Valproic Acid-Induced Teratogenesis in Japanese Rice Fish (Oryzias Latipes) Embryogenesis

Valproic acid (VPA) was introduced as an antiepileptic in 1967 in France and it has become the most prescribed anticonvulsive drug therapy worldwide since then. In the clinic, valproic acid is selected to treat absence seizures, myoclonic seizures, generalized tonic-clonic seizures, atonic attacks and partial seizures. Epilepsy is the second most comneurologic disorder that affects pregnant women (0.5%–1%). Approximately 1 out of 250 pregnant women are taking antiepileptic drugs. Valproic acid is designated as a human teratogen, which induces major congenital anomalies, facial dysmorphic features, and autistic-like behaviors, which affect verbal, cognitive, communicative, and social abilities of affected children. We are developing the Japanese rice fish (Oryzias latipes), also known as Japanese medaka, as an animal model to study valproate-induced teratogenesis during the period of embryogenesis. Fertilized embryos of Japanese rice fish at three developmental stages (group A: 0–2 dpf; group B: 1–3 dpf; group C: 4–6 dpf) were exposed to VPA (0–80 mM) for 48 hrs. The amounts of VPA to cause 50% mortality (LC50), which were observed on 14 day post fertilization (dpf), are found to be developmental stage-specific. The LC50 for group A (Iwamatsu developmental stage 4–10) is 1.68 ± 1.55 mM which is much lower than the LC50s for groups B (26.45 ±1.64 mM) and C (20.37 ± 3.3 mM) (Iwamatsu developmental stages 17–32). The development of the cardiovascular system was disrupted by VPA in each treatment group, displaying increased incidence of thrombus, reduced heart rates, and inhibited or delayed onset of circulation. The hatching efficiency was also reduced by VPA in each treatment group. The higher the concentration of VPA the embryos were treated with, the more severe the results were. The earlier developmental stages the treatments were targeted at, the more deleterious the effects of VPA were. VPA also caused malformation of neurocranial and splanchnocranial cartilages of hatchlings that had been exposed prenatally. The length of neurocranium, quadrate, ceratohyal and basibranchial 1–3 were all reduced in hatchlings of both groups E (0–2 pdf) and L (4–6 dpf). Trabeculae, epiphyseal bar, anterior orbital cartilage and basilar plate displayed reduction in length only in hatchlings of group E. In addition, the significant reduction in the linear length of polar cartilage and ceratobranchials 1–5 were manifested only in hatchlings of group L. Other cartilages remained unaltered in both groups E and L. It was indicated that the length of the neurocranium was reduced due to cumulative reduction of the component cartilages. mRNA analyses of nine genes demonstrated that the genes involved with oxidative stress remained unaltered after valproate exposure. However, the genes involved with neurogenesis (wnt1, otx2 and nlgn3b) and regulation of cell division (shh and ccna2) shodevelopmental stage-specific alteration after valproate exposure. This study indicates that valproate is able to induce some phenotypic features in Japanese rice fish which are analogous to human fetal valproate syndrome (FVS), and Japanese rice fish can be used as a unique alternatively non-mammalian vertebrate model to study valproate-induced teratogenesis, including FVS

Phase Coupled Firing of Prefrontal Parvalbumin Interneuron With High Frequency Oscillations

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays a central role in executive functions and inhibitory control over many cognitive behaviors. Dynamic changes in local field potentials (LFPs), such as gamma oscillation, have been hypothesized to be important for attentive behaviors and modulated by local interneurons such as parvalbumin (PV) cells. However, the precise relationships between the firing patterns of PV interneurons and temporal dynamics of PFC activities remains elusive. In this study, by combining in vivo electrophysiological recordings with optogenetics, we investigated the activities of prefrontal PV interneurons and categorized them into three subtypes based on their distinct firing rates under different behavioral states. Interestingly, all the three subtypes of interneurons showed strong phase-locked firing to cortical high frequency oscillations (HFOs), but not to theta or gamma oscillations, despite of behavior states. Moreover, we showed that sustained optogenetic stimulation (over a period of 10 s) of PV interneurons can consequently modulate the activities of local pyramidal neurons. Interestingly, such optogenetic manipulations only showed moderate effects on LFPs in the PFC. We conclude that prefrontal PV interneurons are consist of several subclasses of cells with distinct state-dependent modulation of firing rates, selectively coupled to HFOs

Techno-invasion and job satisfaction in China: The roles of boundary preference for segmentation and marital status

BACKGROUND: While the intensive work-related use of information and communication technologies after working hours have led to increased techno-invasion, much less is known regarding whether and for whom techno-invasion influences job satisfaction. OBJECTIVE: Drawing on the conservation of resources theory and person-environment fit theory, this study examined the relationship between techno-invasion and decreased job satisfaction. Specific attention was paid to the moderating effect of boundary preference for segmentation and its joint influence with marital status on this relationship. METHODS: Questionnaire data were collected by an online survey of a nationwide and diverse sample of 472 employees from China. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, confirmatory factor analysis and hierarchical regression analysis. RESULTS: We found that techno-invasion negatively correlated with job satisfaction, which was strengthened by boundary preference for segmentation. Furthermore, the results of a three-way interaction effect suggested that the moderating role of boundary preference for segmentation on the relationship between techno-invasion and job satisfaction is stronger for unmarried employees than it is for married ones. CONCLUSIONS: The effect of techno-invasion on employees’ job satisfaction can be strengthened or weakened by their boundary preference for segmentation and marital status

Road Network Guided Fine-Grained Urban Traffic Flow Inference

Accurate inference of fine-grained traffic flow from coarse-grained one is an emerging yet crucial problem, which can help greatly reduce the number of traffic monitoring sensors for cost savings. In this work, we notice that traffic flow has a high correlation with road network, which was either completely ignored or simply treated as an external factor in previous works. To facilitate this problem, we propose a novel Road-Aware Traffic Flow Magnifier (RATFM) that explicitly exploits the prior knowledge of road networks to fully learn the road-aware spatial distribution of fine-grained traffic flow. Specifically, a multi-directional 1D convolutional layer is first introduced to extract the semantic feature of the road network. Subsequently, we incorporate the road network feature and coarse-grained flow feature to regularize the short-range spatial distribution modeling of road-relative traffic flow. Furthermore, we take the road network feature as a query to capture the long-range spatial distribution of traffic flow with a transformer architecture. Benefiting from the road-aware inference mechanism, our method can generate high-quality fine-grained traffic flow maps. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that the proposed RATFM outperforms state-of-the-art models under various scenarios

A high-performance surface acoustic wave sensing technique

We present a superheterodyne-scheme demodulation system which can detect the amplitude and phaseshift of weak radio-frequency signals with extraordinarily high stability and resolution. As a demonstration, we introduce a process to measure the velocity of the surface acoustic wave using a delay-line device from 30 K to room temperature, which can resolve \textless 0.1ppm velocity shift. Furthermore, we investigate the possibility of using this surface acoustic wave device as a calibration-free, high sensitivity and fast response thermometer.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure