Senna tora is a widely used medicinal plant. Its health benefits have been attributed to the large quantity of anthraquinones, but how they are made in plants remains a mystery. To identify the genes ...responsible for plant anthraquinone biosynthesis, we reveal the genome sequence of S. tora at the chromosome level with 526 Mb (96%) assembled into 13 chromosomes. Comparison among related plant species shows that a chalcone synthase-like (CHS-L) gene family has lineage-specifically and rapidly expanded in S. tora. Combining genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and biochemistry, we identify a CHS-L gene contributing to the biosynthesis of anthraquinones. The S. tora reference genome will accelerate the discovery of biologically active anthraquinone biosynthesis pathways in medicinal plants.
SUMMARY
Background
Tegoprazan is a novel potassium‐competitive acid blocker used to treat acid‐related disorders.
Aim
To compare tegoprazan 25 mg with lansoprazole 15 mg as maintenance therapy in ...healed erosive oesophagitis (EE)
Methods
In this phase 3, double‐blind, multi‐centre study, patients with endoscopically confirmed healed EE were randomised 1:1 to receive tegoprazan 25 mg or lansoprazole 15 mg once daily for up to 24 weeks. The primary efficacy endpoint was the endoscopic remission rate after 24 weeks. The secondary efficacy endpoint was the endoscopic remission rate after 12 weeks. Safety endpoints included adverse events, clinical laboratory results and serum gastrin and pepsinogen I/II levels.
Results
We randomised patients to tegoprazan 25 mg (n = 174) or lansoprazole 15 mg (n = 177). Most had mild EE (Los Angeles (LA) grade A: 57.3%, LA grade B: 37.3%). The endoscopic remission rate after 24 weeks was 90.6% with tegoprazan and 89.5% with lansoprazole. Tegoprazan was not inferior to lansoprazole for maintaining endoscopic remission at 24 weeks and 12 weeks. In subgroup analysis, tegoprazan 25 mg showed no significant difference in maintenance rate according to LA grade (p = 0.47). The maintenance effect of tegoprazan was consistent in CYP2C19 extensive metabolisers (p = 0.76). Increases in serum gastrin were not higher in tegoprazan‐treated than lansoprazole‐treated patients.
Conclusions
Tegoprazan 25 mg was non‐inferior to lansoprazole 15 mg in maintenance of healing of mild EE. In this study, tegoprazan had a similar safety profile to lansoprazole.
In this phase 3, double‐blind, multi‐centre study, patients with endoscopically confirmed healederosive oesophagitis were randomised 1:1 to receive tegoprazan 25 mg or lansoprazole 15 mg once daily for up to 24 weeks. The endoscopic remission rate after 24 weeks was 90.6% for the tegoprazan group and 89.5% for the lansoprazole group. Overall, tegoprazan was not inferior to lansoprazole for maintaining endoscopic remission rates at 24 weeks and 12 weeks, and was well tolerated during the maintenance period.
Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) via rank minimization is a powerful tool for recovering underlying low-rank structure of clean data corrupted with sparse noise/outliers. In many low-level ...vision problems, not only it is known that the underlying structure of clean data is low-rank, but the exact rank of clean data is also known. Yet, when applying conventional rank minimization for those problems, the objective function is formulated in a way that does not fully utilize a priori target rank information about the problems. This observation motivates us to investigate whether there is a better alternative solution when using rank minimization. In this paper, instead of minimizing the nuclear norm, we propose to minimize the partial sum of singular values, which implicitly encourages the target rank constraint. Our experimental analyses show that, when the number of samples is deficient, our approach leads to a higher success rate than conventional rank minimization, while the solutions obtained by the two approaches are almost identical when the number of samples is more than sufficient. We apply our approach to various low-level vision problems, e.g., high dynamic range imaging, motion edge detection, photometric stereo, image alignment and recovery, and show that our results outperform those obtained by the conventional nuclear norm rank minimization method.
Background
Limited reports exist regarding invasive fungal diseases (IFDs) in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients.
Objectives
This study aims to investigate the incidence and risk factors of ...IFDs, specifically invasive candidiasis, aspergillosis and pneumocystosis, in IBD patients in South Korea using nationwide data.
Patients/Methods
A population‐based retrospective cohort of 42,913 IBD patients between January 2010 and December 2018 was evaluated using the Health Insurance Review and Assessment database. The primary outcome was the incidence of IFDs, including invasive candidiasis, aspergillosis and pneumocystosis, while the secondary outcome involved analysing the risk factors associated with each specific infection.
Results
The study included a total of 42,913 IBD patients, with 29,909 (69.7%) diagnosed with ulcerative colitis (UC) and 13,004 (30.3%) diagnosed with Crohn's disease (CD). IFDs occurred in 166 IBD patients (0.4%), with 93 cases in UC patients and 73 cases in CD patients. The incidence rates of invasive candidiasis, aspergillosis and pneumocystosis in IBD patients were 0.71 per 1000 person‐years (PYs), 0.15 per 1000 PYs and 0.12 per 1000 PYs, respectively. The cumulative incidence of invasive candidiasis (adjusted p‐value <.001) and Pneumocystosis (adjusted p‐value = .012) was found to be higher in CD patients than in UC patients. Each IFD had different risk factors, including IBD subtypes, age at diagnosis, anti‐tumour necrotic factor agents or the Charlson comorbidity index.
Conclusion
Based on nationwide data in South Korea, this study shows that IFDs occur consistently in patients with IBD, albeit with a low frequency.
The prevalence of hyperuricemia and chronic kidney disease (CKD) has been steadily increasing. The role of hyperuricemia and efficacy of uric acid-lowering agents against CKD progression remain ...controversial. This study aimed to evaluate the effect of hyperuricemia and uric acid-lowering agents on the progression of CKD. A total 2042 patients with CKD were analyzed in the KoreaN cohort Study for Outcomes in patients With Chronic Kidney Disease (KNOW-CKD), a prospective cohort study. Patients were classified into quartiles on the basis of their serum uric acid level and the prevalence of advanced CKD was higher in patients with a high uric acid level. A composite renal outcome was defined as one or more of the following: initiation of dialysis or transplantation, a two-fold increase in baseline serum creatinine levels, or a 50% decline in the estimated glomerular filtration rate during the follow-up period. A Cox proportional hazard ratio model was applied to analyze the relationship between composite renal outcome and uric acid levels. The risk of progression to renal failure increased by 28% (hazard ratio HR, 1.277; 95% confidence interval CI, 1.212-1.345) for each 1 mg/dl increase in the baseline uric acid level. In multivariate models, an association was found between the highest quartile of uric acid and increased risk of composite renal outcome (HR, 3.590; 95% CI, 2.546-5.063). A propensity score matching analysis was performed to survey the effect of uric acid lowering agent. Both allopurinol and febuxostat did not affect the renal outcome. In conclusion, hyperuricemia appears to be an independent risk factor for composite renal outcome, but allopurinol and febuxostat did not show reno-protective effect.
Visual events are usually accompanied by sounds in our daily lives. We pose the question: Can the machine learn the correspondence between visual scene and the sound, and localize the sound source ...only by observing sound and visual scene pairs like human? In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised algorithm to address the problem of localizing the sound source in visual scenes. A two-stream network structure which handles each modality, with attention mechanism is developed for sound source localization. Moreover, although our network is formulated within the unsupervised learning framework, it can be extended to a unified architecture with a simple modification for the supervised and semi-supervised learning settings as well. Meanwhile, a new sound source dataset is developed for performance evaluation. Our empirical evaluation shows that the unsupervised method eventually go through false conclusion in some cases. We also show that even with a few supervision, i.e., semi-supervised setup, false conclusion is able to be corrected effectively.
Canine atopic dermatitis (AD) is a common chronic inflammatory skin disorder resulting from imbalance between T lymphocytes. Current canine AD treatments use immunomodulatory drugs, but some of the ...dogs have limitations that do not respond to standard treatment, or relapse after a period of time. Thus, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the immunomodulatory effect of mesenchymal stem cells derived from canine adipose tissue (cASCs) and cASCs-derived extracellular vesicles (cASC-EVs) on AD. First, we isolated and characterized cASCs and cASCs-EVs to use for the improvement of canine atopic dermatitis. Here, we investigated the effect of cASCs or cASC-EVs on DNCB-induced AD in mice, before using for canine AD. Interestingly, we found that cASCs and cASC-EVs improved AD-like dermatitis, and markedly decreased levels of serum IgE, (49.6%,
= 0.002 and 32.1%,
= 0.016 respectively) epidermal inflammatory cytokines and chemokines, such as IL-4 (32%,
= 0.197 and 44%,
= 0.094 respectively), IL-13 (47.4%,
= 0.163, and 50.0%,
= 0.039 respectively), IL-31 (64.3%,
= 0.030 and 76.2%,
= 0.016 respectively), RANTES (66.7%,
= 0.002 and 55.6%,
= 0.007) and TARC (64%,
= 0.016 and 86%,
= 0.010 respectively). In addition, cASCs or cASC-EVs promoted skin barrier repair by restoring transepidermal water loss, enhancing stratum corneum hydration and upregulating the expression levels of epidermal differentiation proteins. Moreover, cASCs or cASC-EVs reduced IL-31/TRPA1-mediated pruritus and activation of JAK/STAT signaling pathway. Taken together, these results suggest the potential of cASCs or cASC-EVs for the treatment of chronic inflammation and damaged skin barrier in AD or canine AD.
We introduce dense relational captioning, a novel image captioning task which aims to generate multiple captions with respect to relational information between objects in a visual scene. Relational ...captioning provides explicit descriptions for each relationship between object combinations. This framework is advantageous in both diversity and amount of information, leading to a comprehensive image understanding based on relationships, e.g., relational proposal generation . For relational understanding between objects, the part-of-speech (POS; i.e., subject-object-predicate categories) can be a valuable prior information to guide the causal sequence of words in a caption. We enforce our framework to learn not only to generate captions but also to understand the POS of each word. To this end, we propose the multi-task triple-stream network (MTTSNet) which consists of three recurrent units responsible for each POS which is trained by jointly predicting the correct captions and POS for each word. In addition, we found that the performance of MTTSNet can be improved by modulating the object embeddings with an explicit relational module. We demonstrate that our proposed model can generate more diverse and richer captions, via extensive experimental analysis on large scale datasets and several metrics. Then, we present applications of our framework to holistic image captioning, scene graph generation, and retrieval tasks.
This letter proposes a lightweight model for speaker recognition by leveraging a hyperbolic space. The speaker recognition performance heavily depends on the distinctiveness of speaker embeddings ...induced by metric learning. However, most state-of-the-art embedding methods are typically based on the Euclidean metric space, which does not account for inherent hierarchical structures of speech voice characteristics. The recent development of the neural hyperbolic geometry has demonstrated its effectiveness to model continuous hierarchical structures, which have been typically cumbersome to model by standard deep neural networks. This facet provides an additional by-product of a compact representation. Inspired by the favorable geometry of the hyperbolic geometry, we developed a hyperbolic ResNet for speaker recognition. We found that in smaller dimension regimes than typical cases, the learned speaker embeddings are more discriminative; in other words, more compact at the same level of performance. Our experiments on the large-scale VoxCeleb datasets show that, given the limited channel dimensions of neural networks, our method consistently has favorable performance against the standard ResNet for both speaker recognition and verification tasks.
This article presents a novel method of dealing with disturbances and control saturation in the framework of discrete-time sliding mode control (DSMC). A DSMC with decoupled disturbance compensator ...(DDC) was developed for SMC to recover the loss of stability in the discrete-time domain. However, windup phenomena occur in both the switching function and the disturbance estimate when control saturation occurs, and the method cannot guarantee stability. The article develops a new method for maintaining stability under both disturbances and control saturation by incorporating a novel auxiliary state into the DSMC with DDC method. The auxiliary state prevents the windup phenomena, and the developed new method preserves the asymptotic convergence property of the disturbance estimation error dynamics and the stability of the sliding mode dynamics. Also, the error states are stable under bounded disturbances and control saturation. Simulations and experiments are performed on a commonly used industrial servo system to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
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