Withaferin A promotes proliferation and migration of brain endothelial cells

Purpose: To investigate the effect of withaferin A (WFA) on the proliferation and migration of brain endothelial cells.Methods: BALB-5023 mouse microvascular cells were treated with a range of withaferin A (WFA) concentrations from 10 to 100 ng/mL. Dojindo’s CCK-8 cell proliferation kit was used for the analysis of cell proliferation. Transwell cell culture inserts were used to determine the migration potential of WFAtreated endothelial cells. Absorbance was measured at 450 nm on an enzyme-linked immunosorbent(ELISA) reader.Results: The results revealed a significant increase in the proliferation and migration of endothelial cells following treatment with a low concentration (30 ng/mL) of WFA compared with the higher concentration (> 10 ng/mL). The effect was further  enhanced when WFA was used in combination with soluble Fas ligand (sFasL). Autocrine signaling of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) by endothelial cellswas significantly increased following treatment with WFA or in combination with  sFasL. WFA increased the expression of Fas on endothelial cells, suggesting the involvement of sFasL in the proliferation and migration of brain endothelial cells.Conclusion: Thus, WFA promotes the proliferation and migration of endothelial cells through increase in the expression of Fas and secretion of VEGF.Keywords: Endothelial cells, Vascular endothelial growth factor, Microvascular, Vascular disease, Withaferin

Almost disjointness preserving functionals on Banach lattices of differentiable functions (Research on preserver problems on Banach algebras and related topics)

Let C¹[0, 1] be the space of all continuously differentiable function on [0, 1]. When define the order f ≥ g by f(0) ≥ g(0) and f′ ≥ g′ pointwise on [0, 1], and the norm is defined by ∥f∥σ = |f(0)| + ∥f′∥∞, the space C¹[0, 1] is a Banach lattice. We will give the representation of bounded ε-disjointness preserving linear functionals of C¹[0, 1]

5-[4-(1H-Imidazol-1-yl)phen­yl]-1H-tetra­zole

In the title compound, C10H8N6, the tetra­zole and benzene rings are close to being coplanar [dihedral angle = 9.90 (16)°], but the imidazole ring is rotated 37.18 (09)° out of the benzene plane. In the crystal, mol­ecules are connected through tetra­zole–imidazole N—H⋯N hydrogen bonds, giving rise to zigzag chains, which extend along [010]

catena-Poly[(trans-diaqua­cadmium)-bis­{μ-5-[4-(1H-imidazol-1-yl)phen­yl]tetra­zol-1-ido}]

In the title compound, [Cd(C10H7N6)2(H2O)2], the CdII atom lies on an inversion centre and is coordinated by four N atoms from 5-[4-(1H-imidazol-1-yl)phen­yl]tetra­zol-1-ide ligands and two O atoms from the coordinated water mol­ecules in an octa­hedral arrangement. The complex polymeric chains are inter­connected via inter­molecular water O—H⋯N hydrogen bonds into a three-dimensional network

Neutralizing Monoclonal Antibodies Reduce Human Cytomegalovirus Infection and Spread in Developing Placentas.

Congenital human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) infection is a leading cause of birth defects worldwide, yet the most effective strategies for preventing virus transmission during pregnancy are unknown. We measured the efficacy of human monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) to HCMV attachment/entry factors glycoprotein B (gB) and the pentameric complex, gH/gL-pUL128-131, in preventing infection and spread of a clinical strain in primary placental cells and explants of developing anchoring villi. A total of 109 explants from five first-trimester placentas were cultured, and infection was analyzed in over 400 cell columns containing ~120,000 cytotrophoblasts (CTBs). mAbs to gB and gH/gL, 3-25 and 3-16, respectively, neutralized infection in stromal fibroblasts and trophoblast progenitor cells. mAbs to pUL128-131 of the pentameric complex, 1-103 and 2-18, neutralized infection of amniotic epithelial cells better than mAbs 3-25 and 3-16 and hyperimmune globulin. Select mAbs neutralized infection of cell column CTBs, with mAb 2-18 most effective, followed by mAb 3-25. Treatment of anchoring villi with mAbs postinfection reduced spread in CTBs and impaired formation of virion assembly compartments, with mAb 2-18 achieving better suppression at lower concentrations. These results predict that antibodies generated by HCMV vaccines or used for passive immunization have the potential to reduce transplacental transmission and congenital disease

Backreaction in Axion Monodromy, 4-forms and the Swampland

Axion monodromy models can always be described in terms of an axion coupled to 3-form gauge fields with non-canonical kinetic terms. The presence of the saxions parametrising the kinetic metrics of the 3-form fields leads to backreaction effects in the inflationary dynamics. We review the case in which saxions backreact on the K\"ahler metric of the inflaton leading to a logarithmic scaling of the proper field distance at large field. This behaviour is universal in Type II string flux compactifications and consistent with a refinement of the Swampland Conjecture. The critical point at which this behaviour appears depends on the mass hierarchy between the inflaton and the saxions. However, in tractable compactifications, such a hierarchy cannot be realised without leaving the regime of validity of the effective theory, disfavouring transplanckian excursions in string theory.Comment: Proceedings prepared for the "Workshop on Geometry and Physics", November 2016, Ringberg Castl

CTSN: Predicting Cloth Deformation for Skeleton-based Characters with a Two-stream Skinning Network

We present a novel learning method to predict the cloth deformation for skeleton-based characters with a two-stream network. The characters processed in our approach are not limited to humans, and can be other skeletal-based representations of non-human targets such as fish or pets. We use a novel network architecture which consists of skeleton-based and mesh-based residual networks to learn the coarse and wrinkle features as the overall residual from the template cloth mesh. Our network is used to predict the deformation for loose or tight-fitting clothing or dresses. We ensure that the memory footprint of our network is low, and thereby result in reduced storage and computational requirements. In practice, our prediction for a single cloth mesh for the skeleton-based character takes about 7 milliseconds on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 GPU. Compared with prior methods, our network can generate fine deformation results with details and wrinkles.Comment: 13 page

Tetra­aqua­bis­[4-(1H-imidazol-1-yl-κN 3)benzoato]cobalt(II)

In the title compound, [Co(C10H7N2O2)2(H2O)4], the CoII atom lies on an inversion centre and displays a slightly distorted octa­hedral geometry. The coordination sphere is defined by two mutually trans N atoms from two 4-(imidazol-1-yl)benzoate ligands and the O atoms from four water mol­ecules. The crystal structure is stabilized by O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds