Research progress in the relationship between plasma FIB and prostate cancer

The incidence of prostate cancer （PCa） has been increased year by year， mainly occurring in elderly men. Currently， prostate-specific antigen （PSA） is still used as a marker for diagnosing PCa in clinical practice. However， the accuracy and sensitivity of PSA remain relatively low. Identifying more clinical detection parameters for assisting diagnosis becomes a research hotspot. Most of patients with malignant tumors are in a hypercoagulable state. Studies have found that plasma fibrinogen （FIB） is differentially expressed in PCa. In addition， FIB has been considered as a potential tumor-promoting factor in PCa. In this article， the discovery， biological structure， physiological function， pathological changes （inflammation and tumor） and functions of plasma FIB， especially the relationship between plasma FIB and PCa， were systematically reviewed， aiming to provide reference for relevant clinical research

Magnetic propelled hydrogel microrobots for actively enhancing the efficiency of lycorine hydrochloride to suppress colorectal cancer

Research and development in the field of micro/nano-robots have made significant progress in the past, especially in the field of clinical medicine, where further research may lead to many revolutionary achievements. Through the research and experiment of microrobots, a controllable drug delivery system will be realized, which will solve many problems in drug treatment. In this work, we design and study the ability of magnetic-driven hydrogel microrobots to carry Lycorine hydrochloride (LH) to inhibit colorectal cancer (CRC) cells. We have successfully designed a magnetic field driven, biocompatible drug carrying hydrogel microsphere robot with Fe3O4 particles inside, which can achieve magnetic field response, and confirmed that it can transport drug through fluorescence microscope. We have successfully demonstrated the motion mode of hydrogel microrobots driven by a rotating external magnetic field. This driving method allows the microrobots to move in a precise and controllable manner, providing tremendous potential for their use in various applications. Finally, we selected drug LH and loaded it into the hydrogel microrobot for a series of experiments. LH significantly inhibited CRC cells proliferation in a dose- and time-dependent manner. LH inhibited the proliferation, mobility of CRC cells and induced apoptosis. This delivery system can significantly improve the therapeutic effect of drugs on tumors

Identification of Specific Nuclear Genetic Loci and Genes That Interact With the Mitochondrial Genome and Contribute to Fecundity in Caenorhabditis elegans

Previous studies have found that fecundity is a multigenic trait regulated, in part, by mitochondrial-nuclear (mit-n) genetic interactions. However, the identification of specific nuclear genetic loci or genes interacting with the mitochondrial genome and contributing to the quantitative trait fecundity is an unsolved issue. Here, a panel of recombinant inbred advanced intercrossed lines (RIAILs), established from a cross between the N2 and CB4856 strains of C. elegans, were used to characterize the underlying genetic basis of mit-n genetic interactions related to fecundity. Sixty-seven single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were identified by association mapping to be linked with fecundity among 115 SNPs linked to mitotype. This indicated significant epistatic effects between nuclear and mitochondria genetics on fecundity. In addition, two specific nuclear genetic loci interacting with the mitochondrial genome and contributing to fecundity were identified. A significant reduction in fecundity was observed in the RIAILs that carried CB4856 mitochondria and a N2 genotype at locus 1 or a CB4856 genotype at locus 2 relative to the wild-type strains. Then, a hybrid strain (CNC10) was established, which was bred as homoplasmic for the CB4856 mtDNA genome and N2 genotype at locus 1 in the CB4856 nuclear background. The mean fecundity of CNC10 was half the fecundity of the control strain. Several functional characteristics of the mitochondria in CNC10 were also influenced by mit-n interactions. Overall, experimental evidence was presented that specific nuclear genetic loci or genes have interactions with the mitochondrial genome and are associated with fecundity. In total, 18 genes were identified using integrative approaches to have interactions with the mitochondrial genome and to contribute to fecundity

VIGC: Visual Instruction Generation and Correction

The integration of visual encoders and large language models (LLMs) has driven recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, the scarcity of high-quality instruction-tuning data for vision-language tasks remains a challenge. The current leading paradigm, such as LLaVA, relies on language-only GPT-4 to generate data, which requires pre-annotated image captions and detection bounding boxes, suffering from understanding image details. A practical solution to this problem would be to utilize the available multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to generate instruction data for vision-language tasks. However, it's worth noting that the currently accessible MLLMs are not as powerful as their LLM counterparts, as they tend to produce inadequate responses and generate false information. As a solution for addressing the current issue, this paper proposes the Visual Instruction Generation and Correction (VIGC) framework that enables multimodal large language models to generate instruction-tuning data and progressively enhance its quality on-the-fly. Specifically, Visual Instruction Generation (VIG) guides the vision-language model to generate diverse instruction-tuning data. To ensure generation quality, Visual Instruction Correction (VIC) adopts an iterative update mechanism to correct any inaccuracies in data produced by VIG, effectively reducing the risk of hallucination. Leveraging the diverse, high-quality data generated by VIGC, we finetune mainstream models and validate data quality based on various evaluations. Experimental results demonstrate that VIGC not only compensates for the shortcomings of language-only data generation methods, but also effectively enhances the benchmark performance. The models, datasets, and code will be made publicly available

LLaMA-Adapter V2: Parameter-Efficient Visual Instruction Model

How to efficiently transform large language models (LLMs) into instruction followers is recently a popular research direction, while training LLM for multi-modal reasoning remains less explored. Although the recent LLaMA-Adapter demonstrates the potential to handle visual inputs with LLMs, it still cannot generalize well to open-ended visual instructions and lags behind GPT-4. In this paper, we present LLaMA-Adapter V2, a parameter-efficient visual instruction model. Specifically, we first augment LLaMA-Adapter by unlocking more learnable parameters (e.g., norm, bias and scale), which distribute the instruction-following ability across the entire LLaMA model besides adapters. Secondly, we propose an early fusion strategy to feed visual tokens only into the early LLM layers, contributing to better visual knowledge incorporation. Thirdly, a joint training paradigm of image-text pairs and instruction-following data is introduced by optimizing disjoint groups of learnable parameters. This strategy effectively alleviates the interference between the two tasks of image-text alignment and instruction following and achieves strong multi-modal reasoning with only a small-scale image-text and instruction dataset. During inference, we incorporate additional expert models (e.g. captioning/OCR systems) into LLaMA-Adapter to further enhance its image understanding capability without incurring training costs. Compared to the original LLaMA-Adapter, our LLaMA-Adapter V2 can perform open-ended multi-modal instructions by merely introducing 14M parameters over LLaMA. The newly designed framework also exhibits stronger language-only instruction-following capabilities and even excels in chat interactions. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/LLaMA-Adapter.Comment: Code and models are available at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/LLaMA-Adapte

Software investment and organizational change: evidence from panel data

Technological investment is a key managerial decision to make by firms. In recent years, firms increasingly invest in software systems to support big data analytics, digital transformation, and AI, which however do not always pay off. Recent research suggests that software availability may influence entry, at the industry level, by increasing labor productivity, reducing scaling costs, and/or facilitating demand forecasting. However, how these mechanisms through which firms' software investment may affect organizations by inducing various changes is unclear. Insights into these mechanisms require microdata at the firm level over years. We construct a unique panel dataset from 13,335 German firms across industry sectors in 2011–2017 to conduct a firm-level econometric analysis. We find that, on average, firms' software investment improves demand forecasting but, interestingly, may reduce labor productivity and slow down scaling up. We further propose several organizational contexts in which software investment can be more beneficial to remedy such challenges. Labor productivity is improved only if firms reorganize labor work when making software investment, and scaling costs may be reduced if firms facilitate learning through investments in both software and human capital development. Putting together, this research contributes a new understanding of organizational changes induced by software investment and what contingency factors can make software investment more beneficial in the organizational contexts, to guide managers to make value-increasing decisions

An azoospermic male with a novel chromosome 46, XX, der(15)t(Y; 15)(p11.3; p12)

Abstract Male individuals with a 46, XX karyotype are commonly diagnosed with 46, XX male sex reversal syndrome, one of the rarest sex chromosomal anomalies. In this case, we report a rare XX male with Y‐specific DNA sequences located near the end of chromosome 15 p‐arm, which was verified by fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) as well as copy number variation sequencing (CNV‐seq) based on the next‐ generation sequencing method (>100 Kb). To the best of our knowledge, there have been no reports of XX male with the Yp region transferred to the terminal of chromosome 15 short arm

Numerical Simulation of Tandem Shaped Charge Penetrating Armored Target under Explosive Loading

Tandem shaped charge is one of the hotspots in the research of antiarmor ammunition at present, but because of the shortcoming that the front-stage jet penetrates and detonates ERA (Explosive Reactive Armor), then it will affect the rear-stage jet to penetrate the main armor. Our research team proposes that the front charge of the tandem shaped charge can be designed as a low-density material charge liner so that the front-stage low-density jet can penetrate a small hole in the reactive armor without detonating. The rear-stage main charge forms a main jet through the small hole to penetrate the main armor. In this article, the damage of tandem shaped charge to armored target is studied when copper and new modified PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene) materials are used as front-stage charge liner, and the numerical simulation results are verified by experiments. The numerical results show that the Cu (copper) jet formed by tandem shaped charge of double-copper material has strong impact performance. The interlayer explosive in reactive armor is detonated in the process of penetrating reaction armor, which weakens the penetration ability of the main rear-jet. However, the interlayer explosive in the reactive armor is not detonated during the penetration of the double-material tandem shaped charge. The front-stage modified PTFE jet and the rear-stage main jet are not affected by the explosion loading before penetrating the main armor. The experimental results show that the double-material tandem shaped charge overcomes the shortcoming of the influence of the front-stage explosion, and the penetration depth of the main armor reaches 703 mm, which is 14.3% higher than the penetration ability of the double-copper tandem shaped charge, which is basically consistent with the numerical simulation results. It provides a reference for improving the damage ability of tandem shaped charge to armored target

Establishment of a Novel Bladder Cancer Xenograft Model in Humanized Immunodeficient Mice

Background/Aims: The aim of this study was to develop a novel model by transplanting human bladder cancer xenografts into humanized immunodeficient mice (SCID). Methods: The animals first underwent sublethal irradiation and then were subjected to simultaneous transplantation of human lymphocytes (5 × 107 cells/mouse i.p.) and human bladder cancer cells (3 × 106 cells/mouse s.c.). Results: The xenografts developed in all 12 mice that had received bladder cancer BIU-87 cells, and the tumor specimens were evaluated histologically. All 6 model mice expressed human CD3 mRNA and/or protein in the peripheral blood, spleens and xenografts. The mean proportion of human CD3+ cells was 19% with a level of human IgG 532.4µ/ml in the peripheral blood at Week 6 after transplant inoculation. The re-constructed human immune system in these mice was confirmed to be functional by individual in vitro testing of their proliferative, secretory and cytotoxic responses. Conclusion: The successful engraftment of the human bladder cancer xenografts and the establishment of the human immune system in our in vivo model described here may provide a useful tool for the development of novel therapeutic strategies targeting at bladder cancer