Dopaminergic neurons (DANs) are essential modulators for brain functions involving memory formation, reward processing, and decision‐making. Here I demonstrate a novel and important function of the ...DANs in regulating aging and longevity. Overexpressing the putative scaffolding protein Mask in two small groups of DANs in flies can significantly extend the lifespan in flies and sustain adult locomotor and fecundity at old ages. This Mask‐induced beneficial effect requires dopaminergic transmission but cannot be recapitulated by elevating dopamine production alone in the DANs. Independent activation of Gαs in the same two groups of DANs via the drug‐inducible DREADD system also extends fly lifespan, further indicating the connection of specific DANs to aging control. The Mask‐induced lifespan extension appears to depend on the function of Mask to regulate microtubule (MT) stability. A structure–function analysis demonstrated that the ankyrin repeats domain in the Mask protein is both necessary for regulating MT stability (when expressed in muscles and motor neurons) and sufficient to prolong longevity (when expressed in the two groups of DANs). Furthermore, DAN‐specific overexpression of Unc‐104 or knockdown of p150Glued, two independent interventions previously shown to impact MT dynamics, also extends lifespan in flies. Together, these data demonstrated a novel DANs‐dependent mechanism that, upon the tuning of their MT dynamics, modulates systemic aging and longevity in flies.
Dopaminergic neurons modulate essential brain functions in animals. In fly brains, overexpressing the putative scaffolding protein Mask in a small subset of dopaminergic neurons can significantly prolong lifespan. This effect appears to be a result of altered microtubule stability that is induced by Mask.
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DOBA, FZAB, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Volcanism is an important geological evolutionary process on the Moon. The study of lunar volcanic features is of great significance and value to understanding the geological evolution of the Moon ...better. Lunar domes are one of the essential volcanic features of the Moon. However, the existing lunar dome detection methods are still traditional manual or semiautomatic identification approaches that require extensive prior knowledge and have a complex identification process. Therefore, this paper proposes an automatic detection method based on improved YOLOv7 for lunar dome detection. First, a new lunar dome dataset was created by digital elevation model (DEM) data, and the effective squeeze and excitation (ESE) attention mechanism module was added to the backbone and neck sections to reduce information loss in the feature map and enhance network expressiveness. Then, a new SPPCSPC-RFE module was proposed by adding the receptive field enhancement (RFE) module into the neck section, which can adapt to dome feature maps of different shapes and sizes. Finally, the bounding box regression loss function complete IOU (CIOU) was replaced by wise IOU (WIOU). The WIOU loss function improved the model’s performance for the dome detection effect. Furthermore, this study combined several data enhancement strategies to improve the robustness of the network. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, we conducted several experiments using the dome dataset developed in this study. The experimental results indicate that the improved method outperforms related methods with a mean average precision (mAP@0.5) value of 88.7%, precision (P) value of 85.6%, and recall (R) value of 86.4%. This study provides an effective solution for lunar dome detection.
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IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
Many bacteria are known to regulate their cooperative activities and physiological processes through a mechanism called quorum sensing (QS), in which bacterial cells communicate with each other by ...releasing, sensing and responding to small diffusible signal molecules. The ability of bacteria to communicate and behave as a group for social interactions like a multi-cellular organism has provided significant benefits to bacteria in host colonization, formation of biofilms, defense against competitors, and adaptation to changing environments. Importantly, many QS-controlled activities have been involved in the virulence and pathogenic potential of bacteria. Therefore, understanding the molecular details of quorum sensing mechanisms and their controlled social activities may open a new avenue for controlling bacterial infections.
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IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
Lineament is a unique geological structure. The study of Lunar lineament structure has great significance on understanding its history and evolution of Lunar surface. However, the existing geographic ...feature extraction methods are not suitable for the extraction of Lunar lineament structure. In this paper, a new lineament extraction method is proposed based on improved-UNet++ and YOLOv5. Firstly, new lineament dataset is created containing lineaments structure based on CCD data from LROC. At same time the residual blocks are replaced with the VGG blocks in the down sample part of the UNet++ with adding the attention block between each layer. Secondly, the improved-UNet++ and YOLO networks are trained to execute the object detection and semantic segmentation of lineament structure respectively. Finally, a polygon-match strategy is proposed to combine the results of object detection and semantic segmentation. The experiment result indicate that this new method has relatively better and more stable performance compared with current mainstream networks and the original UNet++ network in the instance segmentation of lineament structure. Additionally, the polygon-match strategy is able to perform preciser edge detail in the instance segmentation of lineament structure result.
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IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) are neural network frameworks for machine learning on graphs. They can simultaneously perform end-to-end learning on the attribute information and the structure ...information of graph data. However, most existing GCNs inevitably encounter the limitations of non-robustness and low classification accuracy when labeled nodes are scarce. To address the two issues, the deep graph convolutional generative adversarial network (DGCGAN), a model combining GCN and deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (DCGAN), is proposed in this paper. First, the graph data is mapped to a highly nonlinear space by using the topology and attribute information of the graph for symmetric normalized Laplacian transform. Then, through the feature-structured enhanced module, the node features are expanded into regular structured data, such as images and sequences, which are input to DGCGAN as positive samples, thus expanding the sample capacity. In addition, the feature-enhanced (FE) module is adopted to enhance the typicality and discriminability of node features, and to obtain richer and more representative features, which is helpful for facilitating accurate classification. Finally, additional constraints are added to the network model by introducing DCGAN, thus enhancing the robustness of the model. Through extensive empirical studies on several standard benchmarks, we find that DGCGAN outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on semi-supervised node classification and remote sensing image classification.
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IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
Fluoride is widely distributed in nature, and at high concentrations, it targets the kidney and especially proximal tubule epithelial cells. Selenium is a typical trace element beneficial to humans, ...and the role of selenium in the prevention and treatment of fluoride-induced organ damage is an important research topic. The purpose of this study was to investigate the possible protective effects of selenium against fluoride-induced oxidative stress and apoptosis in rat renal tubular epithelial cells. We showed that the activity of antioxidant enzymes (superoxide dismutase and glutathione peroxidase) and total antioxidant capacity were significantly reduced in NaF-treated normal rat kidney cells (NRK-52E), whereas the levels of nitrogen monoxide (NO) and malondialdehyde (MDA) were significantly increased. Moreover, the number of apoptotic cells, mRNA expression of Bax, Bad, caspase-3, caspase-8, and caspase-9, and protein expression of Bax were elevated, while mitochondrial membrane potential and the protein expression of Bcl-2 were reduced. Compared with the NaF group, pretreatment with selenium enhanced the activity of antioxidant enzymes, mitochondrial membrane potential, and protein expression of Bcl-2, while the levels of NO and MDA, number of apoptotic cells, mRNA expression of Bax, Bad, caspase-3, caspase-8, and caspase-9, and protein expression of Bax were decreased. In conclusion, selenium exerted remarkable protective effect against NaF-induced oxidative stress and apoptosis and altered the expression of Bcl-2/caspase family.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
In order to realize high contrast imaging with portable devices for potential mobile healthcare, we demonstrate a hand-held smartphone based quantitative phase microscope using the transport of ...intensity equation method. With a cost-effective illumination source and compact microscope system, multi-focal images of samples can be captured by the smartphone's camera via manual focusing. Phase retrieval is performed using a self-developed Android application, which calculates sample phases from multi-plane intensities via solving the Poisson equation. We test the portable microscope using a random phase plate with known phases, and to further demonstrate its performance, a red blood cell smear, a Pap smear and monocot root and broad bean epidermis sections are also successfully imaged. Considering its advantages as an accurate, high-contrast, cost-effective and field-portable device, the smartphone based hand-held quantitative phase microscope is a promising tool which can be adopted in the future in remote healthcare and medical diagnosis.
Deep learning technology has achieved breakthrough research results in the fields of medical computer vision and image processing. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have demonstrated a capacity ...for image generation and expression ability. This paper proposes a new method called MWG-UNet (multiple tasking Wasserstein generative adversarial network U-shape network) as a lung field and heart segmentation model, which takes advantages of the attention mechanism to enhance the segmentation accuracy of the generator so as to improve the performance. In particular, the Dice similarity, precision, and F1 score of the proposed method outperform other models, reaching 95.28%, 96.41%, and 95.90%, respectively, and the specificity surpasses the sub-optimal models by 0.28%, 0.90%, 0.24%, and 0.90%. However, the value of the IoU is inferior to the optimal model by 0.69%. The results show the proposed method has considerable ability in lung field segmentation. Our multi-organ segmentation results for the heart achieve Dice similarity and IoU values of 71.16% and 74.56%. The segmentation results on lung fields achieve Dice similarity and IoU values of 85.18% and 81.36%.
Many “hot spot” geographic areas across the world with drinking water co-contaminated with inorganic arsenic (iAs) and fluoride (F-), two of the most common natural contaminants in drinking water. ...Both iAs and F- are known neurotoxins and affect neurodevelopment of children. However, very few studies have investigated the neurodevelopmental effects of concurrent exposure to iAs and F-, which could potentially pose a greater risk than iAs or F- exposure alone. Further, perturbations of gut microbiota, which plays a regulatory role in neurodevelopment, resulting from iAs and F- exposure has been reported in numerous studies. There is lacking of information regarding to the relationship among concurrent iAs and F- exposure, microbiome disruption, and neurodevelopmental impacts. To fill these gaps, we treated offspring rats to iAs (50 mg/L NaAsO2) and F- (100 mg/L NaF), alone or combined from early life (in utero and childhood) to puberty. We applied Morris water maze test to assess spatial learning and memory of these rats and generated gut microbiome profiles using 16S rRNA gene sequencing. We showed that concurrent iAs and F- exposure caused more prominent neurodevelopmental effects in rats than either iAs or F- exposure alone. Moreover, Unsupervised Principal Coordinates Analysis (PCoA) and Linear Discriminant Analysis Effect Size (LEfSe) analysis of gut microbiome sequencing results separated concurrent exposure group from others, indicating a more sophisticated change of gut microbial communities occurred under the concurrent exposure condition. Further, a correlation analysis between indices of the water maze test and microbial composition at the genus level identified featured genera that were clearly associated with neurobehavioral performance of rats. 75% (9 out of 12) genera, which had a remarkable difference in relative abundance between the control and combined iAs and F- exposure groups, showed significantly strong correlations (r = 0.70–0.90) with the water maze performance indicators. Collectively, these results suggest that concurrent iAs and F- exposure led to more prominent effects on neurodevelopment and gut microbiome composition structures in rats, and the strong correlation between them indicates a high potential for the development of novel microbiome-based biomarkers of iAs and/or F- associated neurodevelopmental deficits.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
While numerous studies have shown that fluoride or arsenic exposure may damage the reproductive system, there are few reports of co-exposure to fluoride and arsenic. In addition, the literature on ...autophagy and intestinal flora composition in reproductive toxicity studies of co-exposure to fluoride and arsenic is insufficient. In this study, we developed a rat model of fluoride and arsenic exposure via drinking water from pre-pregnancy to 90 days postnatal. Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly divided into sterile water control group, fluoride group (100 mg/L NaF), arsenic group (50 mg/L NaAsO2) and combined exposure group (100 mg/L NaF+50 mg/L NaAsO2). Our results showed that fluoride and arsenic exposure caused a reduction in testicular weight and significant pathological damage to tissue. We found that the levels of follicle-stimulating hormone, luteinizing hormone, and testosterone were reduced to varying degrees. Meanwhile experiments showed that fluoride and arsenic exposure can modulate autophagic flux, causing increased levels of Beclin1 and LC3 expression and decreased p62 expression. Analogously, by performing 16S sequencing of rat feces, we found 24 enterobacterial genera that differed significantly among the groups. Furthermore, the flora associated with testicular injury were identified by correlation analysis of hormonal indices and autophagy alterations with intestinal flora composition at the genus level, respectively. In summary, our study shows that fluoride and arsenic co-exposure alters autophagic flux in the testis, causes testicular injury, and reveals an association between altered intestinal flora composition and testicular injury.
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•F and As exposure caused an imbalance in the intestinal flora of rats.•F and As exposure caused alterations in autophagic flux, which were positively correlated with SMB53 and Anaerostipes.•F and As exposure caused alterations in reproductive hormones, which were negatively correlated with Parabacteroides.•Under experimental conditions, the co-exposure to fluoride and arsenic showed some antagonistic effects in rat testis.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
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