Studies on the Mechanism of Induction of Human Sulfotransferase by Methotrexate

We use human Caco-2 and Hep G2 cell lines as model to investigate the MTX effect to human sulfotransferases through enzymatic assay, western blot, and RT-PCR methods. We used MTT assay to detect the cytotoxicity of MTX to these cell lines. Through the reporter gene assay, RNA interference, step wise promoter deletion, site directed promoter mutation, real-time PCR, DNA gel shift assay, and super shift assay, we found several nuclear receptors involved in the transcriptional regulation of hSULT2A1. Findings and conclusions./ We found MTX can induce human sulfotransferases in a time - and concentration-dependent manner in both human Caco-2 and Hep G2 cell lines. The induction of human sulfotransferases mediated by MTX can be repressed by folic acid in human Hep G2 cell line. The toxicity study indicates the induction of hSULTs was not caused by the cytotoxicity of MTX. Through multiple molecular techniques, we found the IR2 sequence located in -186 to -173 of hSULT2A1 promoter region plays very important funcVeterinary Pathobiolog

The Redox Proteome of Thiol Proteins in the Rice Blast Fungus Magnaporthe oryzae

Redox modification, a post-translational modification, has been demonstrated to be significant for many physiological pathways and biological processes in both eukaryotes and prokaryotes. However, little is known about the global profile of protein redox modification in fungi. To explore the roles of redox modification in the plant pathogenic fungi, a global thiol proteome survey was performed in the model fungal pathogen Magnaporthe oryzae. A total of 3713 redox modification sites from 1899 proteins were identified through a mix sample containing mycelia with or without oxidative stress, conidia, appressoria, and invasive hyphae of M. oryzae. The identified thiol-modified proteins were performed with protein domain, subcellular localization, functional classification, metabolic pathways, and protein-protein interaction network analyses, indicating that redox modification is associated with a wide range of biological and cellular functions. These results suggested that redox modification plays important roles in fungal growth, conidium formation, appressorium formation, as well as invasive growth. Interestingly, a large number of pathogenesis-related proteins were redox modification targets, suggesting the significant roles of redox modification in pathogenicity of M. oryzae. This work provides a global insight into the redox proteome of the pathogenic fungi, which built a groundwork and valuable resource for future studies of redox modification in fungi

AME-CAM: Attentive Multiple-Exit CAM for Weakly Supervised Segmentation on MRI Brain Tumor

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is commonly used for brain tumor segmentation, which is critical for patient evaluation and treatment planning. To reduce the labor and expertise required for labeling, weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) methods with class activation mapping (CAM) have been proposed. However, existing CAM methods suffer from low resolution due to strided convolution and pooling layers, resulting in inaccurate predictions. In this study, we propose a novel CAM method, Attentive Multiple-Exit CAM (AME-CAM), that extracts activation maps from multiple resolutions to hierarchically aggregate and improve prediction accuracy. We evaluate our method on the BraTS 2021 dataset and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2306.0547

Robust Saliency-Aware Distillation for Few-shot Fine-grained Visual Recognition

Recognizing novel sub-categories with scarce samples is an essential and challenging research topic in computer vision. Existing literature addresses this challenge by employing local-based representation approaches, which may not sufficiently facilitate meaningful object-specific semantic understanding, leading to a reliance on apparent background correlations. Moreover, they primarily rely on high-dimensional local descriptors to construct complex embedding space, potentially limiting the generalization. To address the above challenges, this article proposes a novel model called RSaG for few-shot fine-grained visual recognition. RSaG introduces additional saliency-aware supervision via saliency detection to guide the model toward focusing on the intrinsic discriminative regions. Specifically, RSaG utilizes the saliency detection model to emphasize the critical regions of each sub-category, providing additional object-specific information for fine-grained prediction. RSaG transfers such information with two symmetric branches in a mutual learning paradigm. Furthermore, RSaG exploits inter-regional relationships to enhance the informativeness of the representation and subsequently summarize the highlighted details into contextual embeddings to facilitate the effective transfer, enabling quick generalization to novel sub-categories. The proposed approach is empirically evaluated on three widely used benchmarks, demonstrating its superior performance.Comment: Under Revie

Conditional Diffusion Models for Weakly Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Recent advances in denoising diffusion probabilistic models have shown great success in image synthesis tasks. While there are already works exploring the potential of this powerful tool in image semantic segmentation, its application in weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) remains relatively under-explored. Observing that conditional diffusion models (CDM) is capable of generating images subject to specific distributions, in this work, we utilize category-aware semantic information underlied in CDM to get the prediction mask of the target object with only image-level annotations. More specifically, we locate the desired class by approximating the derivative of the output of CDM w.r.t the input condition. Our method is different from previous diffusion model methods with guidance from an external classifier, which accumulates noises in the background during the reconstruction process. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art CAM and diffusion model methods on two public medical image segmentation datasets, which demonstrates that CDM is a promising tool in WSSS. Also, experiment shows our method is more time-efficient than existing diffusion model methods, making it practical for wider applications

Relationship between extensive and persistent extreme cold events in China and stratospheric circulation anomalies

This study examines the relationship between the extensive and persistent extreme cold events (EPECEs) in China and geopotential height anomalies in the stratosphere using daily mean fields of outgoing long wave radiation (OLR) produced by the NCAR and daily atmospheric circulations produced by the NCEP/NCAR. The OLR composite analysis for the EPECE in China demonstrates that the negative OLR height anomalies (cold air) originated from Siberia influence China progressively from north to south. The largest negative OLR height anomaly (cooling event) occurs in the region to the north of the Nanling Mountains. This suggests that the OLR height anomalies can be used to represent the temporal and spatial characteristics of extreme low temperatures and cold air activities in winter in China. The composite analysis of large-scale atmospheric circulations during the EPECE reveals characteristic evolutions of stratospheric and tropospheric circulations during the extreme cold event. We demonstrate the important role of atmospheric circulation anomalies in the outbreak and dissipation of the EPECE in China. We also demonstrate that significant perturbations in the stratospheric circulation occur more than 10 days prior to the outbreak of the EPECE, with positive height anomalies in the Arctic stratosphere. These positive anomalies propagate downward from the stratosphere and affect the formation and development of the high pressure ridge in the middle troposphere over the Ural Mountains. Significant changes also occur in the atmospheric circulation in the mid-latitude stratosphere. These changes propagate downward from the stratosphere and strengthen the low pressure trough in the troposphere in the region to the east of Lake Balkhash and Lake Baikal. Therefore, the changes in the stratospheric circulation during the EPECE in China occur prior to changes in the tropospheric circulation and are very useful for predicting extreme wintertime cold temperatures in China

Murine model for congenital CMV infection and hearing impairment

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Congenital cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection is the leading cause of sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL), and SNHL is the most frequent sequela of congenital CMV infection. But the pathogenic mechanism remains unknown, and there is no ideal CMV intrauterine infection animal model to study the mechanisms by which SNHL develops.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We established the congenital murine cytomegalovirus (MCMV) infection model by directly injecting the virus into the placenta on day 12.5 of gestation. Then, we observed the development and the MCMV congenital infection rate of the fetuses on the day they were born. Furthermore, we detected the auditory functions, the conditions of the MCMV infection, and the histological change of the inner ears of 28-day-old and 70-day-old offspring.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Both the fetal loss rate and the teratism rate of offspring whose placentas were inoculated with MCMV increased, and their body length, head circumference, and weight decreased. The hearing level of offspring both decreased at both 28- and 70-days post birth; the 70-day-old mice developed lower hearing levels than did the 28-day old mice. No significant inflammatory changes in the cochleae of the mice were observed. MCMV DNA signals were mainly detected in the spiral ganglion neurons and the endolymph area, but not in the perilymph area. The number of neurons decreased, and their ultrastructures changed. Moreover, with age, the number of neurons dramatically decreased, and the ultrastructural lesions of neurons became much more severe.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The results suggest that the direct injection of MCMV into the placenta may efficiently cause fetal infection and disturb the intrauterine development of the fetus, and placental inoculation itself has no obvious adverse effects on offspring. The reduction in the number of spiral ganglion neurons and the ultrastructural lesions of the neurons may be the major cause of congenital CMV infection-induced progressive SNHL.</p

Basalt-polypropylene fiber reinforced concrete for durable and sustainable pipe production. Part 1: experimental program

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: [ Deng, Z, Liu, X, Chen, P, et al. Basalt-polypropylene fiber reinforced concrete for durable and sustainable pipe production. Part 1: Experimental program. Structural Concrete. 2022; 23: 311– 327. https://doi.org/10.1002/suco.202000759], which has been published in final form at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/suco.202000759. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.An experimental program consisting in producing and testing reinforced concrete pipes (RCPs) under the three-edge bearing tests considering different types of reinforcement was carried out. Four types of RCPs were produced, these reinforced with: (1) polypropylene macrofibers; (2) basalt microfibers; (3) combination of both (hybrid reinforcement); and (4) plain concrete. The analysis of the crack patterns and both service and ultimate mechanical responses allowed concluding that the use of fibers do not lead to an effective increase of the first cracking load; however, both types of fibers allowed a better crack width control respect to the standard RCP. In this regard, basalt microfiber reinforced concrete led to a better response caused by concentrated loads (jacketing) whilst polypropylene macrofibers increased the concrete pipe performance in terms of bearing capacity and flexural crack control. The hybrid fiber reinforced concrete was found to be the most suitable alternative for increasing the load bearing capacity and the crack width control for service loads. These incipient experimental results permit to conclude that this type of hybrid basalt-polypropylene fiber reinforced concretes are an interesting alternative to traditional steel-cage RCPs.This work is supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2018YFC1504802), Natural Science Foundation Project of Chongqing, Chongqing Science and Technology Commission (cstc2018jscxmszdX0071), Postgraduate Research Innovation Project of Chongqing (CYS19005, CYS18026). In addition, Prof. Albert de la Fuente also wants to express his gratitude to the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation for the financial support received under the scope of the project CREEF (PID2019-108978RB-C32).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Assessing the effects of different management activities on the conservation of endangered Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin

Predictions of population viability can provide valid information for guiding the management and conservation of species. However, such studies are rarely conducted on cetaceans due to limited basic data. In this study, a detailed assessment of the population dynamics of Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins (Sousa chinensis) in Xiamen Bay, China was carried out using a Vortex model that was based on model parameters that were derived from monitoring data and published sources. Then, sensitivity analyses were conducted to test the relative importance of the uncertainty of the model parameters. Moreover, potential management models were evaluated to determine their effectiveness in assisting with species recovery. The baseline model projected a decline in the population abundance with a growth rate (r) of -0.031, and the probability of extinction was 58.7% over the next 100 years. The sensitivity analyses revealed that juvenile mortality and fertility were the most pivotal factors for the viability of this population. All the conservation measures, including habitat improvement, catastrophe control, and individual supplementation, contributed to population increases when compared with the baseline model. In particular, decreasing calf and juvenile mortality through habitat improvement, at high levels, was the only way to generate positive growth rates. The findings suggest that these practical management activities can reduce the risk of extinction for this species