Duplication and Remolding of tRNA Genes in the Mitochondrial Genome of \u3cem\u3eReduvius tenebrosus\u3c/em\u3e (Hemiptera: Reduviidae)

Most assassin bugs are predators that act as important natural enemies of insect pests. Mitochondrial (mt) genomes of these insects are double-strand circular DNAs that encode 37 genes. In the present study, we explore the duplication and rearrangement of tRNA genes in the mt genome of Reduvius tenebrosus, the first mt genome from the subfamily Reduviinae. The gene order rearranges from CR (control region)-trnI-trnQ-trnM-ND2 to CR-trnQ-trnI2-trnI1-trnM-ND2. We identified 23 tRNA genes, including 22 tRNAs commonly found in insects and an additional trnI (trnI2), which has high sequence similarity to trnM. We found several pseudo genes, such as pseudo-trnI, pseudo-CR, and pseudo-ND2, in the hotspot region of gene rearrangement (between the control region and ND2). These features provided evidence that this novel gene order could be explained by the tandem duplication/random loss (TDRL) model. The tRNA duplication/anticodon mutation mechanism further explains the presence of trnI2, which is remolded from a duplicated trnM in the TDRL process (through an anticodon mutation of CAT to GAT). Our study also raises new questions as to whether the two events proceed simultaneously and if the remolded tRNA gene is fully functional. Significantly, the duplicated tRNA gene in the mitochondrial genome has evolved independently at least two times within assassin bugs

Gut microbiome and metabolome in aneurysm rat with hypertension after ginsenoside Rb1 treatment

Introduction: Hypertension is a well-known risk factor for aneurysms, as high blood pressure can worsen the development and rupture of aneurysms. Ginsenoside, derived from ginseng and widely used in traditional herbal medicine, is believed to have antihypertensive properties. Recent research has also shown a connection between gut microbiota and various diseases, including hypertension. However, the relationship between ginsenosides, gut microbiota, blood pressure, and intracranial aneurysms needs further exploration.Methods: In this study, a rat model was used to investigate the effects of ginsenosides on both blood pressure and intracranial arteries. Comparative analysis was conducted, and 16S rRNA sequencing was employed to identify marker genera within the gut microbiota. Metabolites were also analyzed to uncover potential mediators of blood pressure regulation.Results and Discussion: The results of this study revealed that ginsenosides, particularly ginsenoside Rb1, demonstrated positive effects in reducing both blood pressure and the development of intracranial aneurysms in rats. Furthermore, the analysis of gut microbiota showed that certain genera, including Clostridium, Roseburia, Ruminococcus, and Treponema, were significantly influenced by ginsenoside treatment. Several metabolites, such as behenic acid, N-Acetylserotonin, Prostaglandin F2a, and Vitamin D2, were also detected, all of which play a role in regulating blood pressure. These findings provide valuable insights into the potential benefits of ginsenosides in hypertension and atheroma development. Furthermore, they suggest a possible link between ginsenosides, gut microbiota, and blood pressure regulation. Further research is needed to fully understand the mechanisms underlying these effects and to determine the clinical implications for treating hypertension and reducing the risk of aneurysm development

FusionFormer: A Multi-sensory Fusion in Bird's-Eye-View and Temporal Consistent Transformer for 3D Objection

Multi-sensor modal fusion has demonstrated strong advantages in 3D object detection tasks. However, existing methods that fuse multi-modal features through a simple channel concatenation require transformation features into bird's eye view space and may lose the information on Z-axis thus leads to inferior performance. To this end, we propose FusionFormer, an end-to-end multi-modal fusion framework that leverages transformers to fuse multi-modal features and obtain fused BEV features. And based on the flexible adaptability of FusionFormer to the input modality representation, we propose a depth prediction branch that can be added to the framework to improve detection performance in camera-based detection tasks. In addition, we propose a plug-and-play temporal fusion module based on transformers that can fuse historical frame BEV features for more stable and reliable detection results. We evaluate our method on the nuScenes dataset and achieve 72.6% mAP and 75.1% NDS for 3D object detection tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art methods

A Two-Year Surveillance of 2009 Pandemic Influenza A (H1N1) in Guangzhou, China: From Pandemic to Seasonal Influenza?

In this two-years surveillance of 2009 pandemic influenza A (H1N1) (pH1N1) in Guangzhou, China, we reported here that the scale and duration of pH1N1 outbreaks, severe disease and fatality rates of pH1N1 patients were significantly lower or shorter in the second epidemic year (May 2010-April 2011) than those in the first epidemic year (May 2009-April 2010) (P<0.05), but similar to those of seasonal influenza (P>0.05). Similar to seasonal influenza, pre-existing chronic pulmonary diseases was a risk factor associated with fatal cases of pH1N1 influenza. Different from seasonal influenza, which occurred in spring/summer seasons annually, pH1N1 influenza mainly occurred in autumn/winter seasons in the first epidemic year, but prolonged to winter/spring season in the second epidemic year. The information suggests a tendency that the epidemics of pH1N1 influenza may probably further shift to spring/summer seasons and become a predominant subtype of seasonal influenza in coming years in Guangzhou, China

RPL22 Overexpression Promotes Psoriasis-Like Lesion by Inducing Keratinocytes Abnormal Biological Behavior

BackgroundKeratinocytes of psoriasis have anti-apoptotic properties including delayed apoptosis process, accelerated proliferation metabolism and postponed differentiation process. However, the specific mechanism leading to the abnormal biological behavior of keratinocytes remains unclear.ObjectivesWe investigated the role of increased RPL22 expression in regulating the abnormal biological behavior of keratinocytes and the mechanism of regulation of RPL22 expression in skin lesions of psoriatic patients.MethodsWe examined clinical samples and utilized cytokine-induced cell and IMQ-treated mouse models. We determined the expression and functions of RPL22 in vitro and in vivo.ResultsWe showed that RPL22 expression was significantly increased in the skin lesions of psoriasis patients and IMQ-treated psoriatic-like mice. Such increased expression is attributed to hyperacetylation of histone H3K27 in the promoter region of RPL22. Interestingly, overexpression of RPL22 enhanced keratinocyte proliferation by increasing cyclinD1 expression and accelerated CD4+T cells recruitment via upregulating CXCL10 expression. Finally, we demonstrated that RPL22 overexpression promoted psoriasiform phenotypes in IMQ-induced mouse skins.ConclusionsThese findings suggested that RPL22 regulates keratinocytes abnormal biological behavior and contributes to the development of psoriatic phenotypes. Thus, RPL22 might be a novel potential molecular target for treatment of psoriasis

Energy-efficient, wideband transceiver architectures and circuits for high-speed communications and interconnects

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2012.Recently with the increasing demand for high-speed communications, wideband systems have becomes one of the major research focuses for both academia and industry. While wide bandwidth benefits high data-rate communication, compared to the conventional narrow bandwidth system, it poses large design challenges for both transceiver architectures and circuits, especially using the mainstream low cost CMOS and BiCMOS technologies. Besides, wideband systems typically inevitably require large power consumption, which might lead to worse energy-efficiency compared to the narrow-band systems. Therefore, in this thesis, we will focus on the energy-efficient, wideband transceiver architectures and circuits for high-speed communications and interconnects: ultra-wideband impulse radios (IR-UWB), intra-chip free-space optical interconnect, and on-chip electrical interconnect for multi-core processors. Ultra-wideband communications has become an active research topic with the approval of UWB technology for commercial applications in the 3.1 - 10.6-GHz band by FCC. With such a large bandwidth, UWB technologies promise to offer low-power and high-speed wireless connectivity for future short-range communication systems. In this thesis, we will focus on the energy-efficient, wide-band UWB receiver architecture and circuits. We will first present a new UWB low-noise amplifier with noise cancelation, and use it to investigate the design trade-off for UWB amplifier. Then we will present a new analog correlation receiver architecture. It employs an energy-efficient correlator called distributed pulse correlator (DPC) for low power ultra-wideband pulse detection. Thanks to the multiple pulsed multipliers time-interleaved in a distributed fashion and built-in local template pulse generation in the DPC, the power consumption and circuit complexity are significantly reduced for the DPC-based analog correlation receiver. The operation and performance of the DPC are analyzed, and the circuit implementation of DPC is discussed in details, especially the most critical component, the pulsed multiplier. A chip prototype of the DPC-based IR-UWB receiver was implemented in a 0.18-m standard digital CMOS technology. In the measurement, the 8-tap, 10-GSample/s DPC achieves a pulse rate of 250 MHz with an energy efficiency of 40 pJ/pulse, and the whole receiver achieves an energy efficiency of 190 pJ/pulse at the 250-MHz pulse rate. Together with a UWB transmitter and two UWB antennas, the complete IR-UWB communication link is also demonstrated. The continuous scaling of CMOS technology enables more and more modules to be implemented into a single chip. However, it actually poses challenges in the global interconnect design, especially with the rapid demand for higher-speed communication among more modules. Conventional electrical interconnect inevitably requires significant improvement for this high-speed on-chip global communication. In this thesis, we will investigate the high-speed global interconnect through both electrical and optical options. Optical interconnects have been recognized as a promising successor to electrical interconnects. They have advantages like large bandwidth, low latency, and less susceptible to noise. We will present a novel optical transceiver architecture and circuits for the free-space optical interconnect for high-speed intra-chip communications. Compared to the conventional embedded-clock and forwarded-clock architectures, the presented shared-clock architecture benefits low power and low design complexity on the clock generation and recovery block and a simple interface between electrics and optics. An injection-locked oscillator is employed to replace the conventional phase-locked loop as the clock generation block to further improve the energy-efficiency. Due to the high-speed and large bandwidth requirement, bandwidth extension techniques are widely used in the transceiver circuits. The optical transceiver was implemented in a 0.13-m standard digital CMOS technology. The simulation results show that a 10-Gb/s data rate with 7.1-pJ/b energy-efficiency communication can be achieved. For the electrical interconnect, we will present a novel on-chip interconnect system for multi-core chips using transmission lines as shared media in this thesis. It supports both point-to-point and broadcasting communications. Compared to network-on-chip approaches, it offers significant advantages in circuit complexity, energy efficiency and link latency. To demonstrate the scheme, a chip prototype with two 20-mm transmission lines running in parallel and multiple transmitters/receivers (including 2:1 serializer/1:2 deserializer) was implemented in a 130-nm SiGe BiCMOS technology. The transmission lines are designed with Ground-Signal-Signal-Ground configuration and patterned ground shields to exhibit low latency, small attenuation, generate less crosstalk, and provide high bandwidth density. The transceivers are designed and optimized to achieve good energy efficiency at the target data rate of 25 Gb/s. On the transmitter side, an efficient and low power pre-emphasis technique is applied to compensate for the transmission line's frequency-dependent loss. On the receiver side, latched samplers are adopted for high sensitivity. To eliminate the insertion loss caused by a dedicated isolation switch, both the transmitter and receiver are designed to be internally switched in/out from the transmission lines. The prototype can successfully demonstrate point-to-point and broadcasting communications, and can achieve a date rate of 25.4 Gb/s with an energy efficiency of 1.67 pJ/b in the measurement