Dorsal Visual Pathway Changes in Patients with Comitant Extropia

BACKGROUND: Strabismus is a disorder in which the eyes are misaligned. Persistent strabismus can lead to stereopsis impairment. The effect of strabismus on human brain is not unclear. The present study is to investigate whether the brain white structures of comitant exotropia patients are impaired using combined T1-weighted imaging and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Thirteen patients with comitant strabismus and twelve controls underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with acquisition of T1-weighted and diffusion tensor images. T1-weighted images were used to analyze the change in volume of white matter using optimized voxel-based morphology (VBM) and diffusion tensor images were used to detect the change in white matter fibers using voxel-based analysis of DTI in comitant extropia patients. VBM analysis showed that in adult strabismus, white matter volumes were smaller in the right middle occipital gyrus, right occipital lobe/cuneus, right supramarginal gyrus, right cingulate gyrus, right frontal lobe/sub-gyral, right inferior temporal gyrus, left parahippocampa gyrus, left cingulate gyrus, left occipital lobe/cuneus, left middle frontal gyrus, left inferior parietal lobule, and left postcentral gyrus, while no brain region with greater white matter volume was found. Voxel-based analysis of DTI showed lower fractional anisotropy (FA) values in the right middle occipital gyrus and right supramarginal gyrus in strabismus patients, while brain region with increased FA value was found in the right inferior frontal gyrus. CONCLUSION: By combining VBM and voxel-based analysis of DTI results, the study suggests that the dorsal visual pathway was abnormal or impaired in patients with comitant exotropia

An aPKC-Exocyst Complex Controls Paxillin Phosphorylation and Migration through Localised JNK1 Activation

The exocyst/aPKC complex controls the spatiotemporal activation of the kinases JNK and ERK at the leading edge of migrating cells and thereby controls the dynamic behaviour of the adhesion protein paxillin during cell migration

Bioinformatic Analysis and Post-Translational Modification Crosstalk Prediction of Lysine Acetylation

Recent proteomics studies suggest high abundance and a much wider role for lysine acetylation (K-Ac) in cellular functions. Nevertheless, cross influence between K-Ac and other post-translational modifications (PTMs) has not been carefully examined. Here, we used a variety of bioinformatics tools to analyze several available K-Ac datasets. Using gene ontology databases, we demonstrate that K-Ac sites are found in all cellular compartments. KEGG analysis indicates that the K-Ac sites are found on proteins responsible for a diverse and wide array of vital cellular functions. Domain structure prediction shows that K-Ac sites are found throughout a wide variety of protein domains, including those in heat shock proteins and those involved in cell cycle functions and DNA repair. Secondary structure prediction proves that K-Ac sites are preferentially found in ordered structures such as alpha helices and beta sheets. Finally, by mutating K-Ac sites in silico and predicting the effect on nearby phosphorylation sites, we demonstrate that the majority of lysine acetylation sites have the potential to impact protein phosphorylation, methylation, and ubiquitination status. Our work validates earlier smaller-scale studies on the acetylome and demonstrates the importance of PTM crosstalk for regulation of cellular function

Direct and indirect effects of climate on richness drive the latitudinal diversity gradient in forest trees

Data accessibility statement: Full census data are available upon reasonable request from the ForestGEO data portal, http://ctfs.si.edu/datarequest/ We thank Margie Mayfield, three anonymous reviewers and Jacob Weiner for constructive comments on the manuscript. This study was financially supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFC0506100), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31622014 and 31570426), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (17lgzd24) to CC. XW was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB3103). DS was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (grant no. 16-26369S). Yves Rosseel provided us valuable suggestions on using the lavaan package conducting SEM analyses. Funding and citation information for each forest plot is available in the Supplementary Information Text 1.Peer reviewedPostprin

The influence of body size and season on the feeding ecology of three freshwater fishes with different diets in Lake Erie

Isotopic niche and length-isotope relationships were quantified across the body size of three similarly-sized fish species with different feeding strategies as adults (benthivore: freshwater drum, Aplodinotus grunniens; piscivore: walleye, Sander vitreus; and omnivore: white perch, Morone americana) in Lake Erie\u27s western basin using δ13C, δ15N and δ34S. Stable isotopes demonstrated that resource utilization changed with body size for all three species and length-isotope relationships varied with season. Isotopic niche overlap was lower when modelled with three isotopes (δ13C, δ15N, and δ34S) than with two (δ13C and δ15N), providing greater resolution of feeding ecology among the species. Based on isotopic niches, there was significant overlap in resource use among species and size classes in spring, but overlap decreased in the fall for both. In this study, freshwater fish species with different adult feeding strategies partition resources through different mechanisms that vary through body size and season. Isotopes supported the generally identified feeding ecology of each species but demonstrated that each species underwent significant changes in feeding ecology with increasing body size. Changes in isotopes across season, and body size for each species demonstrate the need for a more thorough understanding of how resource use changes with body size and season in freshwater fish

Improving Mandarin Tone Recognition Based on DNN by Combining Acoustic and Articulatory Features Using Extended Recognition Networks

In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of articulatory information for Mandarin tone modeling and recognition in a deep neural network – hidden Markov model (DNN-HMM) framework. In conventional approaches, prosodic evidence (e.g., F0, duration and energy) is used to build tone classifiers, we here propose performance enhancement techniques in three areas: (i) adding articulatory features (AFs) and acoustic features, such as MFCCs (Mel frequency cepstrum coefficients), for tone modeling; (ii) adopting phone-dependent tone modeling; and (iii) using tone-based extended recognition network (ERN) to reduce the tone search space. The first approach is feature-related, it explicitly employs the AFs as a form of tonal features and is implemented through a multi-stage procedure. The second approach is model-related and directly extends to phone-dependent tone modeling so that each modeling unit (e.g., tonal phone) not only contains tone information, but also integrates the phone/articulatory information. Finally, the third technique is search-related with a phone-dependent tone-based expanding searching network. A series of comprehensive experiments is conducted using different input feature sets. It is demonstrated that (i) tone recognition accuracy is boosted by incorporating articulatory information, and (ii) ERN, attains the lowest tone error rate of 7.17%, with a 56% relative error reduction from the prosody-only baseline system error of 16.36%