Rab14 is a member of RAS oncogene family, and its dysfunction has been reported to be involved in various types of human cancer. However, its expression and function were still unclear in gastric cancer. The aim of this study was to investigate the function and mechanism of Rab14 in gastric cancer cell lines. Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) was performed in 17 gastric adenocarcinoma tissues and 4 cell lines to detect the expression of Rab14. 3-(4, 5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2, 5-diphenyl-tetrazolium bromide (MTT), colony formation and flow cytometry assays were employed to determine the proliferative ability, cell cycle transition and apoptosis in vitro in BGC-823 or SGC-7901 cells. Western blot was performed to investigate the pathways and mechanism of Rab14 regulation. In this study, we show that Rab14 presents a significant up-regulated expression among the paired tissue samples and cell lines in gastric cancer. When we overexpressed Rab14 in SGC-7901 cells or silenced Rab14 in BGC-823 cells, we found that Rab14 could modify cell growth, cell cycle or apoptosis, which accompanied with an obvious regulation of CCND1, CDK2 and BAX involving in AKT signaling pathway. In conclusion, this study provides a new evidence on that Rab14 functions as a novel tumor oncogene and could be a potential therapeutic target in gastric cancer.

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The study of the origin of diversified life has been plagued by technical and conceptual difficulties, controversy, and apriorism. It is now popularly accepted that the universal tree of life is rooted in the akaryotes and that Archaea and Eukarya are sister groups to each other. However, evolutionary studies have overwhelmingly focused on nucleic acid and protein sequences, which partially fulfill only two of the three main steps of phylogenetic analysis, formulation of realistic evolutionary models, and optimization of tree reconstruction. In the absence of character polarization, that is, the ability to identify ancestral and derived character states, any statement about the rooting of the tree of life should be considered suspect. Here we show that macromolecular structure and a new phylogenetic framework of analysis that focuses on the parts of biological systems instead of the whole provide both deep and reliable phylogenetic signal and enable us to put forth hypotheses of origin. We review over a decade of phylogenomic studies, which mine information in a genomic census of millions of encoded proteins and RNAs. We show how the use of process models of molecular accumulation that comply with Weston's generality criterion supports a consistent phylogenomic scenario in which the origin of diversified life can be traced back to the early history of Archaea.

The fat mass and obesity-associated enzyme (FTO) can catalyze the demethylation of N 6 -methyladenosine (m 6 A) residues in mRNA, regulates the cellular level of m 6 A modification, and plays a critical role in human obesity and cancers. Herein, we develop a single-quantum-dot (QD)-based fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) sensor for the identification of specific FTO demethylase inhibitors. The FTO-mediated demethylation of m 6 A can induce the cleavage of demethylated DNA to generate the biotinylated DNA fragments, which may function as capture probes to assemble the Cy5-labeled reporter probes onto the QD surface, enabling the occurrence of FRET between the QD and Cy5. The presence of inhibitors can inhibit the FTO demethylation and consequently abolish FRET between the QD and Cy5. The inhibition effect of inhibitors upon FTO demethylation can be simply evaluated by monitoring the decrease of Cy5 counts. We use this nanosensor to screen several small-molecule inhibitors and identify diacerein as a highly selective inhibitor of FTO. Diacerein can inhibit the demethylation activity of endogenous FTO in HeLa cells. Interestingly, diacerein is neither a structural mimic of 2-oxoglutarate (2-OG) nor a chelator of metal ions, and it can selectively inhibit FTO demethylation by competitively binding the m 6 A-containing substrate.