The aim of this study was to evaluate the benefit provided by intraosseous infiltration combined with intra-articular injection of platelet-rich plasma to treat mild and moderate stages of knee joint degeneration (Kellgren-Lawrence score II-III) compared with other treatments, specifically intra-articular injection of PRP and of HA. Eighty-six patients with grade II to grade III knee OA according to the Kellgren-Lawrence classification were randomly assigned to intra-articular combined with intraosseous injection of PRP (group A), intra-articular PRP (group B), or intra-articular HA (group C). Patients in group A received intra-articular combined with intraosseous injection of PRP (administered twice, 2 weeks apart). Patients in group B received intra-articular injection of PRP every 14 days. Patients in group C received a series of five intra-articular injections of HA every 7 days. All patients were evaluated using the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) and Western Ontario and McMaster Universities (WOMAC) score before the treatment and at 1, 3, 6, 12, and 18 months after treatment. There were significant improvements at the end of the 1st month. Notably, group A patients had significantly superior VAS and WOMAC scores than were observed in groups B and C. The VAS scores were similar in groups B and group C after the 6th month. Regarding the WOMAC scores, groups B and C differed at the 1st, 3rd, 6th, and 12th months; however, no significant difference was observed at the 18th month. The combination of intraosseous with intra-articular injections of PRP resulted in a significantly superior clinical outcome, with sustained lower VAS and WOMAC scores and improvement in quality of life within 18 months.

BackgroundIn plants, the basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) transcription factors play key roles in diverse biological processes. Genome-wide comprehensive and systematic analyses of bHLH proteins have been well conducted in Arabidopsis, rice, tomato and other plant species. However, only few of bHLH family genes have been functional characterized in maize.ResultsIn this study, our genome-wide analysis identified 208 putative bHLH family proteins (ZmbHLH proteins) in maize (Zea mays). We classified these proteins into 18 subfamilies by comparing the ZmbHLHs with Arabidopsis thaliana bHLH proteins. Phylogenetic analysis, conserved protein motifs, and exon-intron patterns further supported the evolutionary relationships among these bHLH proteins. Genome distribution analysis found that the 208 ZmbHLH loci were located non-randomly on the ten maize chromosomes. Further, analysis of conserved cis-elements in the promoter regions, protein interaction networks, and expression patterns in roots, leaves, and seeds across developmental stages, suggested that bHLH family proteins in maize are probably involved in multiple physiological processes in plant growth and development.ConclusionWe performed a genome-wide, systematic analysis of bHLH proteins in maize. This comprehensive analysis provides a useful resource that enables further investigation of the physiological roles and molecular functions of the ZmbHLH transcription factors.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12870-018-1441-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Sugars provide a source of energy; they also function as signaling molecules that regulate gene expression, affect metabolism, and alter growth in plants. Rapid responses to sugar signaling and metabolism are essential for optimal growth and fitness, but the regulatory mechanisms underlying these are largely unknown. In this study, we found that the rapid induction of sugar responses in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) requires the W-box cis-elements in the promoter region of GLC 6-PHOSPHATE/ PHOSPHATE TRANSLOCATOR2, a well-studied sugar response marker gene. The transcription factors WRKY18 and WRKY53 directly bind to the W-Box cis-elements in the promoter region of sugar response genes and activate their expression. In addition, HISTONE ACETYLTRANSFERASE 1 (HAC1) is recruited to the WRKY18 and WRKY53 complex that resides on the promoters. In this complex, HAC1 facilitates the acetylation of histone 3 Lys 27 (H3K27ac) on the sugar-responsive genes. Taken together, our findings demonstrate a mechanism by which sugar regulates chromatin modification and gene expression, thus helping plants to adjust their growth in response to environmental changes.

This paper is the first part of our series of work to establish pointwise second-order necessary conditions for stochastic optimal controls. In this part, both drift and diffusion terms may contain the control variable but the control region is assumed to be convex. Under some assumptions in terms of the Malliavin calculus, we establish the desired necessary conditions for stochastic singular optimal controls in the classical sense. ad is called an admissible control. The stochastic optimal control problem considered in this paper is to find a controlū(·) ∈ U ad such thatAnyū(·) ∈ U ad satisfying (1.3) is called an optimal control. The corresponding statē x(·)(=x(·; x 0 ,ū(·))) (to (1.1)) is called an optimal state, and (x(·),ū(·)) is called an optimal pair.In optimal control theory, one of the central topics is to establish the first-order necessary condition for optimal controls. We refer to [15] for an early study on the first-order necessary condition for stochastic optimal controls. After that, many authors contributed on this topic; see [2,3,12] and references cited therein. Compared to the deterministic setting, new phenomena and difficulties appear when the diffusion term of the stochastic control system (i.e., σ(t, x, u) in (1.1)) contains the control variable and the control region is nonconvex. The corresponding first-order necessary condition for this general case was established in [18].For some optimal controls, it may happen that the first-order necessary conditions turn out to be trivial. For deterministic control systems, there are two types of such optimal controls. One of them, called the singular optimal control in the classical sense, is the optimal control for which the gradient and the Hessian of the corresponding Hamiltonian with respect to the control variable vanish/degenerate. The other one, called the singular optimal control in the sense of Pontryagin-type maximum principle, is the optimal control for which the corresponding Hamiltonian is equal to a constant in the control region. When an optimal control is singular, the first-order necessary condition cannot provide enough information for the theoretical analysis and numerical computation, and therefore one needs to study the secondorder necessary conditions. In the deterministic setting, one can find many works in this direction (see [1,7,9,10,11,13,14,16] and references cited therein).As far as we know, there are only two papers [4,19] that address the second-order necessary conditions for stochastic optimal controls. In [19], a pointwise secondorder maximum principle for stochastic singular optimal controls in the sense of the Pontryagin-type maximum principle was established for the case that the diffusion term σ(t, x, u) is independent of the control variable u, while in [4], an integral-type second-order necessary condition for stochastic optimal controls was derived under the assumption that the control region U is convex.The main purpose of this paper is to establish some pointwise second-order necessary conditions for stoc...