Online Networks of Support in Distressed Environments: Solidarity and Mobilization during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Despite their drawbacks and unintended consequences, social media networks have recently emerged as a crucial resource for individuals in distress, particularly during times of crisis. These platforms serve as a means to seek assistance and support, share reliable information, and appeal for action and solidarity. In this paper, we examine the online networks of support during the Russia-Ukraine conflict by analyzing four major social media networks- Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Using a large dataset of 68 million posts, we explore the temporal patterns and interconnectedness between these platforms and online support websites. Our analysis highlights the prevalence of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding websites as the two main support platforms to mobilize resources and solicit donations, revealing their purpose and contents, and investigating different support-seeking and -receiving practices. Overall, our study underscores the potential of social media in facilitating online support in distressed environments through grassroots mobilization, contributing to the growing body of research on the positive impact of online platforms in promoting social good and protecting vulnerable populations during times of crisis and conflict

Synthesis, Biological Evaluation of Fluorescent 23-Hydroxybetulinic Acid Probes, and Their Cellular Localization Studies

© 2018 American Chemical Society. 23-Hydroxybetulinic acid (23-HBA) is a complex lupane triterpenoid, which has attracted increasing attention as an anticancer agent. However, its detailed mechanism of anticancer action remains elusive so far. To reveal its anticancer mode of action, a series of fluorescent 23-HBA derivatives conjugated with coumarin dyes were designed, synthesized, and evaluated for their antiproliferative activities. Subcellular localization and uptake profile studies of representative fluorescent 23-HBA probe 26c were performed in B16F10 cells, and the results suggested that probe 26c was rapidly taken up into B10F10 cells in a dose-dependent manner and mitochondrion was the main site of its accumulation. Further mode of action studies implied that the mitochondrial pathway was involved in 23-HBA-mediated apoptosis. Together, our results provided new clues for revealing the molecular mechanism of natural product 23-HBA for its further development into an antitumor agent

Effects of SC dual pulsed-microwaves irradiation on the bioeffects in rats' organs under a mutually perpendicular incidence

To investigate the potential risk of electromagnetic exposure, systematic studies on the bioeffects caused by single-frequency electromagnetic fields have been carried out with plenty of achievements.However, the bioeffects caused by multiple-frequency fields still need to be further studied. In the resent work, we constructed a dual-sourced irradiation system to allow two microwaves simultaneously incident from two perpendicular directions. Subsequently, the influence of the number of pulses on the blood, brain, testis, heart, and liver tissues of rats under the simultaneous irradiation of S-band and C-band pulsed microwaves was studied, and compared to that caused by the single-sourced exposure with the same electromagnetic exposure dose. The results showed that when the amplitude of the space electric field intensity was 44.84 kV/m and the number of the pulses was 2, 5, 20 and 200, the blood routine, testosterone, alanine aminotransferase and aspartate aminotransferase content of rats in the irradiation groups did not change significantly compared with the control group and sham group (p>0.05). The nuclear area in the brain, heart and liver of rats, as well as the Johnson score of the testis, has not significantly changed after the irradiation (p>0.05), and no pathological changes have been observed in these target tissues. The content of Bax in the above four tissues of rats in the irradiation groups increased nonlinearly with the increase of the number of pulses, which can be described as the non-thermal bioeffect that concerned the intensity of the electric field of the pulsed microwave. When the number of pulses is greater than 2, a significant apoptotic response was detected in the brain and testicle (p˂0.05), while in the liver and heart the pulse number needs to be greater than 20 (p˂0.05). This is mainly because the amplitude of the internal field of the brain and testicle (11.3 kV/m and 10 kV/m respectively) is higher than that of the liver and heart (5.73 kV/m and 5.33 kV/m respectively). Under the same electromagnetic exposure dose, there was no difference between the SC combined irradiation and the S or C individual-irradiation (p>0.05)

Potential Role of Exosomes in Ischemic Stroke Treatment

Ischemic stroke is a life-threatening cerebral vascular disease and accounts for high disability and mortality worldwide. Currently, no efficient therapeutic strategies are available for promoting neurological recovery in clinical practice, except rehabilitation. The majority of neuroprotective drugs showed positive impact in pre-clinical studies but failed in clinical trials. Therefore, there is an urgent demand for new promising therapeutic approaches for ischemic stroke treatment. Emerging evidence suggests that exosomes mediate communication between cells in both physiological and pathological conditions. Exosomes have received extensive attention for therapy following a stroke, because of their unique characteristics, such as the ability to cross the blood brain–barrier, low immunogenicity, and low toxicity. An increasing number of studies have demonstrated positively neurorestorative effects of exosome-based therapy, which are largely mediated by the microRNA cargo. Herein, we review the current knowledge of exosomes, the relationships between exosomes and stroke, and the therapeutic effects of exosome-based treatments in neurovascular remodeling processes after stroke. Exosomes provide a viable and prospective treatment strategy for ischemic stroke patients

WCC-JC: A Web-Crawled Corpus for Japanese-Chinese Neural Machine Translation

Currently, there are only a limited number of Japanese-Chinese bilingual corpora of a sufficient amount that can be used as training data for neural machine translation (NMT). In particular, there are few corpora that include spoken language such as daily conversation. In this research, we attempt to construct a Japanese-Chinese bilingual corpus of a certain scale by crawling the subtitle data of movies and TV series from the websites. We calculated the BLEU scores of the constructed WCC-JC (Web Crawled Corpus—Japanese and Chinese) and the other compared corpora. We also manually evaluated the translation results using the translation model trained on the WCC-JC to confirm the quality and effectiveness

Upregulated miR-96-5p inhibits cell proliferation by targeting HBEGF in T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia cell line

Introduction. microRNAs (miRNAs) are critical for tumorigenesis and progression of T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL). MiR-96-5p has been shown to play important roles in the development of many cancers, but its roles in T-ALL have yet not been studied. Materials and methods. miR-96-5p expression was detected in T-leukemic cells from peripheral blood of 30 patients with T-ALL using real-time quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR). TargetScan database was utilized to identify the target genes for miR-96-5p, and their target relationship was verified by western blot, dual luciferase reporter assay and RT-qPCR. The effects of miR-96-5p on the viability and proliferation of T-leukemic cells (Jurkat cells) were respectively determined using MTT and BrdU incorporation assays. Results. miR-96-5p presented low expression levels by qPCR in peripheral blood of T-ALL patients compared to healthy volunteers. Upregulated miR-96-5p by miR-96-5p mimic transfection markedly inhibited the viability and proliferation of Jurkat cells. Furthermore, miR-96-5p negatively regulated the expression of its target gene, HBEGF. The decreased viability and proliferation of Jurkat cells caused by miR-96-5p over-expression was suppressed after the introduction of HBEGF plasmid. Conclusions. The presented study showed that upregulation of miR-96-5p inhibited the viability and proliferation of Jurkat T-leukemic cells through suppressing HBEGF expression. Our study provides a novel sight for understanding the pathological mechanism of T-ALL and suggests that miR-96-5p may be a potential biomarker for the therapy and diagnosis of T-ALL

Synthesis and Biological Activity of 23-Hydroxybetulinic Acid C-28 Ester Derivatives as Antitumor Agent Candidates

23-Hydroxybetulinic acid (<strong>1</strong>) served as the precursor for the synthesis of C-28 ester derivatives. The target compounds were evaluated <em>in vitro</em> for their antitumor activities against five cell lines (A549, BEL-7402, SF-763, B16 and HL-60)<em>.</em> Among the obtained compounds, <strong>6i</strong> had the most potent antitumor activity, with the IC<sub>50</sub> values of 8.35 µM in HL-60 cells and showed similar antitumor activity as cyclophosphamide in H22 liver tumor and as 5-fluorouracil in B16 melanoma<em> in vivo</em>

DSEMR: A database for special environment microorganisms resource and associating them with synthetic biological parts

Special environmental microorganisms are considered to be of great industrial application value because of their special genotypes, physiological functions and metabolites. The research and development of special environmental microorganisms will certainly bring about some innovations in biotechnology processes and change the face of bioengineering. The Special Environmental Microbial Database (DSEMR) is a comprehensive database that provides information on special environmental microbial resources and correlates them with synthetic biological parts. DSEMR aggregates information on specific environmental microbial genomes, physiological properties, culture media, biological parts, and metabolic pathways, and provides online tool analysis data, including 5268 strains from 620 genera, 31 media, and 42,126 biological parts. In short, DSEMR will become an important resource for the study of microorganisms in special environments and actively promote the development of synthetic biology

Design and synthesis of NAD(P)H: Quinone oxidoreductase (NQO1)-activated prodrugs of 23-hydroxybetulinic acid with enhanced antitumor properties

A series of NQO1 selectively activated prodrugs were designed and synthesized by introducing indolequinone moiety to the C-3, C-23 or C-28 position of 23-hydroxybetulinic acid (23-HBA) and its analogues. Among them, the representative compound 32j exhibited significant antiproliferative activities against NQO1-overexpressing HT-29 cells and A549 cells, with IC50 values of 1.87 and 2.36 μM, respectively, which were 20–30-fold more potent than those of parent compound 23-HBA. More importantly, it was demonstrated in the in vivo antitumor experiment that 32j effectively suppressed the tumor volume and largely reduced tumor weight by 72.69% with no apparent toxicity, which was more potent than the positive control 5-fluorouracil. This is the first breakthrough in the improvement of in vivo antitumor activities of 23-HBA derivatives. The further molecular mechanism study revealed that 32j blocked cell cycle arrest at G2/M phase, induced cell apoptosis, depolarized mitochondria and elevated the intracellular ROS levels in a dose-dependent manner. Western blot analysis indicated that 32j induced cell apoptosis by interfering with the expression of apoptosis-related proteins. These findings suggest that compound 32j could be considered as a potent antitumor prodrug candidate which deserves to be further investigated for personalized cancer therapy

Mercury Chloride Impacts on the Development of Erythrocytes and Megakaryocytes in Mice

Inorganic mercury (Hg2+) is a highly toxic heavy metal. The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of Hg2+ on the development of erythrocytes and megakaryocytes. B10.S mice (H-2s) and DBA/2 mice (H-2d) were administrated with 10 μM HgCl2 or 50 μM HgCl2 via drinking water for four weeks, and erythro-megakaryopoiesis was evaluated thereafter. The administration of 50 μM HgCl2 increased the number of erythrocytes and platelets in B10.S mice, which was not due to a reduced clearance for mature erythrocytes. The administration of 50 μM HgCl2, but not 10 μM HgCl2, increased the number of progenitors for erythrocytes and megakaryocytes in the bone marrow (BM) of B10.S mice, including erythroid-megakaryocyte progenitors (EMPs), burst-forming unit-erythroid progenitors (BFU-Es), colony-forming unit-erythroid progenitors (CFU-Es), and megakaryocyte progenitors (MkPs). Moreover, 50 μM HgCl2 caused EMPs to be more proliferative and possess an increased potential for differentiation into committed progenies in B10.S mice. Mechanistically, 50 μM HgCl2 increased the expression of the erythropoietin receptor (EPOR) in EMPs, thus enhancing the Jak2/STAT5 signaling pathway to promote erythro-megakaryopoiesis in B10.S mice. Conversely, 50 μM HgCl2 did not impact erythro-megakaryopoiesis in DBA/2 mice. This study may extend our current understanding for hematopoietic toxicology of Hg