Low CPNE3 expression is associated with risk of acute myocardial infarction: A feasible genetic marker of acute myocardial infarction in patients with stable coronary artery disease

Background: Gene COPINE III may be related to a phosphoprotein with intrinsic kinase activity and  belongs to an unconventional kinase family. The CPNE3 gene may be used as a biomarker for assess- ment of occurrence and prognosis of various tumors. Methods: Peripheral blood was collected from 87 stable coronary artery disease (CAD) patients and 91 acute myocardial infarction (AMI) patients. Real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction test and the western blot method were adopted to measure expression quantity of CPNE3 gene at the mRNA level and the protein level.  Results: The expression of the CPNE3 gene in peripheral blood of AMI patients was significantly lower than those in peripheral blood of stable CAD patients. Low expression of CPNE3 gene was found to be unrelated to level of fasting blood glucose and serum blood lipid of patients, quantity of cardiac troponin and time of onset but was found to be correlated to the Gensini score for coronary artery. When the ex- pression of CPNE3 gene at the mRNA level in peripheral blood was used as the criterion for diagnosing AMI, its sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value were 69%, 64.8%, 68.6% and 65.2%, respectively.  Conclusions: Compared to stable CAD patients, AMI patients have a lower expression of CPNE3 gene in their peripheral blood. Patients who have low CPNE3 expression in peripheral blood are more likely to suffer from AMI than those with stable CAD. Low expression of CPNE3 gene serves as an potential independent risk factor of AMI.

Extended Ellipsoidal Outer-Bounding Set-Membership Estimation for Nonlinear Discrete-Time Systems with Unknown-but-Bounded Disturbances

This paper develops an extended ellipsoidal outer-bounding set-membership estimation (EEOB-SME) algorithm with high accuracy and efficiency for nonlinear discrete-time systems under unknown-but-bounded (UBB) disturbances. The EEOB-SME linearizes the first-order terms about the current state estimations and bounds the linearization errors by ellipsoids using interval analysis for nonlinear equations of process and measurement equations, respectively. It has been demonstrated that the EEOB-SME algorithm is stable and the estimation errors of the EEOB-SME are bounded when the nonlinear system is observable. The EEOB-SME decreases the computation load and the feasible sets of EEOB-SME contain more true states. The efficiency of the EEOB-SME algorithm has been shown by a numerical simulation under UBB disturbances

Scale-Up Production of Chicken Myoblasts in Microcarrier-Based System

With the rapid development of the cultivated meat industry, large-scale cell culture technology applied to cultivated meat production has received extensive attention. In this study, two microcarriers, Cytodex 1 and 3D TableTrix™, were used for suspension culture of myoblasts in spinner flasks to select a more suitable one for large-scale culture of myoblasts, and then the effects of different culture conditions on the large-scale culture of cells were explored. The microscopic results showed that Cytodex 1 was spheres with a smooth surface and no macroporous structure, and 3D TableTrix™ was irregular spheres with a porous surface and large pores. The results of cell culture in spinner flasks showed that the cells grew on 3D TableTrix™ more efficiently, and after 10 days of culture, the cell yield was 8.97 × 105 cells/mL. The optimal conditions for cell attachment were intermittent stirring at 40 r/min for 10 min with intervals of 50 min. The best cell culture efficiency was obtained by using cell inoculation density of 1 × 105 cells/mL, microcarrier density of 2 mg/mL, agitation speed of 40 r/min, and initial culture serum concentration of 20% as well as replacing the medium with a new one containing 10% serum (V/V) after 24 h of culture, and replacing 50% of the medium with a new one with every other day. By bead to bead transfer of the microcarriers, the cells were transferred to a 2 L spinner flask. Finally, 1.07 × 109 cells were harvested with a survival rate of more than 95%. Microcarriers loaded with cells could be cryopreserved and resuscitated, and no significant differences in proliferation status and morphology were observed compared with thawed cells. The optimized microcarrier based culture process will have promising applications in the industrial scale production of cultivated meat

GSK-3 Activity Is Critical for the Orientation of the Cortical Microtubules and the Dorsoventral Axis Determination in Zebrafish Embryos

The formation of dorsal-ventral (D–V) axis is the earliest event that breaks the radial symmetry and determines the bilateral body plan of a vertebrate embryo, however, the maternal control of this process is not fully understood. Here, we discovered a new dorsalizing window of acute lithium treatment, which covers only less than 10 minutes after fertilization. Lithium treatment in this window was not able to reverse the ventralized phenotype in tokkeabi (tkk) mutant embryos, and its dorsalizing activity on wild-type embryos was inhibited by nocodazole co-treatment. These evidences indicate that the underlying mechanism is independent of a direct activation of Wnt/β-catenin signaling, but depends on the upstream level of the microtubule mediated dorsal determinant transport. In order to identify the target of lithium in this newly discovered sensitive window, GSK-3 inhibitor IX as well as the IMPase inhibitor L690, 330 treatments were performed. We found that only GSK-3 inhibitor IX treatment mimicked the lithium treatment in the dorsalizing activity. Further study showed that the parallel pattern of cortical microtubules in the vegetal pole region and the directed migration of the Wnt8a mRNA were randomized by either lithium or GSK-3 inhibitor IX treatment. These results thus revealed an early and critical role of GSK-3 activity that regulates the orientation of the cortical microtubules and the directed transport of the dorsal determinants in zebrafish embryos

An interactive 3D geometric model acquisition and registration system

The acquisition of geometric information from real world objects has now become a major way of modeling complex scenes and environments. Unfortunately, most optical methods for geometric model acquisition require the combination of partial information from different view points, in order to obtain a single, coherent model. This, in turn, requires the registration of partial models into a common coordinate frame, a process that is usually done offline. As a consequence, holes due to undersampling and missing information often cannot be detected until after the registration process. This thesis tries to solve the 3D registration problem using graphics hardware to achieve an interactive speed, so that online next-best-view planning and hole detection during the scanning process can be conducted. The system implemented realizes effective model reconstruction and refinement by interactively using a stereo camera setup and a hardware accelerated depth-map based registration algorithm. The emphasis is put on the hardware accelerated 3D range registration algorithm which can be categorized as a variant of the well known Iterated Closest Point (ICP) algorithm. This work contributes to the field of 3D geometric model acquisition in that it proposes a fast method that leverages the function and structure of modern graphics hardwares. Technically, graphics hardware is used i n two operations. The first is to compute a rigid transformation using modern graphics rendering pipeline. The second is to combine two rendered depth images to compute quickly the absolute difference of z-values of each projected points in the overlap region in the underlying two depth images, where the computation is used to obtain an error metric for a specific candidate transformation during numerical iteration. This error metric is based on depth images which are rendered by point-based rasterization. This system currently performs roughly one registration per second, and is therefore fast enough for on-the-fly evaluation by the user. Given more time, the same method is also capable of producing full geometric models at higher quality.Science, Faculty ofComputer Science, Department ofGraduat

Interactive 3D Model Acquisition and Registration

The acquisition of geometric information from realworld objects has become a major way of modeling complex scenes and environments. Unfortunately, most optical methods for geometric model acquisition require the combination of partial information from different view points in order to obtain a single, coherent model. This, in turn, requires the registration of partial models into a common coordinate frame, a process that is usually done offline. As a consequence, holes due to undersampling and missing information often cannot be detected until after the registration