6,826 research outputs found
Developmental programming: rescuing disruptions in preovulatory follicle growth and steroidogenesis from prenatal testosterone disruption
Abstract
Background
Prenatal testosterone (T) excess from days 30-90 of gestation disrupts gonadotropin surge and ovarian follicular dynamics and induces insulin resistance and functional hyperandrogenism in sheep. T treatment from days 60-90 of gestation produces a milder phenotype, albeit with reduced fecundity. Using this milder phenotype, the aim of this study was to understand the relative postnatal contributions of androgen and insulin in mediating the prenatal T induced disruptions in ovarian follicular dynamics.
Methods
Four experimental groups were generated: 1) control (vehicle treatment), 2) prenatal T-treated (100 mg i.m. administration of T propionate twice weekly from days 60-90 of gestation), 3) prenatal T plus postnatal anti-androgen treated (daily oral dose of 15 mg/kg/day of flutamide beginning at 8 weeks of age) and 4) prenatal T and postnatal insulin sensitizer-treated (daily oral dose of 8 mg/day rosiglitazone beginning at 8 weeks of age). Follicular response to a controlled ovarian stimulation protocol was tested during their third breeding season. Main outcome measures included the determination of number and size of ovarian follicles and intrafollicular concentrations of steroids.
Results
At the end of the controlled ovarian stimulation, the number of follicles approaching ovulatory size (≥6 mm) were ~35 % lower in prenatal T-treated (6.5 ± 1.8) compared to controls (9.8 ± 2.0). Postnatal anti-androgen (10.3 ± 1.9), but not insulin sensitizer (5.0 ± 0.9), treatment prevented this decrease. Preovulatory sized follicles in the T group had lower intrafollicular T, androstenedione, and progesterone compared to that of the control group. Intrafollicular steroid disruption was partially reversed solely by postnatal insulin sensitizer treatment.
Conclusions
These results demonstrate that the final preovulatory follicular growth and intrafollicular steroid milieu is impaired in prenatal T-treated females. The findings are consistent with the lower fertility rate reported earlier in these females. The finding that final follicle growth was fully rescued by postnatal anti-androgen treatment and intrafollicular steroid milieu partially by insulin sensitizer treatment suggest that both androgenic and insulin pathway disruptions contribute to the compromised follicular phenotype of prenatal T-treated females.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134597/1/13048_2016_Article_250.pd
Tachyon cosmology with non-vanishing minimum potential: a unified model
We investigate the tachyon condensation process in the effective theory with
non-vanishing minimum potential and its implications to cosmology. It is shown
that the tachyon condensation on an unstable three-brane described by this
modified tachyon field theory leads to lower-dimensional branes (defects)
forming within a stable three-brane. Thus, in the cosmological background, we
can get well-behaved tachyon matter after tachyon inflation, (partially)
avoiding difficulties encountered in the original tachyon cosmological models.
This feature also implies that the tachyon inflated and reheated universe is
followed by a Chaplygin gas dark matter and dark energy universe. Hence, such
an unstable three-brane behaves quite like our universe, reproducing the key
features of the whole evolutionary history of the universe and providing a
unified description of inflaton, dark matter and dark energy in a very simple
single-scalar field model.Comment: 18 p
The Schrodinger Wave Functional and Closed String Rolling Tachyon
In this short note we apply Schrodinger picture description of the
minisuperspace approach to the closed string tachyon condensation. We will
calculate the rate of produced closed string and we will show that the density
of high massive closed string modes reaches the string density in time of order
one in string units.Comment: 12 page
Zeta Nonlocal Scalar Fields
We consider some nonlocal and nonpolynomial scalar field models originated
from p-adic string theory. Infinite number of spacetime derivatives is
determined by the operator valued Riemann zeta function through d'Alembertian
in its argument. Construction of the corresponding Lagrangians L starts
with the exact Lagrangian for effective field of p-adic tachyon
string, which is generalized replacing p by arbitrary natural number n and then
taken a sum of over all n. The corresponding new objects we
call zeta scalar strings. Some basic classical field properties of these fields
are obtained and presented in this paper. In particular, some solutions of the
equations of motion and their tachyon spectra are studied. Field theory with
Riemann zeta function dynamics is interesting in its own right as well.Comment: 13 pages, submitted to Theoretical and Mathematical Physic
Deep Depth From Focus
Depth from focus (DFF) is one of the classical ill-posed inverse problems in
computer vision. Most approaches recover the depth at each pixel based on the
focal setting which exhibits maximal sharpness. Yet, it is not obvious how to
reliably estimate the sharpness level, particularly in low-textured areas. In
this paper, we propose `Deep Depth From Focus (DDFF)' as the first end-to-end
learning approach to this problem. One of the main challenges we face is the
hunger for data of deep neural networks. In order to obtain a significant
amount of focal stacks with corresponding groundtruth depth, we propose to
leverage a light-field camera with a co-calibrated RGB-D sensor. This allows us
to digitally create focal stacks of varying sizes. Compared to existing
benchmarks our dataset is 25 times larger, enabling the use of machine learning
for this inverse problem. We compare our results with state-of-the-art DFF
methods and we also analyze the effect of several key deep architectural
components. These experiments show that our proposed method `DDFFNet' achieves
state-of-the-art performance in all scenes, reducing depth error by more than
75% compared to the classical DFF methods.Comment: accepted to Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV) 201
Cosmology in Nonlinear Born-Infeld Scalar Field Theory With Negative Potentials
The cosmological evolution in Nonlinear Born-Infeld(hereafter NLBI) scalar
field theory with negative potentials was investigated. The cosmological
solutions in some important evolutive epoches were obtained. The different
evolutional behaviors between NLBI and linear(canonical) scalar field theory
have been presented. A notable characteristic is that NLBI scalar field behaves
as ordinary matter nearly the singularity while the linear scalar field behaves
as "stiff" matter. We find that in order to accommodate current observational
accelerating expanding universe the value of potential parameters and
must have an {\it upper bound}. We compare different cosmological
evolutions for different potential parameters .Comment: 18 pages, 18 figures, some references added, revised version for
Int.J.Mod.Phys.A, appeared in Int.J.Mod.Phys.
Fluctuation-driven insulator-to-metal transition in an external magnetic field
We consider a model for a metal-insulator transition of correlated electrons
in an external magnetic field. We find a broad region in interaction and
magnetic field where metallic and insulating (fully magnetized) solutions
coexist and the system undergoes a first-order metal-insulator transition. A
global instability of the magnetically saturated solution precedes the local
ones and is caused by collective fluctuations due to poles in electron-hole
vertex functions.Comment: REVTeX 4 pages, 3 PS figure
The RKKY interactions and the Mott Transition
A two-site cluster generalization of the Hubbard model in large dimensions is
examined in order to study the role of short-range spin correlations near the
metal-insulator transition (MIT). The model is mapped to a two-impurity
Kondo-Anderson model in a self-consistently determined bath, making it possible
to directly address the competition between the Kondo effect and RKKY
interactions in a lattice context. Our results indicate that the RKKY
interactions lead to qualitative modifications of the MIT scenario even in the
absence of long range antiferromagnetic ordering.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures; to appear in Phys. Rev. B (1999
Fundamental Strings in Open String Theory at the Tachyonic Vacuum
We show that the world-volume theory on a D-p-brane at the tachyonic vacuum
has solitonic string solutions whose dynamics is governed by the Nambu-Goto
action of a string moving in (25+1) dimensional space-time. This provides
strong evidence for the conjecture that at this vacuum the full (25+1)
dimensional Poincare invariance is restored. We also use this result to argue
that the open string field theory at the tachyonic vacuum must contain closed
string excitations.Comment: LaTeX file, 16 pages, references and clarification adde
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