The role of neutrophils in chorioamnionitis

Chorioamnionitis, commonly referred to as intrauterine infection or inflammation, is pathologically defined by neutrophil infiltration and inflammation at the maternal-fetal interface. Chorioamnionitis is the common complication during late pregnancy, which lead to a series of serious consequences, such as preterm labor, preterm premature rupture of the fetal membranes, and fetal inflammatory response syndrome. During infection, a large number of neutrophils migrate to the chorio-decidua in response to chemokines. Although neutrophils, a crucial part of innate immune cells, have strong anti-inflammatory properties, over-activating them can harm the body while also eliminating pathogens. This review concentrated on the latest studies on chorioamnionitis-related consequences as well as the function and malfunction of neutrophils. The release of neutrophil extracellular traps, production of reactive oxygen species, and degranulation from neutrophils during intrauterine infection, as well as their pathological roles in complications related to chorioamnionitis, were discussed in detail, offering fresh perspectives on the treatment of chorioamnionitis

Diagnostic value of alpha-fetoprotein combined with neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio for hepatocellular carcinoma

Abstract Background To investigate the diagnostic performance of alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) as well as their combinations with other markers. Methods Serum aspartate aminotransferase (AST), alanine aminotransferase (ALT), AFP and levels as well as the numbers of neutrophils and lymphocytes of all enrolled patients were collected. The NLR was calculated by dividing the number of neutrophils by the number of lymphocytes. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was conducted to determine the ability of each marker and combination of markers to distinguish HCC and liver disease patients. Results In total, 545 patients were included in this study. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) values for AFP, ALT, AST, and NLR were 0.775 (0.738–0.810), 0.504 (0.461–0.547), 0.660 (0.618–0.699), and 0.738 (0.699–0.774) with optimal cut-off values of 24.6 ng/mL, 111 IU/mL, 27 IU/mL, and 2.979, respectively. Of the four biomarkers, AFP and NLR showed comparable specificity (0.881 and 0.858) and sensitivity (0.561 and 0.539). The combination of AFP and NLR showed the highest AUC (0.769) with a significantly higher sensitivity (0.767) and a lower specificity (0.773) compared to AFP or NLR alone, and it had the highest sum of sensitivity and specificity (1.54) among all combinations. In patients with AFP < 20 ng/mL, the NLR showed the highest AUC and combination with other markers did not improve the diagnostic accuracy. Conclusions Our data indicate that the combination of AFP and NLR offers better diagnostic performance than either marker alone for differentiating HCC from liver disease, which may benefit clinical screening

Optimized CRISPR/Cas9 system for gene knockout in chicken DF1 cells

ABSTRACT: The editing efficiency primarily hinders the utility of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) technology in poultry. For a better understanding of the factors that influence the efficiency of gene knockout mediated by CRISPR/Cas9 in chicken DF1 cells, the single or dual single guide RNA (sgRNA) targeted exon regions of genes (taking anti-Müllerian hormone, TGF-beta receptor type-2 and Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma as examples) were designed. The sgRNA-CRISPR/Cas9 vectors with corresponding reporter vectors were transfected into DF1 cells. T7 endonuclease 1 (T7E1) and amplicon sequencing assay were compared for evaluating genome editing efficiency and the indel profiles were analyzed based on the data of amplicon sequencing. Meanwhile, to evaluate the precision of Cas9 cleavage, we also analyzed the homology of small insertion with the nucleotides of upstream and downstream of cleave sties. The surrogate reporter systems showed strong enrichment function, and the indel percentages were increased after puromycin selection. The indel ratios of T7E1 assay were lower than amplicon sequencing assay, which indicated T7E1 isn't fit to be used as the sole evaluation criterion for the targeting efficiency of CRISPR/Cas9. Based on the amplicon sequencing analysis, the editing efficiency showed noticeable differences among cells treated with different sgRNAs. However, the variety of indel efficiencies was not related to the GC content of sgRNA or chromosome types of targeted genes. The results showed that the dual sgRNA might not raise the indel ratios compared with individual sgRNA, but they could increase the ratios of the fragment deletions. The present study suggested that the surrogate reporter was an effective method to promote the editing efficiencies of CRISPR/Cas9 in chicken cells. The dual sgRNA could increase the fragment deletions, and the sensitivity of amplicon sequencing to detect cleavage was higher than the T7 endonuclease 1 assay. These results are essential to improve the application of CRISPR/Cas9 technology in chicken cells

Spontaneous facial expression database for academic emotion inference in online learning

Academic emotions can produce a great impact on the learning effect. Normally, emotions are expressed externally in the students' facial expressions, speech and behaviour. In this paper, the focus is on automatic academic emotion inference based on facial expressions in online learning. Considering the lack of training samples for the inference algorithm, a spontaneous facial expression database is established. It includes the facial expressions of five common academic emotions and consists of two subsets: a video clip database and an image database. A total of 1,274 video clips and 30,184 images from 82 students are included in the database. The samples are labelled by both the participants and external coders. An extensive analysis is carried out on the image database using a convolutional neural network (CNN)‐based algorithm to infer self‐annotation. Some data augmentation algorithms are applied to improve the algorithm performance. Additionally, an adaptive data augmentation algorithm based on spatial transformer network is introduced, which can remove some confounding factors in the original images. The algorithm can obviously improve the inference performance, which has been proven by comparing some evaluation indicators before and after adoption. Such a database will certainly accelerate the application of affective computing in the educational field