Exosomes are nano-sized biovesicles released into surrounding body fluids upon fusion of multivesicular bodies and the plasma membrane. They were shown to carry cell-specific cargos of proteins, ...lipids, and genetic materials, and can be selectively taken up by neighboring or distant cells far from their release, reprogramming the recipient cells upon their bioactive compounds. Therefore, the regulated formation of exosomes, specific makeup of their cargo, cell-targeting specificity are of immense biological interest considering extremely high potential of exosomes as non-invasive diagnostic biomarkers, as well as therapeutic nanocarriers. In present review, we outline and discuss recent progress in the elucidation of the regulatory mechanisms of exosome biogenesis, the molecular composition of exosomes, and technologies used in exosome research. Furthermore, we focus on the potential use of exosomes as valuable diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers for their cell-lineage and state-specific contents, and possibilities as therapeutic vehicles for drug and gene delivery. Exosome research is now in its infancy, in-depth understanding of subcellular components and mechanisms involved in exosome formation and specific cell-targeting will bring light on their physiological activities.
The major innate immune cell types involved in tuberculosis (TB) infection are macrophages, dendritic cells (DCs), neutrophils and natural killer (NK) cells. These immune cells recognize the ...TB-causing pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) through various pattern recognition receptors (PRRs), including but not limited to Toll-like receptors (TLRs), Nod-like receptors (NLRs) and C-type lectin receptors (CLRs). Upon infection by Mtb, the host orchestrates multiple signaling cascades via the PRRs to launch a variety of innate immune defense functions such as phagocytosis, autophagy, apoptosis and inflammasome activation. In contrast, Mtb utilizes numerous exquisite strategies to evade or circumvent host innate immunity. Here we discuss recent research on major host innate immune cells, PRR signaling, and the cellular functions involved in Mtb infection, with a specific focus on the host's innate immune defense and Mtb immune evasion. A better understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying host-pathogen interactions could provide a rational basis for the development of effective anti-TB therapeutics.
In the research of computer vision, a very challenging problem is the detection of small objects. The existing detection algorithms often focus on detecting full-scale objects, without making ...proprietary optimization for detecting small-size objects. For small objects dense scenes, not only the accuracy is low, but also there is a certain waste of computing resources. An improved detection algorithm was proposed for small objects based on YOLOv5. By reasonably clipping the feature map output of the large object detection layer, the computing resources required by the model were significantly reduced and the model becomes more lightweight. An improved feature fusion method (PB-FPN) for small object detection based on PANet and BiFPN was proposed, which effectively increased the detection ability for small object of the algorithm. By introducing the spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) in the backbone network into the feature fusion network and connecting with the model prediction head, the performance of the algorithm was effectively enhanced. The experiments demonstrated that the improved algorithm has very good results in detection accuracy and real-time ability. Compared with the classical YOLOv5, the mAP@0.5 and mAP@0.5:0.95 of SF-YOLOv5 were increased by 1.6% and 0.8%, respectively, the number of parameters of the network were reduced by 68.2%, computational resources (FLOPs) were reduced by 12.7%, and the inferring time of the mode was reduced by 6.9%.
Keats constructs the special narrative structure of "Ode to a Nightingale" with diverse auditory methods such as overhearing, auditory hallucination and weird hearing, indicating Keats's ethical ...choice when faced with the specific ethical predicament. Keats uses a rhetorical question in the last two lines of the "Ode" to represent his ethical thought, which reflects the third realm of auditory response with sudden enlightenment, and displays his poetic idea of "negative capability". "Re-listening" to the canonical "Ode" is of benefit for us to explore the ethical value of the "Ode", to revise human being's habitual neglect of auditory sense, and to resume the intuition of hearing the natural voices. Keywords: Keats; "Ode to a Nightingale"; auditory narrative; ethical value; Sphinx Factor phrase omitted
We, the Publisher, have retracted the following article: Haiying Liu (2022). Multi-attention mechanism based on gate recurrent unit for English text classification. EAI Endorsed Scal Inf Syst. ...http://dx.doi.org/10.4108/eai.27-1-2022.173166 The authors submitted the article to the Special Issue on “Real-time image information processing with deep neural networks and data mining technologies”, edited by the Guest Editors Dr Prof. Hang Li (Northeastern University, China) and Dr Prof. Jochen Schiewe, HafenCity Universität Hamburg, Germany. From our Research Integrity Team, we performed auditing of the editorial process of this Special Issue, and we identified misconduct during the review process. The generated reviews were simple, generalistic, without rigour, and the same for every submission. Following the COPE guidelines, we decided to RETRACT this article because “Peer review manipulation suspected after publication”. We informed the authors about this decision. The retracted article will remain, and it has been watermarked as “RETRACTED”.
This article has been retracted, and the retraction notice can be found here: http://dx.doi.org/10.4108/eai.8-4-2022.173791. Text classification is one of the core tasks in the field of natural ...language processing. Aiming at the advantages and disadvantages of current deep learning-based English text classification methods in long text classification, this paper proposes an English text classification model, which introduces multi-attention mechanism based on gate recurrent unit (GRU) to focus on important parts of English text. Firstly, sentences and documents are encoded according to the hierarchical structure of English documents. Second, it uses the attention mechanism separately at each level. On the basis of the global object vector, the maximum pooling is used to extract the specific object vector of sentence, so that the encoded document vector has more obvious category features and can pay more attention to the most distinctive semantic features of each English text. Finally, documents are classified according to the constructed English document representation. Experimental results on public data sets show that this model has better classification performance for long English texts with hierarchical structure.
The aim of this study was to explore the effects of dietary fermented feed addition on growth performance, immune organ indices, serum biochemical parameters, cecal odorous compound production, and ...the bacterial community in broilers. A total of 480 broiler chicks (1-day-old) were randomly assigned to 6 groups, including a basal diet (control group), a basal diet supplemented with 10, 15, 20, and 25% dried fermented feed, and 10% wet fermented feed. Each group contained 8 replicates of 10 chicks each. The results showed that fermentation increased (P < 0.05) the total acid level and the number of Lactobacillus, Yeast, and Bacillus. The 15% dried fermented feed group had an increased (P < 0.05) body weight (BW) than the control, while the 25% dried fermented feed group had the lowest (P < 0.05) BW on 42 d. Compared to the control group, the feed intake (FI) was increased (P < 0.05) in the 10, 15% dried and 10% wet fermented feed groups from 22 to 42 d and from 1 to 42 d. No significant difference (P > 0.05) was observed in feed conversion ratio (FCR) among all groups. Supplementation with fermented feed increased (P < 0.05) the bursa of Fabricius index but not (P > 0.05) the thymus and spleen indices. Compared with the control, the broilers fed fermented feed had increased (P < 0.05) serum total protein, albumin, globulin, IgA, IgG, IgM, lysozyme, complement 3, and complement 4 levels. The cecal concentrations of acetic acid, propionic acid, butyric acid, and lactic acid were increased and the pH values were decreased in the fermented feed groups (P < 0.05). Among the groups, the 15% dried fermented feed group showed the lowest concentrations of skatole and indole in the cecum (P < 0.05). The composition of the cecal microbiota was characterized, in which an increased abundance of Ruminococcaceae, Lactobacillaceae, and unclassified Clostridiales and a decreased abundance of Rikenellaceae, Lachnospiraceae, and Bacteroidaceae were found in the fermented feed groups. Taken together, dietary fermented feed supplementation can improve growth performance, immune organ development, and capacity and decrease cecal odorous compound production, which may be related to the regulation of microbial composition.
Abstract
Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are crucial players in tumour progression. Herein, this work was designated to decipher the clinical significance, function and molecular mechanism of a ...lncRNA, differentiation antagonizing non-coding RNA (DANCR) in colorectal cancer (CRC). Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction was adopted to examine DANCR, miR-185-5p and HMGA2 mRNA expressions in CRC tissues and cells. Both gain-of-function and loss-of-function cell models for DANCR were established, and then MTT, wound healing and Transwell, flow cytometry assays were carried out to detect the proliferation, migration, invasion, cell cycle and apoptosis of CRC cells. Dual-luciferase reporter gene assay and RIP assay were utilized to validate the targeting relationships between DANCR and miR-185-5p. Western blot was employed for detecting high mobility group A2 (HMGA2) expressions in CRC cells. In this study, we demonstrated that the expression of DANCR was elevated in CRC tissues and cell lines, and its high expression was significantly associated with increased TNM stage and positive lymph node metastasis. DANCR overexpression promoted CRC cell proliferation, migration, invasion and cell cycle progression, but inhibited apoptosis; while knocking down DANCR caused the opposite effects. DANCR was further identified as a molecular sponge for miR-185-5p, and DANCR could indirectly increase the expression of HMGA2 via repressing miR-185-5p. In conclusion, DANCR/miR-185-5p/HMGA2 axis participated in the progression of CRC.
Graphical Abstract
Graphical Abstract
Premature telomere shortening is a known factor correlated to idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) occurrence, which is a chronic, progressive, age-related disease with high mortality. The etiology of ...IPF is still unknown. Here, we found that UBQLN1 plays a key role in telomere length maintenance and is potentially relevant to IPF. UBQLN1 involves in DNA replication by interacting with RPA1 and shuttling it off from the replication fork. The deficiency of UBQLN1 retains RPA1 at replication fork, hinders replication and thus causes cell cycle arrest and genome instability. Especially at telomere regions of the genome, where more endogenous replication stress exists because of G rich sequences, UBQLN1 depletion leads to rapid telomere shortening in HeLa cells. It revealed that UBQLN1 depletion also shortens telomere length at mouse lung and accelerates mouse lung fibrosis. In addition, the UBQLN1 expression level in IPF patients is downregulated and correlated to poor prognosis. Altogether, these results uncover a new role of UBQLN1 in ensuring DNA replication and maintaining telomere stability, which may shed light on IPF pathogenesis and prevention.
Soybean oligosaccharides have been previously shown to be associated with the production of major odor-causing compounds in broilers, although little is known about the role of stachyose and ...raffinose, which are key components of soybean oligosaccharide, in broiler cecal microbiota and odor compound production. To this end, soybean oligosaccharide, stachyose, and raffinose were added to the birds' diets to investigate their effects on odor compound production and the microbial community characteristics of the cecum in broilers. A total of 300 one-day-old Arbor Acre broilers with similar initial live weight were randomly allocated into 5 dietary groups with 6 replicates of 10 birds. The diets included soybean meal (positive control), soybean meal-free (negative control), 0.6% soybean oligosaccharide, 0.6% stachyose, or 0.6% raffinose. After a 49-D feeding period, both ceca were aseptically removed postmortem, and the contents were collected and analyzed for skatole, indole, volatile fatty acids, and lactic acid by using high performance liquid chromatography. Bacterial communities were detected by using a high-throughput sequencing platform based on IlluminaMiSeq 2500. Levels of skatole and indole tended to be lower in the dietary supplementation of oligosaccharides. The lowest levels of skatole and indole were observed in the stachyose group (P < 0.05), while the highest levels were found in the negative control group (P < 0.05). Concentrations of acetic acid and propionic acid in the stachyose group were increased (P < 0.05) while those of butyric acid and lactic acid were decreased (P < 0.05) compared with the soybean oligosaccharide and raffinose groups. Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes were prevalent in all groups, the proportion of Bacteroidetes was slightly decreased in the stachyose group, and Verrucomicrobia was abundant in the raffinose group (P > 0.05). Bacterial genera Alistipes and Parabacteroides were comparably abundant in the stachyose group, while Bacteroides, Lactobacillus, and Akkermansia were more abundant in the negative control, stachyose, and raffinose groups, respectively. Collectively, these findings demonstrated that dietary oligosaccharide supplementation significantly reduced odor compound production by modulating the cecal microbial community. Compared with soybean oligosaccharide and raffinose, the addition of stachyose into diets may help improve gut fermentation and minimize odor compound generation in broilers.
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