An siRNA Screen in Pancreatic Beta Cells Reveals a Role for Gpr27 in Insulin Production

The prevalence of type 2 diabetes in the United States is projected to double or triple by 2050. We reasoned that the genes that modulate insulin production might be new targets for diabetes therapeutics. Therefore, we developed an siRNA screening system to identify genes important for the activity of the insulin promoter in beta cells. We created a subclone of the MIN6 mouse pancreatic beta cell line that expresses destabilized GFP under the control of a 362 base pair fragment of the human insulin promoter and the mCherry red fluorescent protein under the control of the constitutively active rous sarcoma virus promoter. The ratio of the GFP to mCherry fluorescence of a cell indicates its insulin promoter activity. As G protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) have emerged as novel targets for diabetes therapies, we used this cell line to screen an siRNA library targeting all known mouse GPCRs. We identified several known GPCR regulators of insulin secretion as regulators of the insulin promoter. One of the top positive regulators was Gpr27, an orphan GPCR with no known role in beta cell function. We show that knockdown of Gpr27 reduces endogenous mouse insulin promoter activity and glucose stimulated insulin secretion. Furthermore, we show that Pdx1 is important for Gpr27's effect on the insulin promoter and insulin secretion. Finally, the over-expression of Gpr27 in 293T cells increases inositol phosphate levels, while knockdown of Gpr27 in MIN6 cells reduces inositol phosphate levels, suggesting this orphan GPCR might couple to Gq/11. In summary, we demonstrate a MIN6-based siRNA screening system that allows rapid identification of novel positive and negative regulators of the insulin promoter. Using this system, we identify Gpr27 as a positive regulator of insulin production

Mid-level synoptic analysis of flood-generating systems in South-west of Iran (case study: Dalaki watershed river basin)

Flood is known as one of the most distractive natural disaster worldwide. Therefore, its prediction is of great importance from the socio-economical point of view. Despite the great improvement in computational techniques and numerical weather prediction approaches, so far, in Iran, an acceptable flood prediction method has not yet been introduced. The main aim of this study is to recognize and classify the patterns of synoptic systems leading to torrential rainfalls in a watershed basin located in south-west of Iran. In this research, 20 major floods characterized by high rainfall intensities and severe damage were selected. The pattern, extension, and the direction of movement of the selected synoptic maps from surface to 500 hPa pressure levels were identified. Furthermore, the position of cyclones, anti-cyclones and mid-level trough lines were carefully tracked and classified into different groups. The results show that the major severe floods occurring in Dalaki watershed river basin are mainly influenced by strengthening of the center of Sudan heat low (SHL) and the coincidence moisture feeding by the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. It was found that simultaneous merging of the SHL system and Mediterranean frontal system would intensify the flood intensities over the basin. The mean positions of high pressures, low pressures, the Red Sea trough lines and 1015 hPa isobars of the major floods are also discussed

The effect of culturally appropriate self-care intervention on health literacy, health-related quality of life and glycemic control in Iranian patients with type 2 diabetes: A controlled randomized clinical trial

Background: Cultural and language differences are necessary factors for diabetes management and self-care education programs in patients suffering from diabetes. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of culture-based self-care intervention on health literacy, quality of life, and glycemic parameters in patients with type 2 diabetes. Materials and Methods: This randomized clinical trial has been carried out in selected centers in Darreh Shahr, Iran; 80 participants were randomly assigned into intervention and control groups. The intervention group received an educational program for 6 sessions twice a week, but the control group only received routine services. Data were collected using health literacy and life quality scales for diabetic patients, which were completed by both groups before, immediately after, and 3 months after the intervention; hemoglobin A1C (HbA1c) was checked before and 3 months after the intervention. SPSS software was also analyzed data using ?(2), Fisher's exact, independent t, and repeated measures analysis of variance tests. Results: There were no significant differences between the 2 groups before the study (p >0.05) goes forward. But, mean scores of health literacy (F-2,F-40 = 5.61, p =0.007), quality of life (F-2, 40 = 4.09, p =0.01), and HbA1c levels (t, 39 = 6. 91, p <0.001) have shown significant differences between the 2 groups immediately and 3 months after the intervention have been applied. Conclusions: Culturally appropriate intervention should be offered as a part of the nurse' care program for diabetic to control HbA1c, and improve their life quality and health literacy

The effect of different genres of music and silence on relaxation and anxiety: A randomized controlled trial

High stress and anxiety in healthy individuals may lead to use different pharmacological and non-pharmacological therapies. The study aimed to investigate the effect of different genres of music on anxiety and relaxation in healthy participants. This study was a randomized controlled trial with a cross-over design. Forty-six healthy undergraduates participated in the study and randomly received different genres of music (Pop, Rock, Western Classical, and Persian Traditional) and silence for five consecutive days between February and June 2018. Each participant was her/his own control. Relaxation and the State Anxiety were checked with Smith Relaxation States Inventory 3 and The State Anxiety Inventory before and after listening to 15 min of music or laying down in silence. None of the five procedures were preferred for a more relaxing effect (P > 0.05). Also, none of the interventions were preferred for reduction of the state anxiety (P > 0.05). Although different genres of music, i.e., Pop, Rock, Western Classical, Persian Traditional, could reduce state anxiety and improve relaxation, they had no extra effect compared to Silence. © 2020 Elsevier Inc

Improved Synthesis of Compressor Trees on FPGAs by a Hybrid and Systematic Design Approach

Improving arithmetic circuits on FPGAs is one of the main imperatives of FPGA vendors. Augmenting logic cells with dedicated arithmetic components such as adders and carry chains indicates the need for such improvements. In a prior work, we showed how the carry chains in the state-of-the-art Altera FPGAs could be exploited for synthesis of compressor trees. In that work, we proposed generalized parallel counters (GPCs) as the building blocks and mapped them to logic cells of FPGA using LUTs and carry chains. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to increase the logic density of compressor tree synthesis by sharing the logic cells between two neighbor GPCs in a chain. Moreover, we expand the GPC library with bigger GPCs and we propose a systematic approach to select the right GPCs based on the synthesis optimization targets. Finally, we will demonstrate that our framework can be retargeted to Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs with minor modifications. 1

Synthesis of Floating-Point Addition Clusters on FPGAs Using Carry-Save Arithmetic

A new method to synthesize clusters of floating-point addition operations on FPGAs is presented. Similar to Altera's floating-point data path compiler, it performs normalization once, at the output of the cluster operation. All significands in the clustered operation are denormalized in parallel with respect to the largest exponent: a fixed-point compressor tree then sums the aligned significands, followed by normalization and rounding. Compared to Altera's floating-point datapath compiler, our method reduces the critical path delay by as much as 20%, and area by as much as 29% on Altera Stratix III FPGAs. © 2010 IEEE

A flexible DSP block to enhance FPGA arithmetic performance

We propose a new DSP block for use in modern high-performance FPGAs. Current DSP blocks contain fixed-bitwidth multipliers that can be combined efficiently to form larger multipliers. Our approach is similar, but includes a bypass layer following the partial product generator that exposes the compressor tree used for partial product reduction directly to the user. As a consequence, the proposed DSP block can accelerate multi-input addition operations in addition to multiplication. To increase the flexibility of the device, the partial product reduction tree used within our DSP block uses a fixed-function compression logic along with a field programmable compressor tree (FPCT), the latter of which is user-configurable to meet the needs of the application at hand. Multi-input addition operations can be mapped directly onto the FPCT without compromising any of the other functionality of the DSP block. © 2009 IEEE