Project description:Stroke places a huge burden on society today, and great of studies were devoted for seeking safe and effective therapeutic strategy to improve the prognosis of stroke. Plasma exosome has exhibited its therapeutic potential against ischemia and reperfusion injury via ameliorating inflammation. To enhance therapeutic potential in patients with ischemic injury, we isolated exosomes from melatonin pretreated rat plasma and assessed the neurological protective effect in a rat model of focal cerebral ischemia. Treatment with melatonin enhanced plasma exosome therapeutic effect against ischemia induced inflammatory response and inflammasome mediated pyroptosis. In addition, we confirmed ischemic stroke induced pyroptotic cell death mainly occurred in microglia, while administration of melatonin treated exosome further effectively decreased infract volume and improved function recovery via regulation of TLR-4/NF-κB signaling pathway. Finally, the altered miRNAs profile in melatonin treated plasma exosomes demonstrated the regulatory mechanisms. This study suggests plasma exosome with melatonin pretreatment might be a more effective strategy for patients with ischemic brain injury. Further exploration of key molecules in plasma exosome may devote more therapeutic value for cerebral ischemic injury.
Project description:The experiment at three long-term agricultural experimental stations (namely the N, M and S sites) across northeast to southeast China was setup and operated by the Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences. This experiment belongs to an integrated project (The Soil Reciprocal Transplant Experiment, SRTE) which serves as a platform for a number of studies evaluating climate and cropping effects on soil microbial diversity and its agro-ecosystem functioning. Soil transplant serves as a proxy to simulate climate change in realistic climate regimes. Here, we assessed the effects of soil type, soil transplant and landuse changes on soil microbial communities, which are key drivers in Earth’s biogeochemical cycles.
Project description:To study the soil mcirobial functional communities and the nutrient cycles couplings changes after exposure to different contaminant
Project description:Circulating TRAIL is reduced in cardiovascular disease patients and TRAIL deletion in mice exacerbates disease. The source of TRAIL and protective mechanism(s) are unclear. Monocyte TRAIL mRNA was reduced from coronary artery disease patients, strikingly associating with reduced plasma TRAIL. A strong inverse correlation between plasma TRAIL and IL-18 was observed, with IL-18 repressing monocyte TRAIL mRNA. In mice, two sources were investigated using bone-marrow (BM) transplants; TRAIL expressed only in BM (BM-TRAIL) or everywhere except BM (parenchymal-TRAIL), vs. whole-body TRAIL ablation (null-TRAIL). BM-TRAIL attenuated macrophage content and atherosclerosis. BM-derived macrophages with TRAIL deletion were more inflammatory, with impaired migration and reduced expression of cholesterol efflux, efferocytosis and nitric oxide-controlling genes. TRAIL expression also reduced islet macrophage content, but only parenchymal-TRAIL islets had improved function. Recombinant TRAIL administration stimulated insulin expression and islet mass. We propose TRAIL maintains monocyte/macrophage homeostasis and limits the progression of atherosclerosis and islet dysfunction.
Project description:The present invention relates to methods for determining soil quality, and especially soil pollution, using the invertebrate soil organism Folsomia candida also designated as springtail. Specifically, the present invention relates to a method for determining soil quality comprising: contacting Folsomia Candida with a soil sample to be analysed during a time period of 1 to 5 days; isolating said soil contacted Folsomia Candida; extracting RNA from said isolated soil contacted Folsomia Candida; determing a gene expression profile based on said extracted RNA using microarray technology; comparing said gene expression profile with a reference gene expression profile; and determing soil quality based expression level differences between said gene expression profile and said control expression profile.
Project description:Soil transplant serves as a proxy to simulate climate change in realistic climate regimes. Here, we assessed the effects of climate warming and cooling on soil microbial communities, which are key drivers in Earth’s biogeochemical cycles, four years after soil transplant over large transects from northern (N site) to central (NC site) and southern China (NS site) and vice versa. Four years after soil transplant, soil nitrogen components, microbial biomass, community phylogenetic and functional structures were altered. Microbial functional diversity, measured by a metagenomic tool named GeoChip, and phylogenetic diversity are increased with temperature, while microbial biomass were similar or decreased. Nevertheless, the effects of climate change was overridden by maize cropping, underscoring the need to disentangle them in research. Mantel tests and canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) demonstrated that vegetation, climatic factors (e.g., temperature and precipitation), soil nitrogen components and CO2 efflux were significantly correlated to the microbial community composition. Further investigation unveiled strong correlations between carbon cycling genes and CO2 efflux in bare soil but not cropped soil, and between nitrogen cycling genes and nitrification, which provides mechanistic understanding of these microbe-mediated processes and empowers an interesting possibility of incorporating bacterial gene abundance in greenhouse gas emission modeling.
Project description:The effects of two years' winter warming on the overall fungal functional gene structure in Alaskan tundra soil were studies by the GeoChip 4.2 Resuts showed that two years' winter warming changed the overall fungal functional gene structure in Alaskan tundra soil.
Project description:We investigated the toxicity of soil samples derived from a former municipal landfill site in the South of the Netherlands, where a bioremediation project is running aiming at reusing the site for recreation. Both an organic soil extract and the original soil sample was investigated using the ISO standardised Folsomia soil ecotoxicological testing and gene expression analysis. The 28 day survival/reproduction test revealed that the ecologically more relevant original soil sample was more toxic than the organic soil extract. Microarray analysis showed that the more toxic soil samples induced gene regulatory changes in twice as less genes compared to the soil extract. Consequently gene regulatory changes were highly dependent on sample type, and were to a lesser extent caused by exposure level. An important biological process shared among the two sample types was the detoxification pathway for xenobiotics (biotransformation I, II and III) suggesting a link between compound type and observed adverse effects. Finally, we were able to retrieve a selected group of genes that show highly significant dose-dependent gene expression and thus were tightly linked with adverse effects on reproduction. Expression of four cytochrome P450 genes showed highest correlation values with reproduction, and maybe promising genetic markers for soil quality. However, a more elaborate set of environmental soil samples is needed to validate the correlation between gene expression induction and adverse phenotypic effects.
Project description:Treatment of tumor progression and metastasis continues to be of major importance in the field of cancer. It is reported that cancer cells often show a pronounced sensitivity towards oxidative stress. Cold plasma offers the ability to deliver a delicate mix of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species directly into cells or tissues. Using a well-described argon plasma jet, we investigated the biological responses of plasma on tumor cell death, cell migration, and expression of adhesion-associated genes as well as cytoskeletal modifications. Using the human melanoma cancer cell line SK-Mel-147 we were able to show that plasma induced only little apoptosis but had profound effects on tumor cell motility. Plasma treatment of cells was associated with an inhibition of migration and disorganization of the actin cytoskeleton which were mediated through multiple signaling pathways, as transcriptome-wide gene analysis suggested. Specifically, changes in cell adhesion were regulated by differential expression of cell junction and cell-matrix proteins. These results provide evidence that plasma may be able to disturb the migration and adhesion in metastatic SK-Mel-147 cells. Microarrays were used to analyze and investigate the biological effects of cold plasma on human melanoma cell line SK-Mel-147. Using an argon plasma jet kinpen, regulated transcripts were analyzed and further described in Schmidt et al. (2015): M-bM-^@M-^\Human melanoma cell migration and adhesion is decreased by cold plasma treatmentM-bM-^@M-^]. A study using total RNA recovered from human SK-Mel-147, treated with cold plasma as well as H2O2-treated and untreated SK-Mel-147 controls.