Effect of Diet Supplemented With Rapeseed Meal or Hydrolysable Tannins on the Growth, Nutrition, and Intestinal Microbiota in Grass Carp (Ctenopharyngodon idellus)

Grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idellus; n = 320) were received four different diets for 56 days. The experimental diets were: fishmeal (FM) containing 10% fishmeal (without rapeseed meal), and rapeseed meal (RM) containing 50% rapeseed meal (without fishmeal), and two semi-purified diets either without (T0) or with 1.25% (T1) supplemental hydrolysable tannin. The approximate content of tannin in the RM diet was 1.31%, which was close to that of T1, while the tannin content of FM was close to that of T0. The weight gain rate of grass carp of the RM group was significantly lower than that of the FM group, while the feeding conversion ratio and the feeding rate were significantly higher in the T1 group than in T0. The muscle lipid content was significantly lower in RM than in FM, while T1 was lower than T0. Intestinal activities of trypsin and α-amylase were significantly higher in T1 and RM groups compared with the other treatments. The hepatic activities of aspartate aminotransferase and alanine aminotransferase were lower in T1 and RM groups compared with the other treatments, while hepatic glycogen, and malonaldehyde were significantly higher in T1 and RM groups. In serum, the total protein and globulin contents were significantly higher in T1 and RM groups, while albumin was significantly lower in the RM group compared to the FM group. High-throughput sequencing showed that Proteobacteria, Firmicutes, and Actinobacteria were the dominant bacterial phyla among groups. The intestinal microbial diversity was higher in T1 and RM. Redundancy analysis showed that tannin, rapeseed meal, and intestinal trypsin activity were positively or negatively correlated with the relative abundance of several different intestinal microbiota at phylum and/or genus levels. The results indicated that 1.25% tannin could not be the main reason for the poor growth of grass carp of the RM group; however, the protein metabolism was disturbed, the absorption of carbohydrate was improved, and the accumulation of lipid had decreased. Furthermore, tannin and rapeseed meal supplementations modulated the intestinal microbiota, and may sequentially regulate the intestinal function by fermenting dietary nutrition, producing digestive enzymes, and modulating probiotics

2,3-Bis(2-chloro­benz­yl)naphthalene-1,4-dione

The title disubstituted naphthalene-1,4-dione, C24H16Cl2O2, has the two chloro­benzyl substituents related by a non-crystallographic twofold rotation axis, generating a chiral conformation; both enantiomers are present. The two chlorobenzene rings are nearly perpendicular to the fused ring system, making angles of 88.8 (1) and 77.5 (1)° with it

Research Progress in Molecular Biology of Fish Immunoglobulin M (IgM)

Immunoglobulin (Ig) is a type of globulin produced by B lymphocytes during pathogenic infection of vertebrates. It has immune functions and can realize specific recognition and neutralization of corresponding antigens. As IgM is reported first in fish, IgM is the first antibody produced during immune responses and plays a vital role in systemic and mucosal immune tissues. IgM molecules have two forms: membrane-bound IgM (mIgM) and secreted IgM (sIgM). The latter is produced by plasmacytes and secreted into body fluid, existing as immunological effect molecules. The former embeds into B cytomembrane and exists as an antigen receptor. It binds with assistant molecules to form cell receptor compounds. This study reviews research progress on the structures and production processes of IgM genes in different fish species and the distribution characteristics of IgM on B cells, mediated signal pathways, and functions. It aims to enrich basic theoretical knowledge of fish immunology and provide some scientific references for disease control in fishes

Cocaine- and amphetamine-regulated transcript promotes the differentiation of mouse bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells into neural cells

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Neural tissue has limited potential to self-renew after neurological damage. Cell therapy using BM-MSCs (bone marrow mesenchymal stromal cells) seems like a promising approach for the treatment of neurological diseases. However, the neural differentiation of stem cells influenced by massive factors and interactions is not well studied at present.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this work, we isolated and identified MSCs from mouse bone marrow. Co-cultured with CART (0.4 nM) for six days, BM-MSCs were differentiated into neuron-like cells by the observation of optical microscopy. Immunofluorescence demonstrated that the differentiated BM-MSCs expressed neural specific markers including MAP-2, Nestin, NeuN and GFAP. In addition, NeuN positive cells could co-localize with TH or ChAT by double-labled immunofluorescence and Nissl bodies were found in several differentiated cells by Nissl stain. Furthermore, BDNF and NGF were increased by CART using RT-PCR.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This study demonstrated that CART could promote the differentiation of BM-MSCs into neural cells through increasing neurofactors, including BNDF and NGF. Combined application of CART and BM-MSCs may be a promising cell-based therapy for neurological diseases.</p

Towards Practical Capture of High-Fidelity Relightable Avatars

In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Tracking-free Relightable Avatar (TRAvatar), for capturing and reconstructing high-fidelity 3D avatars. Compared to previous methods, TRAvatar works in a more practical and efficient setting. Specifically, TRAvatar is trained with dynamic image sequences captured in a Light Stage under varying lighting conditions, enabling realistic relighting and real-time animation for avatars in diverse scenes. Additionally, TRAvatar allows for tracking-free avatar capture and obviates the need for accurate surface tracking under varying illumination conditions. Our contributions are two-fold: First, we propose a novel network architecture that explicitly builds on and ensures the satisfaction of the linear nature of lighting. Trained on simple group light captures, TRAvatar can predict the appearance in real-time with a single forward pass, achieving high-quality relighting effects under illuminations of arbitrary environment maps. Second, we jointly optimize the facial geometry and relightable appearance from scratch based on image sequences, where the tracking is implicitly learned. This tracking-free approach brings robustness for establishing temporal correspondences between frames under different lighting conditions. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves superior performance for photorealistic avatar animation and relighting.Comment: Accepted to SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 (Conference); Project page: https://travatar-paper.github.io

whu-nercms at trecvid2021:instance search task

We will make a brief introduction of the experimental methods and results of the WHU-NERCMS in the TRECVID2021 in the paper. This year we participate in the automatic and interactive tasks of Instance Search (INS). For the automatic task, the retrieval target is divided into two parts, person retrieval, and action retrieval. We adopt a two-stage method including face detection and face recognition for person retrieval and two kinds of action detection methods consisting of three frame-based human-object interaction detection methods and two video-based general action detection methods for action retrieval. After that, the person retrieval results and action retrieval results are fused to initialize the result ranking lists. In addition, we make attempts to use complementary methods to further improve search performance. For interactive tasks, we test two different interaction strategies on the fusion results. We submit 4 runs for automatic and interactive tasks respectively. The introduction of each run is shown in Table 1. The official evaluations show that the proposed strategies rank 1st in both automatic and interactive tracks.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure