Tetra-n-butyl­ammonium tricyanido[N-(2-pyridyl­carbon­yl)pyridine-2-carbox­imidato]ferrate(III) dihydrate

In the title compound, (C16H36N)[Fe(C12H8N3O2)(CN)3]·2H2O, the tetra-n-butyl­ammonium ion has a tetra­hedral configuration around the N atom, while the FeIII atom of the tricyanido[N-(2-pyridyl­carbon­yl)pyridine-2-carboximidato]iron(III) anion adopts a distorted octa­hedral geometry. O—H⋯O and O—H⋯N hydrogen bonds link the components in the crystal structure

DPSA: Dense pixelwise spatial attention network for hatching egg fertility detection

© 2020 SPIE and IS & T. Deep convolutional neural networks show a good prospect in the fertility detection and classification of specific pathogen-free hatching egg embryos in the production of avian influenza vaccine, and our previous work has mainly investigated three factors of networks to push performance: depth, width, and cardinality. However, an important problem that feeble embryos with weak blood vessels interfering with the classification of resilient fertile ones remains. Inspired by fine-grained classification, we introduce the attention mechanism into our model by proposing a dense pixelwise spatial attention module combined with the existing channel attention through depthwise separable convolutions to further enhance the network class-discriminative ability. In our fused attention module, depthwise convolutions are used for channel-specific features learning, and dilated convolutions with different sampling rates are adopted to capture spatial multiscale context and preserve rich detail, which can maintain high resolution and increase receptive fields simultaneously. The attention mask with strong semantic information generated by aggregating outputs of the spatial pyramid dilated convolution is broadcasted to low-level features via elementwise multiplications, serving as a feature selector to emphasize informative features and suppress less useful ones. A series of experiments conducted on our hatching egg dataset show that our attention network achieves a lower misjudgment rate on weak embryos and a more stable accuracy, which is up to 98.3% and 99.1% on 5-day and 9-day old eggs, respectively

Running Cells with Decision-Making Mechanism: Intelligence Decision P System for Evacuation Simulation

Cell migration is a central process which happens along with multicellular organisms' development and maintenance. The process that cells move to specidic locations in particular directions has some similarities with pedestrian walking behaviour. In this work, we propose a simulation model called an Intelligence Decision P System (IDPS), which is inspired by the process of cell migration. Each cell has its own decision-making mechanism and moving mechanism. They move towards its goals on a two-dimensional space under the guidance of external signals and its own regulations. Cells also communicate with each other according to specidic interaction mechanism. The environment is dedined as a place for cell movement. It includes signal objects, some of which help start or end the migration and others have great influence on the speed and directions of cells. It also keeps a record of current position for each cell. Comparing with traditional P systems, cells can be considered as intelligent particles with decision-making mechanism and they can move to their destination. A case study is about modeling and simulating a building evacuation problem in a dire emergency by using the IDPS model. To our best knowledge, the topic of evacuation simulation was not under study in the dield of membrane computing before. The simulation result shows that the IDPS allows much easier and more precise modelling of pedestrian evacuation problems. So it is supposed to be a good simulation model for pedestrian walking behaviour

The potential role of RNA N6-methyladenosine in primary Sjögren’s syndrome

ObjectiveThe pathogenesis of primary Sjögren’s syndrome (pSS) remains incompletely understood. The N6-methyladenosine (m6A) RNA modification, the most abundant internal transcript modification, has close associations with multiple diseases. This study aimed to investigate the role of m6A in patients with pSS.Materials and methodsThis study enrolled 44 patients with pSS, 50 age- and gender-matched healthy controls (HCs), and 11 age- and gender-matched patients with non-SS sicca. We detected the messenger RNA (mRNA) levels of m6A elements (including METTL3, WTAP, RBM15, ALKBH5, FTO, YTHDF1, YTHDF2, YTHDF3, YTHDC1, and YTHDC2), ISG15, and USP18 in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from patients with pSS, patients with non-SS sicca, and HCs. The clinical characteristics and laboratory findings of patients with pSS and patients with non-SS sicca were also collected. We used binary logistic regression to determine if m6A elements were risk factors for pSS.ResultsThe mRNA levels of m6A writers (METTL3 and RBM15), erasers (ALKBH5 and FTO), and readers (YTHDF1, YTHDF2, YTHDF3, YTHDC1, and YTHDC2) were all significantly higher in PBMCs from patients with pSS than in HCs. The mRNA levels of m6A writers (METTL3 and WTAP) and readers (YTHDF2, YTHDF3, and YTHDC2) were lower in PBMCs from patients with pSS compared to patients with non-SS sicca. The expression of METTL3, RBM15, FTO, YTHDF1, YTHDF2, YTHDC1, and YTHDC2 was positively correlated with the level of C-reactive protein (CRP) of patients with pSS. The mRNA level of YTHDF1 in PBMCs from patients with pSS was negatively correlated with the EULAR Sjögren’s syndrome disease activity index (ESSDAI) score. In patients with pSS, FTO, YTHDC1, and YTHDC2 were also related to white blood cells (WBCs), neutrophils, lymphocytes, and monocytes. Increased mRNA level of ALKBH5 in PBMCs was a risk factor for pSS, as determined by binary logistic regression analysis. The mRNA level of ISG15 was positively correlated with that of FTO, YTHDF2, YTHDF3, and YTHDC2 in patients with pSS.ConclusionCompared with HCs, the expression of METTL3, RBM15, ALKBH5, FTO, YTHDF1, YTHDF2, YTHDF3, YTHDC1, and YTHDC2 was considerably higher in PBMCs from patients with pSS. In comparison with patients with non-SS sicca, the expression of METTL3, WTAP, YTHDF2, YTHDF3, and YTHDC2 was reduced in PBMCs from patients with pSS. The m6A elements correlating with clinical variables may indicate the disease activity and inflammation status of pSS. Elevated expression of ALKBH5 was a risk factor for pSS. The dynamic process of m6A modification is active in pSS. m6A elements (FTO, YTHDF2, YTHDF3, or YTHDC2) might target ISG15, stimulate the expression of ISG15, and activate the type I IFN signaling pathway, playing an active role in initiating the autoimmunity in pSS

Decreased BECN1 mRNA Expression in Human Breast Cancer is Associated With Estrogen Receptor-Negative Subtypes and Poor Prognosis

AbstractBoth BRCA1 and Beclin 1 (BECN1) are tumor suppressor genes, which are in close proximity on the human chromosome 17q21 breast cancer tumor susceptibility locus and are often concurrently deleted. However, their importance in sporadic human breast cancer is not known. To interrogate the effects of BECN1 and BRCA1 in breast cancer, we studied their mRNA expression patterns in breast cancer patients from two large datasets: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) (n=1067) and the Molecular Taxonomy of Breast Cancer International Consortium (METABRIC) (n=1992). In both datasets, low expression of BECN1 was more common in HER2-enriched and basal-like (mostly triple-negative) breast cancers compared to luminal A/B intrinsic tumor subtypes, and was also strongly associated with TP53 mutations and advanced tumor grade. In contrast, there was no significant association between low BRCA1 expression and HER2-enriched or basal-like subtypes, TP53 mutations or tumor grade. In addition, low expression of BECN1 (but not low BRCA1) was associated with poor prognosis, and BECN1 (but not BRCA1) expression was an independent predictor of survival. These findings suggest that decreased mRNA expression of the autophagy gene BECN1 may contribute to the pathogenesis and progression of HER2-enriched, basal-like, and TP53 mutant breast cancers

Phosphate glass fibers facilitate proliferation and osteogenesis through Runx2 transcription in murine osteoblastic cells

Cell-material interactions and compatibility are important aspects of bioactive materials for bone tissue engineering. Phosphate glass fiber (PGF) is an attractive inorganic filler with fibrous structure and tunable composition, which has been widely investigated as a bioactive filler for bone repair applications. However, the interaction of osteoblasts with PGFs has not been widely investigated to elucidate the osteogenic mechanism of PGFs. In this study, different concentrations of short PGFs with interlaced oriented topography were co-cultured with MC3T3-E1 cells for different periods, and the synergistic effects of fiber topography and ionic product of PGFs on osteoblast responses including cell adhesion, spreading, proliferation and osteogenic differentiation were investigated. It was found that osteoblasts were more prone to adhere on PGFs through vinculin protein, leading to enhanced cell proliferation with polygonal cell shape and spreading cellular actin filaments. In addition, osteoblasts incubated on PGF meshes showed enhanced alkaline phosphatase (ALP) activity, extracellular matrix mineralization, and increased expression of osteogenesis-related marker genes, which could be attributed to the Wnt/β-catenin/Runx2 signaling pathway. This study elucidated the possible mechanism of PGF on triggering specific osteoblast behavior, which would be highly beneficial for designing PGF-based bone graft substitutes with excellent osteogenic functions