Classification of Alzheimer's Disease, Mild Cognitive Impairment, and Normal Controls With Subnetwork Selection and Graph Kernel Principal Component Analysis Based on Minimum Spanning Tree Brain Functional Network

Effective and accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD), as well as its early stage (mild cognitive impairment, MCI), has attracted more and more attention recently. Researchers have constructed threshold brain function networks and extracted various features for the classification of brain diseases. However, in the construction of the brain function network, the selection of threshold is very important, and the unreasonable setting will seriously affect the final classification results. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a minimum spanning tree (MST) classification framework to identify Alzheimer's disease (AD), MCI, and normal controls (NCs). The proposed method mainly uses the MST method, graph-based Substructure Pattern mining (gSpan), and graph kernel Principal Component Analysis (graph kernel PCA). Specifically, MST is used to construct the brain functional connectivity network; gSpan, to extract features; and subnetwork selection and graph kernel PCA, to select features. Finally, the support vector machine is used to perform classification. We evaluate our method on MST brain functional networks of 21 AD, 25 MCI, and 22 NC subjects. The experimental results show that our proposed method achieves classification accuracy of 98.3, 91.3, and 77.3%, for MCI vs. NC, AD vs. NC, and AD vs. MCI, respectively. The results show our proposed method can achieve significantly improved classification performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods

Dynamics of intestinal metabolites and morphology in response to necrotic enteritis challenge in broiler chickens

Despite the relatively small contribution to metabolizable energy that volatile fatty acids (VFAs) provide in chickens, these organic acids have been reported to play beneficial roles in the gastrointestinal tract (GIT) of birds, for example, inhibition of the growth of some pathogenic bacteria. However, information regarding the dynamics of these metabolites in the GIT of chickens is still scarce, especially under disease conditions such as necrotic enteritis (NE). Here, we investigated the dynamics of VFAs and lactic acid, and intestinal morphology in response to NE predisposing factors, that is, excessive dietary fishmeal and 'Eimeria' inoculation, and causative agent 'Clostridium' perfringens producing NetB toxin. The experiment was designed in a 2 x 2 x 2 factorial arrangement of treatments with or without: fishmeal feeding, 'Eimeria' inoculation and 'C. perfringens' challenge. The results showed that these factors significantly influenced composition and concentration of VFAs and lactic acids, pH and histomorphometry in one way or another. These changes may be important for the onset of NE or only the synergetic responses to micro environmental stress. 'Eimeria' appeared to be more important than fishmeal in predisposing birds to NE, thus the application of 'Eimeria' in NE challenge provides more consistent success in inducing the disease. The metabolic responses to various adverse factors such as excessive dietary fishmeal and 'Eimeria' infection are complex. Thus, intensive efforts are required to better understand NE so as to achieve the control of the disease in the absence of antibiotics

Research on flywheel energy storage control strategy based on active disturbance rejection controller

Based on nonlinear busbar voltage in flywheel energy storage systems and frequent discharge characteristics, in order to improve the dynamic control derived from the analysis of a permanent magnet synchronous motor and its inverter set up model of DC bus and the active disturbance rejection principle and use the active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) technique to design the DC bus voltage adaptive controller, the first- and second-order ADRC controllers are compared with the traditional PI controller in MATLAB. In this work, we demonstrate that the voltage controller designed with the first- and second-order ADRCs was superior to a traditional PI in terms of dynamic performance control

Multimodel Anomaly Identification and Control in Wet Limestone-Gypsum Flue Gas Desulphurization System

Sulphur dioxide, as one of the most common air pollutant gases, brings considerable numbers of hazards on human health and environment. For the purpose of reducing the detrimental effect it brings, it is of urgent necessity to control emissions of flue gas in power plants, since a substantial proportion of sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere stems from flue gas generated in the whole process of electricity generation. However, the complexity and nondeterminism of the environment increase the occurrences of anomalies in practical flue gas desulphurization system. Anomalies in industrial desulphurization system would induce severe consequences and pose challenges for high-performance control with classical control strategies. In this article, based on process data sampled from 1000 MW unit flue gas desulphurization system in a coal-fired power plant, a multimodel control strategy with multilayer parallel dynamic neural network (MPDNN) is utilized to address the control problem in the context of different anomalies. In addition, simulation results indicate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed control method by comparing with different cases

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Syndecan-1 suppresses cell growth and migration via blocking JAK1/STAT3 and Ras/Raf/MEK/ERK pathways in human colorectal carcinoma cells

Abstract Background Syndecan-1 (SDC-1) is a crucial membrane proteoglycan, which is confirmed to participate in several tumor cell biological processes. However, the biological significance of SDC-1 in colorectal carcinoma is not yet clear. An objective of this study was to investigate the role of SDC-1 in colorectal carcinoma cells. Methods Expression of SDC-1 in colorectal carcinoma tissues was evaluated by Reverse transcription-quantitative real-time PCR (RT-qPCR) and western blot. After transfection with pcDNA3.1 or pc-SDC-1, the transfection efficiency was measured. Next, SW480, SW620 and LOVO cell viability, apoptosis, migration and adhesion were assessed to explore the effects of exogenous overexpressed SDC-1 on colorectal carcinoma. In addition, the influences of aberrant expressed SDC-1 in Janus kinase 1 (JAK1)/signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) and rat sarcoma virus (Ras)/rapidly accelerated fibrosarcoma (Raf)/mitogen-activated protein kinase (MEK)/extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) pathways were detected by western blot analysis. Results SDC-1 mRNA and protein levels were down-regulated in human colorectal carcinoma tissues. SDC-1 overexpression inhibited cell proliferation via suppressing CyclinD1 and c-Myc expression, meanwhile stimulated cell apoptosis via increasing the expression levels of B-cell lymphoma-2-associated x (Bax) and Cleaved-Caspase-3. Additionally, SDC-1 overexpression restrained cell migration via inhibiting the protein expression of matrix metallopeptidase 9 (MMP-9), and elicited cell adhesion through increasing intercellular cell adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1). Furthermore, SDC-1 overexpression suppressed JAK1/STAT3 and Ras/Raf/MEK/ERK-related protein levels. Conclusions In general, the evidence from this study suggested that SDC-1 suppressed cell growth, migration through blocking JAK1/STAT3 and Ras/Raf/MEK/ERK pathways in human colorectal carcinoma cells

Properties and ceramic transformation of Si–Zr–O–C precursor ceramics with porous structure

The preparation of ceramic materials with complex porous structures through photopolymerization-based 3D printing requires the development of stable and printable slurries. In this study, zirconium acetylacetonate was incorporated into the thiol vinyl organosilicon prepolymer to create a photosensitive Si–Zr–O–C slurry. Regarding the natural bone structures and the Tyson polygon principle, a gradient pore structure was designed and then printed using a digital light processing 3D printer. After printing, the effects of sintering temperatures on the phase composition and structure of Si–Zr–O–C ceramics were systematically investigated. Subsequently, a comparative analysis of structure and properties was performed on sintered samples with different zirconium acetylacetonate contents. The results revealed that the sample containing 30 wt. % zirconium acetylacetonate exhibited a higher compressive strength of 9.70 ± 0.28 MPa and a lower room temperature thermal conductivity of 0.528 W m−1 K−1. This study confirmed the significant potential of using 3D printing technology to prepare Si–Zr–O–C precursor ceramics with a porous structure

The Vector Construction of Anthocyanins as a Visual Marker Gene and Its Transient Expression in Maize Immature Embryos

采用花青素调控因子C1/Bperu分别与玉米胚特异性启动子Glb1和组成型启动子CaMV35S构建成植物转化载体pGlb1CB和p35SCB，并利用基因枪转化方法，将重组表达载体转入玉米幼胚。显微观察结果证实，这两个载体均能在玉米幼胚细胞中瞬时表达。用花青素作为标记基因不仅可以在一定程度上减少公众对转基因生物安全性方面的担忧，而且可以帮助直观地从转化当代和后代种子中通过颜色标记筛选到转化籽粒，从而可以大大简化筛选程序，提高效率，节约检测成本