Petrogenesis of the early Cretaceous intra-plate basalts from the western North China Craton: Implications for the origin of the metasomatized cratonic lithospheric mantle

We present new bulk-rock 40Ar/39Ar age, major and trace elements and Sr-Nd-Hf isotopic data on the early Cretaceous intra-plate alkali basalts from the Western North China Craton (WNCC) to study the origin of the metasomatized cratonic lithosphere mantle. The age of these basalts is ~116 Ma. These basalts have elevated incompatible element abundance with high [La/Sm]N (2.80–4.56) and enriched Sr-Nd-Hf isotopic compositions (87Sr/86Sri = 0.7062–0.7075, εNd(t) = −6.0 to −13.0 and εHf(t) = −8.3 to −17.4), being similar to the contemporary analogues from the Western North China Craton and Paleozoic kimberlites and mantle xenoliths. The WNCC basalts also show good correlations between ɛNd(t) and ɛHf(t), and high [La/Sm]N. All these geochemical observations are consistent with the interpretation that these basalts originated from partial melting of the lithospheric mantle that experienced melt metasomatism. Two types metasomatism melts are required to explain the geochemical characteristics of these rocks. The obvious negative Nbsingle bondTa (compared with K)-Ti and positive Basingle bondPb anomalies observed in these basalts further constrain that one of the metasomatic melts was derived from the subducted terrigenous sediment. Furthermore, the overall higher P/Nd, Nb/La and Nb/Th and lower Lu/Hf of basalts in the WNCC suggest that there is also contribution of low-F melts from asthenosphere mantle. Collectively, we suggest that the formation of the metasomatized lithosphere mantle beneath the WNCC is the process of metasomatic reaction between mantle peridotite and the melts of different origin to generate metasomatic veins containing amphibole/phlogopite. Partial melting of the metasomatic lithospheric mantle at 106–120 Ma in the WNCC was considered to be induced by thermal perturbation that was ultimately related to the breakoff of the subducted oceanic slab following the closure of the Mongolia-Okhotsk ocean

Dual-acting stapled peptides target both HIV-1 entry and assembly

Background: Previously, we reported the conversion of the 12-mer linear and cell-impermeable peptide CAI to a cell-penetrating peptide NYAD-1 by using an i,i + 4 hydrocarbon stapling technique and confirmed its binding to the C-terminal domain (CTD) of the HIV-1 capsid (CA) protein with an improved affinity (Kd ~ 1 μM) compared to CAI (Kd ~ 15 μM). NYAD-1 disrupts the formation of both immature- and mature-like virus particles in in vitro and cell-based assembly assays. In addition, it displays potent anti-HIV-1 activity in cell culture against a range of laboratory-adapted and primary HIV-1 isolates.<p></p> Results: In this report, we expanded the study to i,i + 7 hydrocarbon-stapled peptides to delineate their mechanism of action and antiviral activity. We identified three potent inhibitors, NYAD-36, -66 and -67, which showed strong binding to CA in NMR and isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) studies and disrupted the formation of mature-like particles. They showed typical α-helical structures and penetrated cells; however, the cell penetration was not as efficient as observed with the i,i + 4 peptides. Unlike NYAD-1, the i,i + 7 peptides did not have any effect on virus release; however, they impaired Gag precursor processing. HIV-1 particles produced in the presence of these peptides displayed impaired infectivity. Consistent with an effect on virus entry, selection for viral resistance led to the emergence of two mutations in the gp120 subunit of the viral envelope (Env) glycoprotein, V120Q and A327P, located in the conserved region 1 (C1) and the base of the V3 loop, respectively.<p></p> Conclusion: The i,i + 7 stapled peptides derived from CAI unexpectedly target both CA and the V3 loop of gp120. This dual-targeted activity is dependent on their ability to penetrate cells as well as their net charge. This mechanistic revelation will be useful in further modifying these peptides as potent anti-HIV-1 agents.<p></p&gt

Information extraction from Webpages based on DOM distances

Retrieving information from Internet is a difficult task as it is demonstrated by the lack of real-time tools able to extract information from webpages. The main cause is that most webpages in Internet are implemented using plain (X)HTML which is a language that lacks structured semantic information. For this reason much of the efforts in this area have been directed to the development of techniques for URLs extraction. This field has produced good results implemented by modern search engines. But, contrarily, extracting information from a single webpage has produced poor results or very limited tools. In this work we define a novel technique for information extraction from single webpages or collections of interconnected webpages. This technique is based on DOM distances to retrieve information. This allows the technique to work with any webpage and, thus, to retrieve information online. Our implementation and experiments demonstrate the usefulness of the technique.Castillo, C.; Valero Llinares, H.; Guadalupe Ramos, J.; Silva Galiana, JF. (2012). Information extraction from Webpages based on DOM distances. En Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. Springer Verlag (Germany). 181-193. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-28601-8_16S181193Dalvi, B., Cohen, W.W., Callan, J.: Websets: Extracting sets of entities from the web using unsupervised information extraction. Technical report, Carnegie Mellon School of computer Science (2011)Kushmerick, N., Weld, D.S., Doorenbos, R.: Wrapper induction for information extraction. In: Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 1997) (1997)Cohen, W.W., Hurst, M., Jensen, L.S.: A flexible learning system for wrapping tables and lists in html documents. In: Proceedings of the international World Wide Web conference (WWW 2002), pp. 232–241 (2002)Lee, P.Y., Hui, S.C., Fong, A.C.M.: Neural networks for web content filtering. IEEE Intelligent Systems 17(5), 48–57 (2002)Anti-Porn Parental Controls Software. Porn Filtering (March 2010), http://www.tueagles.com/anti-porn/Kang, B.-Y., Kim, H.-G.: Web page filtering for domain ontology with the context of concept. IEICE - Trans. Inf. Syst. E90, D859–D862 (2007)Henzinger, M.: The Past, Present and Future of Web Information Retrieval. In: Proceedings of the 23th ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (2004)W3C Consortium. Resource Description Framework (RDF), www.w3.org/RDFW3C Consortium. Web Ontology Language (OWL), www.w3.org/2004/OWLMicroformats.org. The Official Microformats Site (2009), http://microformats.orgKhare, R., Çelik, T.: Microformats: a Pragmatic Path to the Semantic Web. In: Proceedings of the 15h International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 865–866 (2006)Khare, R.: Microformats: The Next (Small) Thing on the Semantic Web? IEEE Internet Computing 10(1), 68–75 (2006)Gupta, S., et al.: Automating Content Extraction of HTML Documents. World Wide Archive 8(2), 179–224 (2005)Li, P., Liu, M., Lin, Y., Lai, Y.: Accelerating Web Content Filtering by the Early Decision Algorithm. IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems E91-D, 251–257 (2008)W3C Consortium, Document Object Model (DOM), www.w3.org/DOMBaeza-Yates, R., Castillo, C.: Crawling the Infinite Web: Five Levels Are Enough. In: Leonardi, S. (ed.) WAW 2004. LNCS, vol. 3243, pp. 156–167. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)Micarelli, A., Gasparetti, F.: Adaptative Focused Crawling. In: The Adaptative Web, pp. 231–262 (2007)Nielsen, J.: Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. New Riders Publishing, Indianapolis (2010) ISBN 1-56205-810-XZhang, J.: Visualization for Information Retrieval. The Information Retrieval Series. Springer, Heidelberg (2007) ISBN 3-54075-1475Hearst, M.A.: TileBars: Visualization of Term Distribution Information. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Denver, CO, pp. 59–66 (May 1995)Gottron, T.: Evaluating Content Extraction on HTML Documents. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Internet Technologies and Applications, pp. 123–132 (2007)Apache Foundation. The Apache crawler Nutch (2010), http://nutch.apache.or

Aluminum impairs rat neural cell mitochondria in vitro.

Exposure to aluminum has been reported to lead to neurotoxicity. Mitochondria are important organelles involved in maintaining cell function. This study investigates the effect of aluminum on mitochondria in rat neural cells. The ultrastructure of mitochondria was observed, and the cell death rate (CDR), reactive oxygen species (ROS), mitochondrial membrane potential (MMP) and 3-[4,5demethyl-2-thiazalyl]-2,-5diphenyl-2H-tetrazolium bromide (MTT) were measured to investigate the effect of aluminum on the mitochondrial structure and its function in neural cells. Results observed from the mitochondrial ultrastructure show that aluminum may impair the mitochondrial membrane and cristae. Increased CDR, enhanced ROS, decreased MMP, and decreased enzyme activity in mitochondria were observed in the Al-exposed neurons (100 – 500 μM). The present study demonstrates that alteration in the mitochondrial structure and function plays an important role in neurotoxic mechanisms induced by aluminum

Monitoring of ultrafine particles in French regional air quality network

Monitoring of ultrafine particles (UFP) in the ambient air is ongoing since 2012 in France. A national working group was created in 2014, including nowadays five French regional air quality monitoring networks. The main instrument selected to monitor UFP is the particle sizer “UFP-3031” (TSI Inc.). It measures the particle number concentration between 20 and 800 nm with six size channels. Two intercomparisons were organized in 2014 and 2015, which evaluated the accuracy of this instrument through a comparison with other techniques (such as Scanning Mobility Particle Sizer, SMPS), and through uncertainty calculations. Recently, several networks have been also equipped with CPC (condensation particle counter) to be able to measure the total UFP number concentration from 7 nm. This work presents the main results of short and long-term measurement of UFP which have been carried out in various environments: urban/traffic sites, near heavy industry zones (Dunkerque and Fos-sur-Mer in northern and southern France, respectively), near harbor area (Nice)… For urban/ traffic environment, the number concentration and size distribution are compared at the national level; it appears that they vary significantly depending on the influence of road traffic around the site. The concentration levels near traffic sites are at least twice than in the urban area, especially for UFP smaller than 50 nm. Additionally, the UFP measurement also makes it possible to improve the identification of specific sources and to understand the atmospheric physicochemical phenomena. The relationship between UFP and industrial emissions, ferries, forest fires was clearly identified in different places in France. During summer, the UFP monitoring also shows the formation of new particles (between 20-30 nm or smaller) in the afternoon, due to photochemical reactions. From 2019, the French national strategy on UFP will start putting a particular emphasis on the impact of UFP on human health

Opto-mechanical measurement of micro-trap via nonlinear cavity enhanced Raman scattering spectrum

High-gain resonant nonlinear Raman scattering on trapped cold atoms within a high-fineness ring optical cavity is simply explained under a nonlinear opto-mechanical mechanism, and a proposal using it to detect frequency of micro-trap on atom chip is presented. The enhancement of scattering spectrum is due to a coherent Raman conversion between two different cavity modes mediated by collective vibrations of atoms through nonlinear opto-mechanical couplings. The physical conditions of this technique are roughly estimated on Rubidium atoms, and a simple quantum analysis as well as a multi-body semiclassical simulation on this nonlinear Raman process is conducted.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure

The Consistent Result of Cosmological Constant From Quantum Cosmology and Inflation with Born-Infeld Scalar Field

The Quantum cosmology with Born-Infeld(B-I) type scalar field is considered. In the extreme limits of small cosmological scale factor the wave function of the universe can also be obtained by applying the methods developed by Hartle-Hawking(H-H) and Vilenkin. H-H wave function predicts that most Probable cosmological constant $\Lambda$ equals to $\frac{1}{\eta}$($\frac{1}{2\eta}$ equals to the maximum of the kinetic energy of scalar field). It is different from the original results($\Lambda=0$) in cosmological constant obtained by Hartle-Hawking. The Vilenkin wave function predicts a nucleating unverse with largest possible cosmological constant and it is larger than $1/\eta$. The conclusions have been nicely to reconcile with cosmic inflation. We investigate the inflation model with B-I type scalar field, and find that $\eta$ depends on the amplitude of tensor perturbation $\delta_h$, with the form $\frac{1}{\eta}\simeq \frac{m^2}{12\pi[(\frac{9\delta_{\Phi}^2}{N \delta_h^2})^2-1]}.$ The vacuum energy in inflation epoch depends on the tensor-to-scalar ratio $\frac{\delta_h}{\delta_{\Phi}}$. The amplitude of the tensor perturbation ${\delta_{h}}$ can, in principle, be large enough to be discovered. However, it is only on the border of detectability in future experiments. If it has been observed in future, this is very interesting to determine the vacuum energy in inflation epoch.Comment: 12 pages, one figure, references added, accepted by European Physical Journal

CATERPILLER 16.2 (CLR16.2), a Novel NBD/LRR Family Member That Negatively Regulates T Cell Function

The newly discovered mammalian CATERPILLER (NOD, NALP, PAN) family of proteins share similarities with the NBD-LRR superfamily of plant disease resistance (R) proteins and are predicted to mediate important immune regulatory function. This report describes the first cloning and characterization of a novel CATERPILLER gene, CLR16.2 that is located on human chromosome 16. The protein encoded by this gene has a typical NBD-LRR configuration. Analysis of CLR16.2 suggests the highest expression among T lymphocytes. Cellular localization studies of CLR16.2 revealed that it is a cytoplasmic protein. Querying microarray studies in the public data base showed that CLR16.2 was significantly (>90%) down-regulated 6 h after anti-CD3 and anti-CD28 stimulation of primary T lymphocytes. Its reduction upon T cell stimulation is consistent with a potential negative regulatory role. Indeed CLR16.2 decreased NF-kappaB, NFAT, and AP-1 induction of reporter gene constructs in response to T cell activation by anti-CD3 and anti-CD28 antibodies or PMA and ionomycin. Following T cell stimulation, the presence of CLR16.2 reduced the levels of the endogenous transcripts for the IL-2 and CD25 proteins that are central in maintaining T cell activation and preventing T cell anergy. This reduction was accompanied by a delay of IkappaBalpha degradation. We propose that CLR16.2 serves to attenuate T cell activation via TCR and co-stimulatory molecules, and its reduction during T cell stimulation allows the ensuing cellular activation

Regulation of Class I Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) by Nucleotide-binding Domain, Leucine-rich Repeat-containing (NLR) Proteins

Most of the nucleotide-binding domain, leucine-rich repeat (NLR) proteins regulate responses to microbial and damage-associated products. Class II transactivator (CIITA) has a distinct function as the master regulator of class II major histocompatibility complex (MHC-II) transcription. Recently, human NLRC5 was found to regulate MHC-I in cell lines; however, a host of conflicting positive and negative functions has been attributed to this protein. To address the function of NLRC5 in a physiologic setting, we generated an Nlrc5−/− strain that contains a deletion in the exon that encodes the nucleotide-binding domain. We have not detected a role for this protein in cytokine induction by pathogen-associated molecular patterns and viruses. However, Nlrc5−/− cells showed a dramatic decrease of classical (H-2K) and nonclassical (Tla) MHC-I expression by T/B lymphocytes, natural killer (NK) cells, and myeloid-monocytic lineages. As a comparison, CIITA did not affect mouse MHC-I expression. Nlrc5−/− splenocytes and bone marrow-derived macrophages were able to up-regulate MHC-I in response to IFN-γ; however, the absolute levels of MHC-I expression were significantly lower than WT controls. Chromatin immunoprecipitation of IFN-γ-treated cells indicates that Nlrc5 reduced the silencing H3K27me3 histone modification, but did not affect the activating AcH3 modification on a MHC-I promoter. In summary, we conclude that Nlrc5 is important in the regulation of MHC-I expression by reducing H3K27me3 on MHC-I promoter and joins CIITA as an NLR subfamily that controls MHC gene transcription