The present study aimed to investigate the role and mechanism of micro RNA (miR)-128 in hypertension-induced myocardial injury. The peripheral blood of patients with hypertension was collected and the expression of miR-128 was detected using fluorescence reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR). Primary myocardial cells isolated from rat in vitro were cultured under conditions of hypoxia and glucose deprivation, and miR-128 expression was measured by RT-qPCR. The expression of c-Met protein was measured using western blot analysis and the apoptosis of transfected cells was measured by flow cytometry in rat myocardial cells following transfection with miR-128 mimics or c-Met siRNA. A luciferase assay was applied to assess the binding of miR-128 to c-Met mRNA. miR-128 expression was significantly higher in hypertension patients compared with controls (P<0.05). miR-128 expression was higher in patients with stage III/IV hypertension compared with patients with stage II hypertension. Similarly, miR-128 expression in primary cardiomyocytes cultured under deprivation of oxygen and glucose increased with the culture time and reached a peak at 12 h. c-Met expression decreased significantly (P<0.05) and the ratio of apoptotic cells increased significantly (P<0.05), following transfection of miR-128 mimics. The number of apoptotic cells also increased when c-Met expression was knocked down by siRNA. The dual luciferase assay indicated that fluorescence intensity decreased significantly in miR-128 mimics and wild type c-Met group (P<0.05), indicating that miR-128 can directly target c-Met. Therefore, the results of the current study suggest that miR-128 may promote myocardial cell injury by regulating c-Met expression.

We present Deuterium---a framework for implementing Java methods as executable contracts. Deuterium introduces a novel, type-safe way to write method contracts entirely in Java, as a combination of imperative generators and declarative specifications (written in a first-order relational logic with transitive closure). Existing approaches are typically based on encoding both the specification and the program heap into a constraint language, and then using an off-the-shelf constraint solver---without any additional guidance---to search for a new program heap that satisfies the specification. Deuterium takes advantage of user-provided generators to prune the search space and reduce incurred overhead of constraint solving. Deuterium supports two ways of solving declarative constraints: SAT-based and search-based with in-memory state exploration. We evaluate our approach on a suite of data structures, established as a standard benchmark by prior work. Furthermore, we use random and sequence-based test generation to create a new benchmark designed to mimic realistic execution scenarios. Our results show that generators improve the performance of executable contracts and that in-memory state exploration is the algorithm of choice when heap sizes are small.

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