Synthesis of N-(3-(4-[11C]methylpiperazin-1-yl)−1-(5-methylpyridin-2-yl)−1H-pyrazol-5-yl)pyrazolo[1,5-a]pyrimidine-3-carboxamide as a new potential PET agent for imaging of IRAK4 enzyme in neuroinflammation

The reference standard N-(3-(4-methylpiperazin-1-yl)−1-(5-methylpyridin-2-yl)−1H-pyrazol-5-yl)pyrazolo[1,5-a]pyrimidine-3-carboxamide (9) and its demethylated precursor N-(1-(5-methylpyridin-2-yl)−3-(piperazin-1-yl)−1H-pyrazol-5-yl)pyrazolo[1,5-α]pyrimidine-3-carboxamide (8) were synthesized from pyrazolo[1,5-a]pyrimidine-3-carboxylic acid and ethyl 2-cyanoacetate with overall chemical yield 13% in nine steps and 14% in eight steps, respectively. The target tracer N-(3-(4-[11C]methylpiperazin-1-yl)−1-(5-methylpyridin-2-yl)−1H-pyrazol-5-yl)pyrazolo[1,5-a]pyrimidine-3-carboxamide ([11C]9) was prepared from its precursor with [11C]CH3OTf through N-[11C]methylation and isolated by HPLC combined with SPE in 50–60% radiochemical yield, based on [11C]CO2 and decay corrected to EOB. The radiochemical purity was >99%, and the specific activity at EOB was 370–1110 GBq/μmol

Tree ring δ18O reveals no long-term change of atmospheric water demand since 1800 in the northern Great Hinggan Mountains, China

Global warming will significantly increase transpirational water demand, which could dramatically affect plant physiology and carbon and water budgets. Tree ring δ18O is a potential index of the leaf-to-air vapor-pressure deficit (VPD) and therefore has great potential for long-term climatic reconstruction. Here we developed δ18O chronologies of two dominant native trees, Dahurian larch (Larix gmelinii Rupr.) and Mongolian pine (Pinus sylvestris var. mongolica), from a permafrost region in the Great Hinggan Mountains of northeastern China. We found that the July–August VPD and relative humidity were the dominant factors that controlled tree ring δ18O in the study region, indicating strong regulation of stomatal conductance. Based on the larch and pine tree ring δ18O chronologies, we developed a reliable summer (July–August) VPD reconstruction since 1800. Warming growing season temperatures increase transpiration and enrich cellulose 18O, but precipitation seemed to be the most important influence on VPD changes in this cold region. Periods with stronger transpirational demand occurred around the 1850s, from 1914 to 1925, and from 2005 to 2010. However, we found no overall long-term increasing or decreasing trends for VPD since 1800, suggesting that despite the increasing temperatures and thawing permafrost throughout the region, forest transpirational demand has not increased significantly during the past two centuries. Under current climatic conditions, VPD did not limit growth of larch and pine, even during extremely drought years. Our findings will support more realistic evaluations and reliable predictions of the potential influences of ongoing climatic change on carbon and water cycles and on forest dynamics in permafrost regions

mRNA transcription and protein expression of PPAR\u3b3, FAS, and HSL in different parts of the carcass between fat-tailed and thin-tailed sheep

Background: The objective of this study was to compare the level differences of mRNA transcription and protein expression of PPAR\u3b3, FAS and HSL in different parts of the carcass in different tail-type sheep. Six Tan sheep and six Shaanbei fine-wool sheep aged 9monthswere slaughtered and sampleswere collected fromthe tail adipose, subcutaneous adipose, and longissimus dorsimuscle. The levels ofmRNA transcription and protein expression of the target genes in these tissues were determined by real-time quantitative PCR and western blot analyses. Results: The results showed that PPAR\u3b3, FAS, and HSL were expressed with spatial differences in tail adipose, subcutaneous adipose and longissimus dorsi muscle of Tan sheep and Shaanbei fine-wool sheep. Differences were also observed between the two breeds. The mRNA transcription levels of these genes were somewhat consistent with their protein expression levels. Conclusion: The present results indicated that PPAR\u3b3, FAS and HSL are correlated with fat deposition, especially for the regulating of adipose deposition in intramuscular fat, and that the mRNA expression patterns are similar to the protein expression patterns. The mechanism requires clarification in further studies

High-performance and Scalable Software-based NVMe Virtualization Mechanism with I/O Queues Passthrough

NVMe(Non-Volatile Memory Express) is an industry standard for solid-state drives (SSDs) that has been widely adopted in data centers. NVMe virtualization is crucial in cloud computing as it allows for virtualized NVMe devices to be used by virtual machines (VMs), thereby improving the utilization of storage resources. However, traditional software-based solutions have flexibility benefits but often come at the cost of performance degradation or high CPU overhead. On the other hand, hardware-assisted solutions offer high performance and low CPU usage, but their adoption is often limited by the need for special hardware support or the requirement for new hardware development. In this paper, we propose LightIOV, a novel software-based NVMe virtualization mechanism that achieves high performance and scalability without consuming valuable CPU resources and without requiring special hardware support. LightIOV can support thousands of VMs on each server. The key idea behind LightIOV is NVMe hardware I/O queues passthrough, which enables VMs to directly access I/O queues of NVMe devices, thus eliminating virtualization overhead and providing near-native performance. Results from our experiments show that LightIOV can provide comparable performance to VFIO, with an IOPS of 97.6%-100.2% of VFIO. Furthermore, in high-density VMs environments, LightIOV achieves 31.4% lower latency than SPDK-Vhost when running 200 VMs, and an improvement of 27.1% in OPS performance in real-world applications

Optimized highway deep learning network for fast single image super-resolution reconstruction

With the success of the deep residual network for image recognition tasks, the residual connection or skip connection has been widely used in deep learning models for various vision tasks, including single image super-resolution (SISR). Most existing SISR approaches pay particular attention to residual learning, while few studies investigate highway connection for SISR. Although skip connection can help to alleviate the vanishing gradient problem and enable fast training of the deep network, it still provides the coarse level of approximation in both forward and backward propagation paths and thus challenging to recover high-frequency details. To address this issue, we propose a novel model for SISR by using highway connection (HNSR), which composes of a nonlinear gating mechanism to further regulate the information. By using the global residual learning and replacing all local residual learning with designed gate unit in highway connection, HNSR has the capability of efficiently learning different hierarchical features and recovering much more details in image reconstruction. The experimental results have validated that HNSR can provide not only improved quality but also less prone to a few common problems during training. Besides, the more robust and efficient model is suitable for implementation in real-time and mobile systems

Association between triglyceride-glucose index and risk of endometriosis in US population: results from the national health and nutrition examination survey (1999–2006)

Background and AimsThe association of the triglyceride-glucose (TyG) index, a promising novel biomarker for insulin resistance, with the risk of endometriosis has not been investigated to date. This nationwide study aimed to explore the association between the TyG index and the endometriosis risk.MethodsData were obtained from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (1999–2006). Female participants who provided complete data on the TyG index and endometriosis were enrolled in the analysis. Multivariate logistic regression analyses were utilized to assess the association of the TyG index with endometriosis, adjusted by multiple potential confounders. Meanwhile, in-depth subgroup analyses were conducted.ResultsA total of 1,590 eligible participants were included, among whom 135 (8.5%) women were diagnosed with endometriosis. The fully adjusted multivariate logistic model showed TyG index was significantly associated with the endometriosis risk (odds ratio [OR]Q4 versus Q1 2.04, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.15–3.62; P for trend=0.013). In subgroup analyses, the significantly positive association between TyG index and the risk of endometriosis was also found in parous women (ORQ4 versus Q1 2.18, 95% CI: 1.20–3.96), women without diabetes (OR Q4 versus Q1 2.12, 95% CI: 1.19–3.79), women who smoke currently (OR Q4 versus Q1 3.93, 95% CI: 1.33–11.58), women who drink currently (OR Q4 versus Q1 2.54, 95% CI: 1.27–5.07), and in women who use oral contraceptives (OR Q4 versus Q1 1.91, 95% CI: 1.04–3.51). Additionally, significantly increasing trends in the odds of endometriosis across the quartiles of the TyG index were observed in the above-mentioned subgroups (all P for trend<0.05).ConclusionsThis population-based study found that a higher TyG index, representing an increased level of insulin resistance, was associated with a higher risk of endometriosis among the US population. Our findings suggested TyG index might be a promising tool for the risk assessment of endometriosis. Prospective studies are warranted to further verify these findings

Infrared Imaging of Magnetic Octupole Domains in Non-collinear Antiferromagnets

Magnetic structure plays a pivotal role in the functionality of antiferromagnets (AFMs), which not only can be employed to encode digital data but also yields novel phenomena. Despite its growing significance, visualizing the antiferromagnetic domain structure remains a challenge, particularly for non-collinear AFMs. Currently, the observation of magnetic domains in non-collinear antiferromagnetic materials is feasible only in Mn$_{3}$Sn, underscoring the limitations of existing techniques that necessitate distinct methods for in-plane and out-of-plane magnetic domain imaging. In this study, we present a versatile method for imaging the antiferromagnetic domain structure in a series of non-collinear antiferromagnetic materials by utilizing the anomalous Ettingshausen effect (AEE), which resolves both the magnetic octupole moments parallel and perpendicular to the sample surface. Temperature modulation due to the AEE originating from different magnetic domains is measured by the lock-in thermography, revealing distinct behaviors of octupole domains in different antiferromagnets. This work delivers an efficient technique for the visualization of magnetic domains in non-collinear AFMs, which enables comprehensive study of the magnetization process at the microscopic level and paves the way for potential advancements in applications.Comment: National Science Review in pres