An Extract of Antrodia camphorata Mycelia Attenuates the Progression of Nephritis in Systemic Lupus Erythematosus-Prone NZB/W F1 Mice

Antrodia camphorata is used in folk medicine for the treatment of inflammation syndromes and liver-related diseases in Taiwan. The goal of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of the mycelial extract of A. camphorata (ACE) for the treatment of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) in SLE-prone NZB/W F1 mice. After antibodies against double-stranded DNA appeared in NZB/W mice, the mice were orally administered varying dosages of ACE (100, 200 and 400 mg kg−1) for 5 consecutive days per week for 12 weeks via gavage. To assess the efficacy of ACE, we measured SLE-associated biochemical and histopathological biomarkers levels of blood urine nitrogen (BUN), blood creatinine, urine protein and urine creatinine and thickness of the kidney glomerular basement membrane by staining with periodic acid-Schiff. Antroquinonol, an active component of ACE, was investigated for anti-inflammation activity in lipopolysaccharide-induced RAW 267.4 cells. ACE at 400 mg kg−1 significantly suppressed urine protein and serum BUN levels and decreased the thickness of the kidney glomerular basement membrane. Antroquinonol significantly inhibited the production of tumor necrosis factor-α and interleukin-1β by 75 and 78%, respectively. In conclusion, ACE reduced urine protein and creatinine levels and suppressed the thickening of the kidney glomerular basement membrane, suggesting that ACE protects the kidney from immunological damage resulting from autoimmune disease

Holographic fermions in charged dilaton black branes

By imposing the relativistic boundary term and Lorentz violating that in the dilatonic black brane with a Lifshitz like IR geometry and $AdS_4$ boundary, we study the properties of the spectral functions of the fermions. We find that in the two fixed points, there are emergent Fermi-surface structures and many properties seem to be in agreement with that of Fermi liquid. Especially, the low energy behavior exhibits a linear dispersion relation. In addition, we also find that a holographic flat band also emerges in this background of the dilatonic black brane.Comment: 22 pages, 11 figures, added refs, typos corrected; version published in Nuclear Physics

Query-controllable Video Summarization

When video collections become huge, how to explore both within and across videos efficiently is challenging. Video summarization is one of the ways to tackle this issue. Traditional summarization approaches limit the effectiveness of video exploration because they only generate one fixed video summary for a given input video independent of the information need of the user. In this work, we introduce a method which takes a text-based query as input and generates a video summary corresponding to it. We do so by modeling video summarization as a supervised learning problem and propose an end-to-end deep learning based method for query-controllable video summarization to generate a query-dependent video summary. Our proposed method consists of a video summary controller, video summary generator, and video summary output module. To foster the research of query-controllable video summarization and conduct our experiments, we introduce a dataset that contains frame-based relevance score labels. Based on our experimental result, it shows that the text-based query helps control the video summary. It also shows the text-based query improves our model performance. Our code and dataset: https://github.com/Jhhuangkay/Query-controllable-Video-Summarization.Comment: This paper is accepted by ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR), 202

Cosmology and Accelerator Tests of Strongly Interacting Dark Matter

A natural possibility for dark matter is that it is composed of the stable pions of a QCD-like hidden sector. Existing literature largely assumes that pion self-interactions alone control the early universe cosmology. We point out that processes involving vector mesons typically dominate the physics of dark matter freeze-out and significantly widen the viable mass range for these models. The vector mesons also give rise to striking signals at accelerators. For example, in most of the cosmologically favored parameter space, the vector mesons are naturally long-lived and produce Standard Model particles in their decays. Electron and proton beam fixed-target experiments such as HPS, SeaQuest, and LDMX can exploit these signals to explore much of the viable parameter space. We also comment on dark matter decay inherent in a large class of previously considered models and explain how to ensure dark matter stability.Comment: 20 pages (4 in the Appendix), 6 figures; references adde

Association of CNVs with methylation variation.

Germline copy number variants (CNVs) and single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) form the basis of inter-individual genetic variation. Although the phenotypic effects of SNPs have been extensively investigated, the effects of CNVs is relatively less understood. To better characterize mechanisms by which CNVs affect cellular phenotype, we tested their association with variable CpG methylation in a genome-wide manner. Using paired CNV and methylation data from the 1000 genomes and HapMap projects, we identified genome-wide associations by methylation quantitative trait locus (mQTL) analysis. We found individual CNVs being associated with methylation of multiple CpGs and vice versa. CNV-associated methylation changes were correlated with gene expression. CNV-mQTLs were enriched for regulatory regions, transcription factor-binding sites (TFBSs), and were involved in long-range physical interactions with associated CpGs. Some CNV-mQTLs were associated with methylation of imprinted genes. Several CNV-mQTLs and/or associated genes were among those previously reported by genome-wide association studies (GWASs). We demonstrate that germline CNVs in the genome are associated with CpG methylation. Our findings suggest that structural variation together with methylation may affect cellular phenotype