201 research outputs found
Regulation Of Innate Immune Cell Response Under Sub-acute/Chronic Inflammatory Conditions
Sub-acute/chronic inflammatory diseases are often associated with altered inflammatory response, leading to increased host vulnerability to secondary inflammatory challenges. In the first study, by employing streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetes in mice, we further investigate mechanisms leading to enhanced polymorphonuclear leukocytes (PMN) response under hyperglycemia. We show that existence of a proinflammatory state associated with broad increases of macrophages in various organs plays a dominant role in promoting PMN response in diabetic mice. Studies of PMN infiltration during zymosan-induced peritonitis reveal that hyperglycemia enhances PMN recruitment through increasing F4/80+ macrophages in the peritoneal cavity. Insulin reversal of hyperglycemia reduces peritoneal macrophage numbers and ameliorates PMN infiltration. Significantly increased macrophages are also observed in the liver, kidneys, and intestines under hyperglycemia, and are attributable to exacerbated nephropathy and colitis when respective inflammatory conditions are induced. We also find that significant monocytosis of inflammatory F4/80+Gr-1+ monocytes from the spleen and macrophage proliferation in situ synergistically contribute to the increased macrophage population under hyperglycemia. In conclusion, our results demonstrate that STZ-induced hyperglycemic/diabetic mice develop a systemic proinflammatory state mediated by broad infiltration of macrophages. In the second study, we focus on the identification of the carrier that binds to and delivers Shiga toxin 2(Stx2) to the target organ causing hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS). By employing a murine HUS model through co-injection of LPS-Stx2, we show that, adoptive transfer of CD11b+ leukocytes, but not CD11b- leukocytes, RBC, platelets or plasma, isolated from mice with HUS induces HUS in healthy recipients. Interestingly, we find that LPS priming of mice significantly promotes CD11b+ leukocytes binding to Stx2. Compared to CD11b+ leukocytes from mice without LPS priming, CD11b+ leukocytes isolated from mice after LPS priming demonstrate higher frequencies of toxin binding and augmented potency to induce HUS. In sum, our results demonstrate peripheral CD11b+ myeloid leukocytes act as effective Stx2 carriers that deliver toxin to kidneys causing HUS and that LPS-induced inflammation enhances the carrier capacity and aggravates HUS
A Survey on Watching Social Issue Videos among YouTube and TikTok Users
The openness and influence of video-sharing platforms (VSPs) such as YouTube
and TikTok attracted creators to share videos on various social issues.
Although social issue videos (SIVs) affect public opinions and breed
misinformation, how VSP users obtain information and interact with SIVs is
under-explored. This work surveyed 659 YouTube and 127 TikTok users to
understand the motives for consuming SIVs on VSPs. We found that VSP users are
primarily motivated by the information and entertainment gratifications to use
the platform. VSP users use SIVs for information-seeking purposes and find
YouTube and TikTok convenient to interact with SIVs. VSP users moderately watch
SIVs for entertainment and inactively engage in social interactions. SIV
consumption is associated with information and socialization gratifications of
the platform. VSP users appreciate the diversity of information and opinions
but would also do their own research and are concerned about the misinformation
and echo chamber problems
Distribution Shift Matters for Knowledge Distillation with Webly Collected Images
Knowledge distillation aims to learn a lightweight student network from a
pre-trained teacher network. In practice, existing knowledge distillation
methods are usually infeasible when the original training data is unavailable
due to some privacy issues and data management considerations. Therefore,
data-free knowledge distillation approaches proposed to collect training
instances from the Internet. However, most of them have ignored the common
distribution shift between the instances from original training data and webly
collected data, affecting the reliability of the trained student network. To
solve this problem, we propose a novel method dubbed ``Knowledge Distillation
between Different Distributions" (KD), which consists of three
components. Specifically, we first dynamically select useful training instances
from the webly collected data according to the combined predictions of teacher
network and student network. Subsequently, we align both the weighted features
and classifier parameters of the two networks for knowledge memorization.
Meanwhile, we also build a new contrastive learning block called
MixDistribution to generate perturbed data with a new distribution for instance
alignment, so that the student network can further learn a
distribution-invariant representation. Intensive experiments on various
benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed KD can outperform the
state-of-the-art data-free knowledge distillation approaches
Identifying crystal accumulation in granitoids through amphibole composition and in situ zircon O isotopes in North Qilian Orogen
Granitoids are the main constituents of the continental crust, and an understanding of their petrogenesis is key to the origin and evolution of continents. Whether crystal fractionation is the dominant way to generate evolved magmas has long been debated, mostly because such processes would produce large volumes of complementary cumulates, which remains elusive. Mafic magmatic enclaves (MMEs) are ubiquitous in granitoids and their presence was initially recognized as cumulates. However, because many MMEs lack obvious evidence of accumulation, such as the classic cumulate textures and modal layering, the cumulate origin of MMEs has been abandoned and the model of magma mixing between mafic and felsic magmas has become popular. In this study, we conduct a combined study of amphibole composition and in situ O isotopes in zircons on three suites of orogenic granitoids with MMEs from the North Qilian Orogenic Belt (NQOB). We find that the MMEs and their host granodiorites show overlapping zircon δ18O values, affirming that they share the same parental magmas. The amphibole compositions indicate that amphiboles from the MMEs are not in equilibrium with a melt whose composition was that of the bulk-rock. These new data, together with the published bulk-rock data, suggest that the MMEs in our study have clear cumulate signatures and are thus of cumulate origin. Our study provides evidence for crystal accumulation in granitoids in the NQOB. This new understanding calls for re-examination on the petrogenesis of some intermediate magmatic rocks (granitoid/andesite) in discussing models of continental crustal growth
Reorganize your blogs: Supporting blog re-visitation with natural language processing and visualization
Temporally-connected personal blogs contain voluminous textual content, presenting challenges in re-visiting and reflecting on experiences. Other data repositories have benefited from natural language processing (NLP) and interactive visualizations (VIS) to support exploration, but little is known about how these techniques could be used with blogs to present experiences and support multimodal interaction with blogs, particularly for authors. This paper presents the effect of reorganization—reorganizing the large blog set with NLP and presenting abstract topics with VIS—to support novel re-visitation experiences to blogs. The BlogCloud tool, a blog re-visitation tool that reorganizes blog paragraphs around user-searched keywords, implements reorganization and similarity-based content grouping. Through a public use session with bloggers who wrote about extended hikes, we observed the effect of NLP-based reorganization in delivering novel re-visitation experiences. Findings suggest that the re-presented topics provide new reflection materials and re-visitation paths, enabling interaction with symbolic items in memory
Building Credibility, Trust, and Safety on Video-Sharing Platforms
Video-sharing platforms (VSPs) such as YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch attract millions of users and have become influential information sources, especially among the young generation. Video creators and live streamers make videos to engage viewers and form online communities. VSP celebrities obtain monetary benefits through monetization programs and affiliated markets. However, there is a growing concern that user-generated videos are becoming a vehicle for spreading misinformation and controversial content. Creators may make inappropriate content for attention and financial benefits. Some other creators also face harassment and attack. This workshop seeks to bring together a group of HCI scholars to brainstorm technical and design solutions to improve the credibility, trust, and safety of VSPs. We aim to discuss and identify research directions for technology design, policy-making, and platform services for video-sharing platforms. © 2023 Owner/Author
Plant buffering against the high-light stress-induced accumulation of CsGA2ox8 transcripts via alternative splicing to finely tune gibberellin levels and maintain hypocotyl elongation
Ajuts: this study was supported by The National Key Research and Development Program of China (2019YFD1000300), the International Postdoctoral Exchange Fellowship Program from the China Postdoctoral Council (20170053), the Technology System Construction of Modern Agricultural Industry of Shanghai (19Z113040008), and the Presidential Foundation of Guangdong Academy of Agricultural Sciences (BZ201901).In plants, alternative splicing (AS) is markedly induced in response to environmental stresses, but it is unclear why plants generate multiple transcripts under stress conditions. In this study, RNA-seq was performed to identify AS events in cucumber seedlings grown under different light intensities. We identified a novel transcript of the gibberellin (GA)-deactivating enzyme Gibberellin 2-beta-dioxygenase 8 (CsGA2ox8). Compared with canonical CsGA2ox8.1, the CsGA2ox8.2 isoform presented intron retention between the second and third exons. Functional analysis proved that the transcript of CsGA2ox8.1 but not CsGA2ox8.2 played a role in the deactivation of bioactive GAs. Moreover, expression analysis demonstrated that both transcripts were upregulated by increased light intensity, but the expression level of CsGA2ox8.1 increased slowly when the light intensity was >400 µmol·m −2 ·s −1 PPFD (photosynthetic photon flux density), while the CsGA2ox8.2 transcript levels increased rapidly when the light intensity was >200 µmol·m −2 ·s −1 PPFD. Our findings provide evidence that plants might finely tune their GA levels by buffering against the normal transcripts of CsGA2ox8 through AS
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