Cancer is a serious health issue worldwide. Traditional treatment methods focus on killing cancer cells by using anticancer drugs or radiation therapy, but the cost of these methods is quite high, and in addition there are side effects. With the discovery of anticancer peptides, great progress has been made in cancer treatment. For the purpose of prompting the application of anticancer peptides in cancer treatment, it is necessary to use computational methods to identify anticancer peptides (ACPs). In this paper, we propose a sequence-based model for identifying ACPs (SAP). In our proposed SAP, the peptide is represented by 400D features or 400D features with g-gap dipeptide features, and then the unrelated features are pruned using the maximum relevance-maximum distance method. The experimental results demonstrate that our model performs better than some existing methods. Furthermore, our model has also been extended to other classifiers, and the performance is stable compared with some state-of-the-art works.

Study Design: Case-control study. Objectives: To investigate the incidence of symptomatic spinal epidural hematoma (SSEH) and recognize its risk factors in a cohort of patients undergoing posterior thoracic surgery in isolation. Methods: From January 2010 to December 2019, patients who developed SSEH after posterior thoracic surgery and underwent hematoma evacuation were enrolled. For each SSEH patient, 2 or 3 controls who did not develop SSEH and underwent the same procedures with similar complexity at the same section of the thoracic spine in the same period were collected. The preoperative and intraoperative factors, blood pressure-related factors and radiographic parameters were collected to identify possible risk factors by comparing between the 2 groups. Results: A total of 24 of 1612 patients (1.49%) were identified as having SSEH after thoracic spinal surgery. Compared to the control group (53 patients), SSEH patients had significant differences in the APTT (p = 0.028), INR (p = 0.009), ratio of previous spinal surgery (p = 0.012), ratio of cerebrospinal fluid leakage (p = 0.004), thoracic kyphosis (p<0.05), local kyphosis angle (p<0.05), epidural fat ratio at T7 (p = 0.003), occupying ratio of the cross-sectional area (p<0.05) and spinal epidural venous plexus grade (p<0.05). Multiple logistic regression analysis revealed 3 risk factors for SSEH: cerebrospinal fluid leakage, the local kyphosis angle (>8.77°) and the occupying ratio of the cross-sectional area (>49.58%). Conclusions: The incidence of SSEH was 1.49% in posterior thoracic spinal surgeries. Large local kyphosis angle (>8.77°), high occupying ratio of cross-sectional area (>49.58%) and cerebrospinal fluid leakage were identified as risk factors for SSEH.

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High light absorption capability and excellent charge carrier kinetics play a key role in determining the improved photoelectrochemical (PEC) performance. Here, to extend the photoresponse of TiO2 to the visible-light range, we encapsulated narrow band gap CoTiO3 on the surface of TiO2 nanowire arrays (NWAs) to form a core–shell heterostructure. The CoTiO3 shell thickness can be controlled by the hydrothermal reaction time. The TiO2/CoTiO3 NWAs with 9.7 nm of CoTiO3 shell thickness had the highest J ph (0.95 mA/cm2 at 1.23 V versus RHE) and largest carrier concentration (1.53 × 1021 cm–3), indicating about 30% and 346% increase compared to bare TiO2 NWAs, respectively. The results indicate that the improved photoresponse of TiO2 NWAs can be attributed to the broadened light absorption, effective separation of the photogenerated electron–hole pairs, and fast interfacial charge carrier transfer achieved over a TiO2/CoTiO3 core–shell heterostructure.

Idiopathic scoliosis (IS) is a disease with unknown etiology characterized by spinal rotation asymmetry. Reports describing the histochemical and pathological analyses of IS patients have shown that necrosis, fibrosis and fatty involution occurred on the apex paraspinal muscles. However, research on the changes in the paraspinal muscles of IS patients compared with those in matched controls is rare; thus, the basic mechanism of how paraspinal muscles are injured in IS patients is still unclear. In this study, we investigated the morphological changes of paraspinal muscles in the control group and IS patients, and the possible mechanisms were examined in vivo and in vitro. Increased myofiber necrosis was found on both sides of the apex paraspinal muscles of IS patients compared with those of the control group, and the number of TUNEL-positive apoptotic cells was also increased. Apoptosis signaling pathways, including pro-apoptosis proteins such as cleaved-caspase 3 and cytochrome c, were markedly upregulated, whereas the anti-apoptotic Bcl-2/Bax was significantly downregulated in IS patients compared with the control group. Moreover, PGC-1α and SOD1 were upregulated in accordance with the increased ROS production in IS patients. The distribution of myofiber types, as well as the mRNA levels of type IIa myofiber marker MYH2 and the important myogenesis regulator MYOG were remarkably changed in IS patients. In addition, C2C12 or human skeletal muscle mesenchymal progenitor cells treated with antimycin A in glucose-free and serum-free culture medium, which can activate oxidative stress and induce apoptosis, showed similar patterns of the changed distribution of myofiber types and downregulation of MYH2 and MYOG. Altogether, our study suggested that the extents of severe muscle injury and accumulated oxidative stress were increased in IS patients compared with the control group, and the abnormal myogenesis was also observed in IS patients. Since elevated oxidative stress can lead to apoptosis and the dysregulation of myogenesis in muscle cells, it may be associated with the pathological changes observed in IS patients and contribute to the development and progression of IS.