Single-crystalline magnesium oxide (MgO) is a material with outstanding high-temperature resistance and huge potential for use in high-temperature devices, light emitting devices and optical display ...fields. The investigation of fabricating a microstructure on the MgO substrate using wet etching process is conducted. The temperature and concentration dependence of the etching rate on the materials, and the surface roughness of the microstructure, are explored and analyzed. A microcavity with good profile and low roughness, 80.7 µm in depth and 4 mm in diameter, has been generated on a MgO substrate with a 50% H3PO4 etchant solution at ~100 °C. Optical microscopy, atomic force microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, x-ray photoelectron spectroscope and x-ray diffraction analysis are employed to demonstrate the successful application of wet etching for improving the etching rate and surface morphology without the deterioration of the surface roughness. Our work is of fundamental importance in the fabrication of MgO-based devices (such as pressure sensors, vibration sensors and photonic resonators) and the improvement of growth condition of oxide films on MgO substrates.
Most patients with osteoporotic vertebral compression fracture (OVCF) obtain pain relief after vertebral augmentation, but some will experience residual back pain (RBP) after surgery. Although ...several risk factors of RBP have been reported, it is still difficult to estimate the risk of RBP preoperatively. Radiomics is helpful for disease diagnosis and outcome prediction by establishing complementary relationships between human-recognizable and computer-extracted features. However, musculoskeletal radiomics investigations are less frequently reported.
This study aims to establish a radiomics score (rad-score) based nomogram for the preoperative prediction of RBP in OVCF patients.
The training cohort of 731 OVCF patients was used for nomogram development, and the validation cohort was utilized for performance test. RBP was determined as the score of visual analogue scale ≥ 4 at both 3 and 30 days following surgery. After normalization, the RBP-related radiomics features were selected to create rad-scores. These rad-scores, along with the RBP predictors initially identified by univariate analyses, were included in the multivariate analysis to establish a nomogram for the assessment of the RBP risk in OVCF patients preoperatively.
A total of 81 patients (11.2%) developed RBP postoperatively. We finally selected 8 radiomics features from 1316 features extracted from each segmented image to determine the rad-score. Multivariate analysis revealed that the rad-score plus bone mineral density, intravertebral cleft, and thoracolumbar fascia injury were independent factors of RBP. Our nomograms based on these factors demonstrated good discrimination, calibration, and clinical utility in both training and validation cohorts. Furthermore, it achieved better performance than the rad-score itself, as well as the nomogram only incorporating regular features.
We developed and validated a nomogram incorporating the rad-score and regular features for preoperative prediction of the RBP risk in OVCF patients, which contributed to improved surgical outcomes and patient satisfaction.
The mechanism of blue light-induced retinal ganglion cell (RGC) injury is poorly understood. In this study, we established a patented light-emitting diode-based system to study the effects of ...long-term blue light exposure under culture conditions on RGC-5 cells. Long-term blue light exposure significantly reduced cell viability in a time-dependent manner and induced apoptosis and necrosis in RGC-5 cells. Long-term blue light exposure marked an increase in the expression of Bax and active Caspase-3 (p17), which was accompanied by Bcl-2 down-regulation, and displayed features of the mitochondria-dependent apoptosis pathway. Blue light exposure also increased the generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS), and was a strong inducer of ROS-sensitive protein nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 (Nrf2) and heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1) expression. Moreover, blue light exposure constitutively activated p38 mitogen-activated protein kinases and c-Jun NH2-terminal kinase (JNK), as well as induced the phosphorylation of extracellular signal-regulated kinase in the early phase, in blue light-exposed RGC-5 cells. The protein expression of c-jun and c-fos was further enhanced after RGC-5 cells were exposed to blue light. Taken together, these findings indicated that blue light induced RGC-5 cell line death in dependence upon exposure duration. The potential mechanisms for this phenomenon might be via activated mitochondria-dependent apoptosis, increased ROS production and protein expressions of Nrf2 and HO-1, and activated JNK/p38 MAPK signaling pathways.
Trajectory prediction is one of the core functions of autonomous driving. Modeling spatial-aware interactions and temporal motion patterns for observed vehicles are critical for accurate trajectory ...prediction. Most recent works on trajectory prediction utilize recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to model temporal patterns and usually need convolutional neural networks (CNNs) additionally to capture spatial interactions. Although Transformer, a multi-head attention-based network, has shown its notable ability in many sequence-modeling tasks (e.g., machine translation in natural language processing), it has not been explored much in trajectory prediction. This paper presents a Spatial Interaction-aware Transformer-based model, which uses the multi-head self-attention mechanism to capture both interactions of neighbor vehicles and temporal dependencies of trajectories. This model applies a GRU-based encoder-decoder module to make the prediction. Besides, different from methods considering the spatial interactions only among observed trajectories in both encoding and decoding stages, our model will also consider the potential spatial interactions between future trajectories in decoding. The proposed model was evaluated on the NGSIM dataset. Compared with other baselines, our model exhibited better prediction precision, especially for long-term prediction.
Inroduction
Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by the receptive syconia of
Ficus
species is a key trait to attract their obligate pollinating fig wasps.
Ficus hirta
Vahl is a dioecious shrub, ...which is pollinated by a highly specialized symbiotic pollinator in southern China. Terpenoids are the main components of VOCs in
F. hirta
and play ecological roles in pollinator attraction, allelopathy, and plant defense. However, it remains unclear that what molecular mechanism difference in terpenoid synthesis pathways between pre-receptive stage (A-phase) and receptive stage (B-phase) of
F. hirta
syconia.
Methods
Transcriptome, proteome and Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometer (GC-MS) were applied here to analyze these difference.
Results and discussion:
Compared to A-phase syconia, the genes (
ACAT2
,
HMGR3
,
GGPS2
,
HDR
,
GPS2
,
TPS2
,
TPS4
,
TPS10-4
,
TPS14
) related to the terpenoid synthesis pathway had higher expression level in receptive syconia (B-phase) according to transcriptome sequencing. Seven differentially expressed transcription factors were screened, namely
bHLH7
,
MYB1R1
,
PRE6
,
AIL1
,
RF2b
,
ANT
,
VRN1
. Specifically,
bHLH7
was only specifically expressed in B-phase. 235 differentially expressed proteins (DEPs) were mainly located in the cytoplasm and chloroplasts. Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) analysis showed that the DEPs were mainly enriched in the metabolic process. A total of 9 terpenoid synthesis proteins were identified in the proteome. Among them, 4 proteins in methylerythritol phosphate (MEP) pathway were all down-regulated. Results suggested the synthesis of terpenoids precursors in B-phase bracts were mainly accomplished through the mevalonic acid (MVA) pathway in cytoplasm. Correlation analysis between the transcriptome and proteome, we detected a total of 1082 transcripts/proteins, three of which are related to stress. From the VOCs analysis, the average percent of monoterpenoids emitted by A-phase and B-phase syconia were 8.29% and 37.08%, while those of sesquiterpenes were 88.43% and 55.02% respectively. Monoterpenes (camphene, myrcene, camphor, menthol) were only detected in VOCs of B-phase syconia. To attract pollinators, B-phase syconia of
F. hirta
need more monoterpenoids and less sesquiterpenes. We speculate that transcription factor
bHLH7
may regulate the terpenoid synthesis pathway between A- and B-phase syconia. Our research provided the first global analysis of mechanism differences of terpenoid synthesis pathways between A and B phases in
F. hirta
syconia.
Aquaporin-2 (AQP2) has been identified as one of the most important biomarkers for nephrotic syndrome analysis. Here we propose and experimentally demonstrate a surface Plasmon resonance (SPR) ...reflective fiber-based biosensor for label-free specific detection of the urinary AQP2 with high resolution. The biosensor utilizes a tilted fiber Bragg grating with a 50 nm gold coating to excite SPR for the detection of refractive indices change at the fiber surface and the surroundings. The sensor works with very controllable cross-sensitivities because the core mode is temperature dependent but insensitive to surrounding refractive index. This label-free sensing system takes advantage of the specific functionalization of the sensor with AQP2 antibody, which has a high specificity to the target protein. The intensity variation of a selected plasmonic resonance caused by the specific capture of urinary AQP2 enables us to clearly differentiate between healthy and nephropathic samples in a few minutes, with the limit of detection up to 1.5 ng/ml.
We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel electric field intensity sensor by using a tilted fiber Bragg grating (TFBG) interacting with liquid crystal. The TFBG is surrounded by the liquid ...crystal whose effective refractive index changes over the range from 1.53 to 1.70 in response to the strength of external electric fields. The guiding properties of cladding modes excited in the TFBG are, therefore, sensitive to the external electric field. By monitoring the amplitude of a selected cladding mode resonance, we measured electric field strength over a range of 1.0-4.8 kV/cm. The sensor demonstrated better than 99% linearity with a sensitivity of 0.287 dB/kV/cm. Temperature cross-sensitivity can be effectively reduced by referenced to the core mode of the proposed TFBG sensor.
Aiming at the current situation that the energy absorbing unit of the re-directive crash-cushion squeezes the corrugated plates on both sides during the collision deformation,causing secondary damage ...caused by the wavy plate scattering,an "H"type energy absorbing unit configuration is proposed. According to Standard for Safety Performance Evaluation of Highway Barriers（ JTG B05-01-2013）,a TA grade re-directive crash-cushion is designed to meet the collision speed of 80 km/h requirement. Meanwhile,the finite element simulation model of vehicle and crash-cushion is established and combined with the collision simulation test,the collision safety of TA grade re-directive crash-cushion is comprehensively analyzed. It shows that the vehicle has no rollover,climbing or riding span. The maximum accelerations at each collision condition are 17. 3 g,16. 5 g,14. 6 g and 8. 1 g,which meet the requirement of the evaluation criteria for collision safety laws.
Advanced glycation end-products (AGEs) can boost their receptor of AGE (RAGE) expression through the downstream signaling pathway to facilitate AGE-RAGE interaction. In this regulation process, the ...primary signaling pathways are NF-κB and STAT3. However, the inhibition of these transcription factors cannot completely block the upregulation of RAGE, which indicates AGEs may also impact RAGE expression
other pathways. In this study, we revealed that AGEs can exhibit epigenetic impacts on RAGE expression. Here, we used carboxymethyl-lysine (CML) and carboxyethyl-lysine (CEL) to treat liver cells and discovered that AGEs can promote the demethylation of the RAGE promoter region. To verify this epigenetic modification, we employed dCAS9-DNMT3a with sgRNA to specifically modify the RAGE promoter region against the effect of carboxymethyl-lysine and carboxyethyl-lysine. The elevated RAGE expressions were partially repressed after AGE-induced hypomethylation statuses were reversed. Additionally, TET1 were also upregulated in AGE-treated cells, indicating AGEs may epigenetically modulate RAGE through the elevating TET1 level.
PDF
