The physicians and nurses in the intensive care unit often discuss about withdrawing or withholding life-support therapy of critical ill patients with them or their family members.In this article,we expatiate on the importance,approach,agendas and medical ethical issues of the communication about end-of-life care between clinicians and families.

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is one of the common techniques in molecular biology, which can amplify nucleic acids through the cycle of denaturation, annealing and extension. Based on the principle of common PCR, rapid PCR is to realize the amplification of nucleic acids in less time without affecting the specificity, sensitivity and fidelity of the reaction. A lot of research work in this field has been going on in recent years. This article will make a review of the development of rapid PCR with emphases on the improvement of DNA polymerase, the choice of additives and the improvement of thermocyclers.

In pregnant women,positive rate of thyroid peroxidase antibody(TPOAb) is approximately 3%~10%.It is still controversial whether thyroid antibody positive rate is higher in women undergoing artificial assistant reproductive technologies.TAI might have a negative effect on pregnant outcome,which has been proved in different groups of women.Intravenous immunoglobulin,thyroxin replacement therapy and selenium therapy have been used for TAI intervention.More evidence is needed to demonstrate mechanism and evaluate effect for each therapy.

Objective To investigate the etiology and prognostic factors of acute kidney injury (AKI) in pediatric patients . Methods The clinical data of children patients with AKI in this hospital ,including the clinical features ,causes and outcomes ,were retrospectively analyzed .The relationship between the risk factors and prognosis was analyzed .Results Infants were dominated by the prerenal factors and the other age groups were dominated by the renal factors .The univariate analysis revealed that the AKI stage ,etiology ,mechanical ventilation ,sepsis/septic shock ,MODS ,acidosis ,creatinine initial value ,creatinine peak value and serum potassium were the factors affecting prognosis .The Logistic regression analysis showed that mechanical ventilation ,MODS and sep-sis/septic shock were the independent risk factors affecting prognosis .Conclusion The etiology of AKI in children is diverse and its distribution has the age characteristics .Mechanical ventilation ,MODS and sepsis/septic shock are the independent risk factors af-fecting prognosis .The early diagnosis and the active treatment conduces to improve prognosis .

Post-operative recurrence and metastasis remain the leading causes of death for patients with gastric cancer. The major determinants of recurrence and metastasis are the biological characteristics of cancer cells and the immunological status of the patients. In recent years, due to the target-specificity, biotherapy has yielded efficacious responses in diverse clinical applications for cancer treatment, partially for the treatment of recurrence and metastasis of gastric cancer. However, because of the high diversities in clinical manifestations, patients' condition, and tumor's characteristics, there is no ideal strategy of biotherapy established for the prevention and treatment of recurrence and metastasis in gastric cancer. Therefore, a lot of work need to be done in basic research and clinical trial to make the biotherapy effective in treatment of gastric cancer recurrence.
Biological Therapy ; Humans ; Neoplasm Metastasis ; Neoplasm Recurrence, Local ; Stomach Neoplasms ; pathology ; therapy ; Treatment Outcome

Humans ; Liver Neoplasms ; metabolism ; pathology

Formation of malignant tumor originating from normal healthy cell is a multistep process including genetic and epigenetic lesions. Previous studies of cell line model systems displayed that early important epigenetic events happened in stepwise fashion prior to cell immortalization. Once these epigenetic alterations are integrated into chromatin, they will perform vertical propagation through cell subculture. Hence, status of epigenetics is dramatically important in maintaining of cell identity. Histone modification is another factor of epigenetic alterations during human oncogenesis. Histones, one of main components of chromatin, can be modified post-translationally. Histone tail modifications are regulated by corresponding modification enzymes. This review focuses on the description of relationship between the main sites of histone modification and oncogenesis.

Adult ; Decompression, Surgical ; methods ; Endoscopy ; Humans ; Male ; Middle Aged ; Optic Nerve ; surgery ; Optic Nerve Injuries ; surgery ; Young Adult

A secretive expression vector of Pichia pastoris system which can be used for the direct cloning of PCR products was constructed,and was verified through the expression of recombinant cellobiohydrolase II in Pichia pastoris.A randomly selected fragment was amplified with properly designed primers by PCR.The XhoI and Eam1105Ⅰ restriction sites were included in the 5'end of the fragment,and the Eam1105Ⅰ and XbaI restriction sites were included in its 3'end.The PCR amplified product was inserted into the P.pastoris expression plasmid pPICZ?A through XhoI and XbaI restriction sites and the resultant plasmid was digested with Eam1105Ⅰ,and lastly the big fragment was recovered,generating the P.pastoris expressive Tvector pPICZ?T.Then the cellobiohydrolase II of T.reesei was successfully expressed in P.pastoris with this expressive Tvector.Such results indicated that the constructed expression Tvector was convenient for PCR product cloning,and was effective for heterologous protein expression in P.pastoris.On the other hand,the application of the expression Tvector avoided the introduction of additional amino acids at the Nterminus of the expressed protein,which generally occurred when normal expression vectors were used in secretive expression system.

It is well documented that altered biosynthesis of cell surface N-linked oligosaccharides is associated with the transformed cells and tumors.N-acetylglucosaminyltransferase Ⅱ(GnT-II;EC 2.4.1.143)is a medial Golgi enzyme that catalyses the incorporation of a GlcNAc residue in ?-1,2 linkage to the Man-?-1,6 arm of the N-glycan core.This is an essential step in the biosynthetic pathway leading from hybrid to complex N-glycans.Because functional GnT-Ⅱ is an prerequisite of N-Acetylglucosaminyltransferase V performance,It was speculated that GnT-Ⅱ was involved in cancer development and progression.The expression of GnT-Ⅱ in mouse breast cancer cells 67NR and 4T1 which have different behavior of metastasis was analysed using RT-PCR.The amounts of GnT-Ⅱ in the highly metastatic cell 4T1 increased to 1.53 times of the lowly metastatic cell 67NR.To determine the association of GnT-Ⅱ with tumor progression,the GnT-Ⅱ encoding gene was amplified with RT-PCR and cloned into retrovirus vector pMSCV,resulting in pMSCV-GnT-Ⅱ.The recombinant plasmid was transfected into 4T1 and the transfected cells were selected in the medium containing puromycin,which were harvested to detect the adhesion ability to fibronection and the migration potential by transwell system.The cell adhesion to fibronectin was weakened by 67% and migration potential was increased by 82%.The data indicates that GnT-Ⅱ mediates cell adhesion and migration,thus may play an important role in cancer metastasis.