DocAsRef: An Empirical Study on Repurposing Reference-Based Summary Quality Metrics Reference-Freely

Automated summary quality assessment falls into two categories: reference-based and reference-free. Reference-based metrics, historically deemed more accurate due to the additional information provided by human-written references, are limited by their reliance on human input. In this paper, we hypothesize that the comparison methodologies used by some reference-based metrics to evaluate a system summary against its corresponding reference can be effectively adapted to assess it against its source document, thereby transforming these metrics into reference-free ones. Experimental results support this hypothesis. After being repurposed reference-freely, the zero-shot BERTScore using the pretrained DeBERTa-large-MNLI model of <0.5B parameters consistently outperforms its original reference-based version across various aspects on the SummEval and Newsroom datasets. It also excels in comparison to most existing reference-free metrics and closely competes with zero-shot summary evaluators based on GPT-3.5.Comment: Accepted into Findings of EMNLP 202

Magnetic forces enable controlled drug delivery by disrupting endothelial cell-cell junctions

The vascular endothelium presents a major transport barrier to drug delivery by only allowing selective extravasation of solutes and small molecules. Therefore, enhancing drug transport across the endothelial barrier has to rely on leaky vessels arising from disease states such as pathological angiogenesis and inflammatory response. Here we show that the permeability of vascular endothelium can be increased using an external magnetic field to temporarily disrupt endothelial adherens junctions through internalized iron oxide nanoparticles, activating the paracellular transport pathway and facilitating the local extravasation of circulating substances. This approach provides a physically controlled drug delivery method harnessing the biology of endothelial adherens junction and opens a new avenue for drug delivery in a broad range of biomedical research and therapeutic applications

Clinical research on liver reserve function by 13C-phenylalanine breath test in aged patients with chronic liver diseases

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The objective of this study was to investigate whether the ¹³C-phenylalanine breath test could be useful for the evaluation of hepatic function in elderly volunteers and patients with chronic hepatitis B and liver cirrhosis.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>L-[1-¹³C] phenylalanine was administered orally at a dose of 100 mg to 55 elderly patients with liver cirrhosis, 30 patients with chronic hepatitis B and 38 elderly healthy subjects. The breath test was performed at 8 different time points (0, 10, 20, 30, 45, 60, 90, 120 min) to obtain the values of Delta over baseline, percentage ¹³CO₂exhalation rate and cumulative excretion (Cum). The relationships of the cumulative excretion with the ¹³C-%dose/h and blood biochemical parameters were investigated.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The ¹³C-%dose/h at 20 min and 30 min combined with the cumulative excretion at 60 min and 120 min correlated with hepatic function tests, serum albumin, hemoglobin, platelet and Child-Pugh score. Prothrombin time, total and direct bilirubin were significantly increased, while serum albumin, hemoglobin and platelet, the cumulative excretion at 60 min and 120 min values decreased by degrees of intensity of the disease in Child-Pugh A, B, and C patients (P < 0.01).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The ¹³C-phenylalanine breath test can be used as a non-invasive assay to evaluate hepatic function in elderly patients with liver cirrhosis. The ¹³C-%dose/h at 20 min, at 30 min and cumulative excretion at 60 min may be the key value for determination at a single time-point. ¹³C-phenylalanine breath test is safe and helpful in distinguishing different stages of hepatic dysfunction for elderly cirrhosis patients.</p

Characterization of Mycosporine-Like Amino Acids in Chlorophyll f Producing Cyanobacteria from Shaded Niches

Cyanobacteria are the oldest photoautotrophic prokaryotes that can perform plant-like oxygenic photosynthesis. The obligate requirement of sunlight for photosynthesis inevitably exposes cyanobacteria to UV radiation. Mycosporine-like amino acids (MAAs) played necessary roles in protecting cyanobacteria from UV radiation and were frequently reported in cyanobacteria exposed to high light radiation. Here, the MAA production was tried in the chlorophyll f-producing cyanobacterial strains isolated from the shaded environments. Four Chroococcidiopsis strains were finally induced to produce MAAs under 0.15 W·m-2 of UV-B exposure, and the MAA contents increased along with the prolonged UV-B treatments in these four Chroococcidiopsis strains. After separation by HPLC system, one MAA type was detected at the similar retention times in the methanol extracts of Chroococcidiopsis strains, and all the MAA compounds showed in-line absorption at 310 nm and mass spectra 246 m/z. The absorption spectra and mass spectra matched well the characteristics of the simplest MAA mycosporine-glycine. Chroococcidiopsis had the simplest MAA gene clusters for mycosporine-glycine. MAAs could also be produced in the cyanobacteria even distributed in the light-deficient niches. These results suggested other roles of MAAs in addition to UV-B protection in the special cyanobacteria from shaded environments

Characterization of Mycosporine-like Amino Acids in Chlorophyll f Producing Cyanobacteria from Shaded Niches

Cyanobacteria are the oldest photoautotrophic prokaryotes that can perform plant-like oxygenic photosynthesis. The obligate requirement of sunlight for photosynthesis inevitably exposes cyanobacteria to UV radiation. Mycosporine-like amino acids (MAAs) played necessary roles in protecting cyanobacteria from UV radiation and were frequently reported in cyanobacteria exposed to high light radiation. Here, the MAA production was tried in the chlorophyll f-producing cyanobacterial strains isolated from the shaded environments. Four Chroococcidiopsis strains were finally induced to produce MAAs under 0.15 W·m-2 of UV-B exposure, and the MAA contents increased along with the prolonged UV-B treatments in these four Chroococcidiopsis strains. After separation by HPLC system, one MAA type was detected at similar retention times in the methanol extracts of Chroococcidiopsis strains, and all the MAA compounds showed in-line absorption at 310 nm and mass spectra 246 m/z. The absorption spectra and mass spectra matched well the characteristics of the simplest MAA mycosporine-glycine. Chroococcidiopsis had the simplest MAA gene clusters for mycosporine-glycine. MAAs could also be produced in the cyanobacteria even distributed in the light-deficient niches. These results suggested other roles of MAAs in addition to UV-B protection in the special cyanobacteria from shaded environments

Identify submitochondria and subchloroplast locations with pseudo amino acid composition: Approach from the strategy of discrete wavelet transform feature extraction

AbstractIt is very challenging and complicated to predict protein locations at the sub-subcellular level. The key to enhancing the prediction quality for protein sub-subcellular locations is to grasp the core features of a protein that can discriminate among proteins with different subcompartment locations. In this study, a different formulation of pseudoamino acid composition by the approach of discrete wavelet transform feature extraction was developed to predict submitochondria and subchloroplast locations. As a result of jackknife cross-validation, with our method, it can efficiently distinguish mitochondrial proteins from chloroplast proteins with total accuracy of 98.8% and obtained a promising total accuracy of 93.38% for predicting submitochondria locations. Especially the predictive accuracy for mitochondrial outer membrane and chloroplast thylakoid lumen were 82.93% and 82.22%, respectively, showing an improvement of 4.88% and 27.22% when other existing methods were compared. The results indicated that the proposed method might be employed as a useful assistant technique for identifying sub-subcellular locations. We have implemented our algorithm as an online service called SubIdent (http://bioinfo.ncu.edu.cn/services.aspx)

Electroacupuncture alleviates ciliary muscle cell apoptosis in lens-induced myopic guinea pigs through inhibiting the mitochondrial signaling pathway

AIM: To investigate the effect of electroacupuncture (EA) on the mitochondria-dependent apoptotic signaling pathway in the ciliary muscle of guinea pigs with negative lens-induced myopia (LIM). METHODS: Guinea pigs were randomly divided into normal control (NC) group, LIM group, LIM+SHAM acupoint (LIM+SHAM) group, and LIM+EA group. Animals in the NC group received no intervention, while those in other three groups were covered with -6.0 diopter (D) lenses on right eyes. Meanwhile, animals in the LIM+EA group received EA at Hegu (LI4) combined with Taiyang (EX-HN5) acupoints, while those in the LIM+SHAM group were treated at sham points. After treatments for 1, 2, and 4wk, morphological changes in ciliary muscles were observed with hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining and nick end labeling (TUNEL), and the expression of the mitochondrial apoptotic signaling pathway-related molecules in ciliary muscles was measured by real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) and Western blot. Additionally, the adenosine triphosphate (ATP) contents were also determined in ciliary muscles. RESULTS: Axial length increased significantly in the LIM and LIM+SHAM groups and decreased in the LIM+EA group. The ciliary muscle fibers were broken and destroyed in both LIM and LIM+SHAM groups, whereas those in the LIM+EA group improved significantly. TUNEL assay showed the number of apoptotic cells increased in the LIM and LIM+SHAM groups, whereas reduced in the LIM+EA group. ATP contents showed a significant decrease in the LIM and LIM+SHAM groups, whereas increased after EA treatment. Compared with the NC group, the dynamin-related protein 1 (DRP1), Caspase3, and apoptotic protease activator 1 (APAF1) levels were significantly increased in the LIM group and decreased in the LIM+EA group. CONCLUSION: The results provide evidence of EA inhibiting the development of myopia by regulating the mitochondrial apoptotic signaling pathway