Nuclear interactions of topoisomerase II α and β with phospholipid scramblase 1

DNA topoisomerase (topo) II modulates DNA topology and is essential for cell division. There are two isoforms of topo II (α and β) that have limited functional redundancy, although their catalytic mechanisms appear the same. Using their COOH-terminal domains (CTDs) in yeast two-hybrid analysis, we have identified phospholipid scramblase 1 (PLSCR1) as a binding partner of both topo II α and β. Although predominantly a plasma membrane protein involved in phosphatidylserine externalization, PLSCR1 can also be imported into the nucleus where it may have a tumour suppressor function. The interactions of PLSCR1 and topo II were confirmed by pull-down assays with topo II α and β CTD fusion proteins and endogenous PLSCR1, and by co-immunoprecipitation of endogenous PLSCR1 and topo II α and β from HeLa cell nuclear extracts. PLSCR1 also increased the decatenation activity of human topo IIα. A conserved basic sequence in the CTD of topo IIα was identified as being essential for binding to PLSCR1 and binding of the two proteins could be inhibited by a synthetic peptide corresponding to topo IIα amino acids 1430-1441. These studies reveal for the first time a physical and functional interaction between topo II and PLSCR1

Local Global Relational Network for Facial Action Units Recognition

Many existing facial action units (AUs) recognition approaches often enhance the AU representation by combining local features from multiple independent branches, each corresponding to a different AU. However, such multi-branch combination-based methods usually neglect potential mutual assistance and exclusion relationship between AU branches or simply employ a pre-defined and fixed knowledge-graph as a prior. In addition, extracting features from pre-defined AU regions of regular shapes limits the representation ability. In this paper, we propose a novel Local Global Relational Network (LGRNet) for facial AU recognition. LGRNet mainly consists of two novel structures, i.e., a skip-BiLSTM module which models the latent mutual assistance and exclusion relationship among local AU features from multiple branches to enhance the feature robustness, and a feature fusion&refining module which explores the complementarity between local AUs and the whole face in order to refine the local AU features to improve the discriminability. Experiments on the BP4D and DISFA AU datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin

Cognitive Function Recovery Pattern in Adult Patients With Severe Anti-N-Methyl-D-Aspartate Receptor Encephalitis: A Longitudinal Study

Objective: To observe the dynamic characteristics of cognitive function following early application of immunotherapy in adult patients with severe anti N-methyl D-aspartate receptor (anti-NMDAR) encephalitis.Methods: Serial neuropsychological assessments were performed at three sequential time points in five adult patients with severe anti-NMDAR encephalitis following early-initiated immunotherapy. The three sequential points were 1–2, 6, and 11–12 months after treatment. Five normal subjects without psychological or neurological diseases were assessed as a control group.Results: Following early-initiated immunotherapy, all five patients demonstrated a gradual improvement of overall cognitive function over the 1-year follow-up period. All patients had suffered from a comprehensive cognitive function disorder from the early stages of the illness. Six months after the immunotherapy, the treatment group showed no significant differences in verbal episodic memory function compared with the control group. One year after the immunotherapy, non-verbal episodic memory function in the treatment group had normalized. The results of other tests related to frontoparietal cognitive function revealed damage of varying degrees during these three phases.Conclusion: The results of this sequential observation study indicated a three-phase recovery pattern of cognitive function in adult patients with severe anti-NMDAR encephalitis following early initiated immunotherapy. These findings extend current understanding of the recovery mechanisms of cognitive function impairment in this disease

Effect of blanching on volatile compounds and structural aspects of Cordyceps militaris dried by microwave-assisted pulse-spouted bed freeze-drying (MPSFD)

Effect of low temperature blanching at 50°C (for 15, 30, and 60 min) and high temperature blanching at 100°C (30, 60, and 120 s) on volatile compounds and structural properties of Cordyceps militaris dried by microwave-assisted pulse-spouted bed freeze-drying were investigated. A total of 83 volatile compounds were identified. Blanching at 100°C remarkably decreased the ketones and alcohols while contributed to the formation of alkanes. The absence at 993 cm and the appearance near 1548 cm in samples blanched at 100°C were observed, indicating blanching at high temperature would cause the loss of polysaccharides and the degradation of proteins. Principal component analysis and cluster analysis suggested that volatile compounds in untreated samples and those blanched at 50°C for 15 min were similar. In general, blanching at 50°C for 15 min is recommended regarding the retention of flavor components and structural properties of dried C. militaris

Effects of microwave-assisted pulse-spouted bed freeze-drying (MPSFD) on volatile compounds and structural aspects of Cordyceps militaris

Microwave-assisted pulse-spouted bed freeze-drying (MPSFD) uses microwave heating to substitute the customary conduction heating during freeze drying (FD), resulting in high-quality dried samples with a short drying time. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of MPSFD on volatile compounds and structural aspects of Cordyceps militaris. In order to highlight the effect of MPSFD, FD (recognized for its high-quality products) and hot-air dying (HD; the most commonly used) were also evaluated using headspace solid-phase micro-extraction combined with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and mid-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy.Sixty-two components were obtained by FD, 62 compounds by MPSFD and 39 by HD. FD and MPSFD exhibited much better effects on the retention of volatile components of C. militaris than HD. Principal component analysis, hierarchical clustering analysis and E-nose analysis indicated that the volatile compounds of C. militaris dried by FD and MPSFD were similar. The spectral features of FD and MPSFD samples were also similar, whereas the HD sample presented a clearly different spectral feature around a wavenumber of 1640 cm .MPSFD exhibited a beneficial effect on aroma and structure retention, with shorter drying time and lower energy consumption. © 2018 Society of Chemical Industry