The principal objective of this present study was to compare the effects of different acupuncture methods on pain, stiffness, and physical function for osteoarthritis of the knee by the pairwise and network meta-analysis (NMA). A network meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) was searched from three English databases and one Chinese database until January 2018. A pairwise meta-analysis was performed with a random effects model. Then we carried out the NMA within a Bayesian framework. Mean difference (MD) and its 95% confidence interval (CI) were calculated by R 3.4.1, Stata 14.0, and RevMan 5.3 software to assess the relief of pain, the effectiveness for stiffness, and physical function recovery. Node-splitting method was used to calculate the inconsistency. Rank probabilities were assessed and clustered by the surface under the cumulative ranking curve (SUCRA). 16 trials mostly researched short-term effectiveness and showed that fire needle and electro-acupuncture were statistically significant to decrease WOMAC pain and physical function scores when compared with other treatments, but there was no significant difference in stiffness calculations. Our NMA demonstrated that acupuncture with heat pain or electrical stimulation might be suggested as the better choices in all acupuncture methods to osteoarthritis of the knee.

Sensitive and specific visualization of cell surface biotin receptors (BRs) a class of clinically important biomarkers, remains a challenge. In this work, a dual-emission ratiometric fluorescent nanoprobe is developed for specific imaging of cell surface avidin, a subtype of BRs. The nanoprobe comprises a dualemission quantum dot nanohybrid, wherein a silica-encapsulated red-emitting QD (rQD@SiO 2 ) is used as the "core" and greenemitting QDs (gQDs) are used as "satellites", which are further decorated with a new "love−hate"-type BR ligand, a phenanthroline−biotin conjugate with an amino linker. The nanoprobe shows intense rQD emission but quenched gQD emission by the BR ligand. Upon imaging, the rQD emission stays constant and the gQD emission is restored as cell surface avidin accrues. Accordingly, the overlaid fluorescence color collected from red and green emission changes from red to yellow and then to green. We refer to such a color change as a traffic light pattern and the nanoprobe as a fluorescent traffic light nanoprobe. We demonstrate the application of our fluorescent traffic light nanoprobe to characterize cancer cells. By the traffic light pattern, cervical carcinoma and normal cells, as well as different-type cancer cells including BR-negative colon cancer cells, BR-positive hepatoma carcinoma cells, breast cancer cells, and their subtypes, have been visually differentiated. We further demonstrate a use of our nanoprobe to distinguish the G2 phase from other stages in a cell cycle. These applications provide new insights into visualizing cell surface biomarkers with remarkable imaging resolution and accuracy.

The interaction mechanism between 3-biotinylate-6-benzimidazole B-nor-cholesterol analogs and ct-DNA was studied under conditions similar to physiological. The interaction mechanism between ct-DNA and three different types of compounds was studied by spectroscopic...

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