Associations of triglyceride levels with longevity and frailty: A Mendelian randomization analysis.

Observational studies suggest associations of triglyceride levels with longevity and frailty. This study aimed to test whether the associations are causal. We used data from the Rugao Longevity and Ageing Study, a population-based cohort study performed in Rugao, China. A variant in the APOA5 gene region (rs662799) was used as the genetic instrument. Mendelian randomization (MR) analyses were performed to examine the associations of genetically predicted triglycerides with two ageing phenotypes - longevity ( ≥95 years) and frailty (modified Fried frailty phenotype and Rockwood frailty index). C allele of rs662799 was robustly associated with higher triglyceride levels in the comparison group (β = 0.301 mmol/L per allele, p < 0.001), with an F statistic of 95.3 and R2 = 0.040. However MR analysis did not provide strong evidence for an association between genetically predicted triglyceride levels and probability of longevity (OR: 0.61; 95% CI: 0.35, 1.07 per 1 mmol/L increase in triglycerides). In the ageing arm (70-84 years), genetically predicted triglyceride levels were not associated with the frailty index (β = 0.008; 95% CI: -0.013, 0.029) or the frailty phenotype (OR: 1.91; 95% CI: 0.84, 4.37). In conclusion, there is currently a lack of sufficient evidence to support causal associations of triglyceride levels with longevity and frailty in elderly populations

Histopathological Observation of Immunized Rhesus Macaques with Plague Vaccines after Subcutaneous Infection of Yersinia pestis

In our previous study, complete protection was observed in Chinese-origin rhesus macaques immunized with SV1 (20 µg F1 and 10 µg rV270) and SV2 (200 µg F1 and 100 µg rV270) subunit vaccines and with EV76 live attenuated vaccine against subcutaneous challenge with 6×106 CFU of Y. pestis. In the present study, we investigated whether the vaccines can effectively protect immunized animals from any pathologic changes using histological and immunohistochemical techniques. In addition, the glomerular basement membranes (GBMs) of the immunized animals and control animals were checked by electron microscopy. The results show no signs of histopathological lesions in the lungs, livers, kidneys, lymph nodes, spleens and hearts of the immunized animals at Day 14 after the challenge, whereas pathological alterations were seen in the corresponding tissues of the control animals. Giemsa staining, ultrastructural examination, and immunohistochemical staining revealed bacteria in some of the organs of the control animals, whereas no bacterium was observed among the immunized animals. Ultrastructural observation revealed that no glomerular immune deposits on the GBM. These observations suggest that the vaccines can effectively protect animals from any pathologic changes and eliminate Y. pestis from the immunized animals. The control animals died from multi-organ lesions specifically caused by the Y. pestis infection. We also found that subcutaneous infection of animals with Y. pestis results in bubonic plague, followed by pneumonic and septicemic plagues. The histopathologic features of plague in rhesus macaques closely resemble those of rodent and human plagues. Thus, Chinese-origin rhesus macaques serve as useful models in studying Y. pestis pathogenesis, host response and the efficacy of new medical countermeasures against plague

Plasma Exfoliated Graphene: Preparation via Rapid, Mild Thermal Reduction of Graphene Oxide and Application in Lithium Batteries

A simple, novel approach is proposed for the preparation of plasma-exfoliated graphene (PEGN) by reducing graphene oxide (GO) through a dielectric-barrier discharge (DBD) plasma treatment in a H2 atmosphere. The surface chemistry, microstructures, and crystallinity of the prepared samples were characterized via X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and Raman spectrometry to determine the formation mechanism of the PEGN. The results demonstrated that the prepared PEGN had only a few layers in its structure and that most of the functional groups containing oxygen on the GO surface were removed. The PEGN exhibited a considerably higher capacity, better cycling stability, and favorable electron transfer rate for use as a cathode material for lithium-ion batteries. This proposed approach is fast, convenient, and inexpensive, constituting a novel means of producing graphene

REGENERATION OF PLANTLETS AND TETRAPLOIDY INDUCTION IN PSEUDOSTELLARIA HETEROPHYLLA

This study was aimed at developing an efficient protocol for regeneration of Pseudostellaria heterophylla plantlets and induction of polyploidy. Calli of P. heterophylla (Miq) from stems, leaves and buds as explants could not differentiate into plantlets. However, Young embryo segments used as primary explants produced embryonic calli on MS medium containing 5.0 mg/L 2,4-D and 0.5 mg/L KT. After the embryonic calli with granular protuberances were transferred to MS medium containing 0.5 mg/L BA, they developed shoots and then rooted to form plantlets. Polyploidy was induced when embryonic calli were placed in liquid MS medium containing 0.5% colchicine for 4 days, followed by culturing in solid medium to induce differentiation. Polyploidy was identified by the number of chromosomes and the size of plantlet stomata. The tetraploid plantlets produced larger root tubers than the diploid plantlets.National Natural Science Foundation of China [30670126]; Xiamen Science Item [3502Z20084037

Progressive Training Technique with Weak-Label Boosting for Fine-Grained Classification on Unbalanced Training Data

In practical classification tasks, the sample distribution of the dataset is often unbalanced; for example, this is the case in a dataset that contains a massive quantity of samples with weak labels and for which concrete identification is unavailable. Even in samples with exact labels, the number of samples corresponding to many labels is small, resulting in difficulties in learning the concepts through a small number of labeled samples. In addition, there is always a small interclass variance and a large intraclass variance among categories. Weak labels, few-shot problems, and fine-grained analysis are the key challenges affecting the performance of the classification model. In this paper, we develop a progressive training technique to address the few-shot challenge, along with a weak-label boosting method, by considering all of the weak IDs as negative samples of every predefined ID in order to take full advantage of the more numerous weak-label data. We introduce an instance-aware hard ID mining strategy in the classification loss and then further develop the global and local feature-mapping loss to expand the decision margin. We entered the proposed method into the Kaggle competition, which aims to build an algorithm to identify individual humpback whales in images. With a few other common training tricks, the proposed approach won first place in the competition. All three problems (weak labels, few-shot problems, and fine-grained analysis) exist in the dataset used in the competition. Additionally, we applied our method to CUB-2011 and Cars-196, which are the most widely-used datasets for fine-grained visual categorization tasks, and achieved respective accuracies of 90.1% and 94.9%. This experiment shows that the proposed method achieves the optimal effect compared with other common baselines, and verifies the effectiveness of our method. Our solution has been made available as an open source project

Serum Cytokine Responses in Primary Pneumonic Plague Patients ▿

The serum levels of interleukin-2 (IL-2), gamma interferon (IFN-γ), tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α), IL-4, IL-6, and IL-10 of pneumonic plague patients were determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. IL-6 was the only elevated cytokine in the patients, and its level increased with a clear time course, indicating that IL-6 might be a prognostic marker for predicting the progression of plague