Objective: To study the treatment of experimental lung metastasis by intratracheal injection of IL 18 gene recombinant adenovirus. Methods: (1)The mouse IL 18 mRNA was detected by RT PCR, the concentrations of IL 18, associated cytokines in lung lavage and blood were determined by ELISA at different times after intratracheal injection of IL 18 recombinant adenovirus. (2)The lung metastasis nodes, mouse survival period, survival rates were investigated in the treatment of experimental lung metastasis in C57BL/6 mouse model. The NK activity and CTL activity were determined by 51 Cr 4 h release method. Results: (1)The IL 18 mRNA could be detected in lung tissue 6 h after intratracheal use of IL 18 recombinant adenovirus, and the concentrations of IL 18 in lung lavage was higher than that of peripheral blood, and both IL 18 mRNA and IL 18 could not be detected in control groups. (2)Intratracheal use of IL 18 recombinant adenovirus had significant therapeutic effect on experimental lung metastasis with the results of increased CTL and NK activity, and with longer survival period and higher survival rates compared with the control groups. Conclusion: Intratracheal usage of adenovirus vector containing IL 18 gene has therapeutic effect on the lung metastasis, denoting that gene therapy of lung diseases can be done through airway directly with recombinant adenovirus.

OBJECTIVE To recognize the frontal recess cells and analyze their distributional characteristics during image navigation assisted endoscopic sinus surgery. METHODS 20 cases(39 sides)of chronic sinusitis with nasal polyps were observed in this study. The fontal recess cells and frontal sinus were opened under the endoscope and the distributional characteristics were observed and recorded, and then confirmed by the image navigation system. RESULTS Centred on frontal sinus ostium, frontal recess cells were divided into three areas: the agger nasi cell(ANC)and frontal cells(FC)are located in front of frontal sinus ostium(FS); frontal septum cells(IFSSC)and terminal cells(RT)are located at the same plane of FS; supra-ethmoidal bulla recess(SBR), frontal bulla cell(FBC)and super-obital cells(SOEC)are in the posterior area. The coincidence of identification for ANC, FCI and II, SBR, FBC and IFSSC under endoscope and image navigation is 100%, the coincidence of identification for FS is 89.7%, SOEC 80%, RT 71.4% and FC III and IV 60%. CONCLUSION The distribution of the frontal recess cells around the frontal ostium showed a fixed pattern.It would well benefit the orientation of frontal ostium and the opening of frontal sinus. Furthermore, it is significant for the orientation and opening of the frontal recess cells.

It is among the goals in metabolic engineering to construct microbial cell factories producing high-yield and high value-added target products, and an important solution is to design efficient synthetic pathway for the target products. However, due to the difference in metabolic capacity among microbial chassises, the available substrate and the yielded products are limited. Therefore, it is urgent to design related metabolic pathways to improve the production capacity. Existing metabolic engineering approaches to designing heterologous pathways are mainly based on biological experience, which are inefficient. Moreover, the yielded results are in no way comprehensive. However, systems biology provides new methods for heterologous pathway design, particularly the graph-based and constraint-based methods. Based on the databases containing rich metabolism information, they search for and uncover possible metabolic pathways with designated strategy (graph-based method) or algorithm (constraint-based method) and then screen out the optimal pathway to guide the modification of strains. In this paper, we reviewed the databases and algorithms for pathway design, and the applications in metabolic engineering and discussed the strengths and weaknesses of existing algorithms in practical application, hoping to provide a reference for the selection of optimal methods for the design of product synthesis pathway.
Algorithms ; Biosynthetic Pathways ; Metabolic Engineering ; Metabolic Networks and Pathways/genetics* ; Systems Biology

Graph-theory-based pathway analysis is a commonly used method for pathway searching in genome-scale metabolic networks. However, such searching often results in many pathways biologically infeasible due to the presence of currency metabolites (e.g. H⁺, H₂O, CO₂, ATP etc.). Several methods have been proposed to address the problem but up to now there is no well-recognized methods for processing the currency metabolites. In this study, we proposed a new method based on the function of currency metabolites for transferring of functional groups such as phosphate. We processed most currency metabolites as pairs rather than individual metabolites, and ranked the pairs based on their importance in transferring functional groups, in order to make sure at least one main metabolite link exists for any reaction. The whole process can be done automatically by programming. Comparison with existing approaches indicates that more biologically infeasible pathways were removed by our method and the calculated pathways were more reliable, which may facilitate the graph-theory-based pathway design and visualization.
Genome ; Metabolic Networks and Pathways