Protective Efficacy of Vitamins C and E on p,p′-DDT-Induced Cytotoxicity via the ROS-Mediated Mitochondrial Pathway and NF-κB/FasL Pathway

Dichlorodiphenoxytrichloroethane (DDT) is a known persistent organic pollutant and liver damage toxicant. However, there has been little emphasis on the mechanism underlying liver damage toxicity of DDT and the relevant effective inhibitors. Hence, the present study was conducted to explore the protective effects of vitamin C (VC) and vitamin E (VE) on the cytotoxicity of DDT in HL-7702 cells and elaborate the specific molecular mechanisms. The results demonstrated that p,p′-DDT exposure at over 10 µM depleted cell viability of HL-7702 cells and led to cell apoptotic. p,p′-DDT treatment elevated the level of reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation, induced mitochondrial membrane potential, and released cytochrome c into the cytosol, with subsequent elevations of Bax and p53, along with suppression of Bcl-2. In addition, the activations of caspase-3 and -8 were triggered. Furthermore, p,p′-DDT promoted the expressions of NF-κB and FasL. When the cells were exposed to the NF-κB inhibitor (PDTC), the up-regulated expression of FasL was attenuated. Strikingly, these alterations caused by DDT treatment were prevented or reversed by the addition of VC or VE, and the protective effects of co-treatment with VC and VE were higher than the single supplement with p,p′-DDT. Taken together, these findings provide novel experimental evidences supporting that VC or/and VE could reduce p,p′-DDT-induced cytotoxicity of HL-7702 cells via the ROS-mediated mitochondrial pathway and NF-κB/FasL pathway

Clothing motivation, online critical thinking, and the behavioural intention of clothing collocation:Mediation analysis on Chinese youth

Recent years have witnessed a boom of fashion blogging sharing information about clothing and cosmetics on diverse social media platforms. Constant exposure to fashion-related digital information heavily impacts the conception and behaviours of Chinese youth. Compared to the substantial studies on the impact of social media, scarce research has been conducted on how youth’s cognitive processing of fashion-related digital information interacts with motivational factors to determine the subsequent behaviours. This study made an initial attempt to address this issue by exploring the successive associations between clothing motivation (amotivation, controlled, and autonomous motivation), online critical thinking (for information credibility, objectivity, and relevance), and the subsequent behavioural intention. A total of 1997 Chinese youth with diverse educational backgrounds voluntarily participated in the study. Results confirmed the direct links between clothing motivation and the behavioural intention, and these links were mediated by different online critical thinking practices. This study provides new insights for both practitioners and scholars in the fields of education, psychology, social media, and marketing.</p

Plant Comparative Transcriptomics Reveals Functional Mechanisms and Gene Regulatory Networks Involved in Anther Development and Male Sterility

Gene transcription and transcriptional regulation are crucial biological processes in all cellular life. Through the next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology, transcriptome data from different tissues and developmental stages can be easily obtained, which provides us a powerful tool to reveal the transcriptional landscape of investigated tissue(s) at special developmental stage(s). Anther development is an important process not only for sexual plant reproduction but also for genic male sterility (GMS) used in agriculture production. Plant comparative transcriptomics has been widely used to uncover molecular mechanism of GMS. Here, we focused on researches of anther developmental process and plant GMS genes by using comparative transcriptomics method. In detail, the contents include the following: (1) we described the commonly used flowchart in comparative transcriptomics; (2) we summarized the comparative strategies used to analyze transcriptome data; (3) we presented a case study on a maize GMS gene, ZmMs33; (4) we described the methods and results previously reported on gene co-expression and gene regulatory networks; (5) we presented the workflow of a case study on gene regulatory network reconstruction. The further development of comparative transcriptomics will provide us more powerful theoretical and application tools to investigate molecular mechanism underlying anther development and plant male sterility

Understanding Representation Learnability of Nonlinear Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has empirically shown its data representation learnability in many downstream tasks. There are only a few theoretical works on data representation learnability, and many of those focus on final data representation, treating the nonlinear neural network as a ``black box". However, the accurate learning results of neural networks are crucial for describing the data distribution features learned by SSL models. Our paper is the first to analyze the learning results of the nonlinear SSL model accurately. We consider a toy data distribution that contains two features: the label-related feature and the hidden feature. Unlike previous linear setting work that depends on closed-form solutions, we use the gradient descent algorithm to train a 1-layer nonlinear SSL model with a certain initialization region and prove that the model converges to a local minimum. Furthermore, different from the complex iterative analysis, we propose a new analysis process which uses the exact version of Inverse Function Theorem to accurately describe the features learned by the local minimum. With this local minimum, we prove that the nonlinear SSL model can capture the label-related feature and hidden feature at the same time. In contrast, the nonlinear supervised learning (SL) model can only learn the label-related feature. We also present the learning processes and results of the nonlinear SSL and SL model via simulation experiments

Non-asymptotic Estimates for Markov Transition Matrices with Rigorous Error Bounds

We establish non-asymptotic error bounds for the classical Maximal Likelihood Estimation of the transition matrix of a given Markov chain. Meanwhile, in the reversible case, we propose a new reversibility-preserving online Symmetric Counting Estimation of the transition matrix with non-asymptotic deviation bounds. Our analysis is based on a convergence study of certain Markov chains on the length-2 path spaces induced by the original Markov chain.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figure

The effect of insulin-loaded linear poly(ethylene glycol)-brush-like poly(L-lysine) block copolymer on renal ischemia/reperfusion-induced lung injury through downregulating hypoxia-inducible factor

The aim of this study was to observe the therapeutic effect of insulin-loaded linear poly(ethylene glycol)-brush-like poly(l-lysine) block copolymer poly(ethylene glycol)-b-(poly(ethylenediamine l-glutamate)-g-poly(l-lysine)) (PEG-b-(PELG-g-PLL) on renal ischemia/reperfusion-induced lung injury through downregulating hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF) as compared to free insulin. Sprague Dawley rats were pretreated with 30 U/kg insulin or insulin/PEG-b-(PELG-g-PLL) complex, and then subjected to 45 minutes of ischemia and 24 hours of reperfusion. The blood and lungs were collected, the level of serum creatinine and blood urea nitrogen were measured, and the dry/wet lung ratios, the activity of superoxide dismutase and myeloperoxidase, the content of methane dicarboxylic aldehyde and tumor necrosis factor-α, and the expression of HIF-1α and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) were measured in pulmonary tissues. Both insulin and insulin/PEG-b-(PELG-g-PLL) preconditioning improved the recovery of renal function, reduced pulmonary oxidative stress injury, restrained inflammatory damage, and downregulated the expression of HIF-1α and VEGF as compared to ischemia/reperfusion group, while insulin/PEG-b-(PELG-g-PLL) significantly improved this effect