Objective. The results of a recent genome-wide association study have shown that ERAP1 and IL23R are associated with ankylosing spondylitis (AS) in Caucasian populations from North America and the UK. Based on these findings, we undertook the current study to investigate whether single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) covering the genes ERAP1 and IL23R are associated with AS in a Han Chinese population.Methods. A case-control study was performed in Han Chinese patients with AS (n ‫؍‬ 527) and controls (n ‫؍‬ 945) from Shanghai and Nanjing. All patients met the modified New York criteria for AS. The Sequenom iPlex platform was used to genotype cases and controls for 21 tag SNPs covering IL23R and 38 tag SNPs covering ERAP1. Statistical analysis was performed using the Cochran-Armitage test for trend.Results. Multiple SNPs in ERAP1 were significantly associated with AS (for rs27980, P ‫؍‬ 0.0048; for rs7711564, P ‫؍‬ 0.0081). However, no association was observed between IL23R and AS (for all SNPs, P > 0.1). The nonsynonymous SNP in IL23R, rs11209026, widely thought to be the primary AS-associated SNP in IL23R in Europeans, was found not to be polymorphic in Chinese.Conclusion. Our results demonstrate that genetic polymorphisms in ERAP1 are associated with AS in Han Chinese, suggesting a common pathogenic mechanism for the disease in Chinese and Caucasian populations, and that IL23R is not associated with AS in Chinese, indicating a difference in the mechanism of disease pathogenesis between Chinese and Caucasian populations. This may result from the fact that rs11209026, the nonsynonymous SNP in IL23R, is not polymorphic in Chinese patients, providing further evidence that rs11209026 is the key polymorphism associated with AS (and likely inflammatory bowel disease and psoriasis) in this gene.

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Chicken swarm optimization is a new intelligent bionic algorithm, simulating the chicken swarm searching for food in nature. Basic algorithm is likely to fall into a local optimum and has a slow convergence rate. Aiming at these deficiencies, an improved chicken swarm optimization algorithm based on elite opposition-based learning is proposed. In cock swarm, random search based on adaptive t distribution is adopted to replace that based on Gaussian distribution so as to balance the global exploitation ability and local development ability of the algorithm. In hen swarm, elite opposition-based learning is introduced to promote the population diversity. Dimension-by-dimension greedy search mode is used to do local search for individual of optimal chicken swarm in order to improve optimization precision. According to the test results of 18 standard test functions and 2 engineering structure optimization problems, this algorithm has better effect on optimization precision and speed compared with basic chicken algorithm and other intelligent optimization algorithms.

We successfully demonstrated that LIPUS enhanced osteogenesis of ASCs, specially at the duty ratio of 20%.

Polymorphism of HLA‐DRB1, DQB1 and DPB1 was revealed with a sequencing‐based typing (SBT) method in unrelated healthy volunteers from the Naxi ethnic group. Among the 43 DRB1 alleles detected, the most common allele was DRB1*12021 with a frequency of 17%, followed by DRB1*08032, DRB1*09012 and DRB1*1404 with frequencies of 8.5%, 7.4% and 7.4%, respectively. Among 23 DQB1 alleles detected, the most frequent DQB1 allele was DQB1*03011/0309 (21.9%), followed by DQB1*0502 (16.4%) and DQB1*05031 (9.6%). For the DPB1 locus, the most common alleles were DPB1*0501 (25.5%), DPB1*0402 (14.6%) and DPB1*02012 (12.0%). The most common DRB1‐DQB1‐DPB1 haplotype was DRB1*1404‐DQB1*05031‐DPB1*0402 with a frequency of 5.26%, followed by the DRB1*08032‐DQB1*06011‐DPB1*1301 (3.51%). The distribution characteristics of the HLA class II alleles revealed that the Naxi ethnic group belonged to the Southern group of Chinese.