34,521 research outputs found
Estrogen Protects the Female Heart from Ischemia/Reperfusion Injury through Manganese Superoxide Dismutase Phosphorylation by Mitochondrial p38β at Threonine 79 and Serine 106.
A collective body of evidence indicates that estrogen protects the heart from myocardial ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury, but the underlying mechanism remains incompletely understood. We have previously delineated a novel mechanism of how 17β-estradiol (E2) protects cultured neonatal rat cardiomyocytes from hypoxia/reoxygenation (H/R) by identifying a functionally active mitochondrial pool of p38β and E2-driven upregulation of manganese superoxide dismutase (MnSOD) activity via p38β, leading to the suppression of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and apoptosis. Here we investigate these cytoprotective actions of E2 in vivo. Left coronary artery ligation and reperfusion was used to produce I/R injury in ovariectomized (OVX) female mice and in estrogen receptor (ER) null female mice. E2 treatment in OVX mice reduced the left ventricular infarct size accompanied by increased activity of mitochondrial p38β and MnSOD. I/R-induced infarct size in ERα knockout (ERKO), ERβ knockout (BERKO) and ERα and β double knockout (DERKO) female mice was larger than that in wild type (WT) mice, with little difference among ERKO, BERKO, and DERKO. Loss of both ERα and ERβ led to reduced activity of mitochondrial p38β and MnSOD at baseline and after I/R. The physical interaction between mitochondrial p38β and MnSOD in the heart was detected by co-immunoprecipitation (co-IP). Threonine 79 (T79) and serine 106 (S106) of MnSOD were identified to be phosphorylated by p38β in kinase assays. Overexpression of WT MnSOD in cardiomyocytes reduced ROS generation during H/R, while point mutation of T79 and S106 of MnSOD to alanine abolished its antioxidative function. We conclude that the protective effects of E2 and ER against cardiac I/R injury involve the regulation of MnSOD via posttranslational modification of the dismutase by p38β
Network hierarchy evolution and system vulnerability in power grids
(c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.The seldom addressed network hierarchy property and its relationship with vulnerability analysis for power transmission grids from a complex-systems point of view are given in this paper. We analyze and compare the evolution of network hierarchy for the dynamic vulnerability evaluation of four different power transmission grids of real cases. Several meaningful results suggest that the vulnerability of power grids can be assessed by means of a network hierarchy evolution analysis. First, the network hierarchy evolution may be used as a novel measurement to quantify the robustness of power grids. Second, an antipyramidal structure appears in the most robust network when quantifying cascading failures by the proposed hierarchy metric. Furthermore, the analysis results are also validated and proved by empirical reliability data. We show that our proposed hierarchy evolution analysis methodology could be used to assess the vulnerability of power grids or even other networks from a complex-systems point of view.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
WordSup: Exploiting Word Annotations for Character based Text Detection
Imagery texts are usually organized as a hierarchy of several visual
elements, i.e. characters, words, text lines and text blocks. Among these
elements, character is the most basic one for various languages such as
Western, Chinese, Japanese, mathematical expression and etc. It is natural and
convenient to construct a common text detection engine based on character
detectors. However, training character detectors requires a vast of location
annotated characters, which are expensive to obtain. Actually, the existing
real text datasets are mostly annotated in word or line level. To remedy this
dilemma, we propose a weakly supervised framework that can utilize word
annotations, either in tight quadrangles or the more loose bounding boxes, for
character detector training. When applied in scene text detection, we are thus
able to train a robust character detector by exploiting word annotations in the
rich large-scale real scene text datasets, e.g. ICDAR15 and COCO-text. The
character detector acts as a key role in the pipeline of our text detection
engine. It achieves the state-of-the-art performance on several challenging
scene text detection benchmarks. We also demonstrate the flexibility of our
pipeline by various scenarios, including deformed text detection and math
expression recognition.Comment: 2017 International Conference on Computer Visio
Superfluid density in the slave-boson theory
Despite of the success of the slave-boson theory in capturing qualitative
physics of high-temperature superconductors like cuprates, it fails to
reproduce the correct temperature-dependent behavior of superfluid density, let
alone the independence of the linear temperature term on doping in the
underdoped regimes of hole-doped cuprate, a common experimental observation in
different cuprates. It remains puzzling up to now in spite of intensive
theoretical efforts. For electron-doped case, even qualitative treatment is not
reported at present time. Here we revisit these problems and provide an
alternative superfluid density formulation by using the London relation instead
of employing the paramagnetic current-current correlation function. The
obtained formula, on the one hand, provides the correct temperature-dependent
behavior of the superfluid density in the whole temperature regime, on the
other hand, makes the doping dependence of the linear temperature term
substantially weaken and a possible interpretation for its independence on
doping is proposed. As an application, electron-doped cuprate is studied, whose
result qualitatively agrees with existing experiments and successfully explains
the origin of - to anisotropic -wave transition across the optimal
doping. Our result remedies some failures of the slave-boson theory as employed
to calculate superfluid density in cuprates and may be useful in the
understanding of the related physics in other strongly correlated systems, e.g.
NaCoOyHO and certain iron-based superconductors with
dominating local magnetic exchange interaction.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure
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