Aquaculture in China accounts for nearly 70% of world aquaculture production. Aquaculture, including a wide variety of freshwater and marine fishes, shellfish, crustaceans, and aquatic plants, has become one of the most vital primary industries and a center of economic activity within the local and global economies. Along with the development of aquaculture, concerns come about such problems in the industry such as aquatic pollution, disease, genetic degradation of aquaculture species, decline of comparative profitability, lack of knowledge on market risks, and financial crises. Thus, there is a need to acquire further knowledge on this industry and provide sound suggestions for its sustainable development. This review aims to identify the current state of and challenges facing the aquaculture industry in China and to provide some suggestions for its sustainable development.

Aptamers are functional single-stranded DNA or RNA oligonucleotides, selected in vitro by SELEX (Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment), which can fold into stable unique three-dimensional structures that bind their target ligands with high affinity and specificity. Although aptamers show a number of favorable advantages such as better stability and easier modification when compared with the properties of antibodies, only a handful of aptamers have entered clinical trials and only one, pegaptanib, has received US Food and Drug Administration approval for clinical use. The main reasons that limit the practical application of aptamers are insufficient nuclease stability, bioavailability, thermal stability, or even affinity. Some aptamers obtained from modified libraries show better properties; however, polymerase amplification of nucleic acids containing non-natural bases is currently a primary drawback of the SELEX process. This review focuses on several post-SELEX optimization strategies of aptamers identified in recent years. We describe four common methods in detail: truncation, chemical modification, bivalent or multivalent aptamer construction, and mutagenesis. We believe that these optimization strategies should improve one or more specific properties of aptamers, and the type of feature(s) selected for improvement will be dependent on the application purpose.

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Thyroid carcinoma is a common endocrine malignancy worldwide, accounting for approximately 1% of all diagnosed cancers and about 91.5% of the malignancies of head and neck. However, differentiating malignant thyroid nodules from benign ones remains a diagnostic challenge. Thus, novel molecular markers that enable non-invasive diagnostics for malignant thyroid nodules are urgently needed. In the present study, a metabonomic investigation based on liquid chromatography-LTQ Orbitrap mass spectrometry was employed for serum metabolic profiling of 30 cases of papillary thyroid carcinomas (PTC), 80 cases of nodular goiters (benign thyroid nodules) and 30 cases of healthy controls. According to the results of multivariate statistical data analysis, the significantly changed metabolites among these three groups were defined. It was found that most of these metabolites decreased in the sera of both malignant and benign thyroid cases due to the increased metabolic rate, which is in accordance with clinical features. The major metabolic differences between benign and malignant nodules occurred in lipid metabolism. Especially, the content of 3-hydroxybutyric acid, an intermediate product of fatty acid metabolism, was much higher in the PTC group than that in the nodule goiter and control groups, indicating its potential as a diagnostic marker for PTC and nodular goiters. These results show that the serum metabolic profiling method is a powerful tool for distinguishing thyroid carcinoma from nodular goiter and healthy controls.

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