Low-energy, Mobile Grain Boundaries in Magnesium

The strong basal texture that is commonly developed during the rolling of magnesium alloy and can even increase during annealing motivates atomic-level study of dislocation structures of both \u3c0001\u3e tilt and twist grain boundaries (GBs) in Magnesium. Both symmetrical tilt and twist GBs over the entire range of rotation angles θ between 0° and 60° are found to have an ordered atomic structure and can be described with grain boundary dislocation models. In particular, 30° tilt and twist GBs are corresponding to energy minima. The 30° tilt GB is characterized with an array of Shockley partial dislocations bp:- bp on every basal plane and the 30° twist GB is characterized with a stacking faulted structure. More interesting, molecular dynamics simulations explored that both 30° tilt and twist GBs are highly mobile associated with collective glide of Shockley partial dislocations. This could be responsible for the formation of the strong basal texture and a significant number of 30° misorientation GBs in Mg alloy during grain growth

Evaluation of PDE4 inhibition for COPD

Targeting type 4 phosphodiesterase (PDE4) for treatment of COPD has multilevel benefits to patients by reducing inflammation, relieving bronchoconstriction, and improving pulmonary circulation. The isoenzyme-specific narrow spectrum PDE4 inhibitors such as cilomilast and roflumilast may have limited clinical efficacy in managing severe and very severe COPD. Development of dual therapy by combining PDE4 inhibition with Ca2+ channel antagonism may introduce an effective novel armory for physicians to manage patients with severe COPD

Functional evaluation of Asp76, 84, 102 and 150 in human arsenic(III) methyltransferase (hAS3MT) interacting with S-adenosylmethionine

AbstractWe prepared eight mutants (D76P, D76N, D84P, D84N, D102P, D102N, D150P and D150N) to investigate the functions of residues Asp76, 84, 102 and 150 in human arsenic(III) methyltransferase (hAS3MT) interacting with the S-adenosylmethionine (SAM)-binding. The affinity of all the mutants for SAM were weakened. All the mutants except for D150N completely lost their methylation activities. Residues Asp76, 84, 102 and 150 greatly influenced hAS3MT catalytic activity via affecting SAM-binding or methyl transfer. Asp76 and 84 were located in the SAM-binding pocket, and Asp102 significantly affected SAM-binding via forming hydrogen bonds with SAM

Structure and Activity of a Selective Antibiofilm Peptide SK-24 Derived from the NMR Structure of Human Cathelicidin LL-37

The deployment of the innate immune system in humans is essential to protect us from infection. Human cathelicidin LL-37 is a linear host defense peptide with both antimicrobial and immune modulatory properties. Despite years of studies of numerous peptides, SK-24, corresponding to the long hydrophobic domain (residues 9–32) in the anionic lipid-bound NMR structure of LL-37, has not been investigated. This study reports the structure and activity of SK-24. Interestingly, SK-24 is entirely helical (~100%) in phosphate buffer (PBS), more than LL-37 (84%), GI-20 (75%), and GF-17 (33%), while RI-10 and 17BIPHE2 are essentially randomly coiled (helix%: 7–10%). These results imply an important role for the additional N-terminal amino acids (likely E16) of SK-24 in stabilizing the helical conformation in PBS. It is proposed herein that SK-24 contains the minimal sequence for effective oligomerization of LL-37. Superior to LL-37 and RI-10, SK-24 shows an antimicrobial activity spectrum comparable to the major antimicrobial peptides GF-17 and GI-20 by targeting bacterial membranes and forming a helical conformation. Like the engineered peptide 17BIPHE2, SK-24 has a stronger antibiofilm activity than LL-37, GI-20, and GF-17. Nevertheless, SK-24 is least hemolytic at 200 µM compared with LL-37 and its other peptides investigated herein. Combined, these results enabled us to appreciate the elegance of the long amphipathic helix SK-24 nature deploys within LL-37 for human antimicrobial defense. SK-24 may be a useful template of therapeutic potentia

Design of Chinese HPSG Framework for Data-Driven Parsing

PACLIC 23 / City University of Hong Kong / 3-5 December 200

MatrixCity: A Large-scale City Dataset for City-scale Neural Rendering and Beyond

Neural radiance fields (NeRF) and its subsequent variants have led to remarkable progress in neural rendering. While most of recent neural rendering works focus on objects and small-scale scenes, developing neural rendering methods for city-scale scenes is of great potential in many real-world applications. However, this line of research is impeded by the absence of a comprehensive and high-quality dataset, yet collecting such a dataset over real city-scale scenes is costly, sensitive, and technically difficult. To this end, we build a large-scale, comprehensive, and high-quality synthetic dataset for city-scale neural rendering researches. Leveraging the Unreal Engine 5 City Sample project, we develop a pipeline to easily collect aerial and street city views, accompanied by ground-truth camera poses and a range of additional data modalities. Flexible controls over environmental factors like light, weather, human and car crowd are also available in our pipeline, supporting the need of various tasks covering city-scale neural rendering and beyond. The resulting pilot dataset, MatrixCity, contains 67k aerial images and 452k street images from two city maps of total size $28km^2$. On top of MatrixCity, a thorough benchmark is also conducted, which not only reveals unique challenges of the task of city-scale neural rendering, but also highlights potential improvements for future works. The dataset and code will be publicly available at our project page: https://city-super.github.io/matrixcity/.Comment: Accepted to ICCV 2023. Project page: $\href{https://city-super.github.io/matrixcity/}{this\, https\, URL}

Efficiency of Autologous Egg Cryopreservation: Eight Years’ Experiences and Clinical Outcomes

Oocyte cryopreservation is one of the state-of-art technologies in human reproductive medicine, which brings opportunities for women to preserve their fertility. In the present study, we analyzed the efficiency and outcomes of 8 years’ autologous egg cryopreservation: Frozen oocytes were warmed from 120 cycles and oocyte survival, fertilization, blastocyst development, clinical pregnancy, embryo implantation, live birth rates and birth weights were collected based on the patients’ ages of  37 years old. The details of oocyte cryopreservation and the efficiency were further analyzed based on different patient categories. During the study period, 849 oocytes from 120 cycles were warmed. Oocyte survival, fertilization, and blastocyst development were not affected by women’s ages at the time of cryopreservation. However, number of patients without blastocyst formation was significantly (P 37 years old (31.2%) than that in patients 37 years old (28.6%) after fresh embryo transfer. Some patients did not have blastocysts mainly due to low fertilization by poor sperm or small number of oocytes warmed. These results indicate that the efficiency of oocyte cryopreservation, evaluated by live birth and embryo implantation rates is affected by women’s age, number of oocytes warmed and sperm quality

Next-Generation Sequencing Revealed that High Proportion of Human Embryos Resulted from Donor Eggs Are Segmental Chromosome Abnormal

High proportion of human embryos produced by in vitro fertilization (IVF) are aneuploidy or have segmental chromosomal errors. Not only a whole chromosome aneuploidy, but also small errors in a chromosome, such as microdeletion can be detected by current next-generation sequencing (NGS) for preimplantation genetic testing (PGT). The prevalence of aneuploidy in donor egg IVF was significantly different between fertility clinics. In the present study, we examined whether different embryo biopsy procedures affect embryonic aneuploidies in donor egg IVF. We did not find significant differences in the samples with abnormal chromosomes between two biopsy methods. When we further analyzed the samples with abnormal chromosomes, we found that 64.0–80.7% of the abnormalities were whole chromosome aneuploidies while 19.3–36.0% were segmental chromosome abnormalities. High embryo implantation rates were obtained after transferring screened euploid blastocysts. These results indicate that blastocyst biopsy procedures may not significantly affect embryo’s chromosomal status, but PGT by high-resolution NGS revealed that high proportions of human embryos derived from donor eggs are not only aneuploidy, but also segmental chromosome abnormal, and screening of small chromosomal errors by NGS is beneficial to patients who use donated eggs for infertility treatment