Constructional Meaning and Inheritance in Mandarin Chinese LVCs: The Case of the GIVE Group

This study focuses on aspectual properties of three light verb constructions in Mandarin Chinese involving the verbs jiyu, yuyi and jiayi, all meaning ‘give’. These verbs combine with an action nominal to form a complex predicate, but unlike jiyu and yuyi, the jiayi-construction is incompatible with any aspectual markers, as evidenced by my investigation into a million-word Mandarin corpus. Assuming that light verbs typically follow the grammaticalisation path from independent verbs to grammatical morphemes, I propose that the three GIVE verbs are at different stages of grammaticalisation. The verb jiayi is the most grammaticalised item. However, jiyu and yuyi have not fully grammaticalised as aspectual morphemes, so aspectuality has to be encoded by means of aspectual markers such as the perfective markers -le and -guo. Taking into account their different aspectual properties, this study gives a constructional presentation on the family of GIVE light verb constructions, which demonstrates both conventional meaning common to all GIVE light verb constructions and idiosyncratic features particular to each light verb construction

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

The 11-Year Prognostic Impact of Chronic Total Occlusion in the Noninfarct-Related Coronary Artery on Patients with Acute Myocardial Infarction

Background. The prognostic significance of CTO in the non-IRA in patients with AMI has been under dispute. Relevant long-term follow-up studies are lacking. Hypothesis. CTO in the non-IRA is an independent predictor of poor long-term prognosis in patients with AMI. Methods. We prospectively enrolled 2336 patients with AMI who received emergent percutaneous coronary intervention successfully from January 2006 to May 2011. Our primary endpoints included death from cardiovascular causes, recurrent myocardial infarction, stroke, and target-vessel revascularization. We adopted Cox regression analysis adjusted for confounders to analyze the impact of CTO in the non-IRA on long-term mortalities. Results. We identified 628 (27.6%) subjects with CTO in the non-IRA among 2282 AMI patients. After a mean follow-up duration of 134.3 months, we found the CTO group had significantly higher MACCE rate than the group without CTO (30.4% versus 24.3%, P=0.004). CTO in the non-IRA independently predicted 11-year MACCE in the male AMI subgroup (hazard ratio 1.28, 95% confidence interval 1.06 to 1.54, P=0.01) and in the male NSTEMI subgroup (hazard ratio 1.53, 95% confidence interval 1.09 to 2.15, P=0.02). In the CTO group, three-vessel disease independently predicted 11 year MACCE (hazard ratio 2.05, 95% confidence interval 1.29 to 3.28, P=0.002). Conclusions. Our long-term observational study supported the association between CTO in the non-IRA and poorer prognosis in AMI patients undergoing primary PCI. We identified the group with the three-vessel disease as a high-risk subgroup in patients with CTO in the non-IRA

Terminalia Chebulanin Attenuates Psoriatic Skin Lesion via Regulation of Heme Oxygenase-1

Background/Aims: Psoriasis is one of the most common inflammatory skin disorders, affecting 3% of the general population. Terminalia chebulanin (TC) is a polyphenolic compound that possesses antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activities. The current study was designed to investigate the effect of TC on psoriatic lesions. Methods: We examined the protective effect of TC against psoriatic lesions in mice and keratinocyte proliferation in HaCaT cells. Results: We found that TC exhibited potent anti-psoriatic activities, as evidenced by improvement of erythema and scaling scores, decrease of epidermal, ear and skinfold thickening, decrease of tumor necrosis factor α (TNFα), interleukin (IL)-17A, IL-23 and matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)-9 expression, and decrease of TBARS content and increase of GSH content in IMQ-treated mice, and decrease of keratinocyte proliferation, TNFα, IL-17A and IL-23 expression, and ROS level in M5-treated cells. All those effects induced by TC were inhibited by zinc protoporphyrin IX (ZnPP), an inhibitor of heme oxygenase (HO)-1, indicating that HO-1 was responsible the anti-psoriatic effect of TC. Moreover, TC inhibited the upregulation of p65 NF-κB under in vitro psoriatic condition. ZnPP suppressed TC-induced inhibition of p65 NF-κB expression. Overexpression of p65 NF-κB significantly suppressed TC-induced decrease of TNFα, IL-17A and IL-23 expression and keratinocyte proliferation, indicating that HO-1-mediated downregulation of NF-κB was involved in the anti-psoriatic effect of TC. Conclusions: The data demonstrate that TC may serve as a potential therapeutic option for psoriatic patients

In situ IgM production and clonal expansion of B-1 cells in peritoneal cavity promote elimination of C. albicans infection in IgH transgenic mice with VH derived from a natural antibody.

B-1 cells are innate-like cells that play important roles in host defense against infection. However, the function of B-1 cells in fungi infection remains unclear. Previously we produced IgH transgenic mice TgVH3B4 with VH derived from a natural antibody 3B4 that can identify C. albicans, and found that TgVH3B4 mice were resistant to intraperitoneal (i. p.) and intravenous C. albicans infection. Most of the peritoneal cavity (PEC) B-1 cells in TgVH3B4 mice express transgenic BCR that binds C. albicans. In the present study, we explored the response of B-1 cells to C. albicans infection by applying i. p. inoculation of fungi in TgVH3B4 mice. We found that C. albicans was cleared more efficiently in TgVH3B4 mice after i. p. inoculation than that of littermate control. The level of C. albicans-reactive IgM in PEC of TgVH3B4 mice was much higher than that of control, and the number of B-1a B cells was also elevated in TgVH3B4 mice, which was mainly due to enhanced proliferation of B-1 cells. Additionally, numbers of C. albicans-specific B cells increased greatly in TgVH3B4 mice after C. albicans inoculation. Our data suggested that in situ IgM production and clonal expansion of B-1 cells in PEC participate in host defense against C. albicans infection

LDTM: A Latent Document Type Model for Cumulative Citation Recommendation

This paper studies Cumulative Citation Recommendation (CCR)- given an entity in Knowledge Bases, how to effectively detect its potential citations from volume text streams. Most previous approaches treated all kinds of features indifferently to build a global relevance model, in which the prior knowledge embedded in docu-ments cannot be exploited adequately. To address this problem, we propose a la-tent document type discriminative model by introducing a latent layer to capture the correlations between documents and their underlying types. The model can better adjust to different types of documents and yield flexible performance when dealing with a broad range of document types. An extensive set of experiments has been con-ducted on TREC-KBA-2013 dataset, and the results demonstrate that this model can yield a significant performance gain in rec-ommendation quality as compared to the state-of-the-art.