Efficient Commitment to Functional CD34+ Progenitor Cells from Human Bone Marrow Mesenchymal Stem-Cell-Derived Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells

The efficient commitment of a specialized cell type from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) without contamination from unknown substances is crucial to their use in clinical applications. Here, we propose that CD34+ progenitor cells, which retain hematopoietic and endothelial cell potential, could be efficiently obtained from iPSCs derived from human bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (hBMMSC-iPSCs) with defined factors. By treatment with a cocktail containing mesodermal, hematopoietic, and endothelial inducers (BMP4, SCF, and VEGF, respectively) for 5 days, hBMMSC-iPSCs expressed the mesodermal transcription factors Brachyury and GATA-2 at higher levels than untreated groups (P<0.05). After culturing with another hematopoietic and endothelial inducer cocktail, including SCF, Flt3L, VEGF and IL-3, for an additional 7–9 days, CD34+ progenitor cells, which were undetectable in the initial iPSC cultures, reached nearly 20% of the total culture. This was greater than the relative number of progenitor cells produced from human-skin-fibroblast-derived iPSCs (hFib-iPSCs) or from the spontaneous differentiation groups (P<0.05), as assessed by flow cytometry analysis. These induced cells expressed hematopoietic transcription factors TAL-1 and SCL. They developed into various hematopoietic colonies when exposed to semisolid media with hematopoietic cytokines such as EPO and G-CSF. Hematopoietic cell lineages were identified by phenotype analysis with Wright-Giemsa staining. The endothelial potential of the cells was also verified by the confirmation of the formation of vascular tube-like structures and the expression of endothelial-specific markers CD31 and VE-CADHERIN. Efficient induction of CD34+ progenitor cells, which retain hematopoietic and endothelial cell potential with defined factors, provides an opportunity to obtain patient-specific cells for iPSC therapy and a useful model for the study of the mechanisms of hematopoiesis and drug screening

Digital Twin Brain: a simulation and assimilation platform for whole human brain

In this work, we present a computing platform named digital twin brain (DTB) that can simulate spiking neuronal networks of the whole human brain scale and more importantly, a personalized biological brain structure. In comparison to most brain simulations with a homogeneous global structure, we highlight that the sparseness, couplingness and heterogeneity in the sMRI, DTI and PET data of the brain has an essential impact on the efficiency of brain simulation, which is proved from the scaling experiments that the DTB of human brain simulation is communication-intensive and memory-access intensive computing systems rather than computation-intensive. We utilize a number of optimization techniques to balance and integrate the computation loads and communication traffics from the heterogeneous biological structure to the general GPU-based HPC and achieve leading simulation performance for the whole human brain-scaled spiking neuronal networks. On the other hand, the biological structure, equipped with a mesoscopic data assimilation, enables the DTB to investigate brain cognitive function by a reverse-engineering method, which is demonstrated by a digital experiment of visual evaluation on the DTB. Furthermore, we believe that the developing DTB will be a promising powerful platform for a large of research orients including brain-inspiredintelligence, rain disease medicine and brain-machine interface.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figure

Numerical Simulation and Optimization Design of End-Suspended Pile Support for Soil-Rock Composite Foundation Pit

In order to design the soil-rock combination foundation pit more safely and effectively, this paper presents the investigations of the mechanical and deformational characteristics of end-suspended piles supporting the structures in Jinan CBD area. Based on the measured data, a finite element model was established through the two-dimensional numerical simulation method to study the deformational characteristics of the end-suspended piles, and the influences of the depth of socketed rock, the width of rock shoulder, and the prestress of anchor cables on the deformations and mechanical property of end-suspended piles were discussed. Some optimization methods are proposed based on these analyses. Results show the following: (1) Rock-socketed depths have boundary effect on end-suspended piles. Under the given geological conditions, the reasonable socketed ratio is within 0.158∼0.200. (2) The anchor cable prestress can effectively slow down the ground settlement, the force, and deformation of the pile body and can be set to 1P∼1.25P under the conditions of the site. (3) Rock-shoulder width has little influence on the ground settlement and horizontal displacement of piles. The reserved width of rock shoulder is suggested to be selected in the range of 1.0 m∼1.5 m

A Dynamic Attention and Multi-Strategy-Matching Neural Network Based on Bert for Chinese Rice-Related Answer Selection

To allow the intelligent detection of correct answers in the rice-related question-and-answer (Q&A) communities of the “China Agricultural Technology Extension Information Platform”, we propose an answer selection model with dynamic attention and multi-strategy matching (DAMM). According to the characteristics of the rice-related dataset, the twelve-layer Chinese Bert pre-training model was employed to vectorize the text data and was compared with Word2vec, GloVe, and TF-IDF (Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency) methods. It was concluded that Bert could effectively solve the agricultural text’s high dimensionality and sparsity problems. As well as the problem of polysemy having different meanings in different contexts, dynamic attention with two different filtering strategies was used in the attention layer to effectively remove the sentence’s noise. The sentence representation of question-and-answer sentences was obtained. Secondly, two matching strategies (Full matching and Attentive matching) were introduced in the matching layer to complete the interaction between sentence vectors. Thirdly, a bi-directional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU) network spliced the sentence vectors obtained from the matching layer. Finally, a classifier was employed to calculate the similarity of splicing vectors, and the semantic correlation between question-and-answer sentences was acquired. The experimental results showed that DAMM had the best performance in the rice-related answer selection dataset compared with the other six answer selection models, of which MAP (Mean Average Precision) and MRR (Mean Reciprocal Rank) of DAMM gained 85.7% and 88.9%, respectively. Compared with the other six kinds of answer selection models, we present a new state-of-the-art method with the rice-related answer selection dataset

An Optimization Scheme of Balancing GHG Emission and Income in Circular Agriculture System

With the rapid development of circular agriculture in China, balancing agricultural income and environmental impact by adjusting the structure and scale of circular agriculture is becoming increasingly important. Agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gas and income earned from agriculture drives sustainable agricultural development. This paper built a multi-objective linear programming model based on greenhouse gas emission and agricultural product income and then optimized the structure and scale of circular agriculture using Beiqiu Farm as a case study. Results showed that greenhouse gas emission was mainly from manure management in livestock industry. While the agriculture income increased by 64% after optimization, GHG emission increased by only 12.3%. The optimization made full use of straw, manure and fodder, but also minimized soil nitrogen loss. The results laid a generalized guide for adjusting the structure and scale of the planting and raising industry. Measures for optimizing the management of manure were critical in achieving low agricultural carbon emissions in future agricultural development efforts