The Effects of Erythropoietin Dose Titration during High-Fat Diet-Induced Obesity

Erythropoietin (Epo) is a pleotropic cytokine with several nonhematopoietic tissue effects. High-dose Epo treatment-mediated effects on body weight, fat mass and glucose tolerance have recently been reported, thus extending its pleotropic effects to fat and glucose metabolism. However, the exact dose range of Epo treatment required for such effects remains unidentified to date. We investigated Epo dosage effect (up to 1000 U/kg) on hematocrit, body weight, body composition, glucose metabolism, food intake, and physical activity, during high-fat diet-induced obesity. We report that Epo doses (1000, 600, 300, and 150 U/kg) significantly reduced body weight gain and fat mass, while, only Epo doses of 300 U/kg and higher significantly affected glucose tolerance. None of the tested Epo doses showed any detectable effects on food intake, and only 1000 U/kg dose significantly increased physical activity, suggesting that these parameters may only be partially responsible for the metabolic effects of Epo treatment

Erythropoietin and hypoxia increase erythropoietin receptor and nitric oxide levels in lung microvascular endothelial cells

Acute lung exposure to low oxygen results in pulmonary vasoconstriction and redistribution of blood flow. We used human microvascular endothelial cells from lung (HMVEC-L) to study the acute response to oxygen stress. We observed that hypoxia and erythropoietin (EPO) increased erythropoietin receptor (EPOR) gene expression and protein level in HMVEC-L In addition, EPO dose- and time-dependently stimulated nitric oxide (NO) production. This NO stimulation was evident despite hypoxia induced reduction of endothelial NO synthase (eNOS) gene expression. Western blot of phospho-eNOS (serine1177) and eNOS and was significantly induced by hypoxia but not after EPO treatment. However, iNOS increased at hypoxia and with EPO stimulation compared to normal oxygen tension. In accordance with our previous results of NO induction by EPO at low oxygen tension in human umbilical vein endothelial cells and bone marrow endothelial cells, these results provide further evidence in HMVEC-L for EPO regulation of NO production to modify the effects of hypoxia and cause compensatory vasoconstriction

GCN5 and E2F1 stimulate nucleotide excision repair by promoting H3K9 acetylation at sites of damage

Chromatin structure is known to be a barrier to DNA repair and a large number of studies have now identified various factors that modify histones and remodel nucleosomes to facilitate repair. In response to ultraviolet (UV) radiation several histones are acetylated and this enhances the repair of DNA photoproducts by the nucleotide excision repair (NER) pathway. However, the molecular mechanism by which UV radiation induces histone acetylation to allow for efficient NER is not completely understood. We recently discovered that the E2F1 transcription factor accumulates at sites of UV-induced DNA damage and directly stimulates NER through a non-transcriptional mechanism. Here we demonstrate that E2F1 associates with the GCN5 acetyltransferase in response to UV radiation and recruits GCN5 to sites of damage. UV radiation induces the acetylation of histone H3 lysine 9 (H3K9) and this requires both GCN5 and E2F1. Moreover, as previously observed for E2F1, knock down of GCN5 results in impaired recruitment of NER factors to sites of damage and inefficient DNA repair. These findings demonstrate a direct role for GCN5 and E2F1 in NER involving H3K9 acetylation and increased accessibility to the NER machinery

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

A Review of Clean Energy Exploitation for Railway Transportation Systems and Its Enlightenment to China

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), China’s rail system will become fully electrified by 2050. However, in some remote areas with a weak power grid connection, the promise of an electrified railway will be hard to achieve. By replacing conventional fuels with clean and environmentally-friendly energy, overall carbon emissions would be significantly reduced, contributing to the fulfillment of the carbon-neutral commitment. This study reviews clean energy exploitation in the railway transportation system and the distribution of renewable energy sources along the railway lines of China. The evaluation results show that China has huge energy potential. In terms of photovoltaics alone, the annual power generation of China’s high-speed railway is about 170 TWh, meaning that the energy self-consistency rate for high-speed railway can reach 284.84%. Efficient exploitation of clean energy sources for China’s railway transportation system would effectively mitigate anxieties surrounding energy shortages

Institutional Investors, CSR Report Readability and the Moderating Role of ESG Performance

This study examines the impact of institutional investors on the readability of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports in the Chinese polluting industry. All available CSR reports in the listed polluting industries in China from 2010 to 2019 are analyzed to develop a readability score for each company. To differentiate the heterogenous motivation of institutional investors, we classify institutional investors into long-term and short-term investors based on their holding purpose and trading frequency. The results show that long-term institutional investors with long-term horizons have strong motivation to engage in the CSR reports disclosure. However, short-term institutional investors pursue near-term interests and they may have weak incentives to participate in the corporate governance and improve CSR report readability. Furthermore, we also find that the positive relationship between long-term institutional investors and CSR readability is stronger in polluting firms with higher environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. The significant role of institutional investors in promoting CSR reporting highlights the importance for polluting firms to acknowledge the needs of large and influential investors

Bearing Fault Diagnosis Method Using Envelope Analysis and Euclidean Distance

Bearings are widely used in rotating machines. Its health status is a significant index to indicate whether machines run continually or not. Detecting the bearing faults timely is very important for the maintenance decision making. In this paper, a new fault diagnosis method based on envelope analysis and Euclidean Distance is developed. Envelope analysis is used to enable the fault frequencies clearly. Then, amplitudes of fault frequencies are used as the fault features. Finally, Euclidean Distance is used to identify the different fault types. This method can identify the fault locations intelligently even if the bearings are under different fault levels. The effectiveness of this methodology is demonstrated using the bearing data sets of Case Western Reserve Univerity. DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/telkomnika.v12i3.418

Research on Operating Condition Effect on the Shock Pulse Method

Rolling bearings are one of the most widely used elements in industrial applications. Shock pulse method (SPM) has proven successfully as a diagnostic tool in determining bearing health. On the basis of illustrating the principle of SPM, this paper mainly concentrates on investigating the effect of different operating conditions on SPM. The shock pulse signals are derived from the wind turbine gearbox test rig by SPM instrument. Through comparing the slope of dB values when the rotating speed or load changes, effect of operating conditions on SPM is analyzed. The analysis results show that SPM is more sensitive to the rotating speed in contrast with the load