Our study suggested that uterine fibroids in women might be related to excess weight and central obesity.

Circular RNAs are widely existing in eukaryotes. However, there is as yet no tissue-specific Arabidopsis circular RNA database, which hinders the study of circular RNA in plants. Here, we used 622 Arabidopsis RNA sequencing data sets from 87 independent studies hosted at NCBI SRA and developed AtCircDB to systematically identify, store and retrieve circular RNAs. By analyzing back-splicing sites, we characterized 84 685 circular RNAs, 30 648 tissue-specific circular RNAs and 3486 microRNA-circular RNA interactions. In addition, we used a metric (detection score) to measure the detection ability of the circular RNAs using a big-data approach. By experimental validation, we demonstrate that this metric improves the accuracy of the detection algorithm. We also defined the regions hosting enriched circular RNAs as super circular RNA regions. The results suggest that these regions are highly related to alternative splicing and chloroplast. Finally, we developed a comprehensive tissue-specific database (AtCircDB) to help the community store, retrieve, visualize and download Arabidopsis circular RNAs. This database will greatly expand our understanding of circular RNAs and their related regulatory networks. AtCircDB is freely available at http://genome.sdau.edu.cn/circRNA.

Clinical pathway (CP) is the standard way to manage medical activities in order to improve the efficiency and minimize the cost of healthcare service. However current application of CPs can hardly adapt to the dynamic and complex clinical processes which involve the coordination of social agents in hospital. This paper focuses on developing a multi-agent modeling method to build up the system that can increase the execution efficiency of clinical pathway. In particular, we present a semiotic approach to analyze the requirement of clinical pathway. Furthermore we describe how the EDA (Epistemic, Deontic, and Axiological) agent and the negotiation model are realized and applied to support the clinical pathway management. Finally, the clinical pathway of breast cancer is presented to demonstrate our method

Age and abnormal metabolism were independently important factors associated with the sex hormone levels in elderly Chinese men, which were all mediated by SHBG.