Geminin is partially localized to the centrosome and plays a role in proper centrosome duplication

Background information. Centrosome duplication normally parallels with DNA replication and is responsible for correct segregation of replicated DNA into the daughter cells. Although geminin interacts with Cdt1 to prevent loading of MCMs (minichromosome maintenance proteins) on to the replication origins, inactivation of geminin nevertheless causes centrosome over-duplication in addition to the re-replication of the genome, suggesting that geminin may play a role in centrosome duplication. However, the exact mechanism by which loss of geminin affects centrosomal duplication remains unclear and the possible direct interaction of geminin with centrosomal-localized proteins is still unidentified

Reactivation of Epstein–Barr virus by a dual-responsive fluorescent EBNA1-targeting agent with Zn2+-chelating function

EBNA1 is the only Epstein–Barr virus (EBV) latent protein responsible for viral genome maintenance and is expressed in all EBV-infected cells. Zn2+ is essential for oligomerization of the functional EBNA1. We constructed an EBNA1 binding peptide with a Zn2+ chelator to create an EBNA1-specific inhibitor (ZRL5P4). ZRL5P4 by itself is sufficient to reactivate EBV from its latent infection. ZRL5P4 is able to emit unique responsive fluorescent signals once it binds with EBNA1 and a Zn2+ ion. ZRL5P4 can selectively disrupt the EBNA1 oligomerization and cause nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) tumor shrinkage, possibly due to EBV lytic induction. Dicer1 seems essential for this lytic reactivation. As can been seen, EBNA1 is likely to maintain NPC cell survival by suppressing viral reactivation

Materials and Devices for Biodegradable and Soft Biomedical Electronics

Biodegradable and soft biomedical electronics that eliminate secondary surgery and ensure intimate contact with soft biological tissues of the human body are of growing interest, due to their emerging applications in high-quality healthcare monitoring and effective disease treatments. Recent systematic studies have significantly expanded the biodegradable electronic materials database, and various novel transient systems have been proposed. Biodegradable materials with soft properties and integration schemes of flexible or/and stretchable platforms will further advance electronic systems that match the properties of biological systems, providing an important step along the path towards clinical trials. This review focuses on recent progress and achievements in biodegradable and soft electronics for biomedical applications. The available biodegradable materials in their soft formats, the associated novel fabrication schemes, the device layouts, and the functionality of a variety of fully bioresorbable and soft devices, are reviewed. Finally, the key challenges and possible future directions of biodegradable and soft electronics are provided

A Multi-level Acoustic Feature Extraction Framework for Transformer Based End-to-End Speech Recognition

Transformer based end-to-end modelling approaches with multiple stream inputs have been achieved great success in various automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks. An important issue associated with such approaches is that the intermediate features derived from each stream might have similar representations and thus it is lacking of feature diversity, such as the descriptions related to speaker characteristics. To address this issue, this paper proposed a novel multi-level acoustic feature extraction framework that can be easily combined with Transformer based ASR models. The framework consists of two input streams: a shallow stream with high-resolution spectrograms and a deep stream with low-resolution spectrograms. The shallow stream is used to acquire traditional shallow features that is beneficial for the classification of phones or words while the deep stream is used to obtain utterance-level speaker-invariant deep features for improving the feature diversity. A feature correlation based fusion strategy is used to aggregate both features across the frequency and time domains and then fed into the Transformer encoder-decoder module. By using the proposed multi-level acoustic feature extraction framework, state-of-the-art word error rate of 21.7% and 2.5% were obtained on the HKUST Mandarin telephone and Librispeech speech recognition tasks respectively.Comment: Accepted by Interspeech 202

Longitudinal changes in brain structure and their relationship with subclinical psychiatric symptoms in parents who lost their only child in China

Background: Losing an only child (Shidu) is a grievous traumatic event that may affect brain structure, even if it does not lead to psychiatric disorders. However, longitudinal changes in brain structure and their relationship to subclinical psychiatric symptoms (SPS) have not been well investigated in Shidu parents without any psychiatric disorders (SDNP). Objectives: This study aimed to investigate cross-sectional and longitudinal changes in cortical thickness and surface area in SDNP, and to explore their relationship with SPS. Methods: A total of 50 SDNP and 40 matched healthy controls (HC) were enrolled. All participants underwent structural MRI scans and clinical assessment at baseline and at the 5-year follow-up. Differences in brain structural phenotypes (cortical thickness, surface area, and their annual rate of change) between the SDNP and HC groups were compared using FreeSurfer. Correlations between significant brain structural phenotypes and SPS in the SDNP group were evaluated using multiple linear regressions. Results: The SDNP group showed a smaller surface area in the left inferior parietal cortex than the HC group at baseline and follow-up. The SDNP group showed slower rates of cortical thinning and surface area loss in several brain regions than the HC group from baseline to follow-up. Moreover, slower rates of cortical thinning in the left insula, superior frontal cortex, and superior temporal cortex were associated with greater reductions in avoidance, depression, and trauma re-experiencing symptoms scores over time in the SDNP group, respectively. Conclusions: Shidu trauma-induced structural abnormalities in the inferior parietal cortex may persist over time and be independent of the severity of psychiatric symptoms. The expansion of prefrontal, temporal, and insular cortex implicated in emotional regulation may contribute to improvements in psychiatric symptoms in Shidu parents

A flexible and physically transient electrochemical sensor for real-time wireless nitric oxide monitoring

Real-time continuous sensing of biological analytes is of importance in a range of biomedical applications. Here, the authors report on a flexible and physically transient sensor for the detection of nitric oxide and demonstrate applications in nitric oxide sensing in organs ex vivo and in vivo

Systemic Study on the Biogenic Pathways of Yezo’otogirins: Total Synthesis and Antitumor Activities of (±)-Yezo’otogirin C and Its Structural Analogues

A systematic study of the biomimetic pathways to yezo’otogirin C under aerobic and anaerobic conditions has been investigated, and both are found to be feasible pathways to the natural product depending on the physiological conditions. Because of the lower activation energy, the aerobic process would be more favorable when the in vivo oxygen level is high. In the course of this study, a highly efficient synthetic route to (±)-yezo’otogirin C has been established in four steps (31% overall yield) from a readily available compound without using any protecting groups. The natural product and its structural analogues exhibited antitumor activities against several human cancer cell lines and appeared to arrest cell cycles in different phases

Systemic Study on the Biogenic Pathways of Yezo’otogirins: Total Synthesis and Antitumor Activities of (±)-Yezo’otogirin C and Its Structural Analogues

A systematic study of the biomimetic pathways to yezo’otogirin C under aerobic and anaerobic conditions has been investigated, and both are found to be feasible pathways to the natural product depending on the physiological conditions. Because of the lower activation energy, the aerobic process would be more favorable when the in vivo oxygen level is high. In the course of this study, a highly efficient synthetic route to (±)-yezo’otogirin C has been established in four steps (31% overall yield) from a readily available compound without using any protecting groups. The natural product and its structural analogues exhibited antitumor activities against several human cancer cell lines and appeared to arrest cell cycles in different phases