Critical Roles of microRNA-141-3p and CHD8 in Hypoxia/Reoxygenation-Induced Cardiomyocyte Apoptosis

Background: Cardiovascular diseases are currently the leading cause of death in humans. The high mortality of cardiac diseases is associated with myocardial ischemia and reperfusion (I/R). Recent studies have reported that microRNAs (miRNAs) play important roles in cell apoptosis. However, it is not known yet whether miR-141-3p contributes to the regulation of cardiomyocyte apoptosis. It has been well established that in vitro hypoxia/reoxygenation (H/R) model can follow in vivo myocardial I/R injury. This study aimed to investigate the effects of miR-141-3p and CHD8 on cardiomyocyte apoptosis following H/R. Results: We found that H/R remarkably reduces the expression of miR-141-3p but enhances CHD8 expression both in mRNA and protein in H9c2 cardiomyocytes. We also found either overexpression of miR-141-3p by transfection of miR-141-3p mimics or inhibition of CHD8 by transfection of small interfering RNA (siRNA) significantly decrease cardiomyocyte apoptosis induced by H/R. Moreover, miR-141-3p interacts with CHD8. Furthermore, miR-141-3p and CHD8 reduce the expression of p21. Conclusion: MiR-141-3p and CHD8 play critical roles in cardiomyocyte apoptosis induced by H/R. These studies suggest that miR-141-3p and CHD8 mediated cardiomyocyte apoptosis may offer a novel therapeutic strategy against myocardial I/R injury-induced cardiovascular diseases

Pushing the Limits of ChatGPT on NLP Tasks

Despite the success of ChatGPT, its performances on most NLP tasks are still well below the supervised baselines. In this work, we looked into the causes, and discovered that its subpar performance was caused by the following factors: (1) token limit in the prompt does not allow for the full utilization of the supervised datasets; (2) mismatch between the generation nature of ChatGPT and NLP tasks; (3) intrinsic pitfalls of LLMs models, e.g., hallucination, overly focus on certain keywords, etc. In this work, we propose a collection of general modules to address these issues, in an attempt to push the limits of ChatGPT on NLP tasks. Our proposed modules include (1) a one-input-multiple-prompts strategy that employs multiple prompts for one input to accommodate more demonstrations; (2) using fine-tuned models for better demonstration retrieval; (3) transforming tasks to formats that are more tailored to the generation nature; (4) employing reasoning strategies that are tailored to addressing the task-specific complexity; (5) the self-verification strategy to address the hallucination issue of LLMs; (6) the paraphrase strategy to improve the robustness of model predictions. We conduct experiments on 21 datasets of 10 representative NLP tasks, including question answering, commonsense reasoning, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, entity-relation extraction, event extraction, dependency parsing, semantic role labeling, and part-of-speech tagging. Using the proposed assemble of techniques, we are able to significantly boost the performance of ChatGPT on the selected NLP tasks, achieving performances comparable to or better than supervised baselines, or even existing SOTA performances

MEI Kodierung der frühesten Notation in linienlosen Neumen

Das Optical Neume Recognition Project (ONRP) hat die digitale Kodierung von musikalischen Notationszeichen aus dem Jahr um 1000 zum Ziel – ein ambitioniertes Vorhaben, das die Projektmitglieder veranlasste, verschiedenste methodische Ansätze zu evaluieren. Die Optical Music Recognition-Software soll eine linienlose Notation aus einem der ältesten erhaltenen Quellen mit Notationszeichen, dem Antiphonar Hartker aus der Benediktinerabtei St. Gallen (Schweiz), welches heute in zwei Bänden in der Stiftsbibliothek in St. Gallen aufbewahrt wird, erfassen. Aufgrund der handgeschriebenen, linienlosen Notation stellt dieser Gregorianische Gesang den Forscher vor viele Herausforderungen. Das Werk umfasst über 300 verschiedene Neumenzeichen und ihre Notation, die mit Hilfe der Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) erfasst und beschrieben werden sollen. Der folgende Artikel beschreibt den Prozess der Adaptierung, um die MEI auf die Notation von Neumen ohne Notenlinien anzuwenden. Beschrieben werden Eigenschaften der Neumennotation, um zu verdeutlichen, wo die Herausforderungen dieser Arbeit liegen sowie die Funktionsweise des Classifiers, einer Art digitalen Neumenwörterbuchs

Investigation of the hydrate formation process in fine sediments by a binary CO2/N-2 gas mixture

To obtain the fundamental data of CO2/N-2 gas mixture hydrate formation kinetics and CO2 separation and sequestration mechanisms, the gas hydrate formation process by a binary CO2/N-2 gas mixture (50:50) in fine sediments (150-250 mu m) was investigated in a semibatch vessel at variable temperatures(273, 275, and 277 K)and pressures (5.8-7.8 MPa). During the gas hydrate reaction process, the changes in the gaseous phase composition were determined by gas chromatography. The results indicate that the gas hydrate formation process of the binary CO2/N-2 gas mixture in fine sediments can be reduced to two stages. Firstly, the dissolved gas containing a large amount of CO2 formed gas hydrates, and then gaseous N-2 participated in the gas hydrate formation. In the second stage, all the dissolved gas was consumed. Thus, both gaseous CO2 and N-2 diffused into sediment. The first stage in different experiments lasted for 5-15 h, and >60% of the gas was consumed in this period. The gas consumption rate was greater in the first stage than in the second stage. After the completion of gas hydrate formation, the CO2 content in the gas hydrate was more than that in the gas phase. This indicates that CO2 formed hydrate easily than N-2 in the binary mixture. Higher operating pressures and lower temperatures increased the gas consumption rate of the binary gas mixture in gas hydrate formation. (C) 2019 The Chemical Industry and Engineering Society of China, and Chemical Industry Press Co., Ltd. All rights reserved

CO2 removal from synthesized ternary gas mixtures used hydrate formation with sodium dodecyl sulfate(SDS) as additive

In order to investigate the hydrate formation kinetics of the ternary gas mixtures containing sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) and evaluate the applicability of hydrate based gas separation (HBGS) technology to biogas, synthesized ternary gas mixture (CH4/CO2N2) hydrate formation processes with different concentrations of SDS were investigated comprehensively in this work. The changes in the gas composition during the hydrate formation process, the gas consumption of the hydrate, the effective reaction time, the recovery factor of CH4, the split ratio of CO2, and the microscopic promotion mechanism of SDS for the hydrate were studied. The results indicated that the addition of SDS increased the hydrate reaction rate and gas consumption compared with those in a pure water system. The promotional effect of SDS improved with an increase in its concentration. The maximum CO2 split ratio was 0.95, at a driving force of 4.4 MPa and 0.05% SDS concentration. The maximum CH4 recovery factor was 3.18, at a driving force of 6.4 MPa and 0.03% SDS concentration. SDS promoted the formation of CO2 hydrate more strongly than that of CH4 and N-2 for the ternary gas mixture. In summary, HBGS technology exhibited a good separation effect under two experimental conditions. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Hydrate Phase Equilibria of Ternary Gas Mixtures with Tetrabutylammonium Bromide and Cyclopentane

As unconventional natural gas and hydrate-based gas separation (HBGS) technology has attracted increasing attention, the safe and effective improvement of the reaction rate and separation effect of hydrates has also become the focus of extensive research. Tetrabutylammonium bromide (TBAB) and cyclopentane (CP) are common thermodynamic additives for promoting hydrate formation. To determine the effect of additives on the hydrate phase equilibria of multicomponent gas, the hydrate phase equilibrium conditions of a synthetic ternary gas mixture (CH4/CO2/N-2 = 0.5/0.4/0.1) were investigated in a solution prepared using CP and different concentrations of TBAB aqueous solutions (0.05, 0.1, 0.2, and 0.4 mass fractions) with a volume ratio of 0.308 (V/V). The promotion effect of the additives on mixed gas hydrate was weaker than that of pure CP, and the concentration of TBAB had a significant effect on the hydrate phase equilibrium of the system. The effect of TBAB could be neglected at a TBAB mass fraction of 0.05, and that of CP could be neglected at a TBAB mass fraction of 0.4. The results provide theoretical support for the HBGS technology

Phase Equilibria of the Synthesized Ternary CH4/CO2/N-2 Mixed-Gas Hydrates in Tetrabutylammonium Bromide Aqueous Solutions at Different Concentrations

Hydrate-based gas separation (HBGS) technology can effectively separate CH4 and CO2 in multicomponent gases. To provide the necessary basic data for the HBGS technology, the hydrate phase equilibrium conditions of a ternary gas mixture (CH4/CO2/N-2 = 0.5/0.4/0.1) were determined and compared in tetrabutylammonium bromide (TBAB) aqueous solutions with different mass fractions (0.05, 0.1, 0.2, and 0.4). The results indicated that all four concentrations of TBAB aqueous solution could shift the hydrate phase equilibrium conditions of the ternary gas mixture to higher temperatures and lower pressures; this influence was enhanced with higher TBAB concentrations. When the TBAB mass fraction was 0.4, under the same phase equilibrium pressure conditions, the phase equilibrium temperature increased by a range of approximately 9-14 K compared with that of a pure water system. Meanwhile, TBAB had a greater impact on the phase equilibrium conditions of hydrates containing larger proportions of CO2 and CH4 gas and a greater impact on the phase equilibrium conditions of CO2 and CH4 gas hydrates than on N-2 hydrate