Thrombomodulin Regulates Keratinocyte Differentiation and Promotes Wound Healing

The membrane glycoprotein thrombomodulin (TM) has been implicated in keratinocyte differentiation and wound healing, but its specific function remains undetermined. The epidermis-specific TM knockout mice were generated to investigate the function of TM in these biological processes. Primary cultured keratinocytes obtained from TMlox/lox; K5-Cre mice, in which TM expression was abrogated, underwent abnormal differentiation in response to calcium induction. Poor epidermal differentiation, as evidenced by downregulation of the terminal differentiation markers loricrin and filaggrin, was observed in TMlox/lox; K5-Cre mice. Silencing TM expression in human epithelial cells impaired calcium-induced extracellular signal–regulated kinase pathway activation and subsequent keratinocyte differentiation. Compared with wild-type mice, the cell spreading area and wound closure rate were lower in keratinocytes from TMlox/lox; K5-Cre mice. In addition, the lower density of neovascularization and smaller area of hyperproliferative epithelium contributed to slower wound healing in TMlox/lox; K5-Cre mice than in wild-type mice. Local administration of recombinant TM (rTM) accelerated healing rates in the TM-null skin. These data suggest that TM has a critical role in skin differentiation and wound healing. Furthermore, rTM may hold therapeutic potential for the treatment of nonhealing chronic wounds

Women with endometriosis have higher comorbidities: Analysis of domestic data in Taiwan

AbstractEndometriosis, defined by the presence of viable extrauterine endometrial glands and stroma, can grow or bleed cyclically, and possesses characteristics including a destructive, invasive, and metastatic nature. Since endometriosis may result in pelvic inflammation, adhesion, chronic pain, and infertility, and can progress to biologically malignant tumors, it is a long-term major health issue in women of reproductive age. In this review, we analyze the Taiwan domestic research addressing associations between endometriosis and other diseases. Concerning malignant tumors, we identified four studies on the links between endometriosis and ovarian cancer, one on breast cancer, two on endometrial cancer, one on colorectal cancer, and one on other malignancies, as well as one on associations between endometriosis and irritable bowel syndrome, one on links with migraine headache, three on links with pelvic inflammatory diseases, four on links with infertility, four on links with obesity, four on links with chronic liver disease, four on links with rheumatoid arthritis, four on links with chronic renal disease, five on links with diabetes mellitus, and five on links with cardiovascular diseases (hypertension, hyperlipidemia, etc.). The data available to date support that women with endometriosis might be at risk of some chronic illnesses and certain malignancies, although we consider the evidence for some comorbidities to be of low quality, for example, the association between colon cancer and adenomyosis/endometriosis. We still believe that the risk of comorbidity might be higher in women with endometriosis than that we supposed before. More research is needed to determine whether women with endometriosis are really at risk of these comorbidities

Operation Characterization of Flash Memory with Silicon Nitride/Silicon Dioxide Stack Tunnel Dielectric

[[abstract]]The operating characteristics of flash memory devices with tunnel dielectrics comprising a silicon nitride layer or a silicon nitride/silicon dioxide (N/O) stack and annealed at various temperatures are studied. The present work indicates that flash memory devices with an N/O stack tunnel dielectric have a higher program/erase speed and reliability than those with a single Si3N4 layer. The stack tunnel dielectric composed of a thick Si3N4 layer and a thin SiO2 layer exhibits even better performance for flash memory operation. Flash memory devices having N/O stack tunnel dielectrics annealed at low temperatures show better performance in terms of erase speed and charge retention but poor robustness under read disturbance.[[fileno]]2060131010023[[department]]工程與系統科學

FPGA-Based Hybrid Stepper Motor Drive System Design by Variable Structure Control

A stepper motor is usually operated in position open-loop control for simplicity. However, in order to improve the transient and steady-state performances of the stepper motor-based drive system, a high performance stepper motor drive system is usually designed to feed the encoder signal back to form a closed-loop system such as a general servo motor drive, and high-performance position and speed loop controller can then be used to overcome the nonlinear characteristics of the motor, such as the cogging force and impacts from external load. On the other hand, the existed cogging force of the hybrid stepper motor must be solved to increase the positioning precision. The variable structure control (VSC) is insensitive to the bounded uncertainty and load disturbance, and has been known as a high-performance controller. A predefined sliding surface is used to shape the system performances, and incorporate with switching control to achieve the robustness property. Thus, we applied the VSC to implement the stepper motor drive system about the position and speed control, and the switching control is used to overcome the cogging force. The field programmable gate array (FPGA) is a good alternative to be used to realize a motor drive system by considering its programmable ability and diverse designing environment. It is easily developed as an intellectual property (IP) for future use or combined as a part of a large control system. This paper showed the procedures to develop the hardware circuits for the variable structure controller, and applied it to stepper motor position and velocity control. Functions such as PI controllers, dq-axis transformation and two-phase space vector space vector modulation (SVPWM) designed for the stepper motor drives are also shown in the paper. The system simulation and hardware circuit realization are based on MATLAB/Simulink, and realized on Altera FPGA. Simulations on MATLAB/Simulink with trapezoidal velocity profile command, and experiments with and without the load added are shown to demonstrate the hardware performances and correctness

Field Programmable Gate Array-Based Linear Shaft Motor Drive System Design in Terms of the Trapezoidal Velocity Profile Consideration

Owing to the benefits of programmable and parallel processing of the field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), they have been widely used to the realization of digital controllers and motor drive systems. In this study, we adopt the FPGA chip to realize the Linear Shaft Motor (LSM) drive system which includes the position, speed and current vector controls. Linear shaft motor is a special motor which has the magnet as the shaft and stator coils are on the forcer. Thus, it reveals a small mechanical time constant. In addition, the electrical side can be looked as a general three-phase Alternating Current (AC) system which can be powered by inverter and vector control technique can be applied to the system. The designed system needs high performance calculation ability about position/speed control and vector current control loops. The mathematical model of linear shaft motor drive system is first built and simulated by MATLAB/Simulink and the accuracy about the effect from the speed estimation method is proposed. The resulting digital model of the drive system is stored into Verilog Hardware Description Language (Verilog HDL) codes and realized by FPGA. At last, the hardware circuits as well as the power module are used to test the performance of the developed hardware system in terms of the trapezoidal velocity profile. The experimental results show that the designed system realized by FPGA has attained the desired performance

Puf6 and Loc1 Are the Dedicated Chaperones of Ribosomal Protein Rpl43 in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Ribosomal proteins are highly expressed, and the quality of ribosomal proteins must be rigorously controlled to build up a functional ribosome. Rpl43, ribosomal protein large subunit 43, is located nearby the E-site of ribosomes. In our previous study, we found that Puf6, Loc1, and Rpl43 form a trimeric complex in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Rpl43 protein levels are under-accumulated in the absence of PUF6 or LOC1. However, why the loss of Puf6 or Loc1 decreased the protein levels of Rpl43 remained unclear. In the present study, we further dissected the connections among these three proteins and found that the processing defects of pre-ribosomal RNA in puf6Δ and loc1Δ are similar to those of the mutant with depletion of Rpl43. The stability of newly synthesized Rpl43 protein decreased slightly in puf6Δ and significantly in loc1Δ. We also found that Puf6 and Loc1 could interact with nascent Rpl43 co-translationally via the N-terminus of Rpl43. While the association and dissociation of Rpl43 with karyopherins did not depend on Puf6 and Loc1, Puf6 and Loc1 interacted with nascent Rpl43 in collaboration. While the N-terminus of Puf6 contained nuclear localization signals for transport, the PUF (Pumilio) domain was essential to interaction with Loc1, Rpl43, and 60S subunits. The C-terminus of Loc1 is more important for interaction with Puf6 and Rpl43. In this study, we found that Puf6 and Loc1 are the dedicated chaperones of ribosomal protein Rpl43 and also analyzed the potential interaction domains among the three proteins. Correct formation of the Puf6, Loc1, and Rpl43 ternary complex is required to properly proceed to the next step in 60S biogenesis

Vowel classification with combining pitch detection and one‐dimensional convolutional neural network based classifier for gender identification

Abstract Human speech signals may contain specific information regarding a speaker's characteristics, and these signals can be very useful in applications involving interactive voice response (IVR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR). For IVR and ASR applications, speaker classification into different ages and gender groups can be applied in human–machine interaction or computer‐based interaction systems for customised advertisement, translation (text generation), machine dialog systems, or self‐service applications. Hence, an IVR‐based system dictates that ASR should function through users' voices (specific voice‐frequency bands) to identify customers' age and gender and interact with a host system. In the present study, we intended to combine a pitch detection (PD)‐based extractor and a voice classifier for gender identification. The Yet Another Algorithm for Pitch Tracking (YAAPT)‐based PD method was designed to extract the voice fundamental frequency (F0) from non‐stationary speaker's voice signals, allowing us to achieve gender identification, by distinguishing differences in F0 between adult females and males, and classify voices into adult and children groups. Then, in vowel voice signal classification, a one‐dimensional (1D) convolutional neural network (CNN), consisted of a multi‐round 1D kernel convolutional layer, a 1D pooling process, and a vowel classifier that could preliminary divide feature patterns into three level ranges of F0, including adult and children groups. Consequently, a classifier was used in the classification layer to identify the speakers' gender. The proposed PD‐based extractor and voice classifier could reduce complexity and improve classification efficiency. Acoustic datasets were selected from the Hillenbrand database for experimental tests on 12 vowels classifications, and K‐fold cross‐validations were performed. The experimental results demonstrated that our approach is a very promising method to quantify the proposed classifier's performance in terms of recall (%), precision (%), accuracy (%), and F1 score

Using chaos eye method to diagnose power capacitors

This study focused on the measurement and diagnostic analysis of partial discharge in power capacitors operating under prolonged periods of high voltage. An off-line test was conducted on two power capacitors, which were subjected to defect preprocessing before the experiment. The partial discharge test of the terminal to the outer casing was carried out using a 24kV high voltage transformer. The voltage of the power discharge, after which the voltage signals of the test voltage and the partial discharge were extracted. The characteristics of the discharge signal were identified using an oscilloscope. The chaos synchronization detection method was then employed to establish a chaotic error scatter plot for the discharge voltage he gravity (chaos eye) of the error scatter plot was used as the fault diagnosis feature. The advantage of this approach was the drastic reduction of the amount of data for feature extraction, and the effective detection of the slight discharge signal variation in power capacitors, thereby anticipating their operation and enabling the implementation of preemptive contingency measures to avoid major accidents