Role of TGFbRII in myeloid cell mediated regenerative processes and fibroplasia

Tissue repair and fibrosis are controlled by the interaction of different cell lineages, their soluble factors and matrix signals. Recently, macrophages have been found to be crucial for proper tissue repair. In particular, the role of Transforming growth factor-β1 (TGF-β1) has been extensively studied during tissue repair and fibrosis. Fibrosis is characterized by excessive production and deposition of extracellular matrix, as well as immune cell infiltration. Macrophages are one of the main sources of TGF-β1. So far, studies on the mechanisms of tissue repair and fibrosis have mainly focused on macrophages or TGF-β1 individually. However, the specific function of TGF-β1 on macrophages in tissue repair and fibrosis still needs to be elucidated. To understand the macrophage specific role of TGFβ1-TGFβRII signaling in tissue repair and fibrosis, we generated a mouse model, which lacks TGFβRII in myeloid cells (TGFβRIIfl/fl/LysMCre). We observed that during mechanical tissue injury TGFβRII signaling in macrophages contributes to wound contraction, possibly by cross—talk between macrophages and fibroblasts. The attenuated wound contraction was accompanied by impaired myofibroblast differentiation and collagen deposition. However, the loss of TGFβRII signaling in macrophages did not lead to reduced expression of TGF- β1, which we proposed as one of the primary mechanisms in wound tissue underlying reduced myofibroblast formation observed in TGFβRIIfl/fl/LysMCre mice. Generation of cutaneous fibrosis by bleomycin injection for two and four weeks resulted in reduced fibrosis in TGFβRIIfl/fl/LysMCre mice, compared to control mice. The mechanisms leading to this phenotype were associated with reduced infiltration of immune cells, reduced deposition of collagen and diminished production of inflammatory mediators such as IL-1β, TNF-α and osteopontin-1 at the early stage of fibrosis formation. At the later stage, the expression of inflammatory mediators in TGFβRIIfl/fl/LysMCre mice was not altered compared to control mice, possibly due to compensatory mechanisms. Our data leads to the hypothesis that the reduced fibrosis is caused by the reduced expression of inflammatory mediators and accumulation of immune cells at the early stage of fibrosis in TGFβRIIfl/fl/LysMCre mice. Our results provide new insights into the crucial role of macrophage specific TGFβRII signaling in tissue repair and fibrosis

Correlation between structure and Rayleigh parameters in the lead-free piezoceramic (1-x)Ba(Ti0.88 Sn0.12)O3-x(Ba0.7Ca0.3)TiO3

Composition dependent Rayleigh and structural analysis was carried out on the lead-free piezoceramics (1-x)(BaTi0.88Sn0.12)-x(Ba0.7Ca0.3)TiO3 at room temperature. The system exhibits tetragonal (P4mm) structure for x > 0.21, rhombohedral (R3m) for x < 0.13 and orthorhombic (Amm2) for 0.13<x<0.21. Rayleigh analysis suggests that the irreversible contribution to the dielectric response is enhanced in the single phase orthorhombic compositions in the vicinity of the R3m-Amm2 and Amm2-P4mm phase boundaries, and not in compositions exhibiting phase coexistences (x = 0.12 and 0.22). We also found a correspondence between the irreversible Rayleigh parameter and the coercive field in this system.Comment: 18 pages 5 figure

Influence of Period on Surrounding Refractive Index Sensitivity of Arc-induced Long Period Gratings☆

Abstract In this work, we present the assessment of our electric arc-discharge based technique in order to fabricate optical fiber Long Period Gratings (LPGs) with desired spectral features and period ranging in 410-470 μm, able to excite high order cladding modes useful in chemical sensing applications. Here, a wide experimental investigation was carried out with the aim to study the sensitivity to surrounding refractive index (SRI) changes of several LPGs as function of the grating period, in order to derive a project criterion to improve the SRI sensitivity. Moreover, in order to evaluate the goodness of the experimental results, we compare the experimental results with numerical ones based on coupled-mode theory achieving very good agreement

A Deep Pyramid Deformable Part Model for Face Detection

We present a face detection algorithm based on Deformable Part Models and deep pyramidal features. The proposed method called DP2MFD is able to detect faces of various sizes and poses in unconstrained conditions. It reduces the gap in training and testing of DPM on deep features by adding a normalization layer to the deep convolutional neural network (CNN). Extensive experiments on four publicly available unconstrained face detection datasets show that our method is able to capture the meaningful structure of faces and performs significantly better than many competitive face detection algorithms

Tuning photoluminescence response by electric field in the lead-free piezoelectric Na1/2Bi1/2TiO3-BaTiO3

We show that an electrically soft ferroelectric host can be used to tune the photoluminescence (PL) response of rare-earth emitter ions by external electric field. The proof of this concept is demonstrated by changing the PL response of Eu+3 ion by electric field on a model system Eu-doped 0.94Na1/2Bi1/2TiO3-0.06BaTiO3. We also show that new channels of radiative transitions, forbidden otherwise, open up due to positional disorder in the system, which can as well be tuned by electric field.Comment: 13 pages 5 figure