Histological Observation of Regions around Bone Tunnels after Compression of the Bone Tunnel Wall in Ligament Reconstruction

The objectives of this study were to investigate the time-course of influence of compression of bone tunnel wall in ligament reconstruction on tissue around the bone tunnel and to histologically examine the mechanism of preventing the complication of bone tunnel dilation, using rabbit tibia. A model in which the femoral origin of the extensor digitorum longus tendon was cut and inserted into a bone tunnel made proximal to the tibia was prepared in the bilateral hind legs of 20 Japanese white rabbits. In each animal, a tunnel was made using a drill only in the right leg, while an undersized bone tunnel was made by drilling and then dilated by compression using a dilator to the same tunnel size as that in the right leg. Animals were sacrificed at 0, 2, 4, 8 and 12 weeks after surgery (4 animals at each time point). Observation of bone tunnels by X-ray radiography showed osteosclerosis in the 2- and 4-week dilation groups. Osteosclerosis appeared as white lines around the bone tunnel on X-ray radiography. This suggests that dilation promotes callus formation in the bone tunnel wall and prevents the complication of bone tunnel enlargement after ligament reconstruction

Suppressive Effect of Juzentaihoto on Vascularization Induced by B16 Melanoma Cells In Vitro and In Vivo

Juzentaihoto (JTT) is well known to be one of Japanese herbal medicines, and used for the supplemental therapy of cancer patients with remarkable success. The present study, therefore, was undertaken to examine the possible therapeutic mechanisms of JTT on cancer using B16 melanoma cell (B16 cell)/experimental mouse system. JTT was well mixed with rodent chow at 3.0% concentrations, and was administered orally ad libitum. Administration of JTT was started one week before tumor cell injection and continued throughout the experiment. Administration of JTT into mice significantly inhibited tumor metastasis in lungs after intravenous injection of 2 × 105 B16 cells in a volume of 50 μL. JTT also significantly suppressed enlargement of tumor size in hind footpad after the subcutaneous injection of 2 × 105 (50 μL) B16 cells. In the second part of experiments, the chamber that containing B16 cells was buried in the murine back. In JTT administrated group, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) of chamber internal fluid significantly decreased, and vascularization of chamber circumference was also inhibited. These results strongly suggest that oral administration of JTT caused decrease in the generation of VEGF, which is responsible for vascularization, and results in inhibition of B16 cell metastasis

Organellar Glue: A Molecular Tool to Artificially Control Chloroplast–Chloroplast Interactions

細胞小器官を接着する新技術「オルガネラグルー」を開発 --オルガネラ間コミュニケーションの操作に期待--. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2022-09-30.Organelles can physically interact to facilitate various cellular processes such as metabolite exchange. Artificially regulating these interactions represents a promising approach for synthetic biology. Here, we artificially controlled chloroplast–chloroplast interactions in living plant cells with our organelle glue (ORGL) technique, which is based on reconstitution of a split fluorescent protein. We simultaneously targeted N-terminal and C-terminal fragments of a fluorescent protein to the chloroplast outer envelope membrane or cytosol, respectively, which induced chloroplast–chloroplast interactions. The cytosolic C-terminal fragment likely functions as a bridge between two N-terminal fragments, thereby bringing the chloroplasts in close proximity to interact. We modulated the frequency of chloroplast–chloroplast interactions by altering the ratio of N- and C-terminal fragments. We conclude that the ORGL technique can successfully control chloroplast–chloroplast interactions in plants, providing a proof of concept for the artificial regulation of organelle interactions in living cells

Switching Head-Tail Funnel UNITER for Dual Referring Expression Comprehension with Fetch-and-Carry Tasks

This paper describes a domestic service robot (DSR) that fetches everyday objects and carries them to specified destinations according to free-form natural language instructions. Given an instruction such as "Move the bottle on the left side of the plate to the empty chair," the DSR is expected to identify the bottle and the chair from multiple candidates in the environment and carry the target object to the destination. Most of the existing multimodal language understanding methods are impractical in terms of computational complexity because they require inferences for all combinations of target object candidates and destination candidates. We propose Switching Head-Tail Funnel UNITER, which solves the task by predicting the target object and the destination individually using a single model. Our method is validated on a newly-built dataset consisting of object manipulation instructions and semi photo-realistic images captured in a standard Embodied AI simulator. The results show that our method outperforms the baseline method in terms of language comprehension accuracy. Furthermore, we conduct physical experiments in which a DSR delivers standardized everyday objects in a standardized domestic environment as requested by instructions with referring expressions. The experimental results show that the object grasping and placing actions are achieved with success rates of more than 90%.Comment: Accepted for presentation at IROS202

Efficacy of Juzentaihoto for Tumor Immunotherapy in B16 Melanoma Metastasis Model

Introduction. Medical care for Japanese cancer patients includes Western and Kampo medicines, and treatments with juzentaihoto (JTT) reportedly prevent cancer metastasis and recurrence. In this study, we examined the effects of JTT on natural killer (NK) cell activity and metastasis in combined treatments with anti-PD-1 antibody in a mouse model of melanoma metastasis. Methods. C57BL/6 male mice were intravenously injected with B16 melanoma cells (B16 cell) and were given chow containing 3% JTT. In subsequent in vivo experiments, we assessed serum cytokine levels and tumor colony formation in the lungs. Additionally, we assessed NK cell activity in ex vivo experiments. Results. JTT significantly suppressed B16 cell metastasis, whereas injection of anti-asialo-GM1 antibody into mice abrogated the inhibitory actions of JTT. JTT significantly increased interleukin- (IL-) 12 and interferon- (IFN-) γ levels in serum and induced NK cell activity. It increased the inhibitory actions of the anti-PD-1 antibody on B16 cell metastasis. Discussion. These data suggest that JTT inhibits B16 cell metastasis by inducing NK cell activity. Additionally, combination therapy with JTT and anti-PD-1 antibody increased treatment response rates for B16 melanoma

Atomic structure and magnetism of the Au-Ga-Ce 1/1 approximant crystal

We report a new Au-Ga-Ce 1/1 approximant crystal (AC) which possesses a significantly wide single-phase region of 53 - 70 at% Au and 13.6 - 15.1 at% Ce. Single crystal X-ray structural analyses reveal the existence of two types of structural degrees of freedom, i.e., the Au/Ga mixing sites and the fractional Ce occupancy site: the former enables a large variation in the electron concentration and the latter allows a variation in the occupancy of a magnetic impurity atom at the center of the Tsai-type cluster. Following these findings, the influences of two types of structural modifications on the magnetism are thoroughly investigated by means of magnetic susceptibility and specific heat measurements on the Au-Ga-Ce 1/1 AC. The spin-glass (SG) state is found to be the ground state over the entire single-phase region, showing a robust nature of the SG state against both structural modifications. In addition, a gigantic specific heat (C/T) is commonly observed at low temperatures for all the compositions, which is consistently explained as a consequence of the spin-freezing phenomenon, not of a heavy Fermion behavior as reported elsewhere. Moreover, the origin of the SG state in the 1/1 Au-Ga-Ce AC is attributed to the existence of non-magnetic atom disorder in the Au/Ga mixing sites. Furthermore, a Kondo behavior is observed in the electrical resistivity at low temperatures, which is enhanced by increasing the Ce concentration, verifying that a Ce atom introduced at the cluster center behaves as a Kondo impurity for the first time.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Unveiling exotic magnetic phase diagram of a non-Heisenberg quasicrystal approximant

A magnetic phase diagram of the non-Heisenberg Tsai-type 1/1 Au-Ga-Tb approximant crystal (AC) has been established across a wide electron-per-atom (e/a) range via magnetization and powder neutron diffraction measurements. The diagram revealed exotic ferromagnetic (FM) and antiferromagnetic (AFM) orders that originate from the unique local spin icosahedron common to icosahedral quasicrystals (iQCs) and ACs; The noncoplanar whirling AFM order is stabilized as the ground state at the e/a of 1.72 or less whereas a noncoplanar whirling FM order was found at the larger e/a of 1.80, with magnetic moments tangential to the Tb icosahedron in both cases. Moreover, the FM/AFM phase selection rule was unveiled in terms of the nearest neighbour (J1) and next nearest neighbour (J2) interactions by numerical calculations on a non-Heisenberg single icosahedron. The present findings will pave the way for understanding the intriguing magnetic orders of not only non-Heisenberg FM/AFM ACs but also non-Heisenberg FM/AFM iQCs, the latter of which are yet to be discovered