Lipolysis drives expression of the constitutively active receptor GPR3 to induce adipose thermogenesis

Thermogenic adipocytes possess a therapeutically appealing, energy-expending capacity, which is canonically cold-induced by ligand-dependent activation of β-adrenergic G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). Here, we uncover an alternate paradigm of GPCR-mediated adipose thermogenesis through the constitutively active receptor, GPR3. We show that the N terminus of GPR3 confers intrinsic signaling activity, resulting in continuous Gs-coupling and cAMP production without an exogenous ligand. Thus, transcriptional induction of Gpr3 represents the regulatory parallel to ligand-binding of conventional GPCRs. Consequently, increasing Gpr3 expression in thermogenic adipocytes is alone sufficient to drive energy expenditure and counteract metabolic disease in mice. Gpr3 transcription is cold-stimulated by a lipolytic signal, and dietary fat potentiates GPR3-dependent thermogenesis to amplify the response to caloric excess. Moreover, we find GPR3 to be an essential, adrenergic-independent regulator of human brown adipocytes. Taken together, our findings reveal a noncanonical mechanism of GPCR control and thermogenic activation through the lipolysis-induced expression of constitutively active GPR3.ISSN:0092-8674ISSN:1097-417

The importance of the altricial – precocial spectrum for social complexity in mammals and birds:A review

Various types of long-term stable relationships that individuals uphold, including cooperation and competition between group members, define social complexity in vertebrates. Numerous life history, physiological and cognitive traits have been shown to affect, or to be affected by, such social relationships. As such, differences in developmental modes, i.e. the ‘altricial-precocial’ spectrum, may play an important role in understanding the interspecific variation in occurrence of social interactions, but to what extent this is the case is unclear because the role of the developmental mode has not been studied directly in across-species studies of sociality. In other words, although there are studies on the effects of developmental mode on brain size, on the effects of brain size on cognition, and on the effects of cognition on social complexity, there are no studies directly investigating the link between developmental mode and social complexity. This is surprising because developmental differences play a significant role in the evolution of, for example, brain size, which is in turn considered an essential building block with respect to social complexity. Here, we compiled an overview of studies on various aspects of the complexity of social systems in altricial and precocial mammals and birds. Although systematic studies are scarce and do not allow for a quantitative comparison, we show that several forms of social relationships and cognitive abilities occur in species along the entire developmental spectrum. Based on the existing evidence it seems that differences in developmental modes play a minor role in whether or not individuals or species are able to meet the cognitive capabilities and requirements for maintaining complex social relationships. Given the scarcity of comparative studies and potential subtle differences, however, we suggest that future studies should consider developmental differences to determine whether our finding is general or whether some of the vast variation in social complexity across species can be explained by developmental mode. This would allow a more detailed assessment of the relative importance of developmental mode in the evolution of vertebrate social systems

I2S2: Image-To-Scene Sketch Translation Using Conditional Input and Adversarial Networks

Image generation from sketch is a popular and well-studied computer vision problem. However, the inverse problem image-to-sketch (I2S) synthesis still remains open and challenging, let alone image-to-scene sketch (I2S 2 ) synthesis, especially when full-scene sketch generations are highly desired. In this paper, we propose a framework for generating full-scene sketch representations from natural scene images, aiming to generate outputs that approximate hand-drawn scene sketches. Specifically, we exploit generative adversarial models to produce full-scene sketches given arbitrary input images that are actually conditions which are incorporated to guide the distribution mapping in the context of adversarial learning. To advance the use of such conditions, we further investigate edge detection solutions and propose to utilize Holistically-nested Edge Detection (HED) maps to condition the generative model. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the proposed framework and provide detailed quantitative and qualitative evaluations to demonstrate its effectiveness. In addition, we also demonstrate the flexibility of the proposed framework by using different conditional inputs, such as the Canny edge detector

Relative errors can cue absolute visuomotor mappings

When repeatedly switching between two visuomotor mappings, e.g. in a reaching or pointing task, adaptation tends to speed up over time. That is, when the error in the feedback corresponds to a mapping switch, fast adaptation occurs. Yet, what is learned, the relative error or the absolute mappings? When switching between mappings, errors with a size corresponding to the relative difference between the mappings will occur more often than other large errors. Thus, we could learn to correct more for errors with this familiar size (Error Learning). On the other hand, it has been shown that the human visuomotor system can store several absolute visuomotor mappings (Mapping Learning) and can use associated contextual cues to retrieve them. Thus, when contextual information is present, no error feedback is needed to switch between mappings. Using a rapid pointing task, we investigated how these two types of learning may each contribute when repeatedly switching between mappings in the absence of task-irrelevant contextual cues. After training, we examined how participants changed their behaviour when a single error probe indicated either the often-experienced error (Error Learning) or one of the previously experienced absolute mappings (Mapping Learning). Results were consistent with Mapping Learning despite the relative nature of the error information in the feedback. This shows that errors in the feedback can have a double role in visuomotor behaviour: they drive the general adaptation process by making corrections possible on subsequent movements, as well as serve as contextual cues that can signal a learned absolute mapping