Evaluation of Association of MicroRNA-122 with Histological Severity of Recurrent HCV Infection in Liver Transplant Recipients

Hepatitis C virus recurrence (which is defined by detection of HCV RNA in serum) in post-transplanted liver is universal but the progression of infection remains unpredictable, varying from case to case. It has been estimated that 75%-80% of the HCV recurrence patients will suffer chronic hepatitis C infection and up to a third of them will progress into the development of fibrosis and cirrhosis within 5 years post-transplantation. Therefore, finding ways to predict early on the progression of fibrosis can contribute to better prognoses. Recent literatures have mentioned that the hepatitis C virus relies on the host microRNA-122 (miR-122) for assistance in replication of the viral genome in hepatocytes. Experimental depletion of miRNA-122 in the cell line Huh 7 has shown up to an 80% decrease in HCV whereas an increase of miRNA-122 has shown an increase of HCV. Since miRNAs are known to have numerous indirect roles by the binding of the target messenger RNAs (mRNAs) and repressing the expression of their proteins, we hypothesized that the elucidation of associations between miRNA-122 and the histological severity in HCV recurrence post-liver transplantation might serve as a biomarker in predicting the outcome of HCV recurrence severity in patients. We also evaluated the expression levels of BCAP31 (a predicted target of miRNA-122), and CD4 (T cell surface molecules involved in immune response) among the HCV recurrence severity groups. RNA samples were isolated from FFPE liver samples from patients with HCV recurrence post-transplantation, and Reverse Transcription and TaqMan Real-Time PCR were carried out for qualitative analysis. We did not see any association between the levels of miRNA-122 expression and severity of HCV recurrence, but we did find a positive correlation between the miRNA-122 expression and the HCV viral load in Group 3 (Severe) at time of HCV recurrence, which supports previous studies of the role of miRNA-122 in HCV replication. We did not find any associations between the expression of BCAP31 and the severity of HCV recurrence but we did discovery an inverse relationship between miRNA-122 and BCAP31 in Group 3 (Severe) at time of HCV recurrence, confirming our assumption of miRNA:mRNA interaction. Also, we did find CD4 expression being statistically significant between Group 1 (Benign) versus Group 3 (Severe), which may support the hypothesis that strong, adequate CD4+ T-cell response is associated with better outcome post-liver transplantation

Read-only Prompt Optimization for Vision-Language Few-shot Learning

In recent years, prompt tuning has proven effective in adapting pre-trained vision-language models to downstream tasks. These methods aim to adapt the pre-trained models by introducing learnable prompts while keeping pre-trained weights frozen. However, learnable prompts can affect the internal representation within the self-attention module, which may negatively impact performance variance and generalization, especially in data-deficient settings. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach, Read-only Prompt Optimization (RPO). RPO leverages masked attention to prevent the internal representation shift in the pre-trained model. Further, to facilitate the optimization of RPO, the read-only prompts are initialized based on special tokens of the pre-trained model. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that RPO outperforms CLIP and CoCoOp in base-to-new generalization and domain generalization while displaying better robustness. Also, the proposed method achieves better generalization on extremely data-deficient settings, while improving parameter efficiency and computational overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/RPO.Comment: Accepted at ICCV202

Capacity of Wood as Flooring Material: Improvement of Thermal Performance of Wood/Phase Change Material Composites

Wood is a biomaterial with good carbon fixation capacity. Phase change materials (PCMs) can impart thermal storage performances to materials. The goal of this study is to improve thermal performance by impregnating PCM into porous wood. The chemical stability of the composites was analyzed to evaluate whether it was appropriate for PCM to be impregnated into wood. Thermal performance of the composites was evaluated through latent heat analysis and thermal conductivity analysis. As a result of the analysis, the composites showed improved thermal performance compared to pure wood. In addition, in order to evaluate the applicability of the composites for floor heating, the dynamic heat transfer test was conducted using specimens as flooring material. As a result, it was confirmed that room temperature maintained the indoor comfort temperature range for longer time in rooms where composite specimens were applied as floor material. Result suggests that the composites can reduce the time for operating heating energy for floor heating. Thus, composites produced in this study proved to have the potential to be used as floor finishing material for floor radiant heating systems

Reduced Expression of Inflammatory Genes in Deceased Donor Kidneys Undergoing Pulsatile Pump Preservation

Background The use of expanded criteria donor kidneys (ECD) had been associated with worse outcomes. Whole gene expression of pre-implantation allograft biopsies from deceased donor kidneys (DDKs) was evaluated to compare the effect of pulsatile pump preservation (PPP) vs. cold storage preservation (CSP) on standard and ECD kidneys. Methodology/Principal Findings 99 pre-implantation DDK biopsies were studied using gene expression with GeneChips. Kidneys transplant recipients were followed post transplantation for 35.8 months (range = 24–62). The PPP group included 60 biopsies (cold ischemia time (CIT) = 1,367+/−509 minutes) and the CSP group included 39 biopsies (CIT = 1,022+/−485 minutes) (P Conclusions/Significance Inflammation was the most important up-regulated pattern associated with pre-implantation biopsies undergoing CSP even when the PPP group has a larger number of ECD kidneys. No significant difference was observed in delayed graft function incidence and graft function post-transplantation. These findings support the use of PPP in ECD donor kidneys

Multiplex CRISPR/Cas9 Mutagenesis of BrVRN1 Delays Flowering Time in Chinese Cabbage (Brassica rapa L. ssp. pekinensis)

The VERNALIZATION1 (VRN1) gene is a crucial transcriptional repressor involved in triggering the transition to flowering in response to prolonged cold. To develop Chinese cabbage (Brassica rapa L. ssp. pekinensis) plants with delayed flowering time, we designed a multiplex CRISPR/Cas9 platform that allows the co-expression of four sgRNAs targeting different regions of the endogenous BrVRN1 gene delivered via a single binary vector built using the Golden Gate cloning system. DNA sequencing analysis revealed site-directed mutations at two target sites: gRNA1 and gRNA2. T1 mutant plants with a 1-bp insertion in BrVRN1 exhibited late flowering after the vernalization. Additionally, we identified ‘transgene-free’ BrVRN1 mutant plants without any transgenic elements from the GE1 (gene-editing 1) and GE2 generations. All GE2 mutant plants contained successful edits in two out of three BrVRN1 orthologs and displayed delayed flowering time. In GE2 mutant plants, the floral repressor gene FLC1 was expressed during vernalization; but the floral integrator gene FT was not expressed after vernalization. Taken together, our data indicate that the BrVRN1 genes act as negative regulators of FLC1 expression during vernalization in Chinese cabbage, raising the possibility that the ‘transgene-free’ mutants of BrVRN1 developed in this study may serve as useful genetic resources for crop improvement with respect to flowering time regulation

Seventeen probe sets were significant when adjusting the analysis for cold ischemia time using probe set level linear models.

<p>Seventeen probe sets were significant when adjusting the analysis for cold ischemia time using probe set level linear models.</p

Demographic and relevant clinical information for the enrolled study patients separated according to deceased donor kidney undergoing PPP <i>vs.</i> CSP.

*<p>eGFR at the end of the study for each patient (minimal follow-up 24 months post-transplantation).</p><p>Abbreviations: CIT = cold ischemia time, WIT/RVT = warm ischemia time/revascularization time, eGFR = estimated glomerular filtration rate, AA = African American, PRA = panel reactive antibodies, HCV = hepatitis C virus, CMV = cytomegalovirus, Estimated GFR (eGFR) was calculated using the abbreviated MDRD formula. P-values were calculated using Fisher's exact test.</p>1<p>All values are given as averages ± standard deviation if not otherwise stated.</p