BIOMECHANICAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN TAI-CHI PRACTICING AND ACTIVE ELDERLY DURING THE STAIR-TO-FLOOR TRANSITION

Long-term Tai-Chi practitioners tend to have similar movement to healthy adults and exhibit movement strategies that reduce fall risk during stair-to-floor transition. We aimed to assess the differences during stair descent to ground in Tai-Chi elderly practitioners and active elderly. Fourteen regular Tai-Chi practitioners and fourteen active elderly participated. Whole-body kinematics and ground reaction forces (GRFs) were recorded synchronously by using motion analysis and a force platform. A t-test was used to test the differences between the groups. Both descent and forward walking step length and center of mass (COM) velocity, both horizontal braking and propulsive force and impulse, ankle range of motion (ROM) and total work in the sagittal plane, and maximum hip moment in the frontal plane had significant differences. Our results appear to support the benefits of long-term Tai-Chi training during the stair-to-floor transition

THE EFFECTS OF QUADRICEPS TAPING AND NOWTAPING APPROCHES ON COUNTERMOVEMENT JUMP PERFORMANCE

Kinesio is one of the most common adhesive therapeutic tapes. Expect for clinical applications, kinesio claims to be able to enhance muscle activity performance. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of kinesio taping on quadriceps during a maximal counter-movement jump. Six healthy men was recruited in this study (Height: 173.8 k 4.2 em; Weight: 68.8 k 7.3 kg; Age: 22.9 k 2.3 yrs ). The kistler force plate was used to measure the jump height, takeoff force and landing force. No significant differences between two groups. The results showed that kinesio tape did not affect muscle activity and ground recreation force, jumping height and landing force

Clinical Applications of a Combination Chemotherapy Using 8-Chloro cAMP and 8-Chloro Adenosine

Dr. Cho-Chung from the NIH first thought to use halogenated cAMP derivatives as competitive inhibitors of cAMP to slow down cancer cell mitosis. While the iodine and bromine substituted versions showed very little therapeutic actions, 8-Chloro cAMP has been shown to have strong anti-cancer effects. This has been shown in the phase II clinical trials this drug has undergone. However, these trials have had issues with solubility and toxicity. The drug is similar to vitamin C and is excreted quickly. Scientists tried to overcome this by using a peristaltic pump to give patients a continuous dosage, but this proved too toxic for patients, leading to the denial of phase III trials. However, this may be overcome by taking advantage of another drug. 8-Cl Adenosine, a drug currently in phase I clinical trials, is metabolized in the body to 8-Cl ATP which is further metabolized to 8-Cl cAMP. This is important as 8-Cl Adenosine is thus not only a prodrug for 8-Cl cAMP but it is also less soluble meaning its concentrations remain high in the body for longer periods of time. Therefore, lowering the dosage of 8-Cl-cAMP and adding an IV dosage of 8-Cl Adenosine would not only provide patients with the enhanced anti-cancer effects but also give the body a less toxic source of 8-Cl cAMP in the form of 8-Cl Adenosine. We believe that combination therapy using both 8-Cl cAMP and 8-Cl Adenosine can operate synergistically, provide better anti-cancer effects, and are thus prime targets for clinical trials

Drosophila eyes absent is a Novel mRNA Target of the Tristetraprolin (TTP) Protein DTIS11

The Tristetraprolin (TTP) protein family includes four mammalian members (TTP, TIS11b, TIS11d, and ZFP36L3), but only one in Drosophila melanogaster (DTIS11). These proteins bind target mRNAs with AU-rich elements (AREs) via two C3H zinc finger domains and destabilize the mRNAs. We found that overexpression of mouse TIS11b or DTIS11 in the Drosophila retina dramatically reduced eye size, similar to the phenotype of eyes absent (eya) mutants. The eya transcript is one of many ARE-containing mRNAs in Drosophila. We showed that TIS11b reduced levels of eya mRNA in vivo. In addition, overexpression of Eya rescued the TIS11b overexpression phenotype. RNA pull-down and luciferase reporter analyses demonstrated that the DTIS11 RNA-binding domain is required for DTIS11 to bind the eya 3′ UTR and reduce levels of eya mRNA. Moreover, ectopic expression of DTIS11 in Drosophila S2 cells decreased levels of eya mRNA and reduced cell viability. Consistent with these results, TTP proteins overexpressed in MCF7 human breast cancer cells were associated with eya homologue 2 (EYA2) mRNA, and caused a decrease in EYA2 mRNA stability and cell viability. Our results suggest that eya mRNA is a target of TTP proteins, and that downregulation of EYA by TTP may lead to reduced cell viability in Drosophila and human cells

CoLLD: Contrastive Layer-to-layer Distillation for Compressing Multilingual Pre-trained Speech Encoders

Large-scale self-supervised pre-trained speech encoders outperform conventional approaches in speech recognition and translation tasks. Due to the high cost of developing these large models, building new encoders for new tasks and deploying them to on-device applications are infeasible. Prior studies propose model compression methods to address this issue, but those works focus on smaller models and less realistic tasks. Thus, we propose Contrastive Layer-to-layer Distillation (CoLLD), a novel knowledge distillation method to compress pre-trained speech encoders by leveraging masked prediction and contrastive learning to train student models to copy the behavior of a large teacher model. CoLLD outperforms prior methods and closes the gap between small and large models on multilingual speech-to-text translation and recognition benchmarks.Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 202

Structural basis of functions of the mitochondrial cytochrome bc1 complex

AbstractThe crystal structure of the cytochrome bc1 complex (ubiquinol-cytochrome c reductase) from bovine heart submitochondria was determined at 2.9 Å resolution. The bc1 complex in crystal exists as a closely interacting dimer, suggesting that the dimer is a functional unit. Over half of the mass of the complex, including subunits core 1 and core 2, are on the matrix side of the membrane, while most of the cytochrome b subunit is located within the membrane. There are 13 transmembrane helices in each monomer, eight of them belonging to cytochrome b. Two large cavities are made of the transmembrane helices D, C, F and H in one monomer and helices D′ and E′ from the other monomer of cytochrome b, and the transmembrane helices of c1, iron-sulfur protein (ISP), and subunits 10 and 11. These cavities provide entrances for ubiquinone or inhibitor and connect the Qi pocket of one monomer and the Qo pocket of the other monomer. Ubiquinol made at the Qi site of one monomer can proceed to the nearby Qo site of the other monomer without having to leave the bc1 complex. The soluble parts of cytochrome c1 and ISP, including their redox prosthetic groups, are located on the cytoplasmic side of the membrane. The distances between the four redox centers in the complex have been determined, and the binding sites for several electron transfer inhibitors have been located. Structural analysis of the protein/inhibitor complexes revealed that the extramembrane domain of the Rieske iron-sulfur protein may undergo substantial movement during the catalytic cycle of the complex. The Rieske protein movement and the larger than expected distance between FeS and cytochrome c1 heme suggest that electron transfer reaction between FeS and cytochrome c1 may involve movements or conformational changes in the soluble domain of iron-sulfur protein. The inhibitory function of E-β-methoxyacrylate-stilbene and myxothiazol may result from the increase of mobility in ISP, whereas the function of stigmatellin and 5-undecyl-6-hydroxy-4,7-dioxobenzothiazole may result from the immobilization of ISP