Nutrition in early life has a long-term influence on later health. In order to the explore effects of in ovo feeding (IOF) of vitamin C on splenic development, splenic metabolism and apoptosis were detected in embryo, adult chickens and in vitro. A total of 360 fertile eggs were selected and randomly assigned to control (CON) and vitamin C (VC) groups which were injected with saline and vitamin C on embryonic day 11, respectively. Functional enrichment of differentially expressed genes by transcriptome on embryonic day 19 suggested that purine nucleotide metabolism might be a potential pathway for the IOF of vitamin C to regulate spleen development. Additionally, the IOF of vitamin C significantly increased splenic vitamin C content on post-hatch day 21. Meanwhile, the splenic expression of adenosine deaminase, serine/threonine kinase 1 and proliferating cell nuclear antigen was down-regulated, whereas the expression of cysteinyl aspartate specific proteinase 9 was up-regulated in the VC group. On post-hatch day 42, the IOF of vitamin C significantly down-regulated the splenic expression of B-cell lymphoma 2 and increased the mRNA level of cysteinyl aspartate specific proteinase 9. The IOF of vitamin C could regulate the expression of genes related to adenylate metabolism and increased the apoptosis rate in vitro, which is consistent with the result in vivo. In conclusion, the IOF of vitamin C regulated splenic development and maturation by affecting purine nucleotide metabolism pathway and promoting apoptosis.

Adenosine deaminases that act on RNA (ADARs) are RNA editing enzymes that convert adenosines to inosines within cellular and viral RNAs. Certain glutamate receptor (gluR) pre-mRNAs are substrates for the enzymes in vivo. For example, at the R/G editing site of gluR-B, -C, and -D RNAs, ADARs change an arginine codon (AGA) to a glycine codon (IGA) so that two protein isoforms can be synthesized from a single encoded mRNA; the highly related gluR-A sequence is not edited at this site. To gain insight into what features of an RNA substrate are important for accurate and efficient editing by an ADAR, we performed a phylogenetic analysis of sequences required for editing at the R/G site. We observed highly conserved sequences that were shared by gluR-B, -C, and -D, but absent from gluR-A. Surprisingly, in contrast to results obtained in phylogenetic analyses of tRNA and rRNA, it was the bases in paired, helical regions whose identity was conserved, whereas bases in nonhelical regions varied, but maintained their nonhelical state. We speculate this pattern in part reflects constraints imposed by ADAR's unique specificity and gained support for our hypotheses with mutagenesis studies. Unexpectedly, we observed that some of the gluR introns were conserved beyond the sequences required for editing. The ∼600-nt intron 13 of gluR-C was particularly remarkable, showing >94% nucleotide identity between human and chicken, organisms estimated to have diverged 310 million years ago.

In this study, pre- and post-operative serum activities of adenosine deaminase (ADA) and total superoxide dismutase (SOD) enzymes were measured in patients with squamous cell laryngeal cancer. Activities of both enzymes were found to be higher in cancerous patients compared to the controls. No significant differences were found however between pre- and post-operative values for both enzymes in the patient group.

It has been suggested that ADA and SOD enzymes leak from the cancerous laryngeal tissues into the blood stream. The absence of differences between pre- and post-operative serum enzyme activities has two possible explanations: Firstly, removal of previously released enzymes from the blood stream takes a much longer period than one month; and secondly, cancerous laryngeal tissue is not the only source of the enzymes mentioned even after removal of cancerous tissue by surgical operation, other sources such as adjacent tissues and/or metastatic tissues etc, still release these enzymes into the blood stream.