December 2021 Member Publications

  1. ElNakieb Y, Ali MT, Elnakib A, Shalaby A, Soliman A, Mahmoud A, Ghazal M, Barnes GN, El-Baz A. The Role of Diffusion Tensor MR Imaging (DTI) of the Brain in Diagnosing Autism Spectrum Disorder: Promising Results. Sensors (Basel). 2021 Dec 7;21(24):8171. doi: 10.3390/s21248171. PMID: 34960265; PMCID: PMC8703859.
    Impact Statement: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis is usually subjective, and scores can vary from one specialist to another. Previous literature suggests differences in brain development, environmental, and/or genetic factors play a role in developing autism, yet scientists still do not know exactly the pathology of this disorder. This paper provides a study of implementing feature engineering tools to find discriminant insights from brain imaging of white matter connectivity and using a machine learning framework for an accurate classification of autistic individuals.
  2. Men H, Young JL, Zhou W, Zhang H, Wang X, Xu J, Lin Q, Tan Y, Zheng Y, Cai L. Early-Life Exposure to Low-Dose Cadmium Accelerates Diethylnitrosamine and Diet-Induced Liver Cancer. Oxid Med Cell Longev. 2021 Nov 28;2021:1427787. doi: 10.1155/2021/1427787. PMID: 34876963; PMCID: PMC8645401.
    Impact Statement: Although maternal exposure to cadmium causes obesity and metabolic changes in the offspring, including nonalcoholic fatty liver disease-like pathology, whether maternal cadmium exposure accelerates liver cancer in the offspring is unknown. This study investigated the impact of early-life exposure to cadmium on the incidence and potential mechanisms of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in offspring subjected to postweaning HCC induction, and confirmed that early-life exposure to low-dose cadmium accelerates liver cancer development induced by a DEN/HFCD in male mice, probably due to chronic lipotoxicity and inflammation.
  3. Bao T, Liu J, Leng J, Cai L. The cGAS-STING pathway: more than fighting against viruses and cancer. Cell Biosci. 2021 Dec 14;11(1):209. doi: 10.1186/s13578-021-00724-z. PMID: 34906241; PMCID: PMC8670263.
    Impact Statement: In the classic cGAS-stimulator of interferon genes (STING) pathway, downstream signals can control the production of type I interferon (IFN) and NF-κB to promote the activation of pro-inflammatory molecules, which are mainly induced during antiviral responses. However, this review mainly highlights the functions of the cGAS-STING pathway in chronic inflammatory diseases, with focus on the important role of cGAS-STING pathway in the chronic inflammatory status in diabetes and diabetes-related complications.
  4. Zhou W, Young JL, Men H, Zhang H, Yu H, Lin Q, Xu H, Xu J, Tan Y, Zheng Y, Cai L. Sex differences in the effects of whole-life, low-dose cadmium exposure on postweaning high-fat diet-induced cardiac pathogeneses. Sci Total Environ. 2021 Dec 5;809:152176. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.152176. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34875320.
    Impact Statement: We previously showed the development of cardiac remodeling (hypertrophy or fibrosis) in mice with either post-weaning high-fat diet (HFD, 60% kcal fat) feeding or exposure to chronic low-dose cadmium. Here, we determined whether whole-life exposure to environmentally relevant, low-dose cadmium affects the susceptibility of offspring to post-weaning HFD-induced cardiac pathologies and function, and confirmed that whole-life 5 ppm cadmium exposure significantly increases the susceptibility of female offspring to HFD-induced cardiac remodeling and dysfunction.
  5. Li F, Chen J, Liu Y, Gu Z, Jiang M, Zhang L, Chen SY, Deng Z, McClain CJ, Feng W. Deficiency of Cathelicidin Attenuates High-Fat Diet Plus Alcohol-Induced Liver Injury through FGF21/Adiponectin Regulation. Cells. 2021 Nov 27;10(12):3333. doi: 10.3390/cells10123333. PMID: 34943840; PMCID: PMC8699208.
    Impact Statement: Alcohol consumption and obesity are known risk factors of steatohepatitis. In this paper, Dr. Wenke Feng, Professor of Medicine, and his collaborators, including some in the CIEHS, demonstrated that deficiency of CRAMP is against a high-fat diet plus acute alcohol-induced liver injury. These results suggest that targeting CRAMP could be an effective approach for the prevention/treatment of high-fat diet plus alcohol consumption-induced steatohepatitis.
  6. Zhao CB, Yu J, Kong M, Han J, Du H, Huang J. Ketamine for Monitored Anesthesia Care during Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement. J Perianesth Nurs. 2021 Dec 28:S1089-9472(21)00147-7. doi: 10.1016/j.jopan.2021.06.007. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34972624.
    Impact Statement: Employing Ketamine as an adjunct during monitored anesthesia care for transcatheter aortic valve replacement is a feasible option.
  7. Majumder S, Pushpakumar S, Juin SK, Jala VR, Sen U. Toll-like receptor 4 mutation protects the kidney from Ang-II-induced hypertensive injury. Pharmacol Res. 2021 Dec 9;175:106030. doi: 10.1016/j.phrs.2021.106030. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34896544.
    Impact Statement: This article describes the mechanism of how TLR4 activation suppresses autophagy, induces apoptosis and kidney injury in Ang-II-induced hypertension, and TLR4 mutation protects the kidney.
  8. Das S, Rai A, Merchant ML, Cave MC, Rai SN. A Comprehensive Survey of Statistical Approaches for Differential Expression Analysis in Single-Cell RNA Sequencing Studies. Genes (Basel). 2021 Dec 2;12(12):1947. doi: 10.3390/genes12121947. PMID: 34946896; PMCID: PMC8701051.
    Impact Statement: Differential Expression (DE) analysis in presence of noises from different sources remains a key challenge in Single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) studies. Earlier practices for addressing this involved borrowing methods from bulk RNA-seq, which are based on non-zero differences in average expressions of genes across cell populations. We evaluate the performance of 19 widely used methods in terms of 13 performance metrics on 11 real scRNA-seq datasets. Our findings suggest that some bulk RNA-seq methods are quite competitive with the single-cell methods, but their performance depends on the underlying models. However, the multi-criteria and combined-data analysis indicates that DECENT and EBSeq are the best options for DE analysis. Our evaluation provides proper guidelines for selecting the proper tool which performs best under particular experimental settings in the context of the scRNA-seq.
  9. Xu F, Mu J, Teng Y, Zhang X, Sundaram K, Sriwastva MK, Kumar A, Lei C, Zhang L, Liu QM, Yan J, McClain CJ, Merchant ML, Zhang HG. Restoring Oat Nanoparticles Mediated Brain Memory Function of Mice Fed Alcohol by Sorting Inflammatory Dectin-1 Complex Into Microglial Exosomes. Small. 2021 Dec 13:e2105385. doi: 10.1002/smll.202105385. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34897972.
    Impact Statement: This study focuses on the molecular mechanism(s) underlying how oat nanoparticles (oatN) contributes to the inhibition of microglial cell mediated inflammation. The findings from this study are significant in that it provides a basis for developing mechanism-driven novel approaches for prevention of microglial cell mediated chronic inflammation of the brain via non-invasive oral administration.
  10. Wu B, Pal S, Kang J, Guo Y. Distributional independent component analysis for diverse neuroimaging modalities. Biometrics. 2021 Oct 25. doi: 10.1111/biom.13594. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34694629.
    Impact Statement: Analysis of images derived from various neuroimaging modalities involves some common goals such as dimension reduction, denoising, and feature extraction. However, since these modalities have vastly different data characteristics, the current analysis is usually performed using distinct analytical tools that are only suitable for a specific imaging modality. In this paper, we present a Distributional Independent Component Analysis (DICA) that represents a new approach that performs decomposition on the distribution level, providing a unified framework for extracting features across imaging modalities with different scales and representations.
  11. Wu B, Pal S, Kang J, Guo Y. Rejoinder to discussions of "distributional independent component analysis for diverse neuroimaging modalities". Biometrics. 2021 Nov 15. doi: 10.1111/biom.13588. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34780668.
    Impact Statement: This paper provides results and comments to address the questions raised in the discussions of our recent publication entitled "Distributional independent component analysis for diverse neuroimaging modalities".
  12. Aqil F, Munagala R, Agrawal AK, Jeyabalan J, Tyagi N, Rai SN, Gupta RC. Anthocyanidins Inhibit Growth and Chemosensitize Triple-Negative Breast Cancer via the NF-κB Signaling Pathway. Cancers (Basel). 2021 Dec 13;13(24):6248. doi: 10.3390/cancers13246248. PMID: 34944868; PMCID: PMC8699375.
    Impact Statement: Breast cancer is the most common female cancer diagnosed in the U.S. and the second most common cause of cancer death in women. Chemotherapeutics used to treat breast cancer often have side effects, which are sometimes life-threatening. Moreover, the tumors can develop resistance over time, making breast cancer treatment challenging. In this paper, we show that the oral administration of colored pigments isolated from bilberry/blueberry, called anthocyanidins (Anthos), significantly decrease tumor volume, inhibit the growth and metastasis of breast cancer, sensitize drug-resistant tumor cells, and exhibit a lower rate of lymph node and lung metastasis, compared to control. These mechanistic insights are expected to be valuable for clinical translation of berry Anthos, either alone or as adjuvant to chemotherapy, for the treatment of breast cancer patients.
  13. Yusuf M, Pan J, Rai SN, Eldredge-Hindy H. Financial Toxicity in Women With Breast Cancer Receiving Radiation Therapy: Final Results of a Prospective Observational Study. Pract Radiat Oncol. 2021 Dec 9:S1879-8500(21)00301-5. doi: 10.1016/j.prro.2021.11.003. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34896597.
    Impact Statement: In this prospective study of women with BC receiving RT, distinct factors including surgery type were significantly associated with FT. FT was strongly correlated with health-related QoL. Increased characterization of the relationship between FT and health-related QoL for women with BC receiving RT and defining clinical predictors of FT may help guide future studies investigating optimal targeted interventions for patients with BC at high risk for FT.