Brown adipocytes can display a mammary basal myoepithelial cell phenotype in vivo

This work was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB13030000) and the CAS-Novonordisk Foundation, as well as grants from the ‘1000 talents’ recruitment program, and a ‘Great-wall professorship’ from the CAS-Novonordisk Foundation all to JRS. We are grateful to all the members of Molecular Energetics Group for their support and discussion of the results. We would like to thank the Center for Biological Imaging from Institute of Biophysics Chinese Academy of Sciences and Professor Zhaohui Wang's Lab from Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology Chinese Academy of Sciences for confocal microscopy and the Center for Developmental Biology from Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology Chinese Academy of Sciences and Dr. Jai from Core Facility for Protein Research from Institute of Biophysics Chinese Academy of Sciences for flow cytometry. We are grateful to Dr. Kuang from Purdue University and Dr. Zhu from Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences Peking Union Medical College for the kind donation of Myf5-Cre mice and Dr. Wolfrum from the Institute of Food Nutrition and Health at the ETH Zurich for the kind donation of the Ucp1-DTR mice. Xun Huang provided valuable comments on previous versions of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

An empirical analysis of pork price fluctuations in China with the autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model

ABSTRACT: Pork price fluctuations are closely related to the national economy and people’s livelihoods in China. Based on the monthly pork price fluctuations in China from January 2011 to August 2022, this study uses ARCH family models to assess the characteristics and laws of these fluctuations in China. The pork price fluctuations show obvious clustering, with external shock information from the previous month affecting the pork price in the following period; the pork market price is characterized by risk compensation, with the high risk of pork supply driving the pork price up. In addition, the pork price fluctuations are characterized by asymmetry, with a greater impact of good than of bad news on the pork price. Due to the pork industry’ low entry threshold and the existence of sunk costs, positive information on the pork market has a stronger impact on price fluctuations than negative information. To guide pork supply, we recommend improving monitoring and early-warning mechanisms in the pork market to identify the pork price volatility threshold and measure the price volatility. In addition, price index insurance products should be constantly strengthened, with different types of insurance products being offered to meeting the insurance demand of various sectors in the pig meat supply chain

Stock Trading Optimization through Model-based Reinforcement Learning with Normalizing Fl

With the fast development of quantitative portfolio optimization in financial engineering, lots of promising algorithmic trading strategies have shown competitive advantages in recent years. However, the environment from real financial markets is complex and hard to be fully simulated, considering non-stationarity of the stock data, unpredictable hidden causal factors and so on. Fortunately, difference of stock prices is often stationary series, and the internal relationship between difference of stocks can be linked to the decision-making process, then the portfolio should be able to achieve better performance. In this paper, we demonstrate normalizing flows is adopted to simulated high-dimensional joint probability of the complex trading environment, and develop a novel model based reinforcement learning framework to better understand the intrinsic mechanisms of quantitative online trading. Second, we experiment various stocks from three different financial markets (Dow, NASDAQ and S&P 500) and show that among these three financial markets, Dow gets the best performance results on various evaluation metrics under our back-testing system. Especially, our proposed method even resists big drop (less maximum drawdown) during COVID-19 pandemic period when the financial market got unpredictable crisis. All these results are comparatively better than modeling the state transition dynamics with independent Gaussian Processes. Third, we utilize a causal analysis method to study the causal relationship among different stocks of the environment. Further, by visualizing high dimensional state transition data comparisons from real and virtual buffer with t-SNE, we uncover some effective patterns of betComment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2205.1505

Gene-induced Multimodal Pre-training for Image-omic Classification

Histology analysis of the tumor micro-environment integrated with genomic assays is the gold standard for most cancers in modern medicine. This paper proposes a Gene-induced Multimodal Pre-training (GiMP) framework, which jointly incorporates genomics and Whole Slide Images (WSIs) for classification tasks. Our work aims at dealing with the main challenges of multi-modality image-omic classification w.r.t. (1) the patient-level feature extraction difficulties from gigapixel WSIs and tens of thousands of genes, and (2) effective fusion considering high-order relevance modeling. Concretely, we first propose a group multi-head self-attention gene encoder to capture global structured features in gene expression cohorts. We design a masked patch modeling paradigm (MPM) to capture the latent pathological characteristics of different tissues. The mask strategy is randomly masking a fixed-length contiguous subsequence of patch embeddings of a WSI. Finally, we combine the classification tokens of paired modalities and propose a triplet learning module to learn high-order relevance and discriminative patient-level information.After pre-training, a simple fine-tuning can be adopted to obtain the classification results. Experimental results on the TCGA dataset show the superiority of our network architectures and our pre-training framework, achieving 99.47% in accuracy for image-omic classification. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/huangwudiduan/GIMP

Identification of Apo-A1 as a biomarker for early diagnosis of bladder transitional cell carcinoma

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Bladder transitional cell carcinoma (BTCC) is the fourth most frequent neoplasia in men, clinically characterized by high recurrent rates and poor prognosis. Availability of urinary tumor biomarkers represents a convenient alternative for early detection and disease surveillance because of its direct contact with the tumor and sample accessibility.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We tested urine samples from healthy volunteers and patients with low malignant or aggressive BTCC to identify potential biomarkers for early detection of BTCC by two-dimensional electrophoresis (2-DE) coupled with mass spectrometry (MS) and bioinformatics analysis. We observed increased expression of five proteins, including fibrinogen (Fb), lactate dehydrogenase B (LDHB), apolipoprotein-A1 (Apo-A1), clusterin (CLU) and haptoglobin (Hp), which were increased in urine samples of patients with low malignant or aggressive bladder cancer. Further analysis of urine samples of aggressive BTCC showed significant increase in Apo-A1 expression compared to low malignant BTCC. Apo-A1 level was measured quantitatively using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and was suggested to provide diagnostic utility to distinguish patients with bladder cancer from controls at 18.22 ng/ml, and distinguish patients with low malignant BTCC from patients with aggressive BTCC in two-tie grading system at 29.86 ng/ml respectively. Further validation assay showed that Apo-A1 could be used as a biomarker to diagnosis BTCC with a sensitivity and specificity of 91.6% and 85.7% respectively, and classify BTCC in two-tie grading system with a sensitivity and specificity of 83.7% and 89.7% respectively.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Taken together, our findings suggest Apo-A1 could be a potential biomarker related with early diagnosis and classification in two-tie grading system for bladder cancer.</p

Alternative splicing regulation and its therapeutic potential in bladder cancer

Bladder cancer is one of the leading causes of mortality globally. The development of bladder cancer is closely associated with alternative splicing, which regulates human gene expression and enhances the diversity of functional proteins. Alternative splicing is a distinctive feature of bladder cancer, and as such, it may hold promise as a therapeutic target. This review aims to comprehensively discuss the current knowledge of alternative splicing in the context of bladder cancer. We review the process of alternative splicing and its regulation in bladder cancer. Moreover, we emphasize the significance of abnormal alternative splicing and splicing factor irregularities during bladder cancer progression. Finally, we explore the impact of alternative splicing on bladder cancer drug resistance and the potential of alternative splicing as a therapeutic target

DETC2008-49077 A GENERAL FORMULA OF DEGREE OF FREEDOM FOR PARALLEL MECHANISMS

ABSTRACT In this paper, a general formula of degree of freedom (DOF) for parallel mechanisms has been presented which could provide the full-cycle DOF. The key parameters in the formula can be determined via the position and orientation characteristic equations and their symbolic operations of serial and parallel mechanisms proposed by author and the symbolic operation is simple. It is totally different from the methods based on screw theory and based on displacement subgroup. The formula has been used for selection of driving pairs and determination of idle pairs. The formula may also be used for determining the DOF of other multi-loop mechanisms besides parallel mechanisms

Rural Physicians' Duties and Responsibilities in COVID-19 Pandemic Containment：an Empirical Study from the Perspective of Governance in Primary Care

BackgroundCOVID-19 pandemic containment in rural areas is the frontline for containing COVID-19 and a key part of response system for public health emergencies in China, during which rural physicians play an important role as the &quot;gatekeeper&quot; of rural residents&apos; health and rural pandemic prevention and control. However, rural physicians have demonstrated some work-related problems during the COVID-19 pandemic containment, which have affected the implementation effectiveness of their duties and responsibilities.ObjectiveTo investigate the duties and responsibilities of rural physicians during COVID-19 pandemic containment in rural areas, and to identify the problems, then put forward relevant suggestions.MethodsAn on-site semi-structured interview using non-participant observation approach was carried out in Beijing&apos;s Huairou District from April to July, 2021. Eighteen rural physicians were selected to attend the interview as stakeholders. The interview was guided by an outline developed based on a literature review and an expert consultation, including three parts: (1) demographic characteristics (practice location, sex, age) , (2) practicing qualifications (education level, starting time of practicing, professional qualifications) , (3) involvement in COVID-19 pandemic prevention and control (awareness of the 10 instructions for COVID-19 pandemic containment in village clinics, participation in COVID-19 pandemic containment, and personal protective equipment materials for COVID-19) . The interview was continued until data saturation.ResultsAmong the 18 rural physicians, 14 (77.8%) were certified as rural physicians, 3 (16.7%) were certified as rural assistant general practitioners, 2 (11.1%) had a certificate of licensed physician and 1 (5.6%) had a certificate of licensed assistant physician. Except for one (5.6%) , the rural physicians〔17 (94.4%) 〕 indicated that they knew the 10 instructions for COVID-19 pandemic containment in the village clinic. The top three services about COVID-19 pandemic containment most frequently provided by the rural physicians were health education (94.4%) , information reporting (72.2%) and diagnosis and treatment (64.7%) , and the least provided was throat swab sampling〔only one case (5.6%) 〕. In addition, three rural physicians participated in providing other services, which included screening suspected COVID-19 cases in the village, guiding COVID-19 pandemic containment in the village, and purchasing food for villagers. Ten physicians (55.6%) indicated that personal protective equipment materials for COVID-19 were adequate, but other 8 (44.4%) expressed that such materials were inadequate during the first response phase. During the regular COVID-19 pandemic containment phase, 16 physicians (88.9%) indicated that personal protective equipment materials for COVID-19 were adequate, but other 2 (11.1%) still indicated that such materials were inadequate. The top four personal protective equipment materials for COVID-19 owned by the physicians in regular COVID-19 pandemic containment phase were 84 Disinfectant (72.2%) , ordinary disposable medical masks (66.7%) , disposable gloves (66.7%) and medical surgical masks (61.1%) , and the least owned were medical protective clothing (38.9%) and goggles (11.1%) .ConclusionRural physicians play a necessary role in COVID-19 pandemic containment in rural areas, but the effectiveness of their services has been affected by limited personal capabilities in delivering COVID-19 pandemic containment services (including pharyngeal swab sampling) , lack of a legal right to provide home-based isolation and monitoring services, and inadequate personal protective equipment materials. Therefore, it is recommended that relevant laws and regulations should be improved to provide a legal right for rural physicians to perform their duties and responsibilities in COVID-19 pandemic containment, recruit them to the public health team of the village committee, and ensure the provision of emergency materials for village physicians to help them to realize their potential in pandemic containment