Irreversible electroporation (IRE) is a tissue ablation method, uses short high electric pulses and results in cell death in target tissue by irreversibly permeabilizing the cell membrane. Potato is ...commonly used as a tissue model for electroporation experiments. The blackened area that forms 12 h after electric pulsing is regarded as an IRE-ablated area caused by melanin accumulation. Here, the 2,3,5-triphenyltetrazolium chloride (TTC) was used as a dye to assess the IRE-ablated area 3 h after potato model ablation. Comparison between the blackened area and TTC-unstained white area in various voltage conditions showed that TTC staining well delineated the IRE-ablated area. Moreover, whether the ablated area was consistent over time and at different staining times was investigated. In addition, the presumed reversible electroporation (RE) area was formed surrounding the IRE-ablated area. Overall, TTC staining can provide a more rapid and accurate electroporated area evaluation.
•A kinetic model for CO2 adsorption on a PEI-functionalized sorbent is studied.•An Autochem® reactor system was used to obtain experimental data.•Long-tails in adsorption breakthrough curves could be ...accurately represented.•Desorption patterns of the sorbent could be accurately represented.
A kinetic model of CO2 adsorption on an amine-functionalized silica sorbent, 0.37EB-PEI, was proposed by using experimental data from a miniature isothermal fixed bed reactor system called Autochem. Breakthrough curve tests were conducted at different CO2 concentrations and different temperatures to acquire experimental data under adsorption-dominant conditions. Additionally, temperature programmed desorption (TPD) experiments were carried out for different CO2 concentrations with different starting temperatures to investigate the desorption kinetics. A modified Langmuir kinetic equation was found to provide a satisfactory representation of the adsorption-dominant experimental data, including the long tails. A separate kinetic model was proposed to express the desorption-dominant TPD data. The dynamic effects of the empty volume in the Autochem device on the experimental measurements were rigorously handled through separate empty-volume dynamic tests.
X-ray computed tomography (XCT), field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) were evaluated for imaging and element identification of woody ...plant roots. Lateral roots of Japanese zelkova (Zelkova serrata) were severed in spring and maintained in soil for six months. The lateral roots were observed using XCT without maceration and sectioning. The general wood characteristics were discernible to reveal the bark and xylem structures in contrast-inverted tomograms. Virtual sections showed a newly formed ring of woundwood encircling the severed lateral roots. FESEM exhibited secondary xylem structures in which tyloses, fungal hyphae, and aggregates were present. While silicon was dispersed in and around the fungal hyphae, calcium was localized as distinct aggregates using EDS. These results suggest that the combined use of XCT, FESEM, and EDS has merit into the morphological assessment of tree health care, providing virtual sections, high-resolution images, and element composition from an entire woodblock.
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•The general wood characteristics were discernible to reveal the bark and xylem structures in contrast-inverted tomograms of X-ray CT.•FESEM exhibited secondary xylem structures in which tyloses, fungal hyphae, and aggregates were present•While silicon was dispersed in and around the fungal hyphae, calcium was localized as distinct aggregates using EDS.
Metamaterials can possess extraordinary properties not readily available in nature. While most of the early metamaterials had narrow frequency bandwidth of operation, many recent works have focused ...on how to implement exotic properties and functions over broad bandwidth for practical applications. Here, we provide two definitions of broadband operation in terms of effective material properties and device functionality, suitable for describing materials and devices, respectively, and overview existing broadband metamaterial designs in such two categories. Broadband metamaterials with nearly constant effective material properties are discussed in the materials part, and broadband absorbers, lens, and hologram devices based on metamaterials and metasurfaces are discussed in the devices part.
Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a relapsing skin disease with persistent inflammation as a causal factor for symptoms and disease progression. Current therapies provide only temporary relief and require ...long-term usage accompanied by side effects due to persistent relapses. A short peptide, TPS240, has been tested for its potential to subside AD. In this study, we confirmed the anti-atopic effect of TPS240 in vivo and in vitro using a DNCB-induced AD mouse model and TNF-α/IFN-γ-stimulated HaCaT cells. In the AD mouse model, topical treatment with TPS240 diminished AD-like skin lesions and symptoms such as epidermal thickening and mast cell infiltration induced by DNCB, similar to the existing treatment, dexamethasone (Dex). Furthermore, skin atrophy, weight loss, and abnormal organ weight changes observed in the Dex-treated group were not detected in the TPS240-treated group. In TNF-α/IFN-γ-stimulated HaCaT cells, TPS240 reduced the expression of the inflammatory chemokines CCL17 and CCL22 and the pruritic cytokines TSLP and IL-31 by inhibiting NF-κB and STAT3 activation. These results suggest that TPS240 has an anti-atopic effect through immunomodulation of AD-specific cytokines and chemokines and can be used as a candidate drug for the prevention and treatment of AD that can solve the safety problems of existing treatments.
The trichomes of
Quercus acutissima
(sawtooth oak) leaves were investigated to ascertain a possible fungal habitat on the phyllosphere. Brown spots with yellow halos occurred on naturally-infected ...leaves of sawtooth oak in Suwon, Korea.
Tubakia dryina
was isolated from the brown spots and identified based on its morphological characteristics and DNA sequence data. Field emission scanning electron microscopy revealed hyphal branching and prevalence of septate hyphae on the adaxial leaf surface. Non-glandular trichomes were usually colonized by septate hyphae. Hyphae coiled around the trichome rays. Epidermal shrinkage of trichomes appeared rather frequently observed on the diseased leaves than on the control leaves. Transmission electron microscopy revealed the presence of fungal hyphae in the naturally-infected trichomes of this oak species. Hyphal growth appeared to dissolve the non-glandular trichomes on the abaxial leaf surface. Concentric bodies and intrahyphal hyphae were often found in the hyphal cytoplasm. These results suggest that the foliar trichomes of sawtooth oak could serve as fungal habitats or infection sites.
Grading of cancer histopathology slides requires more pathologists and expert clinicians as well as it is time consuming to look manually into whole-slide images. Hence, an automated classification ...of histopathological breast cancer sub-type is useful for clinical diagnosis and therapeutic responses. Recent deep learning methods for medical image analysis suggest the utility of automated radiologic imaging classification for relating disease characteristics or diagnosis and patient stratification.
To develop a hybrid model using the convolutional neural network (CNN) and the long short-term memory recurrent neural network (LSTM RNN) to classify four benign and four malignant breast cancer subtypes. The proposed CNN-LSTM leveraging on ImageNet uses a transfer learning approach in classifying and predicting four subtypes of each. The proposed model was evaluated on the BreakHis dataset comprises 2480 benign and 5429 malignant cancer images acquired at magnifications of 40×, 100×, 200× and 400×.
The proposed hybrid CNN-LSTM model was compared with the existing CNN models used for breast histopathological image classification such as VGG-16, ResNet50, and Inception models. All the models were built using three different optimizers such as adaptive moment estimator (Adam), root mean square propagation (RMSProp), and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimizers by varying numbers of epochs. From the results, we noticed that the Adam optimizer was the best optimizer with maximum accuracy and minimum model loss for both the training and validation sets. The proposed hybrid CNN-LSTM model showed the highest overall accuracy of 99% for binary classification of benign and malignant cancer, and, whereas, 92.5% for multi-class classifier of benign and malignant cancer subtypes, respectively.
To conclude, the proposed transfer learning approach outperformed the state-of-the-art machine and deep learning models in classifying benign and malignant cancer subtypes. The proposed method is feasible in classification of other cancers as well as diseases.
Fleshy fruits are the most demanded fruits because of their organoleptic qualities and nutritional values. The genus Prunus is a rich source of diversified stone/drupe fruits such as almonds, ...apricots, plums, sweet cherries, peaches, and nectarines. The fruit-ripening process in Prunus involves coordinated biochemical and physiological changes resulting in changes in fruit texture, aroma gain, color change in the pericarp, sugar/organic acid balance, fruit growth, and weight gain. There are different varieties of peaches with unique palatable qualities and gaining knowledge in the genetics behind these quality traits helps in seedling selection for breeding programs. In addition, peaches have shorter post-harvest life due to excessive softening, resulting in fruit quality reduction and market loss. Many studies have been executed to understand the softening process at the molecular level to find the genetic basis. To summarize, this review focused on the molecular aspects of peach fruit quality attributes and their related genetics to understand the underlying mechanisms.
Measurements of systems taken along a continuous functional dimension, such as time or space, are ubiquitous in many fields, from the physical and biological sciences to economics and engineering. ...Such measurements can be viewed as realisations of an underlying smooth process sampled over the continuum. However, traditional methods for independence testing and causal learning are not directly applicable to such data, as they do not take into account the dependence along the functional dimension. By using specifically designed kernels, we introduce statistical tests for bivariate, joint, and conditional independence for functional variables. Our method not only extends the applicability to functional data of the Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion (hsic) and its d-variate version (
-hsic), but also allows us to introduce a test for conditional independence by defining a novel statistic for the conditional permutation test (cpt) based on the Hilbert-Schmidt conditional independence criterion (hscic), with optimised regularisation strength estimated through an evaluation rejection rate. Our empirical results of the size and power of these tests on synthetic functional data show good performance, and we then exemplify their application to several constraint- and regression-based causal structure learning problems, including both synthetic examples and real socioeconomic data.
Cockroaches are surrogate hosts for microbes that cause many human diseases. In spite of their generally destructive nature, cockroaches have recently been found to harbor potentially beneficial and ...medically useful substances such as drugs and allergens. However, genomic information for the American cockroach (Periplaneta americana) is currently unavailable; therefore, transcriptome and gene expression profiling is needed as an important resource to better understand the fundamental biological mechanisms of this species, which would be particularly useful for the selection of novel antimicrobial peptides. Thus, we performed de novo transcriptome analysis of P. americana that were or were not immunized with Escherichia coli. Using an Illumina HiSeq sequencer, we generated a total of 9.5 Gb of sequences, which were assembled into 85,984 contigs and functionally annotated using Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST), Gene Ontology (GO), and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) database terms. Finally, using an in silico antimicrobial peptide prediction method, 86 antimicrobial peptide candidates were predicted from the transcriptome, and 21 of these peptides were experimentally validated for their antimicrobial activity against yeast and gram positive and -negative bacteria by a radial diffusion assay. Notably, 11 peptides showed strong antimicrobial activities against these organisms and displayed little or no cytotoxic effects in the hemolysis and cell viability assay. This work provides prerequisite baseline data for the identification and development of novel antimicrobial peptides, which is expected to provide a better understanding of the phenomenon of innate immunity in similar species.
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