Human activities accelerated the degradation of saline seepweed red beaches by amplifying top‐down and bottom‐up forces

Salt marshes dominated by saline seepweed (Suaeda heteroptera) provide important ecosystem services such as sequestering carbon (blue carbon), maintaining healthy fisheries, and protecting shorelines. These salt marshes also constitute stunning red beach landscapes, and the resulting tourism significantly contributes to the local economy. However, land use change and degradation have led to a substantial loss of the red beach area. It remains unclear how human activities influence the top‐down and bottom‐up forces that regulate the distribution and succession of these salt marshes and lead to the degradation of the red beaches. We examined how bottom‐up forces influenced the germination, emergence, and colonization of saline seepweed with field measurements and a laboratory experiment. We also examined whether top‐down forces affected the red beach distribution by conducting a field survey for crab burrows and density, laboratory feeding trials, and waterbird investigations. The higher sediment accretion rate induced by human activities limited the establishment of new red beaches. The construction of tourism facilities and the frequent presence of tourists reduced the density of waterbirds, which in turn increased the density of crabs, intensifying the top‐down forces such as predators and herbivores that drive the degradation of the coastal red beaches. Our results show that sediment accretion and plant–herbivory changes induced by human activities were likely the two primary ecological processes leading to the degradation of the red beaches. Human activities significantly shaped the abundance and distribution of the red beaches by altering both top‐down and bottom‐up ecological processes. Our findings can help us better understand the dynamics of salt marshes and have implications for the management and restoration of coastal wetlands

Ureteral inflammatory edema grading clinical application

PurposeTo evaluate the relationship between endoscopic ureteral inflammatory edema (UIE) and ureteral lumen, formulate a preliminary grading method for the severity of UIE, and analyze the impact of different grades of UIE on endoscopic ureteral calculi surgery and prognosis.Materials and methodsWe retrospectively analyzed 185 patients who underwent ureteroscopic lithotripsy (URSL) for upper urinary tract stones between January 2021 and November 2021. The UIE grade and lumen conditions were assessed by endoscopic observation. The effect of UIE grade on URSL and on patient prognosis were analyzed by multiple linear regression and binary logistic regression.ResultsA total of 185 patients were included in the study. UIE grade showed a significant correlation with age, hydronephrosis grading (HG), ureteroscope placement time (UPT), surgery time (ST), hemoglobin disparity value (HDV), and postoperative ureteral stenosis (PUS) (P < 0.05). Logistics regression analysis showed a gradual increase in intraoperative UPT and ST with increase in UIE grade. The severity of UIE showed a negative correlation with improvement of postoperative hydronephrosis (IPH) and the appearance of PUS. HDV was significantly increased in patients with UIE grade 3.ConclusionsUIE grading can be used as an adjunctive clinical guide for endoscopic treatment of upper urinary tract stones. The postoperative management measures proposed in this study can help inform treatment strategy for ureteral stones

Identification of LncRNA Linc00513 Containing Lupus-Associated Genetic Variants as a Novel Regulator of Interferon Signaling Pathway

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a complex autoimmune disease characterized by augmented type I interferon signaling. High-throughput technologies have identified plenty of SLE susceptibility single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) yet the exact roles of most of them are still unknown. Functional studies are principally focused on SNPs in the coding regions, with limited attention paid to the SNPs in non-coding regions. Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are important players in shaping the immune response and show relationship to autoimmune diseases. In order to reveal the role of SNPs located near SLE related lncRNAs, we performed a transcriptome profiling of SLE patients and identified linc00513 as a significantly over expressed lncRNA containing functional SLE susceptibility loci in the promoter region. The risk-associated G allele of rs205764 and A allele of rs547311 enhanced linc00513 promoter activity and related to increased expression of linc00513 in SLE. We also identified linc00513 to be a novel positive regulator of type I interferon pathway by promoting the phosphorylation of STAT1 and STAT2. Elevated linc00513 expression positively correlated with IFN score in SLE patients. Linc00513 expression was higher in active disease patients than those inactive ones. In conclusion, our data identify two functional promoter variants of linc00513 that contribute to increased level of linc00513 and confer susceptibility on SLE. The study provides new insights into the genetics of SLE and extends the role of lncRNAs in the pathogenesis of SLE

Mitochondrial Fragmentation Is Involved in Methamphetamine-Induced Cell Death in Rat Hippocampal Neural Progenitor Cells

Methamphetamine (METH) induces neurodegeneration through damage and apoptosis of dopaminergic nerve terminals and striatal cells, presumably via cross-talk between the endoplasmic reticulum and mitochondria-dependent death cascades. However, the effects of METH on neural progenitor cells (NPC), an important reservoir for replacing neurons and glia during development and injury, remain elusive. Using a rat hippocampal NPC (rhNPC) culture, we characterized the METH-induced mitochondrial fragmentation, apoptosis, and its related signaling mechanism through immunocytochemistry, flow cytometry, and Western blotting. We observed that METH induced rhNPC mitochondrial fragmentation, apoptosis, and inhibited cell proliferation. The mitochondrial fission protein dynamin-related protein 1 (Drp1) and reactive oxygen species (ROS), but not calcium (Ca2+) influx, were involved in the regulation of METH-induced mitochondrial fragmentation. Furthermore, our results indicated that dysregulation of ROS contributed to the oligomerization and translocation of Drp1, resulting in mitochondrial fragmentation in rhNPC. Taken together, our data demonstrate that METH-mediated ROS generation results in the dysregulation of Drp1, which leads to mitochondrial fragmentation and subsequent apoptosis in rhNPC. This provides a potential mechanism for METH-related neurodegenerative disorders, and also provides insight into therapeutic strategies for the neurodegenerative effects of METH

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

OPTIMAL PARTIAL REGULARITY FOR NONLINEAR SUB-ELLIPTIC SYSTEMS RELATED TO HÖRMANDER'S VECTOR FIELDS

This paper is concerned with partial regularity for weak solutions to nonlinear sub-elliptic systems related to Hörmander's vector fields. The method of A-harmonic approximation introduced by Simon and developed by Duzaar and Grotowski is adapted to our context, and then a Caccioppoli-type inequality and partial regularity with optimal local Hölder exponent for gradients of weak solutions to the systems under super-quadratic natural growth conditions is established

OPTIMAL PARTIAL REGULARITY FOR NONLINEAR SUB-ELLIPTIC SYSTEMS RELATED TO HÖRMANDER\u27S VECTOR FIELDS

This paper is concerned with partial regularity for weak solutions to nonlinear sub-elliptic systems related to Hörmander\u27s vector fields. The method of A-harmonic approximation introduced by Simon and developed by Duzaar and Grotowski is adapted to our context, and then a Caccioppoli-type inequality and partial regularity with optimal local Hölder exponent for gradients of weak solutions to the systems under super-quadratic natural growth conditions is established

Optimal partial regularity of discontinuous subelliptic systems with VMO coefficients related to Hörmander’s vector fields

Abstract In this paper, we study discontinuous subelliptic systems with VMO coefficients related to Hörmander’s vector fields. In the case of growth exponential p ≥ 2 $p\geq 2$  , the regularity results of the partial Hölder continuity of weak solutions are established based on the  A $\mathcal{A}$ -harmonic approximation method under the controllable growth condition