骨髓基质细胞和壳聚糖/明胶共混材料生物相容性研究

目的:研究壳聚糖/明胶共混材料对离体培养的骨髓基质细胞粘附及增殖的影响,寻找骨髓基质细胞新的载体材料。方法:取2周龄幼兔的长骨采集骨髓,培养骨髓基质细胞,体外扩增1周后,种植于纯壳聚糖和壳聚糖/明胶共混材料的表面。在倒置光学显微镜、扫描电镜的辅助下,观察细胞的粘附和生长情况,种植7d后用透射电镜观察细胞功能状况,用MTT方法检测种植后2d、4d、6d、8d细胞的增殖情况。结果:壳聚糖/明胶共混材料和纯壳聚糖能促进骨髓基质细胞在材料表面粘附并保持其在机体内的形态。壳聚糖/明胶共混材料表面的骨髓基质细胞功能活跃。在材料表面和培养板表面培养的骨髓基质细胞均能持续增殖,而壳聚糖/明胶共混材料能显著促进骨髓基质细胞的增殖(P<0.01)。结论:壳聚糖/明胶共混材料保持了壳聚糖的某些生物活性,同时由于加入明胶,能促进骨髓基质细胞的增殖,可作为骨髓基质细胞的载体应用于组织工程。     

磷脂酰胆碱抗氧化效应及对遗传损伤的保护作用

磷脂酰胆碱５００ｍｇ／ｋｇ灌胃２０日可使Ｏ_３环境中的小鼠超氧化物歧化酶（ＳＯＤ）活性显著增强，血浆丙二醛（ＭＤＡ）含量及外周血正染红细胞（ＮＣＥ）微核率明显下降。结果提示：磷脂酰胆碱具有抗氧化作用及拮抗自由基造成遗传的损伤。进一步证实了自由基在微核形成中具有重要意义。     

Two antigens on zygotes and ookinetes of Plasmodium yoelii and Plasmodium berghei that are distinct targets of transmission-blocking immunity.

We have developed transmission-blocking monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) against Plasmodium yoelii 21-kDa (Pys21) and 28-kDa (Pys25) ookinete surface proteins. These MAbs block infectivity of P. yoelii to Anopheles stephensi. One MAb, 14, cross-reacted by Western blotting with a 28-kDa surface protein (Pbs25) of P. berghei ookinetes and blocked oocyst development, as assayed by direct mosquito feeds on passively immunized P. berghei-infected mice. In total, we have identified two ookinete surface proteins in P. yoelii, one of which is also present in P. berghei. The transmission-blocking activity of the anti-Pys25 MAb 4 was complete and more potent than that of the anti-Pys21 MAb 2. Moreover, Fab fragments of MAb 4 had transmission-blocking activity in mice. In comparison, Fab fragments of MAb 2 did not have detectable transmission-blocking effect, although F(ab')2 did. Furthermore, MAb 2 and MAb 4 appeared to block the in vitro formation and development of zygotes as well.     

新鲜羊膜致I型超敏反应的变应原性研究

研究新鲜人羊膜的变应原性及其致敏后发生I型超敏反应的可能性。建立豚鼠全身主动过敏实验模型。分新鲜羊膜组、新鲜蛋清组(阳性对照)和PBS液组(阴性对照),每组10只豚鼠。观察豚鼠在致敏期和激发后的反应,采用化学荧光法检测外周血组胺含量,血液流变分析系统检测4项血液流变学指标(全血高切变率黏度、全血低切变率黏度、血浆黏度、红细胞聚集指数)。致敏期间各组豚鼠的体重变化无明显差别(P>0.05);激发后羊膜组豚鼠与阴性组表现一致,无异常反应;羊膜组外周血组胺含量及4项血液流变学指标均与阴性对照无明显差别(P>0.05),与阳性对照有显著性差异(P<0.01)。经规范化无菌处理后的新鲜羊膜,一般不具有变应原性,不会引起I型超敏反应。     

莱姆病人工宿主动物模型的建立

为了建立莱姆病人工宿主模型进行实验传播研究,用从我国全沟硬蜱分离的莱姆病螺旋体Borrelia garinii CHNM4人工感染4种实验动物.结果表明,以0.1×106条/mL的剂量皮下注射3日龄昆明小鼠是比较理想的方案.由此建立的动物模型既能用作全沟硬蜱的血源动物,又能在15天内保持所感染螺旋体对全沟硬蜱的感染力,可作为人工宿主动物模型.     

PCR-based capsular serotype determination of Haemophilus influenzae strains recovered from Japanese paediatric patients with invasive infection

The serotypes of 53 isolates of Haemophilus influenzae from children with invasive infections were determined by a conventional slide agglutination test (SAT) and a recently proposed PCR-based method for serotyping H. influenzae. The PCR assay identified 47 (88.7%) type b isolates, one (1.9%) type e isolate and five (9.4%) non-typeable isolates. The only discrepancy between the methods was an isolate that was non-typeable by SAT, but was identified as serotype e by PCR. Of 41 isolates from patients with meningitis, 39 (95.1%) were type b. Of the five non-typeable isolates, three (60%) were from the blood of patients with septicaemic pneumonia and two (40%) were from the cerebrospinal fluid of patients with meningitis. None of the non-typeable isolates appeared to be a capsule-deficient mutant of an encapsulated H. influenzae strain. Overall, the study confirmed the usefulness of this PCR method for the serotyping of invasive H. influenzae isolates.     

Heat shock up-regulates TLR9 expression in human B cells through activation of ERK and NF-kappaB signal pathways

Toll-like receptors (TLRs) play a critical role in innate immunity and TLR9 is essential for CpG ODN signaling. As "dangerous signal", heat shock may regulate immune response. However, little is known about TLRs expression and signaling after heat shock. In this study, we investigated regulation of TLR9 expression and function in human B cell line RPMI8226 by heat shock. We demonstrated that TLR9 expression was up-regulated remarkably following heat shock. Coincidently, CpG ODN stimulation significantly increased IL-6 production and up-regulated expressions of MHC I, MHC II and CD86 by heat-shocked B cells. Heat shock activated ERK and NF-kappaB signal pathways, and pretreatment of B cells with specific inhibitors of ERK or NF-kappaB signal pathways inhibited heat shock-induced up-regulation of TLR9 expression. These results demonstrated that heat shock promotes TLR9 expression and signaling through activation of ERK and NF-kappaB signal pathways in B cells, suggesting that heat shock might modulate host immune response by regulating TLR expression.     

Pseudosubstrate inhibition of protein kinase PKR by swine pox virus C8L gene product

The interferon-induced protein kinase PKR is activated upon binding double-stranded RNA and phosphorylates the translation initiation factor eIF2alpha on Ser-51 to inhibit protein synthesis in virally infected cells. Swinepox virus C8L and vaccinia virus K3L gene products structurally resemble the amino-terminal third of eIF2alpha. We demonstrate that the C8L protein, like the K3L protein, can reverse the toxic effects caused by high level expression of human PKR in yeast cells. In addition, expression of either the K3L or C8L gene product was found to reverse the inhibition of reporter gene translation caused by PKR expression in mammalian cells. The inhibitory function of the K3L and C8L gene products in these assays was found to be critically dependent on residues near the carboxyl-termini of the proteins including a sequence motif shared among eIF2alpha and the C8L and K3L gene products. Thus, despite significant sequence differences both the C8L and K3L proteins function as pseudosubstrate inhibitors of PKR.     

A HIT-trapping strategy for rapid generation of reversible and conditional alleles using a universal donor

Targeted mutagenesis in model organisms is key for gene functional annotation and biomedical research. Despite technological advances in gene editing by the CRISPR-Cas9 systems, rapid and efficient introduction of site-directed mutations remains a challenge in large animal models. Here, we developed a robust and flexible insertional mutagenesis strategy, homology-independent targeted trapping (HIT-trapping), which is generic and can efficiently target-trap an endogenous gene of interest independent of homology arm and embryonic stem cells. Further optimization and equipping the HIT-trap donor with a site-specific DNA inversion mechanism enabled one-step generation of reversible and conditional alleles in a single experiment. As a proof of concept, we successfully created mutant alleles for 21 disease-related genes in primary porcine fibroblasts with an average knock-in frequency of 53.2%, a great improvement over previous approaches. The versatile HIT-trapping strategy presented here is expected to simplify the targeted generation of mutant alleles and facilitate large-scale mutagenesis in large mammals such as pigs.

Following the completion of animal genome sequencing projects, rapid and efficient mutagenesis strategies are needed for analyzing gene function and for creating human disease models. Gene trapping is a high-throughput mutagenesis strategy whereby random vector insertion can be achieved across the mouse genome. A typical gene-trap vector contains a promoter-less reporter/selection gene flanked by an upstream splice acceptor (SA) and a downstream poly(A) signal. Upon insertion into an intron of a gene, the vector both inactivates the trapped gene and enables the gene-specific expression of a reporter gene (Gossler et al. 1989; Stanford et al. 2001). To date, gene-trapping approaches have been successfully applied toward large-scale mutagenesis in mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs) and generation of gene knockout mice (Skarnes et al. 2004). The main drawback of random gene trapping is that gene-trap alleles are not specifically engineered to target genes of interest in advance. Therefore, methods to streamline the introduction of predesigned, site-specific modifications into the genome by homologous recombination would represent a significant technological advance. Previously, a hybrid approach combining gene targeting and gene trapping (targeted trapping) enabled mutation of expressed genes in mESCs with high efficiency, using a gene-trap construct flanked by homologous sequences of the target locus (Friedel et al. 2005). Also, homologous recombination is commonly used for creating conditional alleles, which is essential to avoid embryonic lethality and to study the stage- and tissue-specific functions of genes (Branda and Dymecki 2004). However, both standard gene trapping and targeted trapping are only suitable for genes expressed in embryonic stem (ES) cells. Furthermore, construction of targeting donor vectors with homology arms is labor intensive and costly, and the low efficiency of homologous recombination is also a rate-limiting step for gene targeting in mammalian genomes.Recently, by taking advantage of precise genomic double-strand breaks (DSBs) created by the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-associated protein 9 (Cas9) system (Ran et al. 2013; Doudna and Charpentier 2014; Hsu et al. 2014), homology-directed repair (HDR) efficiency was substantially enhanced (Porteus and Carroll 2005), and even donors with short homology arms (Orlando et al. 2010) or single-stranded DNA oligonucleotides (Chen et al. 2011; Quadros et al. 2017) were found to be compatible with site-specific integration. However, each targeting donor for HDR still needs to be customized with gene-specific homology sequences. Because of the lack of ES cells for certain animals such as pigs, sheep, and cattle, the genome must be edited either in a zygote embryo or in a somatic cell for somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) (Reddy et al. 2020). It is still not feasible to achieve large-scale insertional mutagenesis including conditional knockouts in these important species with random gene trapping or HDR-based methods. Also, the problem of genetic mosaicism in embryo editing remains unresolved (Mehravar et al. 2019), prompting a need for technological advances to accelerate genetic modification in somatic cells.Alternatively, the generally more efficient nonhomologous end joining (NHEJ) pathway has been exploited for site-specific insertion of exogenous DNA by simultaneous cleavage of both donor plasmid and genome using programmable nucleases (Cristea et al. 2013; Maresca et al. 2013; Brown et al. 2016; Suzuki et al. 2016; Sawatsubashi et al. 2018). In contrast to HDR-based strategies, NHEJ-mediated insertions do not require gene-specific homology arms, enabling diverse sites to be targeted with a universal donor vector. Therefore, we speculated that a gene-trap cassette could be inserted into a specific locus easily through this mechanism in any cell type.Here, by combining NHEJ-mediated knock-in and gene trapping, we developed a strategy for targeted mutagenesis, especially in somatic cells with low HDR activity, referred to as HIT-trapping. By using a universal donor, this strategy allows us to (1) create null alleles, (2) produce a fluorescent reporter signal that could potentially allow cells with null alleles to be identified very quickly, and (3) produce reversible and conditional alleles that would be very helpful to have in most animal models but are often cumbersome to create.     

Peroxisomal proliferator activated receptor-γ deficiency in a Canadian kindred with familial partial lipodystrophy type 3 (FPLD3)

Background  

Familial partial lipodystrophy (Dunnigan) type 3 (FPLD3, Mendelian Inheritance in Man [MIM] 604367) results from heterozygous mutations in PPARG encoding peroxisomal proliferator-activated receptor-γ. Both dominant-negative and haploinsufficiency mechanisms have been suggested for this condition.