No abstract

a b s t r a c tBackground: As the deep influence of traditional medical education, many undergraduate nursing colleges and universities in China still keep the traditional disease-focused curriculum system. However, it became outdated as the Chinese high nursing education developed. Meanwhile, the increasing demand of nursing human resources stimulates the enrollment expansion of colleges. All of these bring more difficulties and opportunities for nurse educators who are endeavoring to reform the undergraduate curriculum. Methods: The authors retrospectively reviewed the related literature, illustrated the existing challenges and opportunities during the curriculum renewal process in China. This paper also analyzed the tendencies of Chinese baccalaureate curriculum innovation. Results: Chinese current undergraduate nursing curriculum has larger proportion of basic medical courses, which brings great challenge for nursing educators. In the meantime, the expansion of enrollment brings conflicts with existing nursing education resources in China. Integration, humanization, internationalization and diversification are main tendencies leading the future nursing curriculum innovation in China. Conclusions: The more effective teaching innovations in the nursing education system are in great demand.

A simple scheme was developed to study the mRNA stability of the proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) gene during cellular transition from the G1/S boundary to a quiescent state. By this scheme, CHO.K1 cells were grown to about 80% confluence and then serum-starved for 40 h for synchronization in a quiescent state. The quiescent cells were serum-stimulated for a period of time (between 8 h and 12 h) and then grown in serum-free medium until being harvested for further analyses. The cellular PCNA mRNA level was analyzed by Northern blotting. As compared with that in cells which were continuously incubated in serum-containing medium, the decline of the mRNA level, after reaching the peak, in these serum-deprived cells was virtually devoid of mRNA synthesis. Thus, this mRNA decay was taken for the measurement of mRNA stability. The advantage of the scheme is that, unlike the treatment of transcription inhibitors, it does not prevent the cells from completing the rest of the cell cycle before returning to the resting state, and so the mRNA stability observed is cell cycle dependent. In contrast with the previous report that the stability of PCNA mRNA in quiescent cells is less by severalfold than that in S phase cells, our study shows that the mRNA stability of PCNA remained constant during the cellular transition from G1/S boundary to quiescent state.