158 research outputs found
Understanding lamin proteins and their roles in aging and cardiovascular diseases
The occurrence of cardiovascular diseases increases with age independent of other risk factors, and the percentage of senescent cells is significantly elevated in vascular cells at atherosclerotic sites. Patients with accelerated aging syndromes caused by mutant lamin A protein, a structural component in nuclear lamina, also share many similarities with normal aged people, including the propensity to develop atherosclerosis. Recent studies have revealed the accumulation of prelamin A in normal aged vascular cells, and that lamin A participated as a mechanosensitive molecule in regulating various cellular events. These findings suggest that the ectopic expression of mutant lamin A or lamin A precursor (prelamin A) not only causes defects in cell mechanics, but it also disturbs stress-induced mechanotransduction pathways involving lamin A, both of which may contribute to vascular dysregulation. This review summarizes the current understanding of how lamin proteins are involved in vascular cell during aging, with a particular focus on the effect of mechanical stresses from blood flow on nuclear lamina of endothelial cells. Related studies are clarifying the role of lamin A in the progression of atherosclerosis, which will aid in the development of potential therapies for those suffering from lamin A-associated accelerated aging syndromes
Transforming to Yoked Neural Networks to Improve ANN Structure
Most existing classical artificial neural networks (ANN) are designed as a
tree structure to imitate neural networks. In this paper, we argue that the
connectivity of a tree is not sufficient to characterize a neural network. The
nodes of the same level of a tree cannot be connected with each other, i.e.,
these neural unit cannot share information with each other, which is a major
drawback of ANN. Although ANN has been significantly improved in recent years
to more complex structures, such as the directed acyclic graph (DAG), these
methods also have unidirectional and acyclic bias for ANN. In this paper, we
propose a method to build a bidirectional complete graph for the nodes in the
same level of an ANN, which yokes the nodes of the same level to formulate a
neural module. We call our model as YNN in short. YNN promotes the information
transfer significantly which obviously helps in improving the performance of
the method. Our YNN can imitate neural networks much better compared with the
traditional ANN. In this paper, we analyze the existing structural bias of ANN
and propose a model YNN to efficiently eliminate such structural bias. In our
model, nodes also carry out aggregation and transformation of features, and
edges determine the flow of information. We further impose auxiliary sparsity
constraint to the distribution of connectedness, which promotes the learned
structure to focus on critical connections. Finally, based on the optimized
structure, we also design small neural module structure based on the minimum
cut technique to reduce the computational burden of the YNN model. This
learning process is compatible with the existing networks and different tasks.
The obtained quantitative experimental results reflect that the learned
connectivity is superior to the traditional NN structure.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2008.08261 by other
authors. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2008.08261 by other
author
Sc3.0: revamping and minimizing the yeast genome
From Springer Nature via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: registration 2020-08-04, pub-electronic 2020-08-13, online 2020-08-13, collection 2020-12Publication status: Publishe
Orsay virus CP-δ adopts a novel β-bracelet structural fold and incorporates into virions as a head fiber
Fiber proteins are commonly found in eukaryotic and prokaryotic viruses, where they play important roles in mediating viral attachment and host cell entry. They typically form trimeric structures and are incorporated into virions via noncovalent interactions. Orsay virus, a small RNA virus which specifically infects the laboratory model nematod
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