BMAL1 but not CLOCK is associated with monochromatic green light-induced circadian rhythm of melatonin in chick pinealocytes

The avian pineal gland, an independent circadian oscillator, receives external photic cues and translates them for the rhythmical synthesis of melatonin. Our previous study found that monochromatic green light could increase the secretion of melatonin and expression of CLOCK and BMAL1 in chick pinealocytes. This study further investigated the role of BMAL1 and CLOCK in monochromatic green light-induced melatonin secretion in chick pinealocytes using siRNAs interference and overexpression techniques. The results showed that si-BMAL1 destroyed the circadian rhythms of AANAT and melatonin, along with the disruption of the expression of all the seven clock genes, except CRY1. Furthermore, overexpression of BMAL1 also disturbed the circadian rhythms of AANAT and melatonin, in addition to causing arrhythmic expression of BMAL1 and CRY1/2, but had no effect on the circadian rhythms of CLOCK, BMAL2 and PER2/3. The knockdown or overexpression of CLOCK had no impact on the circadian rhythms of AANAT, melatonin, BMAL1 and PER2, but it significantly deregulated the circadian rhythms of CLOCK, BMAL2, CRY1/2 and PER3. These results suggested that BMAL1 rather than CLOCK plays a critical role in the regulation of monochromatic green light-induced melatonin rhythm synthesis in chicken pinealocytes. Moreover, both knockdown and overexpression of BMAL1 could change the expression levels of CRY2, it indicated CRY2 may be involved in the BMAL1 pathway by modulating the circadian rhythms of AANAT and melatonin

Experimental Studies on Earthen Architecture Sites Consolidated with BS Materials in Arid Regions

This paper takes the preservation works on the archaeological sites of Gaochang Ruins, Xinjiang, as background. Based on the soil characteristics analysis on the archaeological sites, experimental studies were conducted on the consolidation effect of the BS-10 consolidation material on the archaeological sites of adobe and rammed earth. The results showed the following:, after consolidation, the wind erosion resistance of the soil on the archaeological sites was substantially increased, and the wind erosion modulus was reduced by 5~8 times; the soil exhibited fine grid structure and significantly reduced degree of permeability, while still maintaining the moisture exchange between inside and outside the soil; there is excellent ageing resistance; the resistance to freezing and thawing was closely related to the soil water content and had little influence in arid regions; the water resistance was improved and could satisfy the requirements for consolidating the sites in arid regions; the unconfined compressive strength was improved moderately, which was the key direction of improvement in the future, and the consolidated soil did not form duricrust on the surface and had good bonding strength with the internal parts. The BS-10 material can meet the consolidation requirements for the earthen archaeological sites in arid regions of northwest China

HEALTH POLICY AND SYSTEMS Nurses' Practice Environments, Error Interception Practices, and Inpatient Medication Errors

Abstract Purpose: Medication errors remain a threat to patient safety. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine the relationships among characteristics of the nursing practice environment, nurse staffing levels, nurses' error interception practices, and rates of nonintercepted medication errors in acute care hospitals. Design: This study, using a nonexperimental design, was conducted in a sample of 82 medical-surgical units recruited from 14 U.S. acute care hospitals. Registered nurses (RNs) on the 82 units were surveyed, producing a sample of 686 staff nurses

Matricellular protein CCN3 mitigates abdominal aortic aneurysm

Abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality; however, the mechanisms that are involved in disease initiation and progression are incompletely understood. Extracellular matrix proteins play an integral role in modulating vascular homeostasis in health and disease. Here, we determined that the expression of the matricellular protein CCN3 is strongly reduced in rodent AAA models, including angiotensin II-induced AAA and elastase perfusion-stimulated AAA. CCN3 levels were also reduced in human AAA biopsies compared with those in controls. In murine models of induced AAA, germline deletion of Ccn3 resulted in severe phenotypes characterized by elastin fragmentation, vessel dilation, vascular inflammation, dissection, heightened ROS generation, and smooth muscle cell loss. Conversely, overexpression of CCN3 mitigated both elastase- and angiotensin II-induced AAA formation in mice. BM transplantation experiments suggested that the AAA phenotype of CCN3-deficient mice is intrinsic to the vasculature, as AAA was not exacerbated in WT animals that received CCN3-deficient BM and WT BM did not reduce AAA severity in CCN3-deficient mice. Genetic and pharmacological approaches implicated the ERK1/2 pathway as a critical regulator of CCN3-dependent AAA development. Together, these results demonstrate that CCN3 is a nodal regulator in AAA biology and identify CCN3 as a potential therapeutic target for vascular disease

Improving sentiment analysis via sentence type classification using BiLSTM-CRF and CNN

Different types of sentences express sentiment in very different ways. Traditional sentence-level sentiment classification research focuses on one-technique-fits-all solution or only centers on one special type of sentences. In this paper, we propose a divide-and-conquer approach which first classifies sentences into different types, then performs sentiment analysis separately on sentences from each type. Specifically, we find that sentences tend to be more complex if they contain more sentiment targets. Thus, we propose to first apply a neural network based sequence model to classify opinionated sentences into three types according to the number of targets appeared in a sentence. Each group of sentences is then fed into a one-dimensional convolutional neural network separately for sentiment classification. Our approach has been evaluated on four sentiment classification datasets and compared with a wide range of baselines. Experimental results show that: (1) sentence type classification can improve the performance of sentence-level sentiment analysis; (2) the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on several benchmarking datasets

MicroRNA-145 Regulates Chondrogenic Differentiation of Mesenchymal Stem Cells by Targeting Sox9

Chondrogenic differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) is accurately regulated by essential transcription factors and signaling cascades. However, the precise mechanisms involved in this process still remain to be defined. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) regulate various biological processes by binding target mRNA to attenuate protein synthesis. To investigate the mechanisms for miRNAs-mediated regulation of chondrogenic differentiation, we identified that miR-145 was decreased during transforming growth factor beta 3 (TGF-β3)-induced chondrogenic differentiation of murine MSCs. Subsequently, dual-luciferase reporter gene assay data demonstrated that miR-145 targets a putative binding site in the 3′-UTR of SRY-related high mobility group-Box gene 9 (Sox9) gene, the key transcription factor for chondrogenesis. In addition, over-expression of miR-145 decreased expression of Sox9 only at protein levels and miR-145 inhibition significantly elevated Sox9 protein levels. Furthermore, over-expression of miR-145 decreased mRNA levels for three chondrogenic marker genes, type II collagen (Col2a1), aggrecan (Agc1), cartilage oligomeric matrix protein (COMP), type IX collagen (Col9a2) and type XI collagen (Col11a1) in C3H10T1/2 cells induced by TGF-β3, whereas anti-miR-145 inhibitor increased the expression of these chondrogenic marker genes. Thus, our studies demonstrated that miR-145 is a key negative regulator of chondrogenic differentiation by directly targeting Sox9 at early stage of chondrogenic differentiation