Molecular Evolution of the Deuterolysin (M35) Family Genes in Coccidioides

Coccidioides is a primary fungal pathogen of humans, causing life-threatening respiratory disease known as coccidioidomycosis (Valley fever) in immunocompromised individuals. Recently, Sharpton et al (2009) found that the deuterolysin (M35) family genes were significantly expanded in both the Coccidioides genus and in U. reesii, and that Coccidioides has acquired three more M35 family genes than U. reesii. In the present work, phylogenetic analyses based on a total of 28 M35 family genes using different alignments and tree-building methods consistently revealed five clades with high nodal supports. Interestingly, likelihood ratio tests suggested significant differences in selective pressure on the ancestral lineage of three additional duplicated M35 family genes from Coccidioides species compared to the other lineages in the phylogeny, which may be associated with novel functional adaptations of M35 family genes in the Coccidioides species, e.g., recent pathogenesis acquisition. Our study adds to the expanding view of M35 family gene evolution and functions as well as establishes a theoretical foundation for future experimental investigations

Based On Body Communication Wireless Medical Monitoring System Construction

Abstractthe concept of the body communication is put forward, the rapid development of portable medical equipment, medical monitoring systems are improving. Through analyzing the characteristics of body communication and the restrictions of medical equipment, we proposed the idea of medical monitoring system of wireless, and elaborated the system's principle of work. The construction of this system to further promote the development of medical monitoring system and provide security for the healthy development of body society

Hopf Bifurcation Analysis for a Stochastic Discrete-Time Hyperchaotic System

The dynamics of a discrete-time hyperchaotic system and the amplitude control of Hopf bifurcation for a stochastic discrete-time hyperchaotic system are investigated in this paper. Numerical simulations are presented to exhibit the complex dynamical behaviors in the discrete-time hyperchaotic system. Furthermore, the stochastic discrete-time hyperchaotic system with random parameters is transformed into its equivalent deterministic system with the orthogonal polynomial theory of discrete random function. In addition, the dynamical features of the discrete-time hyperchaotic system with random disturbances are obtained through its equivalent deterministic system. By using the Hopf bifurcation conditions of the deterministic discrete-time system, the specific conditions for the existence of Hopf bifurcation in the equivalent deterministic system are derived. And the amplitude control with random intensity is discussed in detail. Finally, the feasibility of the control method is demonstrated by numerical simulations

Lack of association between apolipoprotein C3 gene polymorphisms and risk of coronary heart disease in a Han population in East China

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Several polymorphisms in the apolipoprotein C3 (APOC3) gene have been found association with hypertriglyceridemia(HTG), but the link with coronary heart disease(CHD) risk between ethnicities was still controversial. Among them, reseachers paid more attentions to the promoter polymorphisms T-455C and C-482T because both of them located in insulin-responsive element (IRE) and insulin was thought to exert its action by down-regulating APOC3 gene expression. The aim of this study was to investigate the association of the two polymorphisms of APOC3 with CHD in a Han population in East China.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>TaqMan SNP Genotyping Assays were carried out to detect the genotypes of APOC3 gene, including the T-455C and C-482T, in 286 subjects with CHD and 325 controls without CHD. The levels of serum lipid profiles were also detected by biochemical methods.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>There was no difference of genotype frequencies and allele frequencies between the CHD population and the controls(P > 0.05). Compared with the most common genotype -455TT or -482CC, the variants had neither significantly increased CHD risk, nor the lipid variables showed any statistically relevant differences in the research population. The adjusted OR of CHD were 5.67 [0.27-18.74] and 0.75 [0.20-2.73] in carriers of the APOC3 -455C and -482T variants, respectively(P > 0.05). There was also no significant difference in APOC3 haplotype distribution in CHD and controls, but there was a strong linkage disequilibrium between T-455C and C-482T with D' = 0.9293, 0.8881, respectively(P < 0.0001).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our data did not support a relationship between the two polymorphisms of APOC3 gene and risk of CHD in the Han population in East China.</p

Effect of ammonia on the immune response of mud crab (Scylla paramamosain) and its susceptibility to mud crab reovirus

Ammonia is one of the major environmental pollutants that affect the growth and physiological functions of organisms. In the present study, the effects of ammonia on the immune response and pathogen resistance of mud crab reovirus (MCRV) in mud crab were investigated. Mud crab were exposed to four different ammonia concentrations (0, 2.5, 5 and 10 mg L-1 ammonia-N) for 7 d. The result showed that aspartate aminotransferase (AST) and alanine aminotransferase (ALT) activity significantly increased after 5 and 10 mg L-1 ammonia exposure. The hepatopancreas superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), and total antioxidative capacity (T-AOC) in ammonia-N group were significantly lower than those in the control group, while the levels of malondialdehyde (MDA) were significantly higher than those in the control group. Significant reductions in total hemocyte counts (THC) were observed after ammonia exposure. After 7d ammonia exposure, mud crabs were injected 100 μL MCRV at 105 copies/g body weight. The mortality of mud crabs in ammonia-N group were significantly higher than those in the control group. All these results suggested that ammonia in water caused a depression in the immune response, and increased susceptibility to MCRV infection

Mask-free OVIS: Open-Vocabulary Instance Segmentation without Manual Mask Annotations

Existing instance segmentation models learn task-specific information using manual mask annotations from base (training) categories. These mask annotations require tremendous human effort, limiting the scalability to annotate novel (new) categories. To alleviate this problem, Open-Vocabulary (OV) methods leverage large-scale image-caption pairs and vision-language models to learn novel categories. In summary, an OV method learns task-specific information using strong supervision from base annotations and novel category information using weak supervision from image-captions pairs. This difference between strong and weak supervision leads to overfitting on base categories, resulting in poor generalization towards novel categories. In this work, we overcome this issue by learning both base and novel categories from pseudo-mask annotations generated by the vision-language model in a weakly supervised manner using our proposed Mask-free OVIS pipeline. Our method automatically generates pseudo-mask annotations by leveraging the localization ability of a pre-trained vision-language model for objects present in image-caption pairs. The generated pseudo-mask annotations are then used to supervise an instance segmentation model, freeing the entire pipeline from any labour-expensive instance-level annotations and overfitting. Our extensive experiments show that our method trained with just pseudo-masks significantly improves the mAP scores on the MS-COCO dataset and OpenImages dataset compared to the recent state-of-the-art methods trained with manual masks. Codes and models are provided in https://vibashan.github.io/ovis-web/.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2023. Project site: https://vibashan.github.io/ovis-web

Apocynum Tablet Protects against Cardiac Hypertrophy via Inhibiting AKT and ERK1/2 Phosphorylation after Pressure Overload

Background. Cardiac hypertrophy occurs in many cardiovascular diseases. Apocynum tablet (AT), a traditional Chinese medicine, has been widely used in China to treat patients with hypertension. However, the underlying molecular mechanisms of AT on the hypertension-induced cardiac hypertrophy remain elusive. The current study evaluated the effect and mechanisms of AT on cardiac hypertrophy. Methods. We created a mouse model of cardiac hypertrophy by inducing pressure overload with surgery of transverse aortic constriction (TAC) and then explored the effect of AT on the development of cardiac hypertrophy using 46 mice in 4 study groups (combinations of AT and TAC). In addition, we evaluated the signaling pathway of phosphorylation of ERK1/2, AKT, and protein expression of GATA4 in the cardioprotective effects of AT using Western blot. Results. AT inhibited the phosphorylation of Thr202/Tyr204 sites of ERK1/2, Ser473 site of AKT, and protein expression of GATA4 and significantly inhibited cardiac hypertrophy and cardiac fibrosis at 2 weeks after TAC surgery (P<0.05). Conclusions. We experimentally demonstrated that AT inhibits cardiac hypertrophy via suppressing phosphorylation of ERK1/2 and AKT

Fibroblast Growth Factor 2 Modulates Hippocampal Microglia Activation in a Neuroinflammation Induced Model of Depression

Recent studies indicate that disturbed structure and function of microglia can cause depression and associated neurogenesis impairments. Our previous work has demonstrated that exogenous fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2) reverses the depressive-like behaviors and the impaired hippocampal neurogenesis in a neuroinflammatory model of depression. However, whether and how the antidepressant effects of FGF2 involve the modulation of microglia activation has not been elucidated. In this study, to examine the effects of FGF2 on microglia activation, exogenous FGF2 was supplemented to the lateral ventricle of rats during the neuroinflammatory state induced by central lipopolysaccharides (LPS) administrations. It was found that FGF2 infusions reversed the LPS-induced depressive-like behaviors and inhibited the hippocampal microglia activation. In LPS-treated rats, FGF2 decreased the level of pro-inflammatory cytokines including interlukin-1β (IL-1β), IL-6 and tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α, increased the level of IL-10, the anti-inflammatory cytokine and reversed the decreased expression of CX3CL1, a chemokine mainly expressed by neurons and keeping microglia in surveillance. Further, we examined the effects of inhibited FGF2 signaling by administration of SU5402, an FGFR inhibitor. It was found that SU5402 itself evoked depressive-like behaviors, induced microglia activation, increased production of pro-inflammatory cytokines including IL-1β, IL-6 and TNF-α, and decreased the expression of CX3CL1. Two lines of results that FGF2 signaling and FGFR inhibitor can effectively but oppositely modulate the regulation of microglia and the generation of depressive-like behavior, suggesting that microglia-regulated mechanisms may underlie the antidepressant role of FGF2. The present data provide novel insights into the understanding of mechanism of neuroinflammation-associated depression and may serve as a novel mechanism-based target for the treatment of inflammation-related depression