Indole-thiophene conjugate inhibits proliferation of human cervical cancer cell lines through DNA damage

Purpose: To investigate the inhibitory effect of indole-thiophene conjugate (ITC) against cervical cancer cells. Methods: The effect of ITC on the proliferation of cervical cells was determined using 3 (4,5 dimethylthiazol 2 yl) 2,5 diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) assay. The apoptosis-inducing effect of ITC was analysed with flow cytometry, while its effect on cell invasion was assessed using Transwell assay. Results: ITC inhibited proliferation of HeLa and Caski cancer cell lines, but it had no cytotoxicity against HCvEpC normal epithelial cells. Exposure to ITC at a dose of 12 μmol/L reduced the viability of HeLa and Caski cells to 22.56 and 24.78 %, respectively (p < 0.05). ITC treatment of HeLa cells enhanced the proportion of apoptotic cells. Exposure to ITC at a dose of 12 μmol/L led to near-complete inhibition of the invasive potential of HeLa cells. Moreover, exposure of HeLa cells to ITC downregulated the protein expressions of MMP-2 and MMP-9 (p < 0.05). The expressions of Bcl-2, p-ERK1/2 and p-Akt were markedly decreased in HeLa cells by ITC exposure. In addition, ITC increased Bax expression, and decreased Bcl-2/Bax ratio (p < 0.05). Conclusion: ICT inhibits the proliferation and invasion of cervical cancer cells, and induces their apoptosis. It exhibits these effects via the suppression of Akt and ERK phosphorylation, thereby downregulating the PI3K and MAPK pathways. Therefore, ITC may be beneficial for the treatment of cervical cancer

Bootstrap Motion Forecasting With Self-Consistent Constraints

We present a novel framework for motion forecasting with Dual Consistency Constraints and Multi-Pseudo-Target supervision. The motion forecasting task predicts future trajectories of vehicles by incorporating spatial and temporal information from the past. A key design of DCMS is the proposed Dual Consistency Constraints that regularize the predicted trajectories under spatial and temporal perturbation during the training stage. In addition, we design a novel self-ensembling scheme to obtain accurate pseudo targets to model the multi-modality in motion forecasting through supervision with multiple targets explicitly, namely Multi-Pseudo-Target supervision. Our experimental results on the Argoverse motion forecasting benchmark show that DCMS significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, achieving 1st place on the leaderboard. We also demonstrate that our proposed strategies can be incorporated into other motion forecasting approaches as general training schemes

CDLT: A Dataset with Concept Drift and Long-Tailed Distribution for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization

Data is the foundation for the development of computer vision, and the establishment of datasets plays an important role in advancing the techniques of fine-grained visual categorization~(FGVC). In the existing FGVC datasets used in computer vision, it is generally assumed that each collected instance has fixed characteristics and the distribution of different categories is relatively balanced. In contrast, the real world scenario reveals the fact that the characteristics of instances tend to vary with time and exhibit a long-tailed distribution. Hence, the collected datasets may mislead the optimization of the fine-grained classifiers, resulting in unpleasant performance in real applications. Starting from the real-world conditions and to promote the practical progress of fine-grained visual categorization, we present a Concept Drift and Long-Tailed Distribution dataset. Specifically, the dataset is collected by gathering 11195 images of 250 instances in different species for 47 consecutive months in their natural contexts. The collection process involves dozens of crowd workers for photographing and domain experts for labelling. Extensive baseline experiments using the state-of-the-art fine-grained classification models demonstrate the issues of concept drift and long-tailed distribution existed in the dataset, which require the attention of future researches

Motionless volumetric photoacoustic microscopy with spatially invariant resolution

Photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) is uniquely positioned for biomedical applications because of its ability to visualize optical absorption contrast in vivo in three dimensions. Here we propose motionless volumetric spatially invariant resolution photoacoustic microscopy (SIR-PAM). To realize motionless volumetric imaging, SIR-PAM combines two-dimensional Fourier-spectrum optical excitation with single-element depth-resolved photoacoustic detection. To achieve spatially invariant lateral resolution, propagation-invariant sinusoidal fringes are generated by a digital micromirror device. Further, SIR-PAM achieves 1.5 times finer lateral resolution than conventional PAM. The superior performance was demonstrated in imaging both inanimate objects and animals in vivo with a resolution-invariant axial range of 1.8 mm, 33 times the depth of field of the conventional PAM counterpart. Our work opens new perspectives for PAM in biomedical sciences

Motionless volumetric photoacoustic microscopy with spatially invariant resolution

Photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) is uniquely positioned for biomedical applications because of its ability to visualize optical absorption contrast in vivo in three dimensions. Here we propose motionless volumetric spatially invariant resolution photoacoustic microscopy (SIR-PAM). To realize motionless volumetric imaging, SIR-PAM combines two-dimensional Fourier-spectrum optical excitation with single-element depth-resolved photoacoustic detection. To achieve spatially invariant lateral resolution, propagation-invariant sinusoidal fringes are generated by a digital micromirror device. Further, SIR-PAM achieves 1.5 times finer lateral resolution than conventional PAM. The superior performance was demonstrated in imaging both inanimate objects and animals in vivo with a resolution-invariant axial range of 1.8 mm, 33 times the depth of field of the conventional PAM counterpart. Our work opens new perspectives for PAM in biomedical sciences

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Influence of Flank Wear on the Microstructure Characteristics of the GH4169 Metamorphic Layer under High-Pressure Cooling

Since the flank has an important influence on the surface of a workpiece, and as microstructure flaws of the surface metamorphic layer are a key factor that affects the service performance of a part, this work studied the influence of flank wear on the microstructure characteristics of the metamorphic layer under the conditions of high-pressure cooling. First, Third Wave AdvantEdge was used to create a simulation model of cutting GH4169 using tools with different flank wears under high-pressure cooling. The simulation findings emphasized the impact of flank wear width (VB) on the cutting force, cutting temperature, plastic strain, and strain rate. Second, an experimental platform was established for cutting GH4169 under high-pressure cooling, and the cutting force during the machining process was recorded in real time and compared with the simulation results. Finally, an optical microscope was used to observe the metallographic structure of the GH4169 workpiece section. The microstructure characteristics of the workpiece were analyzed using a scanning electron microscope (SEM) and electron backscattered diffraction (EBSD). It was discovered that, as the flank wear width increased, so did the cutting force, cutting temperature, plastic strain, strain rate, and plastic deformation depth. The relative error between the simulation results of the cutting force and the experimental results was within 15%. At the same time, near the surface of the workpiece, there was a metamorphic layer with fuzzy grain boundaries and refined grain. With an increase in flank wear width, the thickness of the metamorphic layer increased from 4.5 μm to 8.7 μm and the grain refinement intensified. The high strain rate promoted recrystallization, which caused an increase in the average grain boundary misorientation and high-angle grain boundaries, as well as a reduction in twin boundaries