Protective Effects of Chinese Traditional Medicine Buyang Huanwu Decoction on Myocardial Injury

Many clinical studies have reported that Buyang Huanwu Decoction (BYHWD) has a protective effect on ischemic heart disease (IHD). In the present study, the protective effect of BYHWD on myocardial ischemia was investigated. Different doses of BYHWD and Compound Danshen Dropping Pills (CDDP) were lavaged to rats, respectively, isoproterenol (ISO) was intraperitoneally injected in to all animals to induce myocardial ischemia except the control group. Electrocardiogram (ECG) of each animal was recorded; activities of lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), creatine kinase (CK) and aspartate aminotransferase (AST) in serum were detected. As the results of ECG showed, pre-treatment with BYHWD inhibited ischemic myocardial injury, and the activities of LDH, CK and AST were lower than those in the myocardial ischemia model group, which suggests that BYHWD rescues the myocardium from ischemia status. To research the potential mechanism, the level of nitric oxide (NO), nitric oxide syntheses (NOS) and inducible nitric oxide syntheses (iNOS), the expression of iNOS and ligand of cluster of differentiation 40 (CD40L) were detected. The results revealed that BYHWD significantly decreased the level of NO, NOS and iNOS in serum. Moreover, BYHWD decreased the expression of iNOS and CD40L in myocardial tissues. These results indicate that the protective effect of BYHWD on myocardial ischemia and mechanism are associated with inhibition of iNOS and CD40L expression

Joint denoising method of seismic velocity signal and acceleration signals based on independent component analysis

The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of seismic data is the key to seismic data processing, and it also directly affects interpretation of seismic data results. The conventional denoising method, independent variable analysis, uses adjacent traces for processing. However, this method has problems, such as the destruction of effective signals. The widespread use of velocity and acceleration geophones in seismic exploration makes it possible to obtain different types of signals from the same geological target, which is fundamental to the joint denoising of these two types of signals. In this study, we propose a joint denoising method using seismic velocity and acceleration signals. This method selects the same trace of velocity and acceleration signal for Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to obtain the independent initial effective signal and separation noise. Subsequently, the obtained effective signal and noise are used as the prior information for a Kalman filter, and the final joint denoising results are obtained. This method combines the advantages of low-frequency seismic velocity signals and high-frequency and high-resolution acceleration signals. Simultaneously, this method overcomes the problem of inconsistent stratigraphic reflection caused by the large spacing between adjacent traces, and improves the SNR of the seismic data. In a model data test and in field data from a work area in the Shengli Oilfield, the method increases the dominate frequency of the signal from 20 to 40 Hz. The time resolution was increased from 8.5 to 6.8 ms. The test results showed that the joint denoising method based on seismic velocity and acceleration signals can better improve the dominate frequency and time resolution of actual seismic data

All-fiber normal-dispersion single-polarization passively mode-locked laser based on a 45°-tilted fiber grating

An all-fiber normal-dispersion Yb-doped fiber laser with 45- tilted fiber grating (TFG) isto the best of our knowledgeexperimentally demonstrated for the first time. Stable linearly-chirped pulses with the duration of 4 ps and the bandwidth of 9 nm can be directly generated from the laser cavity. By employing the 45 TFG with the polarization-dependent loss of 33 dBoutput pulses with high polarization extinction ratio of 26 dB are implemented in the experiment. Our result shows that the 45 TFG can work effectively as a polarizerwhich could be exploited to singlepolarization all-fiber lasers

Bridging Sensory Perception to Developmental Decision Making in Caenorhabditis elegans

Amidst uncertain environmental flux, organisms must be able to appropriately adapt their physiology in response to or in preparation for harsh conditions. To accomplish this task, organisms need to accurately perceive current environmental cues, make informed decisions about how the future environmental landscape might unfold, and execute the genetic programs to manifest the proper physiological changes. As a prime example, the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans makes multiple developmental decisions during its life cycle in response to environmental cues. During larval growth, C. elegans can forego reproductive growth and instead enter diapause (also called dauer), a developmentally arrested state resistant to environmental stress, in response to unfavorable growth conditions. The decisions to enter and exit dauer involve complex neurogenetic computations that integrate environmental cues, yet despite decades of research in the field of C. elegans dauer biology, we still do not fully understand how such sensory integration occurs. Furthermore, how the dauer entry and exit decisions compare and contrast to one another remains unclear. In this thesis, I comprehensively analyze the C. elegans dauer exit decision using behavioral analyses, neuronal imaging, and gene reporter technologies. In Chapter Two, I I demonstrate how, during dauer exit, the ASJ chemosensory neurons integrate food availability and population density at both the levels of neuronal calcium dynamics and gene expression. I show that expression of the insulin-like peptide encoding gene ins 6 within the ASJ neurons is responsive to dauer-relevant cues, dependent on ASJ neuronal activity, and participates in an autoregulatory feedback mechanism that enforces decision commitment. In Chapter Three, I analyze how steroid hormones are essential for the dauer exit decision, and I illustrate how the spatiotemporal dynamics of steroid hormone regulation during dauer exit compares with that of dauer entry. Taken together, this thesis significantly advances our knowledge of the C. elegans dauer exit decision and helps us better understand how animals coordinate decisions over long timescales in response to changing environments.</p

Machinery, Materials Science and Engineering Applications: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Machinery, Materials Science and Engineering Applications (MMSE 2016)

This conference proceeding contains papers presented at the 6th International Conference on Machinery, Materials Science and Engineering Applications (MMSE 2016), held 28-30 October, 2016 in Wuhan, China. The conference proceeding contributions cover a large number of topics, both theoretical and applied, including Material science, Electrical Engineering and Automation Control, Electronic Engineering, Applied Mechanics, Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Science and Technology, Computer Science and Information technology and other related engineering topics. MMSE provides a perfect platform for scientists and engineering researchers to exchange ideas, build cooperative relationships and discuss the latest scientific achievements. MMSE will be of interest for academics and professionals working in a wide range of industrial, governmental and academic sectors, including Material Science, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Information Technology and Telecommunications, Civil Engineering, Energy Production, Manufacturing, Mechanical Engineering, Nuclear Engineering, Transportation and Aerospace Science and Technolog

Comparison between two device structures of SPR enhanced UV detectors based on ZnO

Surface plasmon resonance can be exploited to greatly enhance the photo response of photo detectors. The enhancement is highly dependent on the device structure of the detector. In this paper, we compared two types of SPR enhanced UV detectors based on ZnO in terms of fabrication process, absorption, I–V curves, and spectral response. The peak responsivity is enlarged by 22–100 times due to SPR enhancement. The embedding type detector has an advantage in dark current controlling. However, the surface type detector has a simpler fabrication process and more importantly a more prominent responsivity enhancement. Therefore, the surface type is a more favourable structure to incorporate SPR with ZnO UV detectors to realize large enhancement of responsivity

MicroRNA Mediating Networks in Granulosa Cells Associated with Ovarian Follicular Development

Ovaries, which provide a place for follicular development and oocyte maturation, are important organs in female mammals. Follicular development is complicated physiological progress mediated by various regulatory factors including microRNAs (miRNAs). To demonstrate the role of miRNAs in follicular development, this study analyzed the expression patterns of miRNAs in granulosa cells through investigating three previous datasets generated by Illumina miRNA deep sequencing. Furthermore, via bioinformatic analyses, we dissected the associated functional networks of the observed significant miRNAs, in terms of interacting with signal pathways and transcription factors. During the growth and selection of dominant follicles, 15 dysregulated miRNAs and 139 associated pathways were screened out. In comparison of different styles of follicles, 7 commonly abundant miRNAs and 195 pathways, as well as 10 differentially expressed miRNAs and 117 pathways in dominant follicles in comparison with subordinate follicles, were collected. Furthermore, SMAD2 was identified as a hub factor in regulating follicular development. The regulation of miR-26a/b on smad2 messenger RNA has been further testified by real time PCR. In conclusion, we established functional networks which play critical roles in follicular development including pivotal miRNAs, pathways, and transcription factors, which contributed to the further investigation about miRNAs associated with mammalian follicular development

Integration of Multiple Genomic and Phenotype Data to Infer Novel miRNA-Disease Associations.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play an important role in the development and progression of human diseases. The identification of disease-associated miRNAs will be helpful for understanding the molecular mechanisms of diseases at the post-transcriptional level. Based on different types of genomic data sources, computational methods for miRNA-disease association prediction have been proposed. However, individual source of genomic data tends to be incomplete and noisy; therefore, the integration of various types of genomic data for inferring reliable miRNA-disease associations is urgently needed. In this study, we present a computational framework, CHNmiRD, for identifying miRNA-disease associations by integrating multiple genomic and phenotype data, including protein-protein interaction data, gene ontology data, experimentally verified miRNA-target relationships, disease phenotype information and known miRNA-disease connections. The performance of CHNmiRD was evaluated by experimentally verified miRNA-disease associations, which achieved an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.834 for 5-fold cross-validation. In particular, CHNmiRD displayed excellent performance for diseases without any known related miRNAs. The results of case studies for three human diseases (glioblastoma, myocardial infarction and type 1 diabetes) showed that all of the top 10 ranked miRNAs having no known associations with these three diseases in existing miRNA-disease databases were directly or indirectly confirmed by our latest literature mining. All these results demonstrated the reliability and efficiency of CHNmiRD, and it is anticipated that CHNmiRD will serve as a powerful bioinformatics method for mining novel disease-related miRNAs and providing a new perspective into molecular mechanisms underlying human diseases at the post-transcriptional level. CHNmiRD is freely available at http://www.bio-bigdata.com/CHNmiRD