79 research outputs found
Hypaphorine ameliorates lipid accumulation and inflammation in a cellular model of non alcoholic fatty liver by regulating p38/JNK and NF κB signaling pathways
Purpose: To investigate the therapeutic effect and underlying mechanism of hypaphorine in a cellular model of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).Methods: Palmitic acid (PA) was used to induce a NAFLD phenotype in hepatocytes. Cell viability and apoptosis were evaluated by CCK-8 and flow cytometry assays. Inflammatory response was measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The effect of hypaphorine on lipid accumulation was evaluated using Oil Red O staining and triglyceride kits. Activation of p38/c–Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) and NF-κB pathways were analyzed by immunoblot assay.Results: Hypaphorine significantly improved cell viability (p < 0.01), suppressed inflammatory response (p < 0.01), and reduced lipid accumulation (p < 0.01) in PA-treated hepatocytes. Hypaphorine ameliorated lipid accumulation and inflammation in PA-treated hepatocytes by targeting p38/JNK and NF-κB pathways.Conclusion: Hypaphorine may serve as a therapeutic target in NAFLD. However, in vivo studies to validate this finding are required
Stacking-dependent electronic structure of trilayer graphene resolved by nanospot angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy
The crystallographic stacking order in multilayer graphene plays an important
role in determining its electronic structure. In trilayer graphene,
rhombohedral stacking (ABC) is particularly intriguing, exhibiting a flat band
with an electric-field tunable band gap. Such electronic structure is distinct
from simple hexagonal stacking (AAA) or typical Bernal stacking (ABA), and is
promising for nanoscale electronics, optoelectronics applications. So far clean
experimental electronic spectra on the first two stackings are missing because
the samples are usually too small in size (um or nm scale) to be resolved by
conventional angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). Here by using
ARPES with nanospot beam size (NanoARPES), we provide direct experimental
evidence for the coexistence of three different stackings of trilayer graphene
and reveal their distinctive electronic structures directly. By fitting the
experimental data, we provide important experimental band parameters for
describing the electronic structure of trilayer graphene with different
stackings
Affective Affordance of Message Balloon Animations: An Early Exploration of AniBalloons
We introduce the preliminary exploration of AniBalloons, a novel form of chat
balloon animations aimed at enriching nonverbal affective expression in
text-based communications. AniBalloons were designed using extracted motion
patterns from affective animations and mapped to six commonly communicated
emotions. An evaluation study with 40 participants assessed their effectiveness
in conveying intended emotions and their perceived emotional properties. The
results showed that 80% of the animations effectively conveyed the intended
emotions. AniBalloons covered a broad range of emotional parameters, comparable
to frequently used emojis, offering potential for a wide array of affective
expressions in daily communication. The findings suggest AniBalloons' promise
for enhancing emotional expressiveness in text-based communication and provide
early insights for future affective design.Comment: Accepted by CSCW 2023 poste
Establishment and characterization of a multi-drug resistant cell line for canine mammary tumors
Background and purposeCanine mammary tumors are the most common tumor disease of female dogs, and adjuvant chemotherapy often results in multi-drug resistance. Currently, the mechanisms underlying the development of tumor multi-drug resistance are unclear. The translation of research applications that can be used to effectively overcome tumor resistance is similarly hampered. Therefore, it is urgent to construct multi-drug resistance models of canine mammary tumors that can be used for research, to explore the mechanisms and means of overcoming resistance.Materials and methodsIn this study, the canine triple negative breast cancer cell line CMT-7364 was induced to develop multidrug resistance using doxorubicin by high-dose drug pulse method. The drug resistance and the expression of drug transport pumps of the cells was verified by CCK8 assay, immunoblotting, qPCR and immunofluorescence. Next, we used scratch assay and Transwell invasion assay to compare the migration and invasion abilities of the two cell lines and examined the expression of EMT-related proteins in both using immunoblotting. The differences of transcriptome between parental and drug-resistant cell lines were detected by RNA-seq sequencing. Finally, mouse xenograft models of drug-resistant and parental cell lines were constructed to evaluate the tumorigenic ability.ResultsAfter more than 50 generations of continuous passages stimulated by high-dose drug pulse method, the morphology of drug-resistant cell line CMT-7364/R tended to be mesenchymal-like and heterogeneous under light microscopy compared with the parental cell line CMT-7364/S, and developed resistance to doxorubicin and other commonly used chemotherapeutic drugs. In CMT-7364/R, BCRP was expressed at higher levels at both transcriptional and protein levels, while P-glycoprotein was not significantly different. Secondly, the migration and invasion ability of CMT-7364/R was significantly enhanced, with decreased expression of E-cadherin and increased expression of vimentin and mucin 1-N terminus. Finally, mouse xenograft models were constructed, while there was no significant difference in the volume of masses formed at 21 days.ConclusionIn summary, by using the canine mammary tumor cell line CMT-7364/S as the parental cell line, we successfully constructed a multidrug-resistant CMT-7364/R with high-dose drug pulse methods. Compared to its parental cell line, CMT-7364/R has decreased growth rate, overexpression of BCRP and increased migration and invasion ability due to EMT. The results of this study showed that CMT-7364/R might serve as a model for future studies on tumor drug resistance
New Superhard Carbon Phases Between Graphite and Diamond
Two new carbon allotropes (H-carbon and S-carbon) are proposed, as possible
candidates for the intermediate superhard phases between graphite and diamond
obtained in the process of cold compressing graphite, based on the results of
first-principles calculations. Both H-carbon and S-carbon are more stable than
previously proposed M-carbon and W-carbon and their bulk modulus are comparable
to that of diamond. H-carbon is an indirect-band-gap semiconductor with a gap
of 4.459 eV and S-carbon is a direct-band-gap semiconductor with a gap of 4.343
eV. The transition pressure from cold compressing graphite is 10.08 GPa and
5.93 Gpa for H-carbon and S-carbon, respectively, which is in consistent with
the recent experimental report.Comment: 5pages,4figures,submitted to Phys.Rev.Lett on 18Jan12, transfer to
Phys.Rev.B on 25Mar12; Solid State Communications(2012),
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssc.2012.05.02
Segment Anything Model for Medical Images?
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) is the first foundation model for general
image segmentation. It designed a novel promotable segmentation task, ensuring
zero-shot image segmentation using the pre-trained model via two main modes
including automatic everything and manual prompt. SAM has achieved impressive
results on various natural image segmentation tasks. However, medical image
segmentation (MIS) is more challenging due to the complex modalities, fine
anatomical structures, uncertain and complex object boundaries, and wide-range
object scales. SAM has achieved impressive results on various natural image
segmentation tasks. Meanwhile, zero-shot and efficient MIS can well reduce the
annotation time and boost the development of medical image analysis. Hence, SAM
seems to be a potential tool and its performance on large medical datasets
should be further validated. We collected and sorted 52 open-source datasets,
and build a large medical segmentation dataset with 16 modalities, 68 objects,
and 553K slices. We conducted a comprehensive analysis of different SAM testing
strategies on the so-called COSMOS 553K dataset. Extensive experiments validate
that SAM performs better with manual hints like points and boxes for object
perception in medical images, leading to better performance in prompt mode
compared to everything mode. Additionally, SAM shows remarkable performance in
some specific objects and modalities, but is imperfect or even totally fails in
other situations. Finally, we analyze the influence of different factors (e.g.,
the Fourier-based boundary complexity and size of the segmented objects) on
SAM's segmentation performance. Extensive experiments validate that SAM's
zero-shot segmentation capability is not sufficient to ensure its direct
application to the MIS.Comment: 23 pages, 14 figures, 12 table
Tunable Dirac Fermion Dynamics in Topological Insulators
Three-dimensional topological insulators are characterized by insulating bulk
state and metallic surface state involving Dirac fermions that behave as
massless relativistic particles. These Dirac fermions are responsible for
achieving a number of novel and exotic quantum phenomena in the topological
insulators and for their potential applications in spintronics and quantum
computations. It is thus essential to understand the electron dynamics of the
Dirac fermions, i.e., how they interact with other electrons, phonons and
disorders. Here we report super-high resolution angle-resolved photoemission
studies on the Dirac fermion dynamics in the prototypical Bi2(Te,Se)3
topological insulators. We have directly revealed signatures of the
electron-phonon coupling in these topological insulators and found that the
electron-disorder interaction is the dominant factor in the scattering process.
The Dirac fermion dynamics in Bi2(Te3-xSex) topological insulators can be tuned
by varying the composition, x, or by controlling the charge carriers. Our
findings provide crucial information in understanding the electron dynamics of
the Dirac fermions in topological insulators and in engineering their surface
state for fundamental studies and potential applications.Comment: 14 Pages, 4 Figure
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