Genetic Polymorphism and mRNA Expression Studies Reveal IL6R and LEPR Gene Associations with Reproductive Traits in Chinese Holsteins

Genetic selection of milk yield traits alters the energy distribution of high producing cows, resulting in gene-induced negative energy balance, and consequently, poor body condition scores and reduced reproductive performances. Here, we investigated two metabolic-syndrome pathway genes, IL6R (Interleukin 6 receptor) and LEPR (Leptin receptor), for their polymorphism effects on reproductive performance in dairy cows, by applying polymorphism association analyses in 1588 Chinese Holstein cows (at population level) and gene expression analyses in granulosa cells isolated from eight cows (at cell level). Among the six single nucleotide polymorphisms we examined (two SNPs for IL6R and four SNPs for LEPR), five were significantly associated with at least one reproductive trait, including female fertility traits covering both the ability to recycle after calving and the ability to conceive and keep pregnancy when inseminated properly, as well as calving traits. Notably, the identified variant SNP g.80143337A/C in LEPR is a missense variant. The role of IL6R and LEPR in cattle reproduction were further confirmed by observed differences in relative gene expression levels amongst granulosa cells with different developmental stages. Collectively, the functional validation of IL6R and LEPR performed in this study improved our understanding of cattle reproduction while providing important molecular markers for genetic selection of reproductive traits in high-yielding dairy cattle

Condiciones Laborales y de Salud de Los Trabajadores de la Maquila del Tabaco. Ciudad El Paraíso, Honduras. Octubre 2003 a Marzo 2004.

El propósito es describir las características socio demográficas, las condiciones de trabajo y situación de salud de los trabajadores para aportar información y conocer la magnitud y trascendencia de esta problemática y tomar decisiones necesarias de prevención

Dynamic Sealing Behavior of Sand Self-Juxtaposition Windows on a Trap-Bounding Fault in a Natural Gas Storage Site

AbstractAn understanding of across-fault seals is essential for planning an injection/production strategy for a fault-bounded gas storage site. In addition, it is more likely to permit lateral leakage for a fault with sand self-juxtaposition windows. This paper is aimed at identifying the dynamic sealing behaviors of a sand self-juxtaposition fault on the geological and gas injection timescales. Banzhongbei gas storage site, China, was taken as a target area, and fault seals and hydrocarbon distributions within the original reservoirs were studied. The results showed that across-fault pressure differences of 0.085~0.146 MPa (equivalent to 41.6~71.5 m oil-column and 27.0~46.4 m gas-column heights) were supported by sand self-juxtaposition windows on the B816 fault, and the resultant absolute permeability (5.97×10−2~5.69×10−1 mD) of the fault was nearly 3~4 orders of magnitude lower than the average absolute permeability of reservoirs (1.16×102 mD). Gas composition contrasts, between the original and injection gas coupled with dynamic pressure monitoring data, indicated that lateral leakage occurred across sand self-juxtaposition windows under the condition of high across-fault pressure difference. However, the low-permeability fault showed strong negative influence on the efficiency of fluid flow in the model calculations and prolongs the timescales of pressure-difference decayed as much as 5 orders of magnitude relative to those of nonfault model calculations. These modeled dynamic sealing behaviors of sand self-juxtaposition windows may lead to a better understanding of the relative retardation of across-fault gas flow by weak sealing faults on the gas injection/production timescale

Toll-Like Receptor 7 Enhances Rabies Virus-Induced Humoral Immunity by Facilitating the Formation of Germinal Centers

Rabies virus (RABV) causes fatal encephalitis in mammals and poses a public health threat in many parts of the world. Vaccination remains the most effective means for prevention and control of rabies. Studies focusing on the mechanism of RABV immunogenicity are necessary for improvement of rabies vaccines. Toll-like receptor 7 (TLR7), an innate receptor sensing single-stranded viral RNA, is important for the induction of innate and adaptive immunity. Our studies revealed that the absence of TLR7 led to a lower antibody production in mice immunized with RABV. It is further found that TLR7 deficiency affected the recruitment of germinal center (GC) B cells and led to lessened GCs formation. Consistently, there were less plasma cells (PCs) and antibody secreting cells (ASC) in TLR7−/− mice than those in wild type (WT) mice, resulting in impaired production of RABV-neutralizing antibodies (VNA). TLR7 deficiency also impaired the generation of memory B cells (MBCs) and the induction of secondary immune responses. Moreover, TLR7 deficiency down-regulated the induction of some cytokines/chemokines, especially IFN-γ, resulting in a Th2-biased antibody production. Overall, our results suggest that TLR7 facilitates the induction of the humoral immunity in response to RABV

Facial expression animation through action units transfer in latent space

Automatic animation synthesis has attracted much attention from the community. As most existing methods take a small number of discrete expressions rather than continuous expressions, their integrity and reality of the facial expressions is often compromised. In addition, the easy manipulation with simple inputs and unsupervised processing, although being important to the automatic facial expression animation applications, is relatively less concerned. To address these issues, we propose an unsupervised continuous automatic facial expression animation approach through action units (AU) transfer in the latent space of generative adversarial networks. The expression descriptor which is depicted with AU vector is transferred into the input image without the need of labeled pairs of images and even without their expressions and further network training. We also propose a new approach to quickly generate input image's latent code and cluster the boundaries of different AU attributes with their latent codes. Two latent code operators, vector addition and continuous interpolation, are leveraged for facial expression animation simulating align with the boundaries in the latent space. Experiments have shown that the proposed approach is effective on facial expression translation and animation synthesis