Relationship Between the Nocturnal Heat Island and Inversion Layer in Matsushiro, Nagano

Article信州大学教育学部研究論集 5: 83-94(2012)departmental bulletin pape

Tamm-Horsfall protein in recurrent calcium kidney stone formers with positive family history: abnormalities in urinary excretion, molecular structure and function

Tamm-Horsfall protein (THP) powerfully inhibits calcium oxalate crystal aggregation, but structurally abnormal THPs from recurrent calcium stone formers may promote crystal aggregation. Therefore, increased urinary excretion of abnormal THP might be of relevance in nephrolithiasis. We studied 44 recurrent idiopathic calcium stone formers with a positive family history of stone disease (RCSFfam) and 34 age- and sex-matched healthy controls (C). Twenty-four-hour urinary THP excretion was measured by enzyme linked immunosorbent assay. Structural properties of individually purified THPs were obtained from analysis of elution patterns from a Sepharose 4B column. Sialic acid (SA) contents of native whole 24-h urines, crude salt precipitates of native urines and individually purified THPs were measured. THP function was studied by measuring inhibition of CaOx crystal aggregation in vitro (pH 5.7, 200mM sodium chloride). Twenty-four-hour urine excretion of THP was higher in RCSFfam (44.0±4.0mg/day) than in C (30.9±2.2mg/day, P=0.015). Upon salt precipitation and lyophilization, elution from a Sepharose 4B column revealed one major peak (peak A, cross-reacting with polyclonal anti-THP antibody) and a second minor peak (peak B, not cross-reacting). THPs from RCSFfam eluted later than those from C (P=0.021), and maximum width of THP peaks was higher in RCSFfam than in C (P=0.024). SA content was higher in specimens from RCSFfam than from C, in native 24-h urines (207.5±20.4mg vs. 135.2±16.1mg, P=0.013) as well as in crude salt precipitates of 24-h urines (10.4±0.5mg vs. 7.4±0.9mg, P=0.002) and in purified THPs (75.3±9.3μg/mg vs. 48.8±9.8μg/mg THP, P=0.043). Finally, inhibition of calcium oxalate monohydrate crystal aggregation by 40mg/L of THP was lower in RCSFfam (6.1±5.5%, range −62.0 to +84.2%) than in C (24.9±6.0%, range −39.8 to +82.7%), P=0.022, and only 25 out of 44 (57%) THPs from RCSFfam were inhibitory (positive inhibition value) vs. 25 out of 34 (74%) THPs from C, P<0.05. In conclusion, severely recurrent calcium stone formers with a positive family history excrete more THP than healthy controls, and their THP molecules elute later from an analytical column and contain more SA. Such increasingly aggregated THP molecules predispose to exaggerated calcium oxalate crystal aggregation, an important prerequisite for urinary stone formatio

Structural characteristics of the redox-sensing coiled coil in the voltage-gated H^+ channel

This research was originally published in Journal of Biological Chemistry. Yuichiro Fujiwara, Kohei Takeshita, Atsushi Nakagawa and Yasushi Okamura. Structural characteristics of the redox-sensing coiled coil in the voltage-gated H^+ channel. Journal of Biological Chemistry. 2013; 288, 17968-17975. © the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

Vertical Temperature Profiles with Light Breezes at Night in Urban and Rural Areas of Obuse, Nagano

This paper describes the vertical structure of the nocturnal heat island in a small town. Tethered balloon soundings were conducted 180 times in and around an urban area on nights with light winds from March 2003 to May 2005. Surface inversions developed not only in rural areas but also in urban areas. Surface inversions developed quickly after sunset at the rural site, whereas development was slower at the urban site. At six hours after sunset the verticaltemperature profile in the urban area was the same as that in the rural area. Heat island formation in the small town was related to the delay in the development of surface inversion in the urban area. The crossover effect can be seen in only three of 23 surveys for which vertical soundings were performed in both urban and rural areas

Time-evolution of Peak Energy and Luminosity Relation within Pulses for GRB 061007: Probing Fireball Dynamics

We perform a time-resolved spectral analysis of bright, long Gamma-ray burst GRB 061007 using Suzaku/WAM and Swift/BAT. Thanks to the large effective area of the WAM, we can investigate the time evolution of the spectral peak energy, Et_peak and the luminosity Lt_iso with 1-sec time resolution, and we find that luminosity Lt_iso with 1-sec time resolution, and we find that the time-resolved pulses also satisfy the Epeak-Liso relation, which was found for the time-averaged spectra of other bursts, suggesting the same physical conditions in each pulse. Furthermore, the initial rising phase of each pulse could be an outlier of this relation with higher Et_peak value by about factor 2. This difference could suggest that the fireball radius expands by a factor of 2-4 and/or bulk Lorentz factor of the fireball is decelerated by a factor of 4 during the initial phase, providing a new probe of the fireball dynamics in real time.Comment: 21 pages, 16 figures, accepted for publication in PAS

Automated Sperm Assessment Framework and Neural Network Specialized for Sperm Video Recognition

Infertility is a global health problem, and an increasing number of couples are seeking medical assistance to achieve reproduction, at least half of which are caused by men. The success rate of assisted reproductive technologies depends on sperm assessment, in which experts determine whether sperm can be used for reproduction based on morphology and motility of sperm. Previous sperm assessment studies with deep learning have used datasets comprising images that include only sperm heads, which cannot consider motility and other morphologies of sperm. Furthermore, the labels of the dataset are one-hot, which provides insufficient support for experts, because assessment results are inconsistent between experts, and they have no absolute answer. Therefore, we constructed the video dataset for sperm assessment whose videos include sperm head as well as neck and tail, and its labels were annotated with soft-label. Furthermore, we proposed the sperm assessment framework and the neural network, RoSTFine, for sperm video recognition. Experimental results showed that RoSTFine could improve the sperm assessment performances compared to existing video recognition models and focus strongly on important sperm parts (i.e., head and neck).Comment: Accepted at Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 202