Cell-free circular RNAs (circRNAs) stably and abundantly exist in body fluids. In this study we aimed to investigate the potential of urinary cell-free circRNAs as a novel class of non-invasive disease biomarkers for diagnosis of bladder cancer. Differentially expressed circRNAs from 10 normal and 10 bladder cancer urine samples were firstly detected by microarray. Hsa_circ_0137439 was then screened and validated in 30 normal and 116 bladder cancer samples. A receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to evaluate the diagnostic value of hsa_circ_0137439. The Kaplan-Meier method was used to evaluate the significance of hsa_circ_0137439 in the prognosis of bladder cancer. We found that hsa_circ_0137439 was significantly upregulated in bladder cancer samples. Moreover, increased expression of hsa_circ_0137439 was correlated with higher tumor stage, higher tumor grade, higher lymph node status, and history of muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC). Also, urinary cell-free hsa_circ_0137439 could not only differentiate bladder cancer from normal controls but also distinguish MIBC from non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC). Additionally, hsa_circ_0137439 in urine supernatant could serve as an independent prognostic predicator of recurrence-free survival and overall survival for patients with bladder cancer. Cell assays showed that hsa_circ_0137439 knockdown contributed to the inhibition of cell proliferation and migration via hsa_circ_0137439/miR-142-5p/MTDH axis. In conclusion, urinary cell-free hsa_circ_0137439 could be a promising biomarker for tumor diagnosis and prognostic assessment of bladder cancer patients.

This experiment was designed to examine the effects of a dietary supplementation of polysaccharides-rich noni (Morinda citrifolia L.) fruit extract (NFP) on the antioxidant enzyme activities, cytokines level, and expression of corresponding genes in blood of cashmere goats. Twelve castrated, 2-years-old male cashmere goats (45.44±3.30 kg of BW ± SD) were used in a 2 × 2 crossover design: the basal diet with or without (CON) supplementation of NFP at 4 g per kg DM (0.4%). Each period lasted for 29 d, including 1 wk for diet transition, 20 d for adaptation, and the last 2 d for sampling. The results showed that NFP supplementation increased (P < 0.05) the levels of nitric oxide, interleukin-6 (IL-6) and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α), and the activities of catalase (CAT), glutathione peroxidase (GPx), thioredoxin reductase (TrxR), and total superoxide dismutase (T-SOD) in serum. The expressions of CAT, GPx4, TrxR, SOD1, IL-6, and TNF-α genes were up-regulated (P < 0.05), whereas the levels of malondialdehyde (P = 0.015) and reactive oxygen species (P = 0.051) in serum were reduced. The body weight gain of goats was increased (P = 0.006) with a non-significant increase of feed intake with NFP supplementation. In conclusion, dietary NFP supplementation enhanced the antioxidant status and immune function in blood of cashmere goats.

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Carbohydrate antigen 19-9 (CA19-9) and cytokeratin 19 fragment (CYFRA21-1) are widely used as tumor markers in clinical practice and are increased in many neoplasms. However, although increased serum CA19-9 levels have been found in some Japanese patients with renal urothelial carcinoma (UC), they have not been detected in patients from other countries or regions, and increased serum CYFRA21-1 levels haves not been reported in patients with renal UC. We analyzed serum CA19-9 and CYFRA21-1 levels in two patients with renal UC and monitored the changes in levels during postoperative follow-up. Both cases with renal pelvis UC had high levels of serum CA19-9 and CYFRA21-1, which decreased to within normal ranges after successful surgery, suggesting a causal relationship between renal UC and increased serum CA19-9 and CYFRA21-1. Because serum levels of CA19-9 and CYFRA21-1 are increased in many neoplastic diseases, they may not be reliable tumor markers for the screening and diagnosis of renal UC. However, they may be useful noninvasive indicators for assessing treatment effects in patients with renal pelvis UC with elevated pretreatment serum CA19-9 or CYFRA21-1.

Wi-Fi sensing can classify human activities because each activity causes unique changes to the channel state information (CSI). Existing WiFi sensing suffers from limited scalability as the system needs to be retrained whenever new activities are added, which cause overheads of data collection and retraining. Cross-domain sensing may fail because the mapping between activities and CSI variations is destroyed when a different environment or user (domain) is involved. This paper proposed a few-shot learning-based WiFi sensing system, named FewSense, which can recognise novel classes in unseen domains with only few samples. Specifically, a feature extractor was pre-trained offline using the source domain data. When the system was applied in the target domain, few samples were used to fine-tune the feature extractor for domain adaptation. Inference was made by computing the cosine similarity. FewSense can further boost the classification accuracy by collaboratively fusing inference from multiple receivers. We evaluated the performance using three public datasets, i.e., SignFi, Widar, and Wiar. The results show that FewSense with five-shot learning recognised novel classes in unseen domains with an accuracy of 90.3%, 96.5% ,82.7% on SignFi, Widar, and Wiar datasets, respectively. Our collaborative sensing model improved system performance by an average of 30%.