Toward blood-based precision medicine: Identifying age-sex-specific vascular biomarker quantities on circulating vascular cells

INTRODUCTION: Abnormal angiogenesis is central to vascular disease and cancer, and noninvasive biomarkers of vascular origin are needed to evaluate patients and therapies. Vascular endothelial growth factor receptors (VEGFRs) are often dysregulated in these diseases, making them promising biomarkers, but the need for an invasive biopsy has limited biomarker research on VEGFRs. Here, we pioneer a blood biopsy approach to quantify VEGFR plasma membrane localization on two circulating vascular proxies: circulating endothelial cells (cECs) and circulating progenitor cells (cPCs). METHODS: Using quantitative flow cytometry, we examined VEGFR expression on cECs and cPCs in four age-sex groups: peri/premenopausal females (aged \u3c 50 years), menopausal/postmenopausal females (≥ 50 years), and younger and older males with the same age cut-off (50 years). RESULTS: cECs in peri/premenopausal females consisted of two VEGFR populations: VEGFR-low (~ 55% of population: population medians ~ 3000 VEGFR1 and 3000 VEGFR2/cell) and VEGFR-high (~ 45%: 138,000 VEGFR1 and 39,000-236,000 VEGFR2/cell), while the menopausal/postmenopausal group only possessed the VEGFR-low cEC population; and 27% of cECs in males exhibited high plasma membrane VEGFR expression (206,000 VEGFR1 and 155,000 VEGFR2/cell). The absence of VEGFR-high cEC subpopulations in menopausal/postmenopausal females suggests that their high-VEGFR cECs are associated with menstruation and could be noninvasive proxies for studying the intersection of age-sex in angiogenesis. VEGFR1 plasma membrane localization in cPCs was detected only in menopausal/postmenopausal females, suggesting a menopause-specific regenerative mechanism. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, our quantitative, noninvasive approach targeting cECs and cPCs has provided the first insights into how sex and age influence VEGFR plasma membrane localization in vascular cells. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12195-023-00771-1

Media Richness and User Continuance to Instant Messaging

Media richness determines adoption of information systems. Insufficient research was done for investigating its influence on user continuance of using instant messaging applications. This study used classic IS and psychological theories to construct a research framework. This study gathered more than 200 responses by using an online form. LISREL software was used to conduct structural equation modeling technique to test the research framework. The findings indicated that various but not all dimensions of media richness positively contribute to users’ continuance to use instant messaging applications. Specific dimensions provide insights for managers to design their applications to effectively retain their users

A wide-band-gap p-type thermoelectric material based on quaternary chalcogenides of Cu2ZnSnQ4 (Q=S,Se)

Chalcopyritelike quaternary chalcogenides, Cu(2)ZnSnQ(4) (Q=S,Se), were investigated as an alternative class of wide-band-gap p-type thermoelectric materials. Their distorted diamondlike structure and quaternary compositions are beneficial to lowering lattice thermal conductivities. Meanwhile, partial substitution of Cu for Zn creates more charge carriers and conducting pathways via the CuQ(4) network, enhancing electrical conductivity. The power factor and the figure of merit (ZT) increase with the temperature, making these materials suitable for high temperature applications. For Cu(2.1)Zn(0.9)SnQ(4), ZT reaches about 0.4 at 700 K, rising to 0.9 at 860 K

A promising p-type transparent conducting material: Layered oxysulfide

Sr3Cu2Sc2O5S2, a layered oxysulfide, composed of anti-PbO-like [Cu2S2] slabs alternating with perovskitelike [Sr3Sc2O5] slabs, was systematically studied as a p-type transparent conducting material. The material has a wide energy gap of 3.1 eV and a p-type electrical conductivity of 2.8 S cm−1 at room temperature. The hole mobility of +150 cm2 V−1 S−1 at room temperature, which is much higher than the typical value of ~10−1–10 cm2 V−1 S−1 found in other copper compounds. The performances of bulk undoped Sr3Cu2Sc2O5S2 show the promise of copper oxysulfides as a class of p-type transparent conductive materials that is essential for optoelectronic applications

Multi-task learing for subspace segmentation

Subspace segmentation is the process of clustering a set of data points that are assumed to lie on the union of multiple linear or affine subspaces, and is increasingly being recognized as a fundamental tool for data analysis in high dimensional settings. Arguably one of the most successful approaches is based on the observation that the sparsest representation of a given point with respect to a dictionary formed by the others involves nonzero coefficients associated with points originating in the same subspace. Such sparse representations are computed independently for each data point via ℓ1-norm minimization and then combined into an affinity matrix for use by a final spectral clustering step. The downside of this procedure is two-fold. First, unlike canonical compressive sensing scenarios with ideally-randomized dictionaries, the data-dependent dictionaries here are unavoidably highly structured, disrupting many of the favorable properties of the ℓ1 norm. Secondly, by treating each data point independently, we ignore useful relationships between points that can be leveraged for jointly computing such sparse representations. Consequently, we motivate a multi-task learning-based framework for learning coupled sparse representations leading to a segmentation pipeline that is both robust against correlation structure and tailored to generate an optimal affinity matrix. Theoretical analysis and empirical tests are provided to support these claims.Y. Wang is sponsored by the University of Cambridge Overseas Trust. Y. Wang and Q. Ling are partially supported by sponsorship from Microsoft Research Asia. Q. Ling is also supported in part by NSFC grant 61004137. W. Chen is supported by EPSRC Research Grant EP/K033700/1 and the Natural Science Foundation of China 61401018.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from JMLR via http://jmlr.org/proceedings/papers/v37/wangc15.htm

Distorted HI Gas in the Widely Separated LIRG Arp 256

We present new interferometric HI and CO (1-0) observations of the luminous infrared source, Arp 256. Arp 256 consists of two spiral galaxies in an early stage of merging, with a projected nuclear separation of 29 kpc (54") and an infrared luminosity of 2.0E11 L_sun. Despite the large separation of the galaxies' nuclei and mildly disrupted stellar components, the HI disks are found to be strongly disrupted, and the southern galaxy in Arp 256 shows an elevated star formation efficiency, which is consistent with a nuclear starburst. Both of these results run contrary to expectations, posing interesting questions on the physical mechanisms involved in stimulating star formation during an interaction.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures. Accepted for publication in AJ. Author added. Full resolution figures available at http://astro.uchicago.edu/home/web/jchen/arp25