Specific Involvement of G Proteins in Regulation of Serum Response Factor-mediated Gene Transcription by Different Receptors

Regulation of serum response factor (SRF)-mediated gene transcription by G protein subunits and G protein-coupled receptors was investigated in transfected NIH3T3 cells and in a cell line that was derived from mice lacking G_(αq) and G_(α11). We found that the constitutively active forms of the α subunits of the G_q and G_(12) class of G proteins, including Gα_q, Gα_(11), Gα_(14), Gα_(16), Gα_(12), and Gα_(13), can activate SRF in NIH3T3 cells. We also found that the type 1 muscarinic receptor (m1R) and α_1-adrenergic receptor (AR)-mediated SRF activation is exclusively dependent on Gα_(q/11), while the receptors for thrombin, lysophosphatidic acid (LPA), thromboxane A2, and endothelin can activate SRF in the absence of Gα_(q/11). Moreover, RGS12 but not RGS2, RGS4, or Axin was able to inhibit Gα_(12) and Gα_(13)-mediated SRF activation. And RGS12, but not other RGS proteins, blocked thrombin- and LPA-mediated SRF activation in the Gα_(q/11)-deficient cells. Therefore, the thrombin, LPA, thromboxane A2, and endothelin receptors may be able to couple to Gα_(12/13). On the contrary, receptors including β_2- and α_2-ARs, m2R, the dopamine receptors type 1 and 2, angiotensin receptors types 1 and 2, and interleukin-8 receptor could not activate SRF in the presence or absence of Gα_(q/11), suggesting that these receptors cannot couple to endogenous G proteins of the G_(12) or G_q classes

Razumikhin-type theorems on exponential stability of SDDEs containing singularly perturbed random processes

This paper concerns Razumikhin-type theorems on exponential stability of stochastic differential delay equations with Markovian switching, where the modulating Markov chain involves small parameters. The smaller the parameter is, the rapider switching the system will experience. In order to reduce the complexity, we will “replace” the original systems by limit systems with a simple structure. Under Razumikhin-type conditions, we establish theorems that if the limit systems are pth-moment exponentially stable; then, the original systems are pth-moment exponentially stable in an appropriate sense

Razumikhin-type theorems on exponential stability of SDDEs containing singularly perturbed random processes

This paper concerns Razumikhin-type theorems on exponential stability of stochastic differential delay equations with Markovian switching, where the modulating Markov chain involves small parameters. The smaller the parameter is, the rapider switching the system will experience. In order to reduce the complexity, we will “replace” the original systems by limit systems with a simple structure. Under Razumikhin-type conditions, we establish theorems that if the limit systems are pth-moment exponentially stable; then, the original systems are pth-moment exponentially stable in an appropriate sense

Razumikhin-type theorems on exponential stability of SDDEs containing singularly perturbed random processes

This paper concerns Razumikhin-type theorems on exponential stability of stochastic differential delay equations with Markovian switching, where the modulating Markov chain involves small parameters. The smaller the parameter is, the rapider switching the system will experience. In order to reduce the complexity, we will “replace” the original systems by limit systems with a simple structure. Under Razumikhin-type conditions, we establish theorems that if the limit systems are pth-moment exponentially stable; then, the original systems are pth-moment exponentially stable in an appropriate sense

Advances in stabilisation of hybrid stochastic differential equations by delay feedback control

A novel approach to design the feedback control based on past states is proposed for hybrid stochastic differential equations (HSDEs). This new theorem builds up the connection between the delay feedback control and the control function without delay terms, which enables one to construct the delay feedback control using the existing results on stabilities of HSDEs. Methods to find the upper bound of the length of the time delay are also investigated. Numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the new theorem

An ES Cell System for Rapid, Spatial and Temporal Analysis of Gene Function in vitro and in vivo

We describe a versatile genetic system for rapid analysis of mammalian gene function. In this, loss of reporter activity in a novel embryonic stem (ES) cell line enables rapid identification of targeting to the ubiquitously expressed Rosa26 locus. Subsequent regulation of gene activity is governed by a dual regulatory strategy utilizing two drugs, Tamoxifen and Doxycycline. To illustrate this approach, a dominant allele of Smoothened was introduced into this cell line, enabling regulated activation of Hedgehog signaling. By coupling Cre-loxP dependent activation with tetracycline dependent transcription in a single allele, we established a conditional method to control Smoothened activity and neural progenitor specification in differentiating ES cells in vitro and in chimeric embryos in vivo When crossed to an appropriate Cre driver strain, gene activity can also be temporally regulated within a specific cell lineage. This platform will facilitate rapid analysis of gene function in the mouse.Molecular and Cellular BiologyStem Cell and Regenerative Biolog

Stabilisation by delay feedback control for highly nonlinear hybrid stochastic differential equations

Given an unstable hybrid stochastic differential equation (SDE, also known as an SDE with Markovian switching), can we design a delay feed- back control to make the controlled hybrid SDE become asymptotically stable? The paper [14] by Mao et al. was the first to study the stabilisation by de- lay feedback controls for hybrid SDEs, though the stabilization by non-delay feedback controls had been well studied. A critical condition imposed in [14] is that both drift and diffusion coefficients of the given hybrid SDE need to satisfy the linear growth condition. However, many hybrid SDE models in the real world do not fulfill this condition (namely, they are highly nonlinear) and hence there is a need to develop a new theory for these highly nonlinear SDE models. The aim of this paper is to design delay feedback controls in order to stabilise a class of highly nonlinear hybrid SDEs whose coefficients satisfy the polynomial growth condition

PromptEM: Prompt-tuning for Low-resource Generalized Entity Matching

Entity Matching (EM), which aims to identify whether two entity records from two relational tables refer to the same real-world entity, is one of the fundamental problems in data management. Traditional EM assumes that two tables are homogeneous with the aligned schema, while it is common that entity records of different formats (e.g., relational, semi-structured, or textual types) involve in practical scenarios. It is not practical to unify their schemas due to the different formats. To support EM on format-different entity records, Generalized Entity Matching (GEM) has been proposed and gained much attention recently. To do GEM, existing methods typically perform in a supervised learning way, which relies on a large amount of high-quality labeled examples. However, the labeling process is extremely labor-intensive, and frustrates the use of GEM. Low-resource GEM, i.e., GEM that only requires a small number of labeled examples, becomes an urgent need. To this end, this paper, for the first time, focuses on the low-resource GEM and proposes a novel low-resource GEM method, termed as PromptEM. PromptEM has addressed three challenging issues (i.e., designing GEM-specific prompt-tuning, improving pseudo-labels quality, and running efficient self-training) in low-resource GEM. Extensive experimental results on eight real benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of PromptEM in terms of effectiveness and efficiency

Technologies to support the psychological health and well-being of social workers in China

The key risk factors that have a direct impact on the psychological health and well-being of people employed in the field of social services are investigate