Background and Objectives: Inflammatory cytokines and metabolic abnormalities are common in patients with tuberculosis. Observational studies have indicated that probiotics modulate inflammatory ...cytokines and metabolites; however, clinical evidence of the effect of probiotics on patients with tuberculosis is lacking. This study investigated the effects of Lactobacillus casei on inflammatory cytokines and metabolites during tuberculosis treatment. Methods and Study Design: A randomized controlled trial was conducted. A total of 47 inpatients were included and randomly assigned to receive standard antituberculosis therapy only (control group) or that treatment together with 1 × 1010 colony-forming units per day of Lactobacillus casei (low-dose group) or 2 × 1010 colony-forming units per day of Lactobacillus casei (high-dose group) for 4 weeks of intensive treatment during hospitalization. Plasma samples were analyzed for inflammatory cytokines and metabolomics with ELISA kits and ultrahigh performance liquid chromatography quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry. Results: Daily Lactobacillus casei supplementation of up to 2 × 1010 colony-forming units significantly lowered the concentrations of tumor necrosis factor-alpha, interleukin-6, interleukin-10, and interleukin-12 (p=0.007, p=0.042, p=0.002, p<0.001, respectively) in patients with tuberculosis. Compared with the control and low-dose groups, the plasma metabolites of phosphatidylserine, maresin 1, phosphatidylcholine, L-saccharopine, and pyridoxamine were significantly upregulated, and N-acetylmethionine, L-tryptophan, phosphatidylethanolamine, and phenylalanine were downregulated in the high-dose group. Strong correlations were observed between metabolites and inflammatory cytokines. Conclusions: Lactobacillus casei supplementation during the intensive phase of tuberculosis treatment can significantly modulate inflammatory cytokines and metabolites. Decreased inflammatory cytokines may be related to metabolite changes.
The WRKY transcription factors (TFs) are one of the largest families of TFs in plants and play multiple roles in plant growth and development and stress response. In this study,
GmWRKY21
encoding a ...WRKY transcription factor was functionally characterized in Arabidopsis and soybean. The GmWRKY21 protein containing a highly conserved WRKY domain and a C
2
H
2
zinc-finger structure is located in the nucleus and has the characteristics of transcriptional activation ability. The
GmWRKY21
gene presented a constitutive expression pattern rich in the roots, leaves, and flowers of soybean with over 6-fold of relative expression levels and could be substantially induced by aluminum stress. As compared to the control, overexpression of
GmWRKY21
in Arabidopsis increased the root growth of seedlings in transgenic lines under the AlCl
3
concentrations of 25, 50, and 100 μM with higher proline and lower MDA accumulation. The results of quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) showed that the marker genes relative to aluminum stress including
ALMT, ALS3, MATE
, and
STOP1
were induced in
GmWRKY21
transgenic plants under AlCl
3
treatment. The stress-related genes, such as
KIN1, COR15A, COR15B, COR47, GLOS3
, and
RD29A
, were also upregulated in
GmWRKY21
transgenic Arabidopsis under aluminum stress. Similarly, stress-related genes, such as
GmCOR47, GmDREB2A, GmMYB84, GmKIN1, GmGST1
, and
GmLEA
, were upregulated in hair roots of
GmWRKY21
transgenic plants. In summary, these results suggested that the GmWRKY21 transcription factor may promote the tolerance to aluminum stress mediated by the pathways regulating the expression of the acidic aluminum stress-responsive genes and abiotic stress-responsive genes.
Malnutrition is associated with an increased risk of pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) treatment failure. Currently, there is no effective adjunctive nutritional therapy. The current objective is to ...investigate the association of dietary micronutrient intake with PTB treatment outcome.A cohort study including 1834 PTB patients was conducted in Linyi, China. The dietary micronutrient intake was assessed through a three-day 24 h dietary recall questionnaire. The treatment outcome was assessed by combinations of sputum smear and computerized tomography results. A multivariate binary regression model was used to assess the associations. The final model was adjusted for potential confounding factors. A low intake of vitamin C (adjusted OR (95% CI): 1.80 (1.07, 3.04), P
= 0.02) and Zn (adjusted OR (95% CI): 2.52 (1.25, 5.08), P
= 0.02) was associated with a high treatment failure rate. In addition, a low intake of vitamin C and Mn was associated with a severe tuberculosis symptom, as indicated by a high TB score. A supplementation of vitamin C and Zn may be beneficial in PTB treatment. Previous meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) reported a null effect of Zn supplementation on PTB treatment. The effect of vitamin C supplementation should be investigated by RCTs.
Electric load forecasting is a vital task for energy management and policy-making. However, it is also a challenging problem due to the complex and dynamic nature of electric load data. In this ...paper, a novel technique, called LSV/MOPA, has been proposed for electric load forecasting. The technique is a hybrid model that combines the advantages of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Support Vector Regression (SVR), two powerful artificial intelligence algorithms. The hybrid model is further optimized by a newly Modified Orca Predation Algorithm (MOPA), which enhances the forecasting accuracy and efficiency. The LSV/MOPA model has been applied to historical electric load data from South Korea, covering four regions and 20 years. The LSV/MOPA model has been compared with other state-of-the-art forecasting techniques, including SVR/FFA, LSTM/BO, LSTM-SVR, and CNN-LSTM. The results show that the LSV/MOPA model with minimum average mean absolute percentage deviation error, including 365 in northern region, 12.8 in southern region, 8.6 in central region, and 30.8 in eastern region, provides the best fitting and outperforms the other techniques in terms of the Mean Absolute Percentage Deviation (MAPD) index, achieving lower values for all regions and years. The LSV/MOPA model also exhibits faster convergence and better generalization than the other techniques. This study demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of the LSV/MOPA model for electric load forecasting and suggests its potential applications in other sectors where accurate forecasting is crucial.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
IL-6, IL-8, and C-C motif chemokine ligand 2 (CCLi2) are important factors in inflammatory and immune responses. To investigate their relationships in the spleen and cecum and between ...coccidiosis-infected and uninfected states, we performed quantitative real-time PCR to compare the relative expression difference of IL-6, IL-8, and CCLi2 in the same tissues between the infection and control groups. In addition, the correlations of the relative expression levels of these 3 genes were determined in the same and different tissues within the same group. The results showed that the expression levels of IL-6, IL-8, and CCLi2 in the spleen and cecum of the infected group were all higher than those of the uninfected group (P < 0.05). The correlation coefficients among the IL-6, IL-8, and CCLi2 expression levels in the spleen or cecum were all positive in both the infection and control groups. In the spleen tissues, CCLi2 expression was strongly correlated with IL-6 and IL-8 in the uninfected group (P < 0.01), and the correlation coefficients reached 0.853 (R
= 0.728) and 0.996 (R
= 0.992), respectively. The expression of CCLi2 was also strongly correlated with IL-8 (R reached 0.890, R
= 0.792) in the infected group. In the cecal tissues, the expression levels of the 3 genes were all extremely significantly correlated in the uninfected group (P < 0.01), and the correlation coefficients ranged from 0.498 to 0.765, indicating moderate correlations. The expression of IL-6 was extremely significantly positively correlated with IL-8 and CCLi2 in the infected group (P < 0.01), with moderate correlations (R ranged from 0.469-0.639). In addition, the expression levels of the 3 genes were not significantly correlated (P > 0.05) between the spleen and cecum tissues in either the infection group or the control group. These results indicate that IL-6, IL-8, and CCLi2 were correlated and play an important role in coccidiosis infection of Jinghai yellow chicken. Our data also provide a basis for further exploring the role of these 3 genes in genetic breeding for coccidiosis resistance.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Abstract
With the continuous advancement of technology, people are paying more and more attention to the living environment of wild animals. Located at the top of the food chain of the forest ...ecosystem, the Siberian tiger is a flagship species and umbrella species for biodiversity protection. The effective protection and sustainable survival of its population has far-reaching natural and social significance for China’s ecological security
1
. At present, the research on the Siberian tiger is mainly concentrated in the biological fields such as genes and heredity. Only a small amount of research on the detection of Siberian tigers and their footprints in static images. Research on the behavior recognition of Siberian tigers in videos is currently in its infancy. In the field of computer vision, as an independent research object, more and more researchers pay attention to the automatic recognition of gait. Based on the human gait model, a standard database for evaluating the performance of gait recognition algorithms has been established to promote the research of gait recognition. development of. This article will use deep neural convolutional networks and feature subspace learning algorithms to extract the gait features of the Siberian tiger from video images and establish a gait model of the Siberian tiger. This will lay the foundation for the identification of Siberian tigers and further research on their health status, and provide a foundation for the wild Provide theoretical support for animal protection.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are important in reconnaissance missions because of their flexibility and convenience. Vitally, UAVs are capable of autonomous navigation, which means they can be used ...to plan safe paths to target positions in dangerous surroundings. Traditional path-planning algorithms do not perform well when the environmental state is dynamic and partially observable. It is difficult for a UAV to make the correct decision with incomplete information. In this study, we proposed a multi-UAV path planning algorithm based on multi-agent reinforcement learning which entails the adoption of centralized training–decentralized execution architecture to coordinate all the UAVs. Additionally, we introduced a hidden state of the recurrent neural network to utilize the historical observation information. To solve the multi-objective optimization problem, We designed a joint reward function to guide UAVs to learn optimal policies under the multiple constraints. The results demonstrate that by using our method, we were able to solve the problem of incomplete information and low efficiency caused by partial observations and sparse rewards in reinforcement learning, and we realized kdiff multi-UAV cooperative autonomous path planning in unknown environment.
As essential structural components of ATP-dependent chromatin-remodeling complex, the nucleolus-localized actin-related proteins (ARPs) play critical roles in many biological processes. Among them, ...ARP4 is identified as an integral subunit of chromatin remodeling complex SWR1, which is conserved in yeast, humans and plants. It was shown that RNAi mediated knock-down of
(
) could affect plant development, specifically, leading to early flowering. However, so far, little is known about how ARP4 functions in the SWR1 complex in plant. Here, we identified a loss-of-function mutant of
with a single nucleotide change from glycine to arginine, which had significantly smaller leaf size. The results from the split luciferase complementation imaging (LCI) and yeast two hybrid (Y2H) assays confirmed its physical interaction with the scaffold and catalytic subunit of SWR1 complex, photoperiod-independent early flowering 1 (PIE1). Furthermore, mutation of
caused altered transcription response of hundreds of genes, in which the number of up-regulated differentially expressed genes (DEGs) was much larger than those down-regulated. Although most DEGs in
are related to plant defense and response to hormones such as salicylic acid, overall, it has less overlapping with other
mutants and the
double-mutant. In conclusion, our results reveal that
is important for plant growth and such an effect is likely attributed to its repression on gene expression, typically at defense-related loci, thus providing some evidence for the coordination of plant growth and defense, while the regulatory patterns and mechanisms are distinctive from other SWR1 complex components.
Cold stress is one of the primary environmental factors that affect plant growth and productivity, especially for crops like Brassica napus that live through cold seasons. Till recently, although a ...number of genes and pathways involved in B. napus cold response have been revealed by independent studies, a genome-wide identification of the key regulators and the regulatory networks is still lack. In this study, we investigated the transcriptomes of cold stressed semi-winter and winter type rapeseeds in short day condition, mainly with the purpose to systematically identify the functional conserved transcription factors (TFs) in cold response of B. napus.
Global modulation of gene expression was observed in both the semi-winter type line (158A) and the winter type line (SGDH284) rapeseeds, in response to a seven-day chilling stress in short-day condition. Function analysis of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) revealed enhanced stresses response mechanisms and inhibited photosynthesis in both lines, as well as a more extensive inhibition of some primary biological processes in the semi-winter type line. Over 400 TFs were differentially expressed in response to cold stress, including 56 of them showed high similarity to the known cold response TFs and were consistently regulated in 158A and SGDH284, as well as 25 TFs which targets were over-represented in the total DEGs. A further investigation based on their interactions indicated the critical roles of several TFs in cold response of B. napus.
In summary, our results revealed the alteration of gene expression in cold stressed semi-winter and winter ecotype B. napus lines and provided a valuable collection of candidate key regulators involved in B. napus response to cold stress, which could expand our understanding of plant stress response and benefit the future improvement of the breed of rapeseeds.
Full text
Available for:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
In the past decades, as an emerging omic, metabolomics has been widely used in meat science research, showing promise in meat quality analysis and meat authentication. This review first provides a ...brief overview of the concept, analytical techniques, and analysis workflow of metabolomics. Additionally, the metabolomics research in quality analysis and authentication of meat is comprehensively described. Finally, the limitations, challenges, and future trends of metabolomics application in meat quality analysis and meat authentication are critically discussed. We hope to provide valuable insights for further research in meat quality.
PDF
