Diabetes mellitus (DM) has become a major chronic disease seriously affecting human health. Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) accounts for about 90% of DM patients, which is the largest type. Approximately 25–35% of T2DM patients develop kidney disease, which not only impacts the survival rate and quality of life but also, to the family and society, are of great economic burden. Early identification of high-risk T2DM patients with kidney disease is crucial for initiating targeted prevention and treatment measures in time to reduce or delay the occurrence and progression of diabetic kidney disease. Previous studies have identified a variety of clinical predictors for the progression of renal function in T2DM patients, including proteinuria, estimated glomerular filtration rate, blood glucose, blood pressure, serum uric acid, dyslipidemia, obesity, smoking, duration of DM, age, gender, race, family history of DM, and diabetic retinopathy. Clinical prediction models based on conventional clinical indicators are instrumental in evaluating the risk of kidney disease in T2DM patients, assisting in patient risk stratification. This article systematically reviews the clinical prediction factors and prediction models associated with the progression of renal function in T2DM patients, providing a comprehensive and current reference for improved clinical assessment of the risk of renal function progression.
Background: Epstein–Barr virus (EBV) is a double-stranded DNA herpesvirus and establishes life-long infection in 95% of the world’s populations.
Main body: EBV is critically involved in multiple diseases. Aberrant signaling pathways, immune escape, and metabolic reprogramming play essential roles in EBV-mediated pathogenesis. However, the underlying mechanisms have not yet been fully elucidated. Here we reviewed recent advances on the epigenetic regulation of EBV pathogenesis, which may translate to potential therapeutic strategies in EBV-associated diseases.
Conclusion: Growing evidence has suggested that viral infections reconstruct epigenome to modulate gene expression both in the host and the virus levels.
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), with its increasing prevalence globally, is emerging as a major health challenge. Hepatocellular carcinoma cells exhibit both significant homogeneity and heterogeneity, governed by complex epigenomic regulations. Recently, numerous single-cell unimodal techniques have been used to study HCC at various levelswhich have already revealed a complex interplay at genomic, transcriptomic, spatial and epigenomic levels. However, the use of single-cell multimodal techniques combining different unimodal layers in HCC remains quite limited, necessitating further studies focusing on these methods to uncover novel markers, and mechanisms at epigenetic levels. In this commentary, we highlight how integrating multimodal approaches with epigenetic modifications can provide new insights into HCC and foster future therapeutic advancements.
The high risk of patients with chronic lung diseases in developing into lung cancer has been recognised, but the key factors driving such procedure are still barely known. Dendritic cells (DCs) as major antigen presenting cells take part in the immune response in the very upstream, and myeloid DCs regulate the inflammation in pulmonary diseases. In this article, we performed single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) analyses on DCs from pulmonary diseases.We explore the DC characteristics in chronic lung diseases, lung cancer and healthy control samples. We discover that a special type of DC, which is highly associated with inflammatory, inf-DC, is abundant in lung cancer samples. Furthermore,we find that there are about 10% patients with chronic lung diseases also has such inf- DC-rich pattern. Such proportion is consistent to the fact that about 10% chronic lung disease patients finally developed into cancer. Our findings indicate inf-DC could be a potential factor to predict the risk of chronic lung disease developing into cancer.
Background and Aims: Cancer has grabbed the attention of scientists and medical professionals all over the world much more than any other disease. In the past few decades, the medical field has improved quite a lot but progress in the path to find a solution for cancer is very less. As the popularity of invasive technologies is diminishing in cancer treatment, scientists have come up withminimally invasive or non-invasive alternatives, among which liquid biopsy, by far is the most suitable.
Methods: Liquid biopsy is used to analyse nucleic acids, subcellular components and circulating tumour cells in various biological fluids for diagnosis of cancer. It can also be used to know the efficacy of cancer drugs in a patient by analysing multiple samples.
Outcomes: Liquid biopsy is becoming standard of care as it allows biopsy of those samples in which solid tumour biopsies are not possible. The diversity of sampling procedures, such as collection of urine for urothelial carcinoma or bladder or prostate cancer and phlebotomy for other types of cancer, make liquid biopsy one of the best methods for diagnosis of cancer.
Conclusion: This review aims in discussing the several techniques used for the detection of cancer biomarkers and some clinical manifestations due to the changes in the biomarkers which are analysed by liquid biopsy.
Background: Pathological retinal neovascularization is marked by microvas-cular lesions manifested initially as endothelial cell dysfunction and metabolic disturbances. However, the regulatory mechanism guiding retinal vascular endothelial cell function remian controversial.
Main body: Previous studies have demonstarted that high glucose or oxidative stress can induce premature senescence in endothelial cells, triggering inflammatory responses within the vascular system and promoting the secretion of pro-inflammatory factors, ultimately leading to pathological angiogenesis. Endothelial cell senescence has thus become a key target for anti-angiogenic therapies.
Conclusion: This review delves into current research on the mechanisms driving senescence-induced retinal angiogenesis and highlights potential target protein pathways, aiming to provide insights for future investigations.
Most eukaryotic genes generate multiple messenger RNA (mRNA) transcript variants by alternative splicing. The incomplete annotation of gene transcripts in genomic databases can result in improper primer design, adversely affecting the reliability of gene expression measurements by reverse transcriptase quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR). Hence, we present aworkflow combining bioinformatics analyses, to select two to three evolutionarily conserved constitutive exons in rats, mice and humans as target sequences for PCR primer design, with experimental RT-PCR amplification and amplicon sequencing to confirm the expression and identity of gene transcript targets. The application of this workflow to the characterization of neurodevelopmental biomarker genes identified an unannotated exon in the rat Map2 gene, illustrating the importance of target sequence validation for the development of translational mRNA biomarkers for toxicological and biomedical studies.