Abstract Purpose To analyze the plasma lipid spectrum between healthy control and patients with pancreatic cancer and to select differentially expressed tumor markers for early diagnosis. Methods In total, 20 patents were divided into case group and healthy control group according to surgical pathology. Of almost 1206 plasma lipid molecules harvested from 20 patients were measured by HILIC using the normal phase LC/MS. Heat map presented the relative levels of metabolites and lipids in the healthy control group and patients with pancreatic cancer. The PCA model was constructed to find out the difference in lipid metabolites. The principal components were drawn in a score plot and any clustering tendency could be observed. PLS-DA were performed to distinguish the healthy control group and pancreatic cancer according to the identified lipid profiling datasets. The volcano plot was used to visualize all variables with VIP>1 and presented the important variables with P<0.01 and |FC|>2. Results The upregulated lipid metabolites in patients with pancreatic cancer contained 9 lipids; however, the downregulated lipid metabolites contained 79 lipids. Conclusion There were lipid metabolomic differences in patients with pancreatic cancer, which could serve as potential tumor markers for pancreatic cancer.

ABSTRACT Protein content is one of the main nutrition quality traits used to measure nutrition value in rice (Oryza sativa L.) Therefore, improving the protein content is a main target for nutrition quality breeding in rice. Previous studies have mainly focused on the total protein content in brown and polished rice using bi-parental segregating populations. Few researchers have focused on four different protein component traits (glutelin, prolamin, albumin, and globulin) in rice, and little is known regarding association analysis in natural populations. In this study, 329 japonica accessions (Oryza sativa L. subsp. japonica Kato) were collected from worldwide geographic distributions and genotyped using 154 microsatellite markers to detect the association between four protein component traits and relative markers in the tested panel. The Coomassie Brilliant Blue G-250 method was used to measure the phenotype of four protein components. A total of 845 amplified alleles were detected with allele number ranging from 2 to 9. The whole population was divided into three subgroups via software STRUCTURE 2.3.4. The scatterplot showed that the LD (linkage disequilibrium) decay distance was about 30 cM in the whole tested population. A total of 15 simple sequence repeats (SSR) markers were identified by using both the general linear model (GLM) and mixed linear model (MLM). These associated marker loci can provide a higher variety of choices in improving the nutrition quality of rice. In addition, the carrier materials with excellent alleles identified in this study can be used as parental genotypes in rice molecular breeding in the future.

A novel kind of adsorbent Li 1+xLaxZr2-x(Po4)3 was synthesized by solid state reaction method. The influence of the content of doping lanthanum on the adsorbent Li 1+xLaxZr2-x(Po4)3 was investigated by XRD and FTIR spectra while the morphology of powders was observed by SEM. The investigation of the adsorption properties showed that the adsorbent can selectively adsorb sodium with the adsorption capacity of 49.83 mg/g. The optimum conditions of adsorption are at pH 10.0-11.0 in LiCl solution.