Characterization of Electronic Cigarette Aerosol and Its Induction of Oxidative Stress Response in Oral Keratinocytes.

In this study, we have generated and characterized Electronic Cigarette (EC) aerosols using a combination of advanced technologies. In the gas phase, the particle number concentration (PNC) of EC aerosols was found to be positively correlated with puff duration whereas the PNC and size distribution may vary with different flavors and nicotine strength. In the liquid phase (water or cell culture media), the size of EC nanoparticles appeared to be significantly larger than those in the gas phase, which might be due to aggregation of nanoparticles in the liquid phase. By using in vitro high-throughput cytotoxicity assays, we have demonstrated that EC aerosols significantly decrease intracellular levels of glutathione in NHOKs in a dose-dependent fashion resulting in cytotoxicity. These findings suggest that EC aerosols cause cytotoxicity to oral epithelial cells in vitro, and the underlying molecular mechanisms may be or at least partially due to oxidative stress induced by toxic substances (e.g., nanoparticles and chemicals) present in EC aerosols

A Latent Encoder Coupled Generative Adversarial Network (LE-GAN) for Efficient Hyperspectral Image Super-resolution

Realistic hyperspectral image (HSI) super-resolution (SR) techniques aim to generate a high-resolution (HR) HSI with higher spectral and spatial fidelity from its low-resolution (LR) counterpart. The generative adversarial network (GAN) has proven to be an effective deep learning framework for image super-resolution. However, the optimisation process of existing GAN-based models frequently suffers from the problem of mode collapse, leading to the limited capacity of spectral-spatial invariant reconstruction. This may cause the spectral-spatial distortion on the generated HSI, especially with a large upscaling factor. To alleviate the problem of mode collapse, this work has proposed a novel GAN model coupled with a latent encoder (LE-GAN), which can map the generated spectral-spatial features from the image space to the latent space and produce a coupling component to regularise the generated samples. Essentially, we treat an HSI as a high-dimensional manifold embedded in a latent space. Thus, the optimisation of GAN models is converted to the problem of learning the distributions of high-resolution HSI samples in the latent space, making the distributions of the generated super-resolution HSIs closer to those of their original high-resolution counterparts. We have conducted experimental evaluations on the model performance of super-resolution and its capability in alleviating mode collapse. The proposed approach has been tested and validated based on two real HSI datasets with different sensors (i.e. AVIRIS and UHD-185) for various upscaling factors and added noise levels, and compared with the state-of-the-art super-resolution models (i.e. HyCoNet, LTTR, BAGAN, SR- GAN, WGAN).Comment: 18 pages, 10 figure

Identification and expression profiles of sRNAs and their biogenesis and action-related genes in male and female cones of Pinus tabuliformis

Detailed description of methods. (DOCX 25 kb

A 10 km daily-level ultraviolet radiation predicting dataset based on machine learning models in China from 2005 to 2020

Ultraviolet (UV) radiation is closely related to health, but limited measurements hindered further investigation of its health effects in China. Machine learning algorithm has been widely used in predicting environmental factors with high accuracy, but limited studies have done for UV radiation. This study aimed to develop UV radiation prediction model based on random forest method, and predict UV radiation at daily level and 10 km resolution in mainland China in 2005–2020. A random forest model was employed to predict UV radiation by integrating ground UV radiation measurements from monitoring stations and multiple predictors, such as UV radiation data from satellite. Missing data of satellite-based UV radiation was filled by three-day moving average method. The model's performance was evaluated through multiple cross-validation (CV) methods. The overall R2 (root mean square error, RMSE) between measured and predicted UV radiation from model development and model 10-fold CV was 0.97 (15.64 W m-2) and 0.83 (37.44 W m-2) at daily level, respectively. The model with OMI EDD performed higher predicting accuracy than the one without it. Based on predictions of UV radiation at daily level and 10 km spatial resolution and nearly 100 % spatiotemporal coverage, we found UV radiation increased by 4.20 % while PM2.5 levels decreased by 48.51 % and O3 levels rose by 22.70 % in 2013–2020, suggesting a potential correlation among these environmental factors. Uneven spatial distribution of UV radiation was found to be associated with factors such as latitude, elevation, meteorological factors and seasons. The eastern areas of China posed higher risk with both high population density and UV radiation intensity. Based on machine learning algorithm, this study generated a gridded dataset characterized by relatively high precision and extensive spatiotemporal coverage of UV radiation, which demonstrates the spatiotemporal variability of UV radiation levels in China and can facilitate health-related research in the future. This dataset is currently freely available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10884591 (Jiang et al., 2024)