Differential Gene Transcription in Honeybee (Apis cerana) Larvae Challenged by Chinese Sacbrood Virus (CSBV)

Honey bees are economically important social insect. They are suffering from all kinds of pathogens, especially the virus. In response to pathogens, different immune pathways such as Toll, Imd, Jak-Stat and RNAi are involved. In the present study, the transcription analysis of 32 immune-related genes from Apis cerana challenged by Chinese sacbrood virus (CSBV), the most widely distributed virus in A. cerana, was carried out by qRT-PCR to provide cues for the antiviral mechanism and the effective control of bee viruses. The expression level of 22 genes were statistically changed, including 11 up-regulated genes (catus-2, lys-2, vir, s3a, mta1, faa, vhdl, co-1-iv, ago-1, ago-3, aub) in which 3 (ago-1, ago-3, aub) were related to RNAi pathway, and 11 down-regulated genes (kenny, pgrp-lc, pgrp-s2, abaecin, lys-1, lys-3, domeless, tepa, mlc, dscam, rpl8) related to Toll, Imd, and Jak-Stat pathways. The results indicated CSBV infection in A. cerana may activate a RNA-based antiviral immunity system. This work constituted the first report, under laboratory conditions, about induction of immune related genes in response to CSBV

In vitro cultivation of rat bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells and establishment of pEGFP/Ang-1 transfection method

ABSTRACTObjectiveTo obtain the bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs), complete phenotypic identification and successfully transfect rat BMSCs by recombinant plasmid pEGFP/Ang-1.MethodsBMSCs were isolated from bone marrow using density gradient centrifugation method and adherence screening method, and purified. Then the recombinant plasmid pEGFP/Ang-1 was used to transfect BMSCs and the positive clones were obtained by the screen of G418 and observed under light microscopy inversely. Green fluorescent exhibited by protein was enhanced to measure the change time of the expression amount of Ang-1.ResultsBMSCs cell lines were obtained successfully by adherence screening method and density gradient centrifugation. Ang-1 recombinant plasmid was transfected smoothly into rat BMSCs, which can express Ang-1 for 3 d and decreased after 7 d.ConclusionsAdherence screening method and density gradient centrifugation can be effective methods to obtain BMSCs with high purity and rapid proliferation. Besides, the expression of transfected recombinant plasmid pEGFP/Ang-1 in rat BMSCs is satisfactory

Hyperbolic Space with Hierarchical Margin Boosts Fine-Grained Learning from Coarse Labels

Learning fine-grained embeddings from coarse labels is a challenging task due to limited label granularity supervision, i.e., lacking the detailed distinctions required for fine-grained tasks. The task becomes even more demanding when attempting few-shot fine-grained recognition, which holds practical significance in various applications. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method that embeds visual embeddings into a hyperbolic space and enhances their discriminative ability with a hierarchical cosine margins manner. Specifically, the hyperbolic space offers distinct advantages, including the ability to capture hierarchical relationships and increased expressive power, which favors modeling fine-grained objects. Based on the hyperbolic space, we further enforce relatively large/small similarity margins between coarse/fine classes, respectively, yielding the so-called hierarchical cosine margins manner. While enforcing similarity margins in the regular Euclidean space has become popular for deep embedding learning, applying it to the hyperbolic space is non-trivial and validating the benefit for coarse-to-fine generalization is valuable. Extensive experiments conducted on five benchmark datasets showcase the effectiveness of our proposed method, yielding state-of-the-art results surpassing competing methods.Comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 202

Geochemical characteristics of biogenic barium in sediments of the Antarctica Ross Sea and their indication for paleoproductivity

241-248In this paper, the biogenic Ba of Column R11 in the Antarctic Ross Sea and its implications to the paleo oceanographic productivity since the late of Late Quaternary were discussed, combined with the organic carbon, opal and biogenic calcium carbonate. The biogenic Ba contents ranged from 51.8 to 508.4 μg/g overall, exhibiting a gradually rising trend from the bottom to the top. It highly correlated both with TOC and opal, revealing that on one hand biogenic Ba can be used to study the change of productivity in the Ross Sea; and on the other hand, the marine productivity gradually increased since the late Pleistocene. The new productivity based on Francois model varied from 0.40 to 233.90 gC/(m2•a). The high values were mainly concentrated at the depth from 32 to 48 cm, but the new productivity values of the bottom were lower. It was inferred that the change in marine productivity in the Ross Sea was possibly affected by the ice cover since the late Pleistocene

Original Article Activation of sonic hedgehog signaling attenuates oxidized low-density lipoprotein-stimulated brain microvascular endothelial cells dysfunction in vitro

Abstract: The study was performed to investigate the role of sonic hedgehog (SHH) in the oxidized low-density lipoprotein (oxLDL)-induced blood-brain barrier (BBB) disruption. The primary mouse brain microvascular endothelial cells (MBMECs) were exposed to oxLDL. The results indicated that treatment of MBMECs with oxLDL decreased the cell viability, and oxidative stress was involved in oxLDL-induce MBMECs dysfunction with increasing intracellular ROS and MDA formation as well as decreasing NO release and eNOS mRNA expression. In addition, SHH signaling components, such as SHH, Smo and Gli1, mRNA and protein levels were significantly decreased after incubation with increasing concentrations of oxLDL. Treatment with oxLDL alone or SHH loss-of-function significantly increased the permeability of MBMECs, and overexpression of SHH attenuated oxLDL-induced elevation of permeability in MBMECs. Furthermore, SHH gain-of-function could reverse oxLDL-induced apoptosis through inhibition caspase3 and caspase8 levels in MBMECs. Taken together, these results demonstrated that the suppression of SHH in MBMECs might contribute to the oxLDL-induced disruption of endothelial barrier. However, the overexpression of SHH could reverse oxLDL-induced endothelial cells dysfunction in vitro

Variational-based data assimilation to simulate sediment concentration in the Lower Yellow River, China

The heavy sediment load of the Yellow River makes it difficult to simulate sediment concentration using classic numerical models. In this paper, on the basis of the classic one-dimensional numerical model of open channel flow, a variational-based data assimilation method is introduced to improve the simulation accuracy of sediment concentration and to estimate parameters in sediment carrying capacity. In this method, a cost function is introduced first to determine the difference between the sediment concentration distributions and available field observations. A one-dimensional suspended sediment transport equation, assumed as a constraint, is integrated into the cost function. An adjoint equation of the data assimilation system is used to solve the minimum problem of the cost function. Field data observed from the Yellow River in 2013 are used to test the proposed method. When running the numerical model with the data assimilation method, errors between the calculations and the observations are analyzed. Results show that (1) the data assimilation system can improve the prediction accuracy of suspended sediment concentration; (2) the variational inverse data assimilation is an effective way to estimate the model parameters, which are poorly known in previous research; and (3) although the available observations are limited to two cross sections located in the central portion of the study reach, the variational-based data assimilation system has a positive effect on the simulated results in the portion of the model domain in which no observations are available