Gene expression profiling of rat livers with Yin-deficiency-heat syndrome

AbstractObjectiveTo explore the nature of ”Yin internal heat caused by Yin-deficiency,” in terms of the theory of Traditional Chinese Medicine, by studying energy metabolism in rats with Yin-deficiency-heat syndrome and analyzing the gene expression profile of their livers.MethodsA Yin-deficiency-heat syndrome model was induced in rats using three Chinese medicinal herbs. Glycogen and triglycerides in blood plasma, and the enzyme activity of ATP in livers were measured colorimetrically. Triiodothyronine (T3), thyroxine (T4), and thyroid stimulating hormone levels in blood plasma were also measured with enzyme linked immunosorbent assay. The gene expression profile of livers was detected with gene chip analysis. Differentially expressed genes were screened out and classified according to Gene Ontology. The accuracy of results were examined with reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction.ResultsCompared with the control group, body weight (P<0.05) and hepatic glycogen (P<0.05) were significantly lower in the Yin-deficiency-heat syndrome group. Moreover, toe temperature (P< 0.01) and triglyceride (P<0.05), Na+−K+−ATPase (P< 0.01), Mg2+−ATPase (P<0.01), T3 (P<0.05), and T4 (P< 0.01) levels were significantly higher. There were 99 differentially expressed genes in livers from the Yin-deficiency-heat syndrome group. Genes were mainly related to sterol synthesis (Pc=0.0392), defense response (Pc=0.0448), and sterol metabolism (Pc=0.0533).ConclusionAbnormal expression genes in rats with Yin-deficiency-heat syndrome prompted the synthesis and metabolism of cholesterol, increased energy consumption, and reduced defense response. This gene expression might be the molecular mechanism underlying “internal heat caused by Yin-deficiency” in the rats with Yin-deficiency-heat syndrome

Improving Few-shot and Zero-shot Entity Linking with Coarse-to-Fine Lexicon-based Retriever

Few-shot and zero-shot entity linking focus on the tail and emerging entities, which are more challenging but closer to real-world scenarios. The mainstream method is the ''retrieve and rerank'' two-stage framework. In this paper, we propose a coarse-to-fine lexicon-based retriever to retrieve entity candidates in an effective manner, which operates in two layers. The first layer retrieves coarse-grained candidates by leveraging entity names, while the second layer narrows down the search to fine-grained candidates within the coarse-grained ones. In addition, this second layer utilizes entity descriptions to effectively disambiguate tail or new entities that share names with existing popular entities. Experimental results indicate that our approach can obtain superior performance without requiring extensive finetuning in the retrieval stage. Notably, our approach ranks the 1st in NLPCC 2023 Shared Task 6 on Chinese Few-shot and Zero-shot Entity Linking.Comment: Accepted to NLPCC202

Characterization of Electronic Cigarette Aerosol and Its Induction of Oxidative Stress Response in Oral Keratinocytes.

In this study, we have generated and characterized Electronic Cigarette (EC) aerosols using a combination of advanced technologies. In the gas phase, the particle number concentration (PNC) of EC aerosols was found to be positively correlated with puff duration whereas the PNC and size distribution may vary with different flavors and nicotine strength. In the liquid phase (water or cell culture media), the size of EC nanoparticles appeared to be significantly larger than those in the gas phase, which might be due to aggregation of nanoparticles in the liquid phase. By using in vitro high-throughput cytotoxicity assays, we have demonstrated that EC aerosols significantly decrease intracellular levels of glutathione in NHOKs in a dose-dependent fashion resulting in cytotoxicity. These findings suggest that EC aerosols cause cytotoxicity to oral epithelial cells in vitro, and the underlying molecular mechanisms may be or at least partially due to oxidative stress induced by toxic substances (e.g., nanoparticles and chemicals) present in EC aerosols