CIS/SOCS Proteins in Growth Hormone Action: A Dissertation

CIS/SOCS (cytokine-inducible SH2 protein/suppressor of cytokine signaling) are a family of proteins that are thought to act as negative regulators of signaling by erythropoetin, interleukin-6 and other cytokines whose receptors are related to the growth hormone receptor (GHR), and like growth hormone (GH), signal through the JAK/STAT pathway. We examined the possibility that CIS/SOCS proteins may also be involved in GH signaling, in particular, in termination of the transient insulin-like effects of GH. mRNAs for CIS, SOCS3, and to a lesser extent SOCS1 were detectable by Northern blot analysis of rat adipocyte total RNA, and the expression of CIS and SOCS3 was markedly increased 30 min after incubation with 500 ng/ml hGH. Both CIS and SOCS3 were detected in adipocyte extracts by immunoprecipitation and immunoblotting with their corresponding antisera. GH stimulated the tyrosine phosphorylation of a 120 kDa protein (p120) that was co-precipitated from adipocyte extracts along with αCIS and detected in Western blots with phospho-tyrosine antibodies. However, no tyrosine phosphorylated proteins in these cell extracts were immunoprecipitated with antibodies to CIS3/SOCS3. p120 was later identified as the GHR based on the observations that two GHR antibodies recognized p120 in scale-up experiments and that p120 and the GHR share several characteristics, including their molecular weights, tyrosine phosphorylation upon GH stimulation, interaction with CIS, similar extent of glycosylation as judged by electrophoretic mobility shift after Endo F digestion, comparable mobility shifts upon thrombin digestion, and N-terminal histidine-tagging. The findings, however, do not rule out the possibility that there might be other tyrosine phosphorylated 120 kDa protein(s) that interact with CIS and contribute to the p120 signal, as well as the GHR. Further studies of the association of CIS with the GHR revealed that CIS might selectively interact with multiply tyrosine phosphorylated forms of the GHR, and these tyrosines are likely located near the carboxyl end of the GHR. Overexpression of CIS partially inhibited GH-induced STAT5 phosphorylation in CHO cells. Studies in freshly isolated and GH-deprived (sensitive) adipocytes revealed that the abundance of CIS does not correlate with the termination of the insulin-like effects of GH or the emergence of refractoriness. Neither the association of CIS with the GHR nor the tyrosine phosphorylation status of the GHR, JAK2 and STAT5 appear responsible for refractoriness in adipocytes. These data imply that some negative regulators other than CIS might contribute to the termination of GH-induced insulin-like effects in adipocytes

Personalized Video Recommendation Using Rich Contents from Videos

Video recommendation has become an essential way of helping people explore the massive videos and discover the ones that may be of interest to them. In the existing video recommender systems, the models make the recommendations based on the user-video interactions and single specific content features. When the specific content features are unavailable, the performance of the existing models will seriously deteriorate. Inspired by the fact that rich contents (e.g., text, audio, motion, and so on) exist in videos, in this paper, we explore how to use these rich contents to overcome the limitations caused by the unavailability of the specific ones. Specifically, we propose a novel general framework that incorporates arbitrary single content feature with user-video interactions, named as collaborative embedding regression (CER) model, to make effective video recommendation in both in-matrix and out-of-matrix scenarios. Our extensive experiments on two real-world large-scale datasets show that CER beats the existing recommender models with any single content feature and is more time efficient. In addition, we propose a priority-based late fusion (PRI) method to gain the benefit brought by the integrating the multiple content features. The corresponding experiment shows that PRI brings real performance improvement to the baseline and outperforms the existing fusion methods

Association between dental pulp stones and calcifying nanoparticles

The etiology of dental pulp stones, one type of extraskeletal calcification disease, remains elusive to date. Calcifying nanoparticles (CNPs), formerly referred to as nanobacteria, were reported to be one etiological factor in a number of extraskeletal calcification diseases. We hypothesized that CNPs are involved in the calcification of the dental pulp tissue, and therefore investigated the link between CNPs and dental pulp stones. Sixty-five freshly collected dental pulp stones, each from a different patient, were analyzed. Thirteen of the pulp stones were examined for the existence of CNPs in situ by immunohistochemical staining (IHS), indirect immunofluorescence staining (IIFS), and transmission electron microscope (TEM). The remaining 52 pulp stones were used for isolation and cultivation of CNPs; the cultured CNPs were identified and confirmed via their shape and growth characteristics. Among the dental pulp stones examined in situ, 84.6% of the tissue samples staines positive for CNPs antigen by IHS; the corresponding rate by IIFS was 92.3 %. In 88.2% of the cultured samples, CNPs were isolated and cultivated successfully. The CNPs were visible under TEM as 200–400 nm diameter spherical particles surrounded by a compact crust. CNPs could be detected and isolated from a high percentage of dental pulp stones, suggesting that CNPs might play an important role in the calcification of dental pulp

BRST-antifield-treatment of metric-affine gravity

The metric-affine gauge theory of gravity provides a broad framework in which gauge theories of gravity can be formulated. In this article we fit metric-affine gravity into the covariant BRST--antifield formalism in order to obtain gauge fixed quantum actions. As an example the gauge fixing of a general two-dimensional model of metric-affine gravity is worked out explicitly. The result is shown to contain the gauge fixed action of the bosonic string in conformal gauge as a special case.Comment: 19 pages LATEX, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Two NHX-type transporters from Helianthus tuberosus improve the tolerance of rice to salinity and nutrient deficiency stress.

The NHX-type cation/H+ transporters in plants have been shown to mediate Na+ (K+ )/H+ exchange for salinity tolerance and K+ homoeostasis. In this study, we identified and characterized two NHX homologues, HtNHX1 and HtNHX2 from an infertile and salinity tolerant species Helianthus tuberosus (cv. Nanyu No. 1). HtNHX1 and HtNHX2 share identical 5'- and 3'-UTR and coding regions, except for a 342-bp segment encoding 114 amino acids (L272 to Q385 ) which is absent in HtNHX2. Both hydroponics and soil culture experiments showed that the expression of HtNHX1 or HtNHX2 improved the rice tolerance to salinity. Expression of HtNHX2, but not HtNHX1, increased rice grain yield, harvest index, total nutrient uptake under K+ -limited salt-stress or general nutrient deficiency conditions. The results provide a novel insight into NHX function in plant mineral nutrition

Rheological and Fatigue Characteristics of Asphalt Mastics and Mixtures Containing Municipal Solid Waste Incineration (MSWI) Residues

The large-scale implementation of municipal solid waste incineration (MSWI) has put great pressure on waste management and environmental protection. Road construction engineering has also been confronted with the challenges of the heavy consumption of non-renewable mineral resources. Therefore, we evaluated the feasibility of recycling and reusing MSWI residue as an alternative to limestone filler (LF) in transport infrastructure. We investigated the rheological characteristics and fatigue performance of asphalt mastics and mixtures containing MSWI residue. Firstly, a particle size analyzer and environmental scanning electron microscope were adopted to characterize the particle distribution and surface micromorphology of the investigated fillers, respectively. Then, tests for determining the steady shear viscosity and multiple-stress creep recovery were conducted to evaluate the high-temperature rheology of five asphalt mastics. Meanwhile, we used Burgers models with fitting parameters to describe the classic creep recovery measurements and viscoelastic responses. The wheel-tracking test revealed the rutting resistance, and the linear amplitude sweep (LAS) and time sweep tests were combined to investigate the fatigue performances of the five asphalt mastics. A dynamic creep test identified the fatigue life of the asphalt mixtures according to the flow number index. Finally, statistical analysis was conducted to identify the correlations between the rheological and fatigue properties of the mastics and mixtures (R-2 over 0.87 and 0.78, respectively). Since the fatigue life predictions for the asphalt mastic decreased by over 42.9% according to the MSWI residue/LF volume ratio, the results of the correlations could improve pavement designs. The substitution of the mineral filler in asphalt mixtures with MSWI residue could be a sustainable strategy for the road construction sector