The Tibetan chicken is a unique breed that has adapted to the high-altitude hypoxic conditions of the Tibetan plateau. A number of positively selected genes have been reported in these chickens; ...however, the mechanisms of gene expression for hypoxia adaptation are not fully understood. In the present study, eggs from Tibetan and Chahua chickens were incubated under hypoxic and normoxic conditions, and vascularization in the chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) of embryos was observed. We found that the vessel density index in the CAM of Tibetan chickens was lower than in Chahua chickens under hypoxia conditions. Transcriptomic and proteomic analyses of CAM tissues were performed in Tibetan and Chahua chicken embryos under hypoxic incubation using RNA-Seq and iTRAQ. We obtained 160 differentially expressed genes and 387 differentially expressed proteins that were mainly enriched in angiogenesis, vasculature development, blood vessel morphogenesis, blood circulation, renin-angiotensin system, and HIF-1 and VEGF signaling pathways. Twenty-six genes involved in angiogenesis and blood circulation, two genes involved in ion transport, and six genes that regulated energy metabolism were identified as candidate functional genes in regulating hypoxic adaptation of chicken embryos. This research provided insights into the molecular mechanism of hypoxia adaptation in Tibetan chickens.
Three-axis atomic magnetometers have great advantages for interpreting information conveyed by magnetic fields. Here, we demonstrate a compact construction of a three-axis vector atomic magnetometer. ...The magnetometer is operated with a single laser beam and with a specially designed triangular 87Rb vapor cell (side length is 5 mm). The ability of three-axis measurement is realized by reflecting the light beam in the cell chamber under high pressure, so that the atoms before and after reflection are polarized along two different directions. It achieves a sensitivity of 40 fT/Hz in x-axis, 20 fT/Hz in y-axis, and 30 fT/Hz in z-axis under spin-exchange relaxation-free regime. The crosstalk effect between different axes is proven to be little in this configuration. The sensor configuration here is expected to form further values, especially for vector biomagnetism measurement, clinical diagnosis, and field source reconstruction.
Extensive uncertainty can affect the efficiency and fairness of consensus in the consensus reaching process (CRP), but few scholars have studied consensus modeling that focuses on fairness and ...efficiency in uncertain environments. Additionally, the weight of the decision maker (DM) in the CRP is influenced by multiple factors. Therefore, this paper proposes robust consensus models (EFCMs) focusing on fairness and efficiency under uncertain costs to address these issues. Firstly, this paper constructs multiple uncertainty sets to describe the uncertainty of the unit adjustment cost. Secondly, the fair utility level and opinion adjustment distance are used to measure the fairness and efficiency of reaching consensus, respectively. Furthermore, this paper uses a data-driven method based on the KDE method combined with trust propagation in social networks to determine the DMs’ weights jointly. Finally, this paper also applies the proposed models to the carbon emission reduction negotiation process between the government and enterprises. The experimental results and sensitivity analysis show that the consensus cost budget and the DMs’ jealous preference behavior particularly affects the efficiency of reaching consensus, which provides a theoretical basis for solving practical decision making problems.
Deficiency in scavenger receptor class B, member 2 (SCARB2) is related to both Gaucher disease (GD) and Parkinson's disease (PD), which are both neurodegenerative-related diseases without cure. ...Although both diseases lead to weight loss, which affects the quality of life and the progress of diseases, the underlying molecular mechanism is still unclear. In this study, we found that
mice showed significantly reduced lipid storage in white fat tissues (WAT) compared to WT mice on a regular chow diet. However, the phenotype is independent of heat production, activity, food intake or energy absorption. Furthermore, adipocyte differentiation and cholesterol homeostasis were unaffected. We found that the impaired lipid accumulation of
mice was due to the imbalance between glycolysis and oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS). Mechanistically, the mechanistic target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1)/ eukaryotic translation initiation factor 4E binding protein 1 (4E-BP1) pathway was down-regulated in Scarb2 deficient adipocytes, leading to impaired mitochondrial respiration and enhanced glycolysis. Altogether, we reveal the role of SCARB2 in metabolism regulation besides the nervous system, which provides a theoretical basis for weight loss treatment of patients with neurodegenerative diseases.
The potential toxicity of microplastic (MPs) to organisms has attracted extensive attention. However, due to the subacute toxicity of MPs, the biological effect is hard to verify in short-term ...exposure experiment. Here, by tracking the dynamics of gut microbes, mice model was utilized to evaluate the toxicity of compositional MPs (PE, PET, PP, PS and PVC). After 7 days digestive exposure, the physiological indicators were normal as the control group that the body weight and serum cholesterol levels were insignificant change. Whereas, through histopathological examination, all the treatment groups suffered colon tissue damage, among which PS had the most inflammatory cells. Moreover, the high-throughput sequencing results revealed great variation of intestinal flora in treated mice. The ratio of Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes in PE, PET and PP treatment groups heighten, and the relative abundance of Ruminococcaceae and Lachnospiraceae increased significantly at family levels. At the genus level, Alistipes bacteria in PS treatment group significantly decreased that is associated with obesity risk. It indicated that MPs induced inflammatory response would further interfere the dynamics of intestinal flora causing health effect in living organisms. This work shed light on MPs toxicity in short-term exposure and supplied research paradigm of MPs health risk assessment.
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•Bioeffects of common microplastics were comparatively assessed after short-term exposure to mice model.•Gut microbes were used as indicators to monitor the biological effects of microplastic.•Exposure to microplastic can lead to potential obesity indicated by the metabolic microbiota.
The rapid identification of the amount and characteristics of chemical oxygen demand (COD) in influent water is critical to the operation of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), especially for WWTPs ...in the face of influent water with a low carbon/nitrogen (C/N) ratio. Given that, this study carried out batch kinetic experiments for soluble chemical oxygen demand (SCOD) and nitrogen degradation for three WWTPs and established machine learning (ML) models for the accurate prediction of the variation in SCOD. The results indicate that four different kinds of components were identified via parallel factor (PARAFAC) analysis. C1 (Ex/Em = 235 nm and 275/348 nm, tryptophan-like substances/soluble microbial by-products) contributes to the majority of internal carbon sources for endogenous denitrification, whereas C4 (230 nm and 275/350 nm, tyrosine-like substances) is crucial for readily biodegradable SCOD composition according to the machine learning (ML) models. Furthermore, the gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) algorithm achieved higher interpretability and generalizability in describing the relationship between SCOD and carbon source components, with an R2 reaching 0.772. A Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) analysis of GBDT models further validated the above result. Undoubtedly, this study provided novel insights into utilizing ML models to predict SCOD through the measurements of the excitation–emission matrix (EEM) in specific Ex and Em positions. The results could help us to identify the degradation and transformation relationship between different kinds of carbon sources and nitrogen species in the wastewater treatment process, and thus provide a novel guidance for the optimized operation of WWTPs.
Foreground and background image segmentation plays an important role in the field of image processing. Convex shape priors are introduced in some image segmentation methods to estimate those implicit ...boundaries of image objects when these convex objects are partly obscured by unrelated surroundings that appeared in images. Classical convex shape prior based image segmentation methods use binary label functions to distinguish different image regions, which are sensitive to model parameter choices and often show poor performance in segmentation results. To solve these problems, in this paper fuzzy membership functions, which can be seen as relaxed forms of typical binary label functions, are chosen to represent different image parts, and a new variational model with respect to fuzzy membership functions is proposed in which a convex shape prior on fuzzy membership functions is designed to guarantee estimated image foregrounds having convex shapes in geometry, while to avoid the indicator function from being over-smoothed, a minimax concave regularization term is introduced to measure the smoothness of fuzzy membership functions. In order to construct an efficient algorithm to obtain desired solutions, the original model we proposed is transformed into an equivalent constrained minimization problem using the variable splitting technology, and then numerical solutions for the equivalent constrained model can be solved by an iteration algorithm which integrates the alternating direction method of multipliers, the fast Fourier transform, and the soft thresholding method. Numerical results demonstrate our proposed image segmentation method can keep estimated foreground regions convex in geometry. Compared with classical image segmentation methods, our proposed method shows more robust in model parameter choices and can obtain better convex shape in image segmentation results.
The task of partitioning convex shape objects from images is a hot research topic, since this kind of object can be widely found in natural images. The difficulties in achieving this task lie in the ...fact that these objects are usually partly interrupted by undesired background scenes. To estimate the whole boundaries of these objects, different neural networks are designed to ensure the convexity of corresponding image segmentation results. To make use of well-trained neural networks to promote the performances of convex shape image segmentation tasks, in this paper a new image segmentation model is proposed in the variational framework. In this model, a fuzzy membership function, instead of a classical binary label function, is employed to indicate image regions. To ensure fuzzy membership functions can approximate to binary label functions well, an edge-preserving smoothness regularizer is constructed from an off-the-shelf plug-and-play network denoiser, since an image denoising process can also be seen as an edge-preserving smoothing process. From the numerical results, our proposed method could generate better segmentation results on real images, and our image segmentation results were less affected by the initialization of our method than the results obtained from classical methods.
Virus infection induces the production of type I interferons (IFNs). IFNs bind to their heterodimeric receptors to initiate downstream cascade of signaling, leading to the up-regulation of ...interferon-stimulated genes (ISGs). ISGs play very important roles in innate immunity through a variety of mechanisms. Although hundreds of ISGs have been identified, it is commonly recognized that more ISGs await to be discovered. The aim of this study was to identify new ISGs and to probe their roles in regulating virus-induced type I IFN production. We used consensus interferon (Con-IFN), an artificial alpha IFN that was shown to be more potent than naturally existing type I IFN, to treat three human immune cell lines, CEM, U937 and Daudi cells. Microarray analysis was employed to identify those genes whose expressions were up-regulated. Six hundred and seventeen genes were up-regulated more than 3-fold. Out of these 617 genes, 138 were not previously reported as ISGs and thus were further pursued. Validation of these 138 genes using quantitative reverse transcription PCR (qRT-PCR) confirmed 91 genes. We screened 89 genes for those involved in Sendai virus (SeV)-induced IFN-β promoter activation, and PIM1 was identified as one whose expression inhibited SeV-mediated IFN-β activation. We provide evidence indicating that PIM1 specifically inhibits RIG-I- and MDA5-mediated IFN-β signaling. Our results expand the ISG library and identify PIM1 as an ISG that participates in the regulation of virus-induced type I interferon production.
Anthropogenic activities have increased nitrogen (N) deposition in terrestrial ecosystems, which directly and indirectly affects soil biogeochemical processes, including soil respiration. However, ...the effects of the increases in N availability on soil respiration are not fully understood. In this study, soil respiration was measured using an infrared gas analyzer system with soil chambers under four N treatments (0, 5, 15, and 30 g N m–2 year–1 as control, low N (LN), moderate N (MN), and high N (HN), respectively) in camphor tree and slash pine forests in subtropical China. Results showed that soil respiration rates decreased by 37% in the camphor tree forest and 27% in the slash pine forest on average on an annual base, respectively, in the N-fertilized treatments when compared with the control. No significant differences were found in the soil respiration rate among the LN, MN, and HN treatments in both forest types as these fertilized plots reached an adequate N content zone. In addition, soil microbial biomass carbon (C) content and fine root biomass declined in N-treated plots compared to the control. Our results indicated that elevated N deposition might alter the tree growth pattern, C partitioning, and microbial activity, which further affect soil C sequestration by reducing soil respiration in subtropical forests of China.
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