Elucidating The Mechanism Of Phenylpropanoid Regulation By The Arabidopsis Mediator Complex

The Mediator complex is a multi-protein co-regulator of eukaryotic transcription which plays a role in the expression of many, if not most, genes of the cell. Two Mediator subunits, REF4 and RFR1, were demonstrated to be important for the normal regulation of phenylpropanoid metabolism in Arabidopsis. Phenylpropanoids are a family of specialized plant metabolites derived from the amino acid phenylalanine and are involved in defense against pathogens, UV protection and structural support. In order to understand how Mediator regulates phenylpropanoid metabolism through REF4 and RFR1, a better basic understanding of this protein complex is required. Here I provide data on the initial steps in characterizing the Arabidopsis Mediator complex. First, I performed partial purification of Mediator using ion-exchange chromatography followed by LC-MS analysis of cation-exchange purified fraction. Then we generated and evaluated antibodies against specific Mediator subunits. Lastly, I used yeast two-hybrid to evaluate previously identified putative interactors of REF4, evaluated interaction between Mediator tail subunits with REF4 and RFR1, and identified new interaction candidates for RFR1

MPCViT: Searching for MPC-friendly Vision Transformer with Heterogeneous Attention

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) enables computation directly on encrypted data on non-colluding untrusted servers and protects both data and model privacy in deep learning inference. However, existing neural network (NN) architectures, including Vision Transformers (ViTs), are not designed or optimized for MPC protocols and incur significant latency overhead due to the Softmax function in the multi-head attention (MHA). In this paper, we propose an MPC-friendly ViT, dubbed MPCViT, to enable accurate yet efficient ViT inference in MPC. We systematically compare different attention variants in MPC and propose a heterogeneous attention search space, which combines the high-accuracy and MPC-efficient attentions with diverse structure granularities. We further propose a simple yet effective differentiable neural architecture search (NAS) algorithm for fast ViT optimization. MPCViT significantly outperforms prior-art ViT variants in MPC. With the proposed NAS algorithm, our extensive experiments demonstrate that MPCViT achieves 7.9x and 2.8x latency reduction with better accuracy compared to Linformer and MPCFormer on the Tiny-ImageNet dataset, respectively. Further, with proper knowledge distillation (KD), MPCViT even achieves 1.9% better accuracy compared to the baseline ViT with 9.9x latency reduction on the Tiny-ImageNet dataset.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Ongoing initiatives in China to enhance prescribing efficiency : impact and proposals for improvement

Pharmaceutical expenditure is currently rising by 16% per annum in China, greater in recent years. Initiatives to moderate this growth include drug pricing regulations, essential medicine lists and encouraging generic prescribing. These measures are principally concentrated in hospitals as they account for over 80% of total pharmaceutical expenditure. However, no monitoring of prescribing and perverse incentives enhances irrational prescribing. Review the influence of recent measures on subsequent utilization and expenditure of high-volume classes in China to provide future guidance. Principally a narrative review of published studies of the proton pump inhibitors (PPIs), statins, renin–angiotensin inhibitor drugs and traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) between 2004 and 2013 in the largest teaching hospital group in Chongqing District. Appeciable increase in drug utilisation including TCMs. Generics typically only 30% to 34% of total utilisation for the molecule for CV medicines, with decreasing trends in recent years. Greater utilisation of generic PPIs; however, this includes generic injectable preparations with considerably higher prices. Prices decreased over time, with appreciable reductions for some generics. Overall, considerable opportunities to save resources without compromising care. Restricting the formulary to just one statin, angiotensin receptor blocker or PPI based on the cheapest one would have saved 50-84% of total accumulated expenditures. Encouraging to see high utilisation of generic PPIs and low prices for some oral generics. However, real progress will only be made by addressing current perverse financial incentives. Potential reforms could include limiting the number of available medicines in a class to enhance the quality and efficiency of prescribing

Review of ongoing initiatives to improve prescribing efficiency in China; angiotensin receptor blockers as a case history

Pharmaceutical expenditure is rising by 16% per annum in China and is now 46% of total expenditure. Initiatives to moderate growth include drug pricing regulations and encouraging international non-proprietary name prescribing. However, there is no monitoring of physician prescribing quality and perverse incentives. Assess changes in angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB) utilization and expenditure as more generics become available; compare findings to Europe. Observational retrospective study of ARB utilization and expenditure between 2006 and 2012 in the largest hospital in Chongqing district. Variable and low use of generics versus originators with a maximum of 31% among single ARBs. Similar for fixed dose combinations. Prices typically reduced over time, greatest for generic telmisartan (-54%), mirroring price reductions in some European countries. However, no preferential increase in prescribing of lower cost generics. Accumulated savings of 33 million CNY for this large provider if they adopted European practices. Considerable opportunities to improve prescribing efficiency in China

Exploring the curriculum development in content and language integrated learning: A systematic review

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) is a booming innovation pervading many educational settings. The global spread of CLIL is being practiced in classrooms the world over. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of systematic curricula for CLIL, despite its widespread adoption. Furthermore, the majority of teachers are implementing CLIL without the support of suitable published materials or resource banks. To explore and explain the curriculum development in CLIL, 281 studies from 2009 to 2019 were reviewed systematically, focusing on peer-reviewed English-language journals. We identified studies through using 'Content and Language Integrated Learning' and CLIL as the search terms in the ProQuest Research Library and EBSCOhost databases. Selected articles were organized into five inquiry areas and analyzed thematically, inspired by the curriculum development model proposed by Pawlas and Oliva: 1) CLIL philosophy; 2) CLIL goals; 3) CLIL plan; 4) CLIL implementation; and 5) CLIL evaluation. Based on these themes, Boyer's scholarship of integration was introduced to propose a holistic model for CLIL curriculum development

Initiatives to improve prescribing efficiency in China and their influence : cardio-cerebral vascular medicines as a case history to provide future direction

Background: Pharmaceutical expenditure has grown by 16% per annum in China during the past decade. This has been enhanced by increased coverage as well as incentives to physicians and hospitals. Hospital pharmacies dispense 80% of medicines in China, with medicines currently accounting for 46% of total hospital expenditure. Hospitals currently rely on revenues from procurement of medicines for their sustainability. Principal measures to moderate growth in drug expenditure include initiatives to reduce procured drug prices. However, to date no formal pricing policies for generics in China similar to Europe and limited demand-side measures to enhance appropriate prescribing, e.g. no universal measures to monitor the quality of prescribing. Current incentives have led to irrationality in prescribing; e.g. high use of injectable drugs, antibiotics and traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) despite the development of essential medicine lists. Objective: Assess current utilisation and expenditure of CV medicines including TCMs between 2006 and 2012 and compare the findings with Western European countries. Methods: Uncontrolled retrospective study of prescriptions to treat cardio-vascular disease in one of the largest hospitals in Southwest China. Results: Utilisation of CV drugs increased 3.3 fold during the study period, greatest for TCMs. Procured expenditure increased 4.85 fold. Variable utilisation of generics at 29% to 31% of the total for each molecule in recent years among high volume pharmacotherapeutic products. However, low prices for generics have been achieved through multiple supply-side measures, matching those achieved among some European countries. Continued irrationality in prescribing is seen with high use TCMs despite limited evidence and the utilisation of drugs dropping significantly once low prices procured. Conclusion: Prices still have appreciable impact on the subsequent utilization of different CV drugs in China. Consequently, there is appreciable potential to introduce measures similar to Western Europe to improve future rationality and reduce overall drug costs. This could include robust formularies, quality targets and financial incentives. We are beginning to see improved rationality in the use of medicines with a reduction in TCMs. This will be monitored along with other suggestions to further enhance accessibility to medicines in China without prohibitive increases in pharmaceutical and overall expenditure

Feature Decoupling-Recycling Network for Fast Interactive Segmentation

Recent interactive segmentation methods iteratively take source image, user guidance and previously predicted mask as the input without considering the invariant nature of the source image. As a result, extracting features from the source image is repeated in each interaction, resulting in substantial computational redundancy. In this work, we propose the Feature Decoupling-Recycling Network (FDRN), which decouples the modeling components based on their intrinsic discrepancies and then recycles components for each user interaction. Thus, the efficiency of the whole interactive process can be significantly improved. To be specific, we apply the Decoupling-Recycling strategy from three perspectives to address three types of discrepancies, respectively. First, our model decouples the learning of source image semantics from the encoding of user guidance to process two types of input domains separately. Second, FDRN decouples high-level and low-level features from stratified semantic representations to enhance feature learning. Third, during the encoding of user guidance, current user guidance is decoupled from historical guidance to highlight the effect of current user guidance. We conduct extensive experiments on 6 datasets from different domains and modalities, which demonstrate the following merits of our model: 1) superior efficiency than other methods, particularly advantageous in challenging scenarios requiring long-term interactions (up to 4.25x faster), while achieving favorable segmentation performance; 2) strong applicability to various methods serving as a universal enhancement technique; 3) well cross-task generalizability, e.g., to medical image segmentation, and robustness against misleading user guidance.Comment: Accepted to ACM MM 202

Analysis of the influence of recent reforms in China : cardiovascular and cerebrovascular medicines as a case history to provide future direction

Background: Pharmaceutical expenditure has grown by 16% per annum in China, enhanced by incentives for physicians and hospitals. Hospital pharmacies dispense 80% of medicines in China, accounting for 46% of total hospital expenditure. Principal measures to moderate drug expenditure growth include pricing initiatives as limited demand-side measures. Objective: Assess current utilization and expenditure including traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) between 2006 and 2012. Methods: Uncontrolled retrospective study of medicines to treat cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases in one of the largest hospitals in southwest China. Results: Utilization increased 3.3-fold for cerebrovascular medicines, greatest for TCMs, with expenditure increasing 4.85-fold. Low prices for generics were seen, similar to Europe. However, there was variable utilization of generics at 29-31% of total product volumes in recent years. There continued to be irrationality in prescribing with high use of TCMs, and the utilization of different medicines dropping significantly once they achieved low prices. Conclusion: Prices still have an appreciable impact on utilization in China. Potential measures similar to those implemented among western European countries could improve prescribing rationality and conserve resources