PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

X Z Wang

Publications and source records attributed to X Z Wang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Induction of decision trees using genetic programming for modelling ecotoxicity data: adaptive discretization of real-valued endpoints.

Recent literature has demonstrated the applicability of genetic programming to induction of decision trees for modelling toxicity endpoints. Compared with other decision tree induction techniques that are based upon recursive partitioning employing greedy searches to choose the best splitting attribute and value at each node that will necessarily miss regions of the search space, the genetic programming based approach can overcome the problem. However, the method still requires the discretization of the often continuous-valued toxicity endpoints prior to the tree induction. A novel extension of this method, YAdapt, is introduced in this work which models the original continuous endpoint by adaptively finding suitable ranges to describe the endpoints during the tree induction process, removing the need for discretization prior to tree induction and allowing the ordinal nature of the endpoint to be taken into account in the models built.

Decision Trees↗
PubMed2006

QSAR approach for mixture toxicity prediction using independent latent descriptors and fuzzy membership functions.

The principle of using a singe model to predict the toxicity of mixtures of chemicals based on the characterisation of the degrees of similarity and dissimilarity of the constituent chemicals using descriptors has been demonstrated in a previous work. The current study introduces a feature extraction technique, independent component analysis, to the method to remove the correlations and dependencies between descriptors and reduce the dimension prior to similarity and dissimilarity calculations. In addition, a goal attainment multi-objective optimisation technique is used for the determination of the fuzzy membership function parameters. For three mixtures, which include a new mixture and two previously studied mixtures that all inhibit reproduction (via different mechanisms of action) in green freshwater algae scenedesmus vacuolatus, the approach showed better or equivalent prediction performance than either concentration addition or independent action models. Unlike QSARs for pure compounds that require large collections of data, the new approach for mixtures only requires one mixture at a particular composition to determine the necessary fuzzy membership function parameter values. These values can then be used to predict the toxicity of the mixture at any other compositions. This could potentially lead to a reduction in the frequency of bioassay tests. Use of the fuzzy membership functions and parameter values obtained for one mixture when used to predict the toxicity of a completely different mixture is also tested and it is found that the approach also gives prediction results with good accuracy.

Chlorophyta↗
PubMed2006

Molecular variation, systematics and distribution of the Anopheles fluviatilis complex in southern Asia.

Species of the Anopheles fluviatilis James and Anopheles minimus complexes (Diptera: Culicidae) are difficult to distinguish morphologically. Members of the two complexes have been confused and, consequently, their distributions and roles in malaria transmission are uncertain. We identified numerous mosquitoes from China, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Iran by single-strand conformation polymorphism (SSCP) and/or sequencing, and analysed the variation in the 28S D3 region of ribosomal DNA for members of the Minimus Subgroup and also the internal transcribed spacer region 2 (ITS2) for members of the An. fluviatilis complex. The D3 region is highly conserved between taxa and therefore could serve as a standard for molecular diagnosis of the subgroup members. D3 sequence, bionomics and malaria transmission data provide further evidence that An. fluviatilis S in India is conspecific with An. minimus C in South-east Asia. An. fluviatilis T has three ITS2 haplotypes (designated T1, T2 and Y) and its distribution in India, Nepal, Pakistan and Iran is confirmed. An. fluviatilis U is well defined on cytogenetic grounds in Uttar Pradesh, India, but is very close to An. fluviatilis T and the two species may hybridize in some regions. Variant ITS2 sequences suggest the possible existence of two additional taxa within the An. fluviatilis complex, one in Iran and another in India, provisionally designated An. fluviatilis forms V and X, respectively. The distributions of members of the An. fluviatilis and An. minimus complexes in south-central Asia are summarized.

Animals↗
PubMed2004

Activation of a rice endogenous retrotransposon Tos17 in tissue culture is accompanied by cytosine demethylation and causes heritable alteration in methylation pattern of flanking genomic regions.

Tos17 is a copia-like, cryptic retrotransposon of rice, but can be activated by tissue culture. To study possible epigenetic mechanism controlling activity of Tos17, we subjected three rice lines (the parental line cv. Matsumae and two introgression lines, RZ2 and RZ35) that harbor different copies of the element to tissue culture. For each line, we investigated transcription and transposition of Tos17 in seed plants, calli and regenerated plants, cytosine-methylation status at CG and CNG positions within Tos17, effect of 5-azacytidine on methylation status and activity of Tos17, and cytosine-methylation states in genomic regions flanking original and some newly transposed copies of Tos17 in calli and regenerated plants. We found that only in introgression line RZ35 was Tos17 transcriptionally activated and temporarily mobilized by tissue culture, which was followed by repression before or upon plant regeneration. The activity and inactivity of Tos17 in calli and regenerated plants of RZ35 are accompanied by hypo- and hyper-CG methylation and hemi- and full CNG methylation, respectively, within the element, whereas immobilization of the element in the other two lines is concomitant with near-constant, full hypermethylation. Treatment with 5-azacytidine induced both CG and CNG partial hypomethylation of Tos17 in two lines (Matsumae and RZ35), which, however, was not accompanied by activation of Tos17 in any line. Heritable alteration in cytosine-methylation patterns occurred in three of seven genomic regions flanking Tos17 in calli and regenerated plants of RZ35, but in none of the five regions flanking dormant Tos17 in the other two lines.

Azacitidine↗
PubMed2004

Refinement of generated fuzzy production rules by using a fuzzy neural network.

Fuzzy production rules (FPRs) have been used for years to capture and represent fuzzy, vague, imprecise and uncertain domain knowledge in many fuzzy systems. There have been a lot of researches on how to generate or obtain FPRs. There exist two methods to obtain FPRs. One is by painstakingly, repeatedly and time-consuming interviewing domain experts to extract the domain knowledge. The other is by using some machine learning techniques to generate and extract FPRs from some training samples. These extracted rules, however, are found to be nonoptimal and sometimes redundant. Furthermore, these generated rules suffer from the problem of low accuracy of classifying or recognizing unseen examples. The reasons for having these problems are 1) the FPRs generated are not powerful enough to represent the domain knowledge, 2) the techniques used to generate FPRs are pre-matured, ad-hoc or may not be suitable for the problem, and 3) further refinement of the extracted rules has not been done. In this paper we look into the solutions of the above problems by 1) enhancing the representation power of FPRs by including local and global weights, 2) developing a fuzzy neural network (FNN) with enhanced learning algorithm, and 3) using this FNN to refine the local and global weights of FPRs. By experimenting our method with some existing benchmark examples, the proposed method is found to have high accuracy in classifying unseen samples without increasing the number of the FPRs extracted and the time required to consult with domain experts is greatly reduced.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2003

Cladistic analysis of iridoviruses based on protein and DNA sequences.

Cladograms of iridoviruses were inferred from bootstrap analysis of molecular data sets comprising all published protein and DNA sequences of the major capsid protein, ATPase and DNA polymerase genes of members of the Iridoviridae family Iridovirus. All data sets yielded cladograms supporting the separation of the Iridovirus, Ranavirus and Lymphocystivirus genera, and the cladogram based on data derived from major capsid proteins further divided both the Iridovirus and Ranavirus genera into two groups. Tests of alternative hypotheses of topological constraints were also performed to further investigate relationships between infectious spleen and kidney necrosis virus (ISKNV), an unclassified fish iridovirus for which the complete genome sequence data is available, and other iridoviruses. Cladograms inferred and results of Shimodaira-Hasegawa tests indicated that ISKNV is more closely related to the Ranavirus genus than it is to the other genera of the family.

Amino Acid Sequence↗
PubMed2001

Complete genome analysis of the mandarin fish infectious spleen and kidney necrosis iridovirus.

The nucleotide sequence of the infectious spleen and kidney necrosis virus (ISKNV) genome was determined and found to comprise 111,362 bp with a G+C content of 54.78%. It contained 124 potential open reading frames (ORFs) with coding capacities ranging from 40 to 1208 amino acids. The analysis of the amino acid sequences deduced from the individual ORFs revealed that 35 of the 124 potential gene products of ISKNV show significant homology to functionally characterized proteins of other species. Some of the putative gene products of ISKNV showed significant homologies to proteins in the GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ databases including enzymes and structural proteins involved in virus replication, transcription, protein modification, and virus-host interaction. In addition, one major repeated sequence showing significant homology to the Red Sea bream iridovirus (RSIV) genome was identified. Based on the information obtained from biological properties (including histopathology, tissue tropisms, natural host range, and geographic distribution), physiochemical and physical properties, and genome analysis, we suggest that ISKNV, RSIV, sea bass iridovirus, grouper iridovirus, and African lampeye iridovirus may belong to a new genus of the Iridoviridae family and are tentatively referred to as cell hypertrophy iridoviruses.

Amino Acid Sequence↗
PubMed2001

Induction of hepatitis B virus-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes response in vivo by filamentous phage display vaccine.

The ability of inducing MHC class I restricted cytotoxic T lymphocytes response in vivo via recombinant filamentous phage was investigated. The recombinant filamentous phage particles that displayed the Hepatitis B virus epitope S(28--39) were injected into BALB/c (H-2d) mice without adjuvants. A MHC class I restricted HBs specific CTL response was found 8 days after injection. The potentiality of using the recombinant filamentous phage as anti-virus vaccine was discussed.

Animals↗
PubMed2001

Yang-Lee circle theorem for an ideal pseudospin-1/2 Bose gas in an external magnetic field.

The Yang-Lee circle theorem is extended to an ideal pseudospin-1/2 Bose gas in an external magnetic field. It is found that the zeros of the canonical partition function are located on the unit circle in the complex activity plane if the temperature is above the critical temperature of ideal Bose-Einstein condensation. No zeros exist if the temperature is below the critical temperature.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2001

Automatic detection and classification of abnormalities for artificial hearts using a hierarchical self-organizing map.

A hierarchical self-organizing map (SOM) has been developed for automatic detection and classification of abnormalities for artificial hearts. The hierarchical SOM has been applied to the monitoring and analysis of an aortic pressure (AoP) signal measured from an adult goat equipped with a total artificial heart. The architecture of the network actually consists of 2 different SOMs. The first SOM clusters the AoP beat patterns in an unsupervised way. Afterward, the outputs of the first SOM combined with the original time-domain features of beat-to-beat data are fed to the second SOM for final classification. Each input vector of the second SOM is associated with a class vector. This class vector is assigned to every node in the second map as an output weight and learned according to Kohonen's learning rule. Some experimental results revealed that a certain abnormality caused by breakage of sensors could be identified and detected correctly and that the change in the state of the circulatory system could be recognized and predicted to some extent.

Animals↗
PubMed2001

[Studies of the correlation between fragile sites and giant panda's breeding problem].

An unique culture system has been established which can effectively indicate fragile sites induced by BrdU on giant panda chromosomes. After we cultured the lymphocytes of giant panda for 96 hours and treated it with low concentration of BrdU (10 micrograms/ml) for only a short time (4 hours), the areas of high-frequency-expressed fragile sites were successfully located on the centromeres of No. 2 and No. 12 chromosomes. After statistic analysis, we found that the frequency of fragile sites on No. 2 and No. 12 chromosomes are notably different among pandas. What is more important, the former is relative to giant pandas' breeding conditions and correlation coefficiency (r equals to -0.772). The result indicates that high frequency of fragile sites on No. 2 chromosome is unfavorable to giant panda's breeding and survival of filial generation.

Animals↗
PubMed2001

[Overexpression of artificial synthetic gene of Aspergillus niger NRRL3135 phytase in Pichia pastoris].

The phytase gene of Aspergillus niger NRRL3135 was modified with a deletion of intron and signal coding sequence. Then, according to the codon preference of Pichia pastoris, modified phyA gene was artificially synthesized and cloned into expression vector of pPICZ alpha A. The recombinant plasmid was transformed into chromosome of Pichia pastoris X-33 strain by electroporation. The results of SDS-PAGE and enzymatic kinetic analysis proved that the recombinant phytase was secreted into culture medium with nearly same character of natural phytase. After screening for high level productive yeast strains, a strain named SPAN-III produced recombinant phytase with 165,000 u/mL under the condition of shake cultivation. It will satisfy the demand for industrialized production in some degree.

6-Phytase↗
PubMed2001

Protective effect of ginsenoside Rg1 on dopamine-induced apoptosis in PC12 cells.

AIM: To explore the possible molecular mechanism of exogenous dopamine-induced apoptosis in PC12 cells and the protective effect of ginsenoside Rg1. METHODS: Flow cytometric assay was used to quantify the apoptotic cells and measure the percentage of cells with positive Bcl-2 and Bax proteins. The morphology of apoptotic cells was evaluated by transmission electron microscope. DNA fragmentation was observed by gel electrophoresis. Caspase-3 activity was determined by fluorescent spectrofluorometer and the expressive bcl-2 and bax mRNA by semiquantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). RESULTS: Dopamine 0.15, 0.30, 0.45, and 0.60 mmol/L induced PC12 cell apoptosis from 1.1 % +/- 0.4 % (control) to 41 % +/- 3 %, 46.4 % +/ -2.7 %, 53 % +/ -3 %, and 64.5 % +/- 2.7 %, respectively. After treatment with dopamine 0.45 mmol/L following pretreatment with Rg1 10 micromol/L for 24 h, the percentage of apoptotic cells and caspase-3 activity decreased from 53 % +/- 3 % and 683 +/- 8 (mean fluorescence intensity, MFI) to 1.9 % +/- 0.6 % and 325 +/- 5, and the percentage of cells with positive Bcl-2 protein increased from 14.3 % +/- 1.1 % to 25.9 % +/- 1.6 %, however, the percentage of cells with positive Bax protein decreased from 48 % +/- 3 % to 35 % +/- 3 %, compared with group treated with DA 0.45 mmol/L alone. CONCLUSION: Ginsenoside Rg1 protected PC12 cells against apoptosis by inhibiting the activation of caspase-3 and regulating the ratio of Bcl-2 to Bax protein.

Animals↗
PubMed2001

[High level secretion expression of porcine somatoropin gene in Pichia pastoris and N-glycosylation analysis of products].

The porcine somatoropin gene was inserted into the Pichia pastoris expression vector of pPICZ alpha A which contains AOX I promoter and alpha-factor signal sequence. The recombinant plasmid of pPICZ alpha A-pST was linearnized by Sac I and transformed into X-33 by electroporation. The multi-copy insert transformants were selected and cultivated in flasks. SDS-PAGE and Western blot analysis showed that PST gene products were observed in the supernants with a little larger molecular weight size than the natural PST's, however, the molecular weight size of the PST gene products in the soluble cellular proteins were identical to the natural PST's. Retransformation of the linearnized pPICZ alpha-pST showed the expression level was improved greatly and rPST has the same antigenicity as natural one. The expressed rPST accumulated up to about 956 mg/L. The N-glycosylation analysis showed rPST had no N-glycosylation.

Animals↗
PubMed2001

[The design of ECG sample device based on Windows 98/95].

The ECG sample system which is based on Microsoft Windows98/95 and IBM-compatible PCs ISA bus, is introduced here. It includes ECG sample device, virtual device driver(VxD) and application program, By the method, we can design the device simply and make good use of the computer to programming powerful auto recognition software and telediagnosis software. The system is a cheap and mini medical apparatus. Applications in family care and community medical treatment are encouraging.

Electrocardiography↗
PubMed2001

[Possible mechanism of the protective effects of ginsenoside Rg1 on apoptosis in PC12 cells].

AIM: To explore the possible mechanism of the protective effect of ginsenoside Rg1 on dopamine-induced apoptosis in PC12 cells. METHODS: Flow cytometric assay was performed to quantify the apoptotic cells and detect the positive percentage of Bcl-2 and Bax proteins in PC12 cells. The expression of bcl-2 and bax mRNA was identified by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). The CPP32 activity was measured by fluorescent spectrofluorometer. RESULTS: Dopamine-induced apoptosis in PC12 cells was inhibited by pretreatment with 10 mumol.L-1 Rg1. Simultaneously, the expression of Bcl-2 protein and mRNA were increased, and the Bax protein and mRNA were decreased. The activation of CPP32 was inhibited after pretreatment with Rg1. CONCLUSION: Rg1 protects against dopamine-induced apoptosis in PC12 cells and this effect might be attributed to its regulation of the ratio of Bcl-2 to Bax and its inhibition of the activation of CPP32.

Animals↗
PubMed2000

General and efficient syntheses of C(18)-4,8-sphingadienines via S(N)2'-type homoallylic coupling reactions mediated by thioether-stabilized copper reagents.

The stereoselective syntheses of C(18)-4,8-sphingadienines 3 and 4 as analogues of sphingosine 1 are described. The key step in these syntheses involved a novel S(N)2'-type homoallylic coupling reaction between the corresponding thioether-stabilized allylic copper reagents and the allylic mesylate 7. The thioether-stabilized allylic copper reagents were easily prepared and retained the configuration of their double bond during the coupling reactions, thus overcoming the problem of isomerization which was normally associated with the use of allylic organometallic reagents in such applications.

Allyl Compounds↗