Modulation of the slow/common gating of CLC channels by intracellular cadmium.

Members of the CLC family of Cl(-) channels and transporters are homodimeric integral membrane proteins. Two gating mechanisms control the opening and closing of Cl(-) channels in this family: fast gating, which regulates opening and closing of the individual pores in each subunit, and slow (or common) gating, which simultaneously controls gating of both subunits. Here, we found that intracellularly applied Cd(2+) reduces the current of CLC-0 because of its inhibition on the slow gating. We identified CLC-0 residues C229 and H231, located at the intracellular end of the transmembrane domain near the dimer interface, as the Cd(2+)-coordinating residues. The inhibition of the current of CLC-0 by Cd(2+) was greatly enhanced by mutation of I225W and V490W at the dimer interface. Biochemical experiments revealed that formation of a disulfide bond within this Cd(2+)-binding site is also affected by mutation of I225W and V490W, indicating that these two mutations alter the structure of the Cd(2+)-binding site. Kinetic studies showed that Cd(2+) inhibition appears to be state dependent, suggesting that structural rearrangements may occur in the CLC dimer interface during Cd(2+) modulation. Mutations of I290 and I556 of CLC-1, which correspond to I225 and V490 of CLC-0, respectively, have been shown previously to cause malfunction of CLC-1 Cl(-) channel by altering the common gating. Our experimental results suggest that mutations of the corresponding residues in CLC-0 change the subunit interaction and alter the slow gating of CLC-0. The effect of these mutations on modulations of slow gating of CLC channels by intracellular Cd(2+) likely depends on their alteration of subunit interactions

Spin-orbit torques acting upon a perpendicularly-magnetized Py layer

We show that Py, a commonly-used soft ferromagnetic material with weak anisotropy, can become perpendicularly-magnetized while depositing on Ta buffer layer with Hf or Zr insertion layers (ILs) and MgO capping layer. By using two different approaches, namely harmonic voltage measurement and hysteresis loop shift measurement, the dampinglike spin-orbit torque (DL-SOT) efficiencies from Ta/IL/Py/IL/MgO magnetic heterostructures with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy are characterized. We find that though Ta has a significant spin Hall effect, the DL-SOT efficiencies are small in systems with the Ta/Py interface compared to that obtained from the control sample with the traditional Ta/CoFeB interface. Our results indicate that the spin transparency for the Ta/Py interface is much less than that for the Ta/CoFeB interface, which might be related to the variation of spin mixing conductance for different interfaces

BANet: Blur-aware Attention Networks for Dynamic Scene Deblurring

Image motion blur usually results from moving objects or camera shakes. Such blur is generally directional and non-uniform. Previous research efforts attempt to solve non-uniform blur by using self-recurrent multi-scale or multi-patch architectures accompanying with self-attention. However, using self-recurrent frameworks typically leads to a longer inference time, while inter-pixel or inter-channel self-attention may cause excessive memory usage. This paper proposes blur-aware attention networks (BANet) that accomplish accurate and efficient deblurring via a single forward pass. Our BANet utilizes region-based self-attention with multi-kernel strip pooling to disentangle blur patterns of different degrees and with cascaded parallel dilated convolution to aggregate multi-scale content features. Extensive experimental results on the GoPro and HIDE benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed BANet performs favorably against the state-of-the-art in blurred image restoration and can provide deblurred results in real-time