AR Highlights

Abstract

The liver plays an important role in the development of organs in the prenatal period. However, morphological and morphometric features of the liver during the early embryonic period are not well understood. Recent advances in medical imaging have enabled earlier assessment of human development in the first trimester. The authors carried out external morphologic and morphometric analysis of the liver during this period using a superparallel magnetic resonance microscope to image embryos obtained from the Kyoto Collection. They determined the external morphology as well as quantitative morphometry of the embryonic liver. They also found that development of the liver was greatly affected by adjacent organs and tissues. The data from this study provide a better understanding of liver development as well as morphogenesis of nearby organs. The authors' results could also be used as a reference for clinical evaluation in the early stage of gestation, and this could be useful in fetal medicine and prenatal diagnosis. The authors predict that further improvement in imaging modalities will enable more precise detection of the intrahepatic vascular system. Natural plants have the potential to produce safe and effective anticancer drugs. E. helioscopia L is a member of the plant family Euphorbiaceae. E. helioscopia L is a traditional Chinese medicine that has been used for centuries to treat various disease conditions, such as tuberculosis, dysentery, cervical carcinoma, and esophageal and lung cancer. The anticancer active fractions and the detailed anticancer mechanism of this herb are not well understood. Therefore, the authors identified the main antitumor active fractions of aqueous-ethanol extracts of E. helioscopia L using five different cancer cell lines in vitro. They found that ethyl acetate and chloroform extracts inhibited proliferation of all five human cancer cell lines and that the ethyl acetate extract was the strongest among four tested. The major active fraction was assayed using high-performance liquid chromatography. The authors found that flavonoids could be the main constituents of the ethyl acetate extract. Electron microscopy results further suggested that ethyl acetate extract of E. helioscopia L may be a potent inducer of apoptosis in cancer cells. The authors also investigated the effects of E. helioscopia L ethyl acetate extract on the invasion and metastasis of a human hepatocellular carcinoma cell line. They found that ethyl acetate extract negatively affected the invasiveness of these cancer cells and that ethyl acetate extract downregulated matrix metalloproteinase-9 (known to play an important role in cancer cell migration and invasion) expression in cancerous cells. Although further studies are required to establish a comprehensive screening of the active constituents of this extract, the authors' results indicate its chemopreventive potential against human cancer. The primary function of sutures in young individuals is to enable growth of the skull. Sutures are morphologically diverse with regard to ontogeny, location, fusion, sexual dimorphism, and intraspecies and interspecies variations. The authors tested the functional hypothesis that sutures act as energy absorbers protecting skulls subjected to dynamic loads. They used a finite element model of a primate cranium (Macaca mulatta) with dynamic simulations to determine the effect of a pair of sutures (zygomaticotemporal) on stress and strain patterns associated with feeding. Feeding is a habitual behavior, which can potentially impose high and/or repetitive loads on the craniofacial skeleton. They scanned the specimen using iCAT cone-beam computed tomography, which is a recently developed technology to evaluate 3D bone morphology at high resolution, and the model was then constructed. This model was simplified structurally to reduce model complexity and to avoid lengthy calculation times during dynamic simulation; therefore, not all of the sutures were modeled. The model also simplified the viscoelastic properties of the sutures. In contrast to expectations and the initial hypothesis, the authors found that zygomaticotemporal sutures play a limited role in modulating global skull mechanics, and they did not absorb significant amounts of energy during dynamic simulations. Based on their study findings, the authors hypothesize that sutures are mechanically significant because they are weak points on the cranium that must be protected from high stresses to avoid disrupting important growth processes. This suggests that sutural protection is an important selective pressure, which may have affected various aspects of sutural and craniofacial form.