Application of Jacket Pack Anchor (JP Anchor)

Jacket Pack Anchor(JP Anchor) is applied the irregular layer that general ground anchor is difficult to be applied such as soft layer(SPT-N values of less than 20) or gravel layer that grout lost. It makes sure of the pullout resistance required in these layers by the certain grout bulb formation and expansion effect. Thereby, Jacket Pack Anchor that is a new concept makes possible the construction improving and the cost saving in the excavation site. From the field test results, it was observed that the pullout resistance of Jacket Pack Anchor was about 84% greater than that of general ground anchor, and plastic deformation of Jacket Pack Anchor compared to that of general ground anchor was about 35% at the same load cycle. Especially, it was showed that the increase of resistance over 200% and plastic deformation was about 17% in gravel layer. This method has been applied mainly in the soft reclaimed soil and marine deposit areas of Inchon and Pusan etc. or in the loose layer of urban waste landfill. From the result of these cases, its usefulness has been proved because of ground displacement and building damage with little during the excavation work. Therefore, we propose strongly to try Jacket Pack Anchor in the past difficult layer from this paper. Also, we are hoping to take the full advantage of ground anchor that is secure enough workspace to minimize disturbance of excavation or underground structure can improve work efficiency, using Jacket Pack Anchor in the excavation site

Liquid biopsy in lung cancer: Clinical applications of circulating biomarkers (CTCs and ctDNA)

Lung cancer is by far the leading cause of cancer death worldwide, with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) accounting for the majority of cases. Recent advances in the understanding of the biology of tumors and in highly sensitive detection technologies for molecular analysis offer targeted therapies, such as epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) tyrosine kinase inhibitors. However, our understanding of an individual patient's lung cancer is often limited by tumor accessibility because of the high risk and invasive nature of current tissue biopsy procedures. Liquid biopsy, the analysis of circulating biomarkers from peripheral blood, such as circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), offers a new source of cancer-derived materials that may reflect the status of the disease better and thereby contribute to more personalized treatment. In this review, we examined the clinical significance and uniqueness of CTCs and ctDNA from NSCLC patients, isolation and detection methods developed to analyze each type of circulating biomarker, and examples of clinical studies of potential applications for early diagnosis, prognosis, treatment monitoring, and prediction of resistance to therapy. We also discuss challenges that remain to be addressed before such tools are implemented for routine use in clinical settings

CIB1 protects against MPTP-induced neurotoxicity through inhibiting ASK1.

Calcium and integrin binding protein 1 (CIB1) is a calcium-binding protein that was initially identified as a binding partner of platelet integrin αIIb. Although CIB1 has been shown to interact with multiple proteins, its biological function in the brain remains unclear. Here, we show that CIB1 negatively regulates degeneration of dopaminergic neurons in a mouse model of Parkinson\u27s disease using 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP). Genetic deficiency of the CIB1 gene enhances MPTP-induced neurotoxicity in dopaminergic neurons in CIB1(-/-) mice. Furthermore, RNAi-mediated depletion of CIB1 in primary dopaminergic neurons potentiated 1-methyl-4-phenyl pyrinidium (MPP(+))-induced neuronal death. CIB1 physically associated with apoptosis signal-regulating kinase 1 (ASK1) and thereby inhibited the MPP(+)-induced stimulation of the ASK1-mediated signaling cascade. These findings suggest that CIB1 plays a protective role in MPTP/MPP(+)-induced neurotoxicity by blocking ASK1-mediated signaling

Circulating levels of DNA-histone complex and dsDNA are independent prognostic factors of disseminated intravascular coagulation

AbstractIntroductionNeutrophils can be induced to release DNA combined with histones. The resulting neutrophil extracellular trap (NET) provides a scaffold for growing hemostatic plug. Therefore, the NET formation may be inevitable in clinical conditions that are characterized by formation of vascular thrombi. Thus far, there have been no reports on the clinical significance of NET in disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC). Therefore, we investigated circulating levels of NET in DIC and analyzed their potential values to assess coagulation severity and predict clinical outcome.MethodsThe plasma levels of DNA-histone complexes and double-stranded DNA (dsDNA), considered to be in vivo markers of NET, were measured in 199 patients suspected of having DIC and 20 healthy controls.ResultThe circulating levels of DNA-histone complexes and dsDNA were significantly elevated in overt-DIC. The increased levels of these two markers correlated with the severity of coagulopathy including DIC score and D-dimer. Multivariable Cox regression analysis, adjusted for the conventional DIC markers, revealed that elevated DNA-histone complexes and dsDNA are poor independent prognostic markers.ConclusionThe circulating levels of NET release reflect the coagulation activation and adverse clinical outcomes in patients with DIC, thereby providing potential clinical relevance for mortality prediction in DIC

GOChase-II: correcting semantic inconsistencies from Gene Ontology-based annotations for gene products

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The Gene Ontology (GO) provides a controlled vocabulary for describing genes and gene products. In spite of the undoubted importance of GO, several drawbacks associated with GO and GO-based annotations have been introduced. We identified three types of semantic inconsistencies in GO-based annotations; semantically redundant, biological-domain inconsistent and taxonomy inconsistent annotations.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>To determine the semantic inconsistencies in GO annotation, we used the hierarchical structure of GO graph and tree structure of NCBI taxonomy. Twenty seven biological databases were collected for finding semantic inconsistent annotation.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The distributions and possible causes of the semantic inconsistencies were investigated using twenty seven biological databases with GO-based annotations. We found that some evidence codes of annotation were associated with the inconsistencies. The numbers of gene products and species in a database that are related to the complexity of database management are also in correlation with the inconsistencies. Consequently, numerous annotation errors arise and are propagated throughout biological databases and GO-based high-level analyses. GOChase-II is developed to detect and correct both syntactic and semantic errors in GO-based annotations.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We identified some inconsistencies in GO-based annotation and provided software, GOChase-II, for correcting these semantic inconsistencies in addition to the previous corrections for the syntactic errors by GOChase-I.</p

Expression of Heterologous OsDHAR Gene Improves Glutathione (GSH)-Dependent Antioxidant System and Maintenance of Cellular Redox Status in Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942.

An excess of reactive oxygen species (ROS) can cause severe oxidative damage to cellular components in photosynthetic cells. Antioxidant systems, such as the glutathione (GSH) pools, regulate redox status in cells to guard against such damage. Dehydroascorbate reductase (DHAR, EC 1.8.5.1) catalyzes the glutathione-dependent reduction of oxidized ascorbate (dehydroascorbate) and contains a redox active site and glutathione binding-site. The DHAR gene is important in biological and abiotic stress responses involving reduction of the oxidative damage caused by ROS. In this study, transgenic Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942 (TA) was constructed by cloning the Oryza sativa L. japonica DHAR (OsDHAR) gene controlled by an isopropyl β-D-1-thiogalactopyranoside (IPTG)-inducible promoter (Ptrc) into the cyanobacterium to study the functional activities of OsDHAR under oxidative stress caused by hydrogen peroxide exposure. OsDHAR expression increased the growth of S. elongatus PCC 7942 under oxidative stress by reducing the levels of hydroperoxides and malondialdehyde (MDA) and mitigating the loss of chlorophyll. DHAR and glutathione S-transferase activity were higher than in the wild-type S. elongatus PCC 7942 (WT). Additionally, overexpression of OsDHAR in S. elongatus PCC 7942 greatly increased the glutathione (GSH)/glutathione disulfide (GSSG) ratio in the presence or absence of hydrogen peroxide. These results strongly suggest that DHAR attenuates deleterious oxidative effects via the glutathione (GSH)-dependent antioxidant system in cyanobacterial cells. The expression of heterologous OsDHAR in S. elongatus PCC 7942 protected cells from oxidative damage through a GSH-dependent antioxidant system via GSH-dependent reactions at the redox active site and GSH binding site residues during oxidative stress

Carpe Diem: On the Evaluation of World Knowledge in Lifelong Language Models

In an ever-evolving world, the dynamic nature of knowledge presents challenges for language models that are trained on static data, leading to outdated encoded information. However, real-world scenarios require models not only to acquire new knowledge but also to overwrite outdated information into updated ones. To address this under-explored issue, we introduce the temporally evolving question answering benchmark, EvolvingQA - a novel benchmark designed for training and evaluating LMs on an evolving Wikipedia database, where the construction of our benchmark is automated with our pipeline using large language models. Our benchmark incorporates question-answering as a downstream task to emulate real-world applications. Through EvolvingQA, we uncover that existing continual learning baselines have difficulty in updating and forgetting outdated knowledge. Our findings suggest that the models fail to learn updated knowledge due to the small weight gradient. Furthermore, we elucidate that the models struggle mostly on providing numerical or temporal answers to questions asking for updated knowledge. Our work aims to model the dynamic nature of real-world information, offering a robust measure for the evolution-adaptability of language models.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables; accepted at NeurIPS Syntheticdata4ML workshop, 202