Role of miR-134 in angiotensin II-induced vascular cell pathological changes in atherosclerosis

Purpose: To investigate the role of miR-134 in vascular smooth muscle cell dysfunction-related cardiovascular disease. Methods: The effect of miR-134 was evaluated after human aortic smooth muscle cells (HASMCs) were transfected with miR-134 mimics. The expression levels of p-Akt, mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR), cleaved caspase-3, p53, and β-actin were evaluated by immunoblotting. Terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase dUTP nick-end labeling was used to measure cell apoptosis. Reactive oxygen species levels were assayed by fluorescence microscopy after staining with 2’,7’– dichlorofluorescein diacetate. Results: Angiotensin II treatment induced miR-134 expression and Akt/mTOR activation, and inhibited cell viability in HASMCs (p < 0.01). Co-treatment with miRNA-134 reversed Ang II-induced HASMC dysfunction (p < 0.01). Overexpression of miR-134 is protective in Ang II-induced oxidative stress and apoptosis via the Akt/mTOR pathway (p < 0.05). Conclusion: MicroRNA-134 in HASMCs is a potential therapeutic target for preventing Ang II-induced cardiac dysfunction via modulating Akt/mTOR pathway

KDM3A Inhibition Ameliorates Hyperglycemia-Mediated Myocardial Injury by Epigenetic Modulation of Nuclear Factor Kappa-B/P65

ObjectivesEven after the glucose level returns to normal, hyperglycemia-induced cardiac dysfunction as well as reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation, inflammatory responses, and apoptosis continued deterioration, showing a long-lasting adverse effect on cardiac function and structure. We aimed to unveil the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying hyperglycemia-induced persistent myocardial injury and cardiac dysfunction.Methods and ResultsRecently, the accumulated evidence indicated epigenetic regulation act as a determining factor in hyperglycemia-induced continuous cardiovascular dysfunction. As an important histone demethylase, the expression of lysine-specific demethylase 3A (KDM3A) was continually increased, accompanied by a sustained decline of H3K9me2 levels in diabetic myocardium even if received hypoglycemic therapy. Besides, by utilizing gain- and loss-of-functional approaches, we identified KDM3A as a novel regulator that accelerates hyperglycemia-mediated myocardial injury by promoting ROS generation, aggregating inflammatory reaction, and facilitating cell apoptosis in vitro and in vivo. The KDM3A inhibition could significantly ameliorate the adverse effect of hyperglycemia in both diabetes model and diabetic intensive glycemic control model. Mechanically, our data uncovered that KDM3A could promote the expression and transcriptional activity of nuclear factor kappa-B (NF-κB/P65), and the succedent rescue experiments further verified that KDM3A regulates hyperglycemia-induced myocardial injury in an NF-κB/P65 dependent manner.ConclusionThis study revealed histone-modifying enzymes KDM3A drives persistent oxidative stress, inflammation, apoptosis, and subsequent myocardial injury in the diabetic heart by regulating the transcription of NF-κB/P65

Neural Bag-of-Ngrams

Bag-of-ngrams (BoN) models are commonly used for representing text. One of the main drawbacks of traditional BoN is the ignorance of n-gram's semantics. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Neural Bag-of-ngrams (Neural-BoN), which replaces sparse one-hot n-gram representation in traditional BoN with dense and rich-semantic n-gram representations. We first propose context guided n-gram representation by adding n-grams to word embeddings model. However, the context guided learning strategy of word embeddings is likely to miss some semantics for text-level tasks. Text guided n-gram representation and label guided n-gram representation are proposed to capture more semantics like topic or sentiment tendencies. Neural-BoN with the latter two n-gram representations achieve state-of-the-art results on 4 document-level classification datasets and 6 semantic relatedness categories. They are also on par with some sophisticated DNNs on 3 sentence-level classification datasets. Similar to traditional BoN, Neural-BoN is efficient, robust and easy to implement. We expect it to be a strong baseline and be used in more real-world applications

Guiding the Training of Distributed Text Representation with Supervised Weighting Scheme for Sentiment Analysis

Abstract With the rapid growth of social media, sentiment analysis has received growing attention from both academic and industrial fields. One line of researches for sentiment analysis is to feed bag-of-words (BOW) text representation into classifiers. Usually, raw BOW requires weighting schemes to obtain better performance, where important words are given more weights while unimportant ones are given less weights. Another line of researches focuses on neural models, where distributed text representations are learned from raw texts automatically. In this paper, we take advantages of techniques in both lines of researches. We use words’ weights to guide neural models to focus on important words. Various supervised weighting schemes are explored in this work. We discover that better text features are learned for sentiment analysis when suitable weighting schemes are applied upon neural models

Correction to: Guiding the Training of Distributed Text Representation with Supervised Weighting Scheme for Sentiment Analysis

Abstract In the originally published article, the acknowledgment section is missing. Please find it as follows

Comparison of investigation methods of heat injury in grapevine (Vitis) and assessment to heattolerance in different cultivars and species

BACKGROUND: In the context of global climate change, heat stress is becoming an increasingly important constraint on grapevine growth and berry quality. There is a need to breed new grape cultivars with heat tolerance and to design effective physiological defenses against heat stress. The investigation of heat injury to plants or tissues under high temperature is an important step in achieving these goals. At present, evaluation methods for heat injury include the gas exchange parameters of photosynthesis, membrane thermostability, chlorophyll content etc.; however, these methods have obvious disadvantages, such as insensitivity, inconvenience and delayed information. An effective and convenient method for investigating the heat injury of grapevine must be developed. RESULTS: In this study, an investigation protocol for a critical temperature (47°C) and heat treatment time (40 min) was developed in detached grape leaves. Based on the results, we found that the OJIP test was superior to measuring electrolyte leakage or photosynthetic O(2) evolution for investigating the heat injury of three cultivars of grapevine. Heat tolerance of 47 grape species and cultivars was evaluated through investigating heat injury using the OJIP test. Moreover, the electron transport chain (donor side, acceptor side and reaction center) of PSII in photosynthesis was further investigated. CONCLUSIONS: The OJIP test was a rapid, sensitive and convenient method for investigating heat injury in grapevine. An analysis of PSII function using this method indicated that the acceptor side was less sensitive to heat than was the donor side or the reaction center in grape leaves. Among the 47 taxa evaluated (cultivars, hybrids, and wild species), heat tolerance varied largely in each genotype group: most wild species and hybrids between V. labrusca and V. vinifera had relatively strong heat tolerance, but most cultivars from V. vinifera had relatively weak heat tolerance

Differential Effects of Senescence on the Phloem Exports of Cadmium and Zinc from Leaves to Grains in Rice during Grain Filling

In rice, non-essential toxic cadmium (Cd) and the essential nutrient zinc (Zn) share similar transport pathways, which makes it challenging to differentially regulate the allocation of these elements to the grain. The phloem is the main pathway for the loading of these elements into rice grains. It has long been accepted that tissue senescence makes the nutrients (e.g., Zn) stored in leaves available for further phloem export toward the grain. Whether senescence could drive the phloem export of Cd remains unclear. To this end, the stable isotopes 111Cd and 67Zn were used to trace the phloem export and the subsequent allocation of Cd and Zn from the flag leaves, where senescence was accelerated by spraying abscisic acid. Furthermore, changes upon senescence in the distribution of these elements among the leaf subcellular fractions and in the expression of key transporter genes were investigated. Abscisic acid-induced senescence enhanced the phloem export of Zn but had no impact on that of Cd, which was explained by the significant release of Zn from the chloroplast and cytosol fractions (concentrations decreased by ~50%) but a strong allocation of Cd to the cell wall fraction (concentration increased by ~90%) during senescence. Nevertheless, neither Zn nor Cd concentrations in the grain were affected, since senescence strengthened the sequestration of phloem-exported Zn in the uppermost node, but did not impact that of phloem-exported Cd. This study suggests that the agronomic strategies affecting tissue senescence could be utilized to differentially regulate Cd and Zn allocation in rice during grain filling