repositioning, which provides a relatively low-cost and high-efficiency approach for drug discovery. With the explosive growth of large-scale biochemical and phenotypic data, drug repositioning holds great potential for precision medicine in the post-genomic era. It is urgent to develop rational and systematic approaches to predict new indications for approved drugs on a large scale.

miR-361-5p inhibits hepatocellular carcinoma cell proliferation and invasion by targeting VEGFA.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play important roles in the pathogenesis of many types of cancers by negatively regulating gene expression at posttranscriptional level. Here, we found that miR-361-5p is down-regulated in 135 patients with HCV-related hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Moreover, the expressions of miR-361-5p were highly correlated with VEGFA in these HCC patients.

Function of RSKS-1-AAK-2-DAF-16 signaling cascade in enhancing toxicity of multi-walled carbon nanotubes can be suppressed by mir-259 activation in Caenorhabditis elegans.

Caenorhabditis elegans is an important non-mammalian alternative assay model for toxicological study. Previous study has indicated that exposure to multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) dysregulated the transcriptional expression of mir-259. In this study, we examined the molecular basis for mir-259 in regulating MWCNTs toxicity in nematodes.

OGG1 is essential in oxidative stress induced DNA demethylation.

DNA demethylation is an essential cellular activity to regulate gene expression; however, the mechanism that triggers DNA demethylation remains unknown. Furthermore, DNA demethylation was recently demonstrated to be induced by oxidative stress without a clear molecular mechanism. In this manuscript, we demonstrated that 8-oxoguanine DNA glycosylase-1 (OGG1) is the essential protein involved in oxidative stress-induced DNA demethylation.