Proliferation and migration of retinal endothelial cells (RECs) contribute to the development of diabetic retinopathy. PLAG1 (pleomorphic adenoma gene 1) functions as a zinc-finger transcription factor to participate in the development of lipoblastomas or pleomorphic adenomas of the salivary glands through regulation of cell proliferation and migration. The role of PLAG1 in diabetic retinopathy was investigated in this study. Firstly, RECs were induced under high glucose conditions, which caused reduction in viability and induction of apoptosis in the RECs. Indeed, PLAG1 was elevated in high glucosetreated RECs. Functional assays showed that silence of PLAG1 increased viability and suppressed apoptosis in high glucose-induced RECs, accompanied with up-regulation of Bcl-2 and down-regulation of Bax and cleaved caspase-3. Moreover, migration of RECs was promoted by high glucose conditions, while repressed by knockdown of PLAG1. High glucose also triggered angiogenesis of RECs through up-regulation of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). However, interference of PLAG1 reduced VEGF expression to retard the angiogenesis. Silence of PLAG1 also attenuated high glucose-induced up-regulation of Wnt3a, β-catenin and c-Myc in RECs. Moreover, silence of PLAG1 ameliorated histopathological changes in the retina of STZ-induced diabetic rats through down-regulation of β-catenin. In conclusion, knockdown of PLAG1 suppressed high glucose-induced angiogenesis and migration of RECs, and attenuated diabetic retinopathy by inactivation of Wnt/ β-catenin signalling.
Statistical component of Chimera, a state-of-the-art MT system. and Project DF12P01OVV022 of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic (NAKI -- Amalach).
Wikipedia plain text data obtained from Wikipedia dumps with WikiExtractor in February 2018.
The data come from all Wikipedias for which dumps could be downloaded at [https://dumps.wikimedia.org/]. This amounts to 297 Wikipedias, usually corresponding to individual languages and identified by their ISO codes. Several special Wikipedias are included, most notably "simple" (Simple English Wikipedia) and "incubator" (tiny hatching Wikipedias in various languages).
For a list of all the Wikipedias, see [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias].
The script which can be used to get new version of the data is included, but note that Wikipedia limits the download speed for downloading a lot of the dumps, so it takes a few days to download all of them (but one or a few can be downloaded fast).
Also, the format of the dumps changes time to time, so the script will probably eventually stop working one day.
The WikiExtractor tool [http://medialab.di.unipi.it/wiki/Wikipedia_Extractor] used to extract text from the Wikipedia dumps is not mine, I only modified it slightly to produce plaintext outputs [https://github.com/ptakopysk/wikiextractor].