How do enamelysin and kallikrein 4 process the 32-kDa enamelin?

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/74876/1/j.1600-0722.2006.00281.x.pd

Coating for fabrics with nano tube-panis and the properties of conducting and shielding microwave

2005-2006 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalVersion of RecordPublishe

Caspase 3/ROCK1 pathway mediates high glucose-induced platelet microparticles shedding

Background: Platelet microparticles (PMPs) are closely associated with diabetic macrovascular complications. This study aimed to explore the underlying mechanisms of high glucose-induced PMPs generation. Methods: Washed platelets, obtained from the plasma of healthy male Sprague-Dawley rats, were incubated with high glucose. PMPs were isolated using gradient centrifugation and counted by flow cytometry. Expression and activity of ROCK1 and caspase3 were evaluated by real-time PCR, Western blotting, and activity assay kit. Results: High glucose enhanced PMPs shedding in the presence of collagen. The mRNA and protein levels of ROCK1, but not ROCK2, were increased in platelets incubated with high glucose. Y-27632, an inhibitor of ROCK, blocked the increased PMPs shedding induced by high glucose. Expression and activity of caspase3 were elevated in platelets under the high glucose conditions. Z-DVED-FMK, a caspase3 inhibitor, inhibited ROCK1 activity and decreased the PMPs generation under high glucose. Conclusion: High glucose increased PMPs shedding via caspase3-ROCK1 signal pathway

Discovery of an X-ray Emitting Contact Binary System 2MASS J11201034-2201340

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A Joint Local and Global Deep Metric Learning Method for Caricature Recognition

Caricature recognition is a novel, interesting, yet challenging problem. Due to the exaggeration and distortion, there is a large cross-modal gap between photographs and caricatures, making it nontrivial to match the features of photographs and caricatures. To address the problem, a joint local and global metric learning method (LGDML) is proposed. First, joint local and global feature representation is learnt with convolutional neural networks to find both discriminant features of local facial parts and global distinctive features of the whole face. Next, in order to fuse the local and global similarities of features, a unified feature representation and similarity measure learning framework is proposed. Various methods are evaluated on the caricature recognition task. We have verified that both local and global features are crucial for caricature recognition. Moreover, experimental results show that, compared with the state-of-the-art methods, LGDML can obtain superior performance in terms of Rank-1 and Rank-10

Mycobacterium tuberculosis acg Gene Is Required for Growth and Virulence In Vivo

Mycobacterium tuberculosis dosRS two-component regulatory system controls transcription of approximately 50 genes including hspX, acg and Rv2030c, in response to hypoxia and nitric oxide conditions and within macrophages and mice. The hspX lies between acg and Rv2030c. However, the functions of the dosR regulated genes in vitro and in vivo are largely unknown. Previously, we demonstrated that deletion of hspX gene produced a mutant which grew faster in macrophages and in mice. In this study, we attempted to determine the functions of acg and Rv2030c by gene inactivation. We demonstrate that Rv2030c is dispensable for virulence and growth. However, deletion of acg produced a mutant which is attenuated in both resting and activated macrophages and in acute and persistent murine infection models. Surprisingly, deletion of acg did not compromise the viability of the mutant to nitrosative and oxidative stresses in vitro and in vivo. In addition, when the WT and the acg mutants were treated with antibiotics such as the prodrugs nitrofurantoin and nitrofuran, the acg mutant became more sensitive than the WT strain to these drugs. This suggests that Acg may not function as a nitroreductase. These data indicate that acg encodes an essential virulence factor for M. tuberculosis and enables it to grow and survive in macrophages and in mouse organs

Non-Clinical Safety Evaluation of Exosomes Derived from Human Umbilical Cord Mesenchymal Stem Cells in Cynomolgus Monkeys

Xin-Mei Hu,1,* Can-Can Wang,1,* Yu Xiao,1 Yu Liu,1 Hong-Ri Huang,2 Peng Jiang,1 Ying-Kai Wang,1 Yun-Jin Lin,1 Liang-Cheng Li,3 Zhong-Quan Qi1 1Medical College, Guangxi University, Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Research and Development, Guangxi Taimei Rensheng Biotechnology Co., Ltd, Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China; 3School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Xiamen University, Xiamen, Fujian Province, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Zhong-Quan Qi, Guangxi University, Da-Xue-Dong Road No. 100, Xixiangtang District, Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, 530004, People’s Republic of China, Tel +8613806001271, Email [email protected] Liang-Cheng Li, Xiamen University, No. 4221-115, Rm 355, Xiang’an District, Xiang’an, Xiamen Fujian Province, 361102, People’s Republic of China, Tel +8618359206906, Email [email protected]: In recent years, exosomes have been proved to be used to treat many diseases. However, due to the lack of uniform quality control standards for exosomes, the safety of exosomes is still a problem to be solved, especially now more and more exosomes are used in clinical trials, and its non-clinical safety evaluation is particularly important. However, there is no safety evaluation standard for exosomes at present. Therefore, this study will refer to the evaluation criteria of therapeutic biological products, adopt non-human primates to evaluate the non-clinical safety of human umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cell exosomes from the general pharmacology and immunotoxicity, aiming at establishing a safety evaluation system of exosomes and providing reference for the clinical application of exosomes in the future.Methods: 3.85 × 1012 exosomes derived from human umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells were injected into cynomolgus monkeys intravenously. The changes of general clinical conditions, hematology, immunoglobulin, Th1/Th2 cytokines, T lymphocytes and B lymphocytes, and immune organs were observed before and within 14 days after injection.Results: The results showed that exosomes did not have obvious pathological effects on the general clinical conditions, blood, coagulation function, organ coefficient, immunoglobulin, Th1/Th2 cytokines, lymphocytes, major organs, and major immune organs (spleen, thymus, bone marrow) of cynomolgus monkeys. However, the number of granulocyte-macrophage colonies in exosomes group was significantly higher than that in control group.Conclusion: To sum up, the general pharmacological results and immunotoxicity results showed that the injection of 3.85 × 1012 exosomes may have no obvious adverse reactions to cynomolgus monkeys. This dose of exosomes is relatively safe for treatment, which provides basis research for non-clinical safety evaluation of exosomes and provides reliable research basis for future clinical application of exosomes.Keywords: exosomes, cynomolgus monkeys, safety, immunotoxicit

How to combine visual features with tags to improve movie recommendation accuracy?

Previous works have shown the effectiveness of using stylistic visual features, indicative of the movie style, in content-based movie recommendation. However, they have mainly focused on a particular recommendation scenario, i.e., when a new movie is added to the catalogue and no information is available for that movie (New Item scenario). However, the stylistic visual features can be also used when other sources of information is available (Existing Item scenario). In this work, we address the second scenario and propose a hybrid technique that exploits not only the typical content available for the movies (e.g., tags), but also the stylistic visual content extracted form the movie files and fuse them by applying a fusion method called Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA). Our experiments on a large catalogue of 13K movies have shown very promising results which indicates a considerable improvement of the recommendation quality by using a proper fusion of the stylistic visual features with other type of features

A simulation study for comparing testing statistics in response-adaptive randomization

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Response-adaptive randomizations are able to assign more patients in a comparative clinical trial to the tentatively better treatment. However, due to the adaptation in patient allocation, the samples to be compared are no longer independent. At large sample sizes, many asymptotic properties of test statistics derived for independent sample comparison are still applicable in adaptive randomization provided that the patient allocation ratio converges to an appropriate target asymptotically. However, the small sample properties of commonly used test statistics in response-adaptive randomization are not fully studied.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Simulations are systematically conducted to characterize the statistical properties of eight test statistics in six response-adaptive randomization methods at six allocation targets with sample sizes ranging from 20 to 200. Since adaptive randomization is usually not recommended for sample size less than 30, the present paper focuses on the case with a sample of 30 to give general recommendations with regard to test statistics for contingency tables in response-adaptive randomization at small sample sizes.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Among all asymptotic test statistics, the Cook's correction to chi-square test (<it>T</it>_<it>MC</it>) is the best in attaining the nominal size of hypothesis test. The William's correction to log-likelihood ratio test (<it>T</it>_<it>ML</it>) gives slightly inflated type I error and higher power as compared with <it>T</it>_<it>MC</it>, but it is more robust against the unbalance in patient allocation. <it>T</it>_{<it>MC </it>}and <it>T</it>_{<it>ML </it>}are usually the two test statistics with the highest power in different simulation scenarios. When focusing on <it>T</it>_{<it>MC </it>}and <it>T</it>_<it>ML</it>, the generalized drop-the-loser urn (GDL) and sequential estimation-adjusted urn (SEU) have the best ability to attain the correct size of hypothesis test respectively. Among all sequential methods that can target different allocation ratios, GDL has the lowest variation and the highest overall power at all allocation ratios. The performance of different adaptive randomization methods and test statistics also depends on allocation targets. At the limiting allocation ratio of drop-the-loser (DL) and randomized play-the-winner (RPW) urn, DL outperforms all other methods including GDL. When comparing the power of test statistics in the same randomization method but at different allocation targets, the powers of log-likelihood-ratio, log-relative-risk, log-odds-ratio, Wald-type Z, and chi-square test statistics are maximized at their corresponding optimal allocation ratios for power. Except for the optimal allocation target for log-relative-risk, the other four optimal targets could assign more patients to the worse arm in some simulation scenarios. Another optimal allocation target, <it>R</it>_{<it>RSIHR</it>}, proposed by Rosenberger and Sriram (<it>Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference</it>, 1997) is aimed at minimizing the number of failures at fixed power using Wald-type Z test statistics. Among allocation ratios that always assign more patients to the better treatment, <it>R</it>_{<it>RSIHR </it>}usually has less variation in patient allocation, and the values of variation are consistent across all simulation scenarios. Additionally, the patient allocation at <it>R</it>_{<it>RSIHR </it>}is not too extreme. Therefore, <it>R</it>_{<it>RSIHR </it>}provides a good balance between assigning more patients to the better treatment and maintaining the overall power.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The Cook's correction to chi-square test and Williams' correction to log-likelihood-ratio test are generally recommended for hypothesis test in response-adaptive randomization, especially when sample sizes are small. The generalized drop-the-loser urn design is the recommended method for its good overall properties. Also recommended is the use of the <it>R</it>_{<it>RSIHR </it>}allocation target.</p

Enhancing Video Recommendation Using Multimedia Content

Video recordings are complex media types. When we watch a movie, we can effortlessly register a lot of details conveyed to us (by the author) through different multimedia channels, in particular, the audio and visual modalities. To date, majority of movie recommender systems use collaborative filtering (CF) models or content-based filtering (CBF) relying on metadata (e.g., editorial such as genre or wisdom of the crowd such as user-generated tags) at their core since they are human-generated and are assumed to cover the 'content semantics' of movies by a great degree. The information obtained from multimedia content and learning from muli-modal sources (e.g., audio, visual and metadata) on the other hand, offers the possibility of uncovering relationships between modalities and obtaining an in-depth understanding of natural phenomena occurring in a video. These discerning characteristics of heterogeneous feature sets meet users' differing information needs. In the context of this Ph.D. thesis [9], which is briefly summarized in the current extended abstract, approaches to automated extraction of multimedia information from videos and their integration with video recommender systems have been elaborated, implemented, and analyzed. Variety of tasks related to movie recommendation using multimedia content have been studied. The results of this thesis can motivate the fact that recommender system research can benefit from knowledge in multimedia signal processing and machine learning established over the last decades for solving various recommendation tasks