214 research outputs found
The Neuropharmacology of (-)-Stepholidine and its Potential Applications
(-)-Stepholidine (SPD), a natural product isolated from the Chinese herb Stephania, possesses dopamine (DA) D1 partial agonistic and D2 antagonistic properties in the nigrostriatal and mesocorticolimbic DAergic pathways. These unique dual effects have suggested that SPD can effectively restore previously imbalanced functional linkage between D1 and D2 receptors under schizophrenic conditions, in which, SPD improves both the negative and positive symptoms of schizophrenia. SPD also relieves the motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (PD) when co-administered with Levodopa. Furthermore, SPD exhibits neuroprotective effects through an antioxidative mechanism and slows down the progression of neuronal degeneration in the substantia nigra (SN) of PD patients and/or animal models. Therefore, SPD is a novel, natural compound with potentially therapeutic roles in the treatment of schizophrenia and/or PD
Learning Image-Adaptive Codebooks for Class-Agnostic Image Restoration
Recent work on discrete generative priors, in the form of codebooks, has
shown exciting performance for image reconstruction and restoration, as the
discrete prior space spanned by the codebooks increases the robustness against
diverse image degradations. Nevertheless, these methods require separate
training of codebooks for different image categories, which limits their use to
specific image categories only (e.g. face, architecture, etc.), and fail to
handle arbitrary natural images. In this paper, we propose AdaCode for learning
image-adaptive codebooks for class-agnostic image restoration. Instead of
learning a single codebook for each image category, we learn a set of basis
codebooks. For a given input image, AdaCode learns a weight map with which we
compute a weighted combination of these basis codebooks for adaptive image
restoration. Intuitively, AdaCode is a more flexible and expressive discrete
generative prior than previous work. Experimental results demonstrate that
AdaCode achieves state-of-the-art performance on image reconstruction and
restoration tasks, including image super-resolution and inpainting
Artificial Polypeptide Scaffold for Protein Immobilization
An artificial polypeptide scaffold composed of surface anchor and protein capture domains was designed and expressed in vivo. By using a mutant E. coli phenylalanyl−tRNA synthetase, the photoreactive amino acid para-azidophenylalanine was incorporated into the surface anchor domain. Octyltrichlorosilane-treated surfaces were functionalized with this polypeptide by spin coating and photocrosslinking. The resulting protein films were shown to immobilize recombinant proteins through association of coiled coil heterodimer
DeepDPM: Dynamic Population Mapping via Deep Neural Network
Dynamic high resolution data on human population distribution is of great
importance for a wide spectrum of activities and real-life applications, but is
too difficult and expensive to obtain directly. Therefore, generating
fine-scaled population distributions from coarse population data is of great
significance. However, there are three major challenges: 1) the complexity in
spatial relations between high and low resolution population; 2) the dependence
of population distributions on other external information; 3) the difficulty in
retrieving temporal distribution patterns. In this paper, we first propose the
idea to generate dynamic population distributions in full-time series, then we
design dynamic population mapping via deep neural network(DeepDPM), a model
that describes both spatial and temporal patterns using coarse data and point
of interest information. In DeepDPM, we utilize super-resolution convolutional
neural network(SRCNN) based model to directly map coarse data into higher
resolution data, and a time-embedded long short-term memory model to
effectively capture the periodicity nature to smooth the finer-scaled results
from the previous static SRCNN model. We perform extensive experiments on a
real-life mobile dataset collected from Shanghai. Our results demonstrate that
DeepDPM outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods and a suite of frequent
data-mining approaches. Moreover, DeepDPM breaks through the limitation from
previous works in time dimension so that dynamic predictions in all-day time
slots can be obtained.Comment: AAAI201
Engineering Cooperativity in Biomotor-Protein Assemblies
A biosynthetic approach was developed to control and probe cooperativity in multiunit biomotor assemblies by linking molecular motors to artificial protein scaffolds. This approach provides precise control over spatial and elastic coupling between motors. Cooperative interactions between monomeric kinesin-1 motors attached to protein scaffolds enhance hydrolysis activity and microtubule gliding velocity. However, these interactions are not influenced by changes in the elastic properties of the scaffold, distinguishing multimotor transport from that powered by unorganized monomeric motors. These results highlight the role of supramolecular architecture in determining mechanisms of collective transport
Ovarian Steroid Cell Tumors, Not Otherwise Specified: Analysis of Nine Cases With a Literature Review
BACKGROUND: Ovarian steroid cell tumors (SCTs), not otherwise specified (NOS), are rare, with few large studies. The purpose of this study was to analyze the clinical features, prognosis, and treatment choices for these patients of different age groups.
METHODS: This was a retrospective study. We identified nine cases of ovarian steroid cell tumor, not otherwise specified, confirmed by post-operative histopathological examination, and analyzed clinical features, surgical procedures, and follow up outcomes. We also reviewed cases reports of ovarian steroid cell tumors, not otherwise specified.
RESULTS: A total of nine cases were included. The age range was 9-68 years (mean, 41.89 ± 19.72 years). Clinical features included virilization, amenorrhea, abdominal pain, vaginal bleeding, isosexual precocious puberty, Cushing\u27s syndrome, and abnormal weight gain with elevated testosterone levels. The follow up interval ranged 5-53 months and no recurrence was observed.
CONCLUSION: Ovarian steroid cell tumors covered all age groups, with manifestations of androgen excess. Younger patients appeared to have a more favorable prognosis, which provided more opportunities for these patients to pursue treatment options that will preserve reproductive function
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