小干扰RNA特异性沉默c-myc基因对人胰腺癌SW1990细胞生物学影响

目的 观察小干扰RNA(siRNA)沉默c-myc基因的表达对人胰腺癌细胞株SW1990细胞生物学影响.方法 用siRNA沉默胰腺癌SW1990细胞中c-myc基因,用实时定量反转录聚合酶链反应(RT-qPCR)及Western blot技术检测c-myc mRNA及蛋白的表达量;噻唑蓝(MTT)法检测siRNA沉默c-myc基因对SW1990细胞增殖的影响;膜联蛋白V/碘化丙锭(Annexin V/PI)双染流式细胞术检测沉默c-myc基因细胞凋亡水平;Transwell细胞迁移实验检测siRNA沉默c-myc基因对SW1990细胞迁移能力的影响.结果 靶向c-myc的特异性siRNA可以高效抑制人胰腺癌SW1990细胞c-myc基因表达,在mRNA水平(0.263±0.048)较转染对照质粒组(0.970±0.012)明显降低,c-myc蛋白质表达量及细胞增值率均较转染对照质粒组明显降低;转染后48 h c-myc siRNA组细胞凋亡率为(19.90±2.09)％,明显高于siRNA阴性对照组(4.93±0.25)％和空白对照组(4.40±0.34)％;Transwell实验结果示细胞穿膜数c-myc siRNA组[(34.3±1.2)个]较siRNA-NC组[(68.3±5.8)个]和空白组[(72.3±1.2)个]均明显降低.结论 c-myc siRNA能够显著抑制c-myc基因在人胰腺癌SW1990细胞中的表达,降低细胞的增殖和迁移能力,促进细胞的凋亡.     

单孔腹腔镜与传统腹腔镜胆囊切除术治疗效果比较

目的 探讨单孔腹腔镜(SILC)与传统腹腔镜两种术式的安全性和可行性.方法 选取胆囊疾病患者54例随机分为SILC组(n=26)和三通道腹腔镜胆囊切除术(3PLC)组(n=28).收集患者年龄、体质量、身高、体质量指数(BMI)、手术时间、疼痛分数、中途转换手术率、切口满意度评分等临床资料,并进行了12个月的随访.结果 两组患者在性别、年龄、体质量、身高和BMI方面比较差异无统计学意义(P＞0.05).SILC组手术时间长于3PLC组[(56.9 ±15.8) min比(35.2±8.7) min,P＜0.01].应用相同的麻醉药品后SILC组在术后第1天较3PLC组疼痛分数更高,总的疼痛分数两者相似,差异无统计学意义(P＞0.05).SILC组患者术后伤口并发症发生率更高,但术后疝发生率相同.SILC组切口满意度评分分数更高[(11.7±0.8)分比(10.1±1.2)分,P＜0.05].结论 SILC较3PLC治疗单纯胆道疾病安全、有效.     

Synthetic heparan sulfate standards and machine learning facilitate the development of solid-state nanopore analysis

The application of solid-state (SS) nanopore devices to single-molecule nucleic acid sequencing has been challenging. Thus, the early successes in applying SS nanopore devices to the more difficult class of biopolymer, glycosaminoglycans (GAGs), have been surprising, motivating us to examine the potential use of an SS nanopore to analyze synthetic heparan sulfate GAG chains of controlled composition and sequence prepared through a promising, recently developed chemoenzymatic route. A minimal representation of the nanopore data, using only signal magnitude and duration, revealed, by eye and image recognition algorithms, clear differences between the signals generated by four synthetic GAGs. By subsequent machine learning, it was possible to determine disaccharide and even monosaccharide composition of these four synthetic GAGs using as few as 500 events, corresponding to a zeptomole of sample. These data suggest that ultrasensitive GAG analysis may be possible using SS nanopore detection and well-characterized molecular training sets.

Glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) are linear anionic polysaccharides found on cell surfaces and in the extracellular matrix in all animals. GAGs comprise an important class of biopolymers that are ubiquitous in nature and exhibit a number of critical functional roles including biological recognition and signaling (1–3). Such processes play critical roles in physiology, such as in development and wound healing, and pathophysiology, such as cancer and infectious disease. Sulfated GAGs result from template-independent synthesis in the Golgi of animal cells (4, 5) and are polydisperse, heteropolysaccharides comprising variable disaccharide repeating units that are classified by these repeating units. Like nucleic acids, sulfated GAGs are made up of repeating units that comprise a linear sequence (Fig. 1). Unlike the nucleic acids, GAGs have far more complicated structures and number of possible sequences and they present severe challenges to both synthesis and characterization. Thus, we undertook to chemoenzymatically synthesize defined GAGs and characterize these using solid-state nanopore analysis.Open in a separate windowFig. 1.Structures of four synthetic GAG samples. Polysaccharide NSH is made up of N-sulfoglucosamine (GlcNS) and glucuronic acid (GlcA),NS2S is made up with GlcNS and 2-O-sulfo-iduronic acid (IdoA2S), NS6S is made up with 6-O-sulfo-N-sulfoheparosan (GlcNS6S) and GlcA, and NS6S2S is made up with GlcNS6S and IdoA2S.Despite their structural complexities, sulfated GAGs often contain well-defined domain structures that are responsible for their diverse biological functions, yet even this level of structural complexity poses a significant general challenge to structural analysis and sequencing. The simple, short-chain, chondroitin sulfate GAG component of bikunin has been sequenced using liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) (6). While LC-MS/MS is capable of sequencing such simple, short-chain GAGs, it is not yet able to distinguish all of the many isobaric isomers of the variably sulfated saccharide residues and uronic acid epimers commonly encountered in more structurally complex GAGs, such as heparan sulfate (HS) (7). NMR has been applied to determine GAG structures but often requires milligram amounts of samples. HS/heparin is made up of →4)-β-d-glucuronic acid (GlcA) [or α-l-iduronic acid (IdoA)] (1→4)-α-d-glucosamine (GlcN) [1→ repeating units with 2-O-sulfo (S) groups on selected uronic acid residues and 3- and/or 6-O-S and N-S or N-acetyl (Ac) group substitutions on the glucosamine residues] (Fig. 1). GAG structural analysis presents challenges beyond their chemical complexity. There are no amplification methods to detect small numbers of GAG chains, whereas nucleic acid analysis can rely on PCR. Similarly, there are few GAG-specific antibodies or aptamers (8), and no natural GAG chromophores or fluorophores (9), in contrast to the many used for protein sensing. Ultrasensitive (zeptomole) detection methods of modified GAGs, based on fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) (10), DNA bar coding (11), and dye-based nanosensors (12) have been demonstrated, but their application to sequencing is particularly challenging because of the high level of structural complexity of sulfated GAGs.Nanopore single-molecule detection is now routinely applied to DNA (13, 14) and RNA (15–17) biopolymers, and is increasingly applied to protein characterization (18–22). In brief, a nanopore is a nanofluidic channel ∼10 nm long and <100 nm in diameter, serving as the sole fluid connection between two reservoirs of electrolyte separated by an otherwise impermeable membrane (Fig. 2A). On applying a voltage across this nanopore, the passage of supporting electrolyte ions results in a “baseline,” or open-pore current, i₀. The passage of a biopolymer analyte through this nanopore disrupts the flow of supporting electrolyte ions, often as a current blockage. This temporary reduction in ionic current is called an “event,” and its magnitude (mean blockage ratio over the dwell time, ⟨f_b⟩=⟨i⟩_Td/⟨i₀⟩) and its temporal features [dwell time (Td)] (Fig. 2 B and C) depend on the size and shape of the nanopore, the biopolymer analyte, and the applied voltage and interfacial charge distributions. Indeed, the passage of DNA through engineered protein nanopore devices produces current blockages that can be applied in sequencing, and the widespread use of these commercial protein nanopore DNA sequencing devices is increasing (23, 24). Despite this success with protein nanopores, the potential benefits of (abiotic) solid-state (SS) nanopores have continued to drive development efforts. Such a transition to the freely size-tunable SS platform (25, 26), however, is vital for the application of nanopores to the characterization of branched glycans (27). Yet the use of SS nanopores in even the better-established DNA sensing regime remains challenging. The application of nanopore sensing to glycans, while promising, remains profoundly exploratory using nanopores of any kind. The transition to the SS nanopores is accompanied by significant changes in pore geometry, chemistry, characteristics, and potential analyte–pore interactions and sensing modalities, so that there is a critical need for studies in the realm of nanopore glycomics (27, 28). For example, outcomes of early nanopore studies on a structurally simple unsulfated GAG, hyaluronan (HA, →4)- β -GlcA (1 → 3)- β -GlcNAc (1→), while providing some information on HA size does not provide definitive structural information (29, 30). SS nanopore analysis of two sulfated GAGs, heparin and a heparin contaminant, oversulfated chondroitin sulfate, using a silicon nitride SS nanopore was able to qualitatively identify these GAGs by either the magnitude or duration of characteristic current blockages (28). SS nanopore data on GAGs, analyzed using a machine-learning (ML) algorithm (i.e., a support vector machine [SVM]), distinguished heparin and chondroitin sulfate oligosaccharides and unfractionated heparin and low molecular weight heparin with >90% accuracy (31).Open in a separate windowFig. 2.Nanopore characteristics of four samples. (A) Schematic of the nanopore configuration. Anionic GAGs driven by electrophoresis to and through the pore with a negative applied voltage would be detected if they perturbed the open-pore current. (B) A representative current trace and events from polysaccharide NS6S2S test using an ∼6-nm-diameter nanopore. Measurements were collected using a −150-mV applied-voltage (details in Results and Discussion, and Materials and Methods) (C) Scatter plots of dwell time vs. current blockage ratio for four polysaccharides. To remove the bias of event numbers in human image recognition, all plots contain only the first 2,475 events. (D) PCA visualization of the embedded images from the four unique GAGs. The blue circles and region represent NSH, the red X and region represents NS2S, the green triangle and region represents NS6S, and the brown cross and region represents NS6S2S. The algorithm clusters signals from each GAG based on scatter plot images. Each insert shows one 500-events image from each sample class. All 500-events images are in SI Appendix, Fig. S12.Nanopore studies on GAGs, and glycans more broadly, have been severely limited by the lack of a library of structurally defined standards. The uniformity of sulfated GAGs prepared from animal sources is difficult to control and exhibits significant sequence heterogeneity and polydispersity (32). HS is particularly problematic as even for a small HS hexasaccharide, composed of an IdoA/GlcA:GlcNS/GlcNAc sequence with 12 available sites for random sulfation, there are 32,768 possible sequences. Recently, chemoenzymatic synthesis has made inroads in the preparation of high-purity sulfated HS GAGs from heparosan (→4)- β -GlcA (1→4)- β -GlcNAc (1→) (33). HS GAGs of approximately the same chain length and polydispersity and having a single repeating disaccharide unit (SI Appendix, Table S1) including, NSH (→4)- β -GlcA (1→4)- β -GlcNS (1→), NS2S (→4)-α α -IdoA2S (1 → 4)- β -GlcNS (1→), NS6S (→4)- β -GlcA (1→4)- β -GlcNS6S(1→)), NS6S2S (→4)- α -IdoA2S (1→4)- β -GlcNS6S (1→) have been prepared (see Materials and Methods and ref. 34) (Fig. 1). Here we use our recently developed synthetic technique, which has proven difficult to benchmark, in conjunction with a nanopore technique, which has only just begun to be applied to glycomics and has been severely challenged by the lack of available high-quality samples, to develop a fully integrated approach for the nanopore analysis of complex carbohydrates.     

Mechanisms of acute gain and late lumen loss after atherectomy in different preintervention arterial remodeling patterns

The main mechanism of restenosis after directional coronary atherectomy (DCA) remains obscure. We investigated mechanisms of restenosis after DCA in different coronary artery remodeling patterns. DCA was performed in 51 de novo lesions. The lesions were evaluated by intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) before, immediately after, and 6 months after the procedure. According to the IVUS findings before DCA, we classified the lesions into the following 3 groups: (1) positive (n = 10), (2) intermediate (n = 25), and (3) negative (n = 16) remodeling. We measured lumen area, vessel area, and plaque area using IVUS before DCA, immediately after DCA, and at follow-up. Lumen area increase after DCA was mainly due to plaque area reduction in the positive and intermediate remodeling groups (90 plus minus 15% and 80 plus minus 25% increase in lumen area, respectively), whereas that in the negative remodeling group was due to both plaque area reduction (57 plus minus 22% increase in lumen area) and vessel area enlargement (43 plus minus 33% increase in lumen area). The plaque area increase correlated strongly with late lumen area loss in the positive and intermediate remodeling groups (r = 0.884, p <0.001; r = 0.626, p <0.001, respectively), but the decrease in vessel area was not correlated with lumen area loss. In contrast, both an increase in plaque area and a decrease in vessel area were correlated with late lumen area loss (r = 0.632, p = 0.009; r = 0.515, p = 0.041) in the negative remodeling group. Coronary artery restenosis after atherectomy was primarily due to an increase in plaque in the positive and/or intermediate remodeling groups. However, in the negative remodeling group, late lumen loss might have been caused by both an increase in plaque and vessel shrinkage.     

Multiple genetic modifications of the erythromycin polyketide synthase to produce a library of novel "unnatural" natural products

The structures of complex polyketide natural products, such as erythromycin, are programmed by multifunctional polyketide synthases (PKSs) that contain modular arrangements of functional domains. The colinearity between the activities of modular PKS domains and structure of the polyketide product portends the generation of novel organic compounds-"unnatural" natural products-by genetic manipulation. We have engineered the erythromycin polyketide synthase genes to effect combinatorial alterations of catalytic activities in the biosynthetic pathway, generating a library of >50 macrolides that would be impractical to produce by chemical methods. The library includes examples of analogs with one, two, and three altered carbon centers of the polyketide products. The manipulation of multiple biosynthetic steps in a PKS is an important milestone toward the goal of producing large libraries of unnatural natural products for biological and pharmaceutical applications.     

Amplification of genes encoding human myeloid membrane antigens after DNA-mediated gene transfer

Spontaneous amplification of genes encoding two different human myeloid surface antigens was observed after DNA-mediated gene transfer of cellular DNA from the human myeloid cell line HL-60 into NIH-3T3 mouse fibroblasts. Transformed recipient cells with highly amplified expression of either of two donor membrane polypeptides, gp150 or p67, were isolated with a fluorescence-activated cell sorter (FACS), using monoclonal antibodies specific for human myeloid cells. Immunoprecipitation of enzymatically radioiodinated polypeptides from the surface of transformed NIH-3T3 cells confirmed that expression of these proteins was amplified tenfold to 20-fold in comparison to their expression on human myeloid cell lines. The cellular DNA of cloned secondary and tertiary transformants expressing high levels of gp150 and p67 contained amplified sets of DNA restriction fragments that hybridized with human repetitive DNA sequences. Cytogenetic analysis of subclones overexpressing gp150 revealed extrachromosomal double minutes (DMs), whose presence correlated with the unstable expression of the membrane polypeptide. Human sequences in gp150-positive clones did not localize to chromosomes, consistent with their association with extrachromosomal DMs. By contrast, p67-positive subclones stably expressed the antigen, and in situ hybridization to metaphase spreads demonstrated that amplified human DNA sequences were integrated into a specific marker chromosome. Cytogenetic analysis of the parental NIH- 3T3 subclone used in these studies disclosed DMs in a low percentage of metaphases, suggesting that the recipient cells have a propensity for amplifying donor DNA.