Pyoderma gangrenosum is a rare but significant cause of ulcerations. It is a diagnosis of exclusion. Herein, we suggest diagnostic criteria and some historical perspectives on the diagnosis of ...pyoderma gangrenosum.
Congenital heart disease (CHD), one of the causes of childhood morbidity and mortality, is mainly triggered by a combination of environmental and genetic factors. Several susceptible genes, such as ...NKX2‐5, GATA4 and TBX5, have been reported as closely related to heart and vessel development. CHD subtypes are classified into diverse clinical phenotypes, such as atrial septal defects (ASD), ventricular septal defects (VSD), tetralogy of Fallot (TOF), and Holt–Oram syndrome (HOS). Here, we summarize the associations of the genetic variants in these three genes with CHD subtypes. CHD‐associated variants of NKX2‐5 locate mainly in the tinman domain and the homeodomain. Mutations in the homeodomain are correlated with ASD and atrioventricular (AV) block subtypes. VSD‐associated variants of GATA4 are mainly at its terminal ends. Variants of TBX5 gene are primarily in exons 3, 4, 5 and 7 and highly associated with HOS subtype. Hence, the variant distribution of NKX2‐5, GATA4 and TBX5 are tightly associated with particular CHD subtypes. Further structure‐modelling analysis revealed that these mutated amino acid residuals maintain their DNA‐binding ability and structural stability. Therefore structural features of these genes may be used to predict the high risk of CHD subtypes in infants.
High dietary fibre intakes may protect against obesity by influencing colonic fermentation and the colonic microbiota. Though, recent studies suggest that increased colonic fermentation contributes ...to adiposity. Diet influences the composition of the gut microbiota. Previous research has not evaluated dietary intakes, body mass index (BMI), faecal microbiota and short chain fatty acid (SCFA) in the same cohort. Our objectives were to compare dietary intakes, faecal SCFA concentrations and gut microbial profiles in healthy lean (LN, BMI⩽25) and overweight or obese (OWOB, BMI>25) participants.
We collected demographic information, 3-day diet records, physical activity questionnaires and breath and faecal samples from 94 participants of whom 52 were LN and 42 OWOB.
Dietary intakes and physical activity levels did not differ significantly between groups. OWOB participants had higher faecal acetate (P=0.05), propionate (P=0.03), butyrate (P=0.05), valerate (P=0.03) and total short chain fatty acid (SCFA; P=0.02) concentrations than LN. No significant differences in Firmicutes to Bacteroides/Prevotella (F:B) ratio was observed between groups. However, in the entire cohort, Bacteroides/Prevotella counts were negatively correlated with faecal total SCFA (r=-0.32, P=0.002) and F:B ratio was positively correlated with faecal total SCFA (r=0.42, P<0.0001). Principal component analysis identified distinct gut microbiota and SCFA-F:B ratio components, which together accounted for 59% of the variation. F:B ratio loaded with the SCFA and not with the microbiota suggesting that SCFA and F:B ratio vary together and may be interrelated.
The results support the hypothesis that colonic fermentation patterns may be altered, leading to different faecal SCFA concentrations in OWOB compared with LN humans. More in-depth studies looking at the metabolic fate of SCFA produced in LN and OWOB participants are needed in order to determine the role of SCFA in obesity.
When dealing with large-scale systems, manual selection of a subset of components (sensors/actuators), or equivalently identification of a favourable structure for the controller, that guarantees a ...certain closed-loop performance, is not very feasible. This paper is dedicated to the problem of concurrent optimal selection of actuators/sensors which can equivalently be considered as the structure identification for the controller. In the context of a multi-channel
dynamic output feedback controller synthesis, we formulate and analyse a framework in which we incorporate two extra terms for penalising the number of actuators and sensors into the variational formulations of controller synthesis problems in order to induce a favourable controller structure. We then develop an explicit scheme as well as an iterative process for the purpose of dealing with the multi-objective problem of controller structure and control law co-design. It is also stressed that the immediate application of the proposed approach lies within the fault accommodation stage of a fault tolerant control scheme. By two numerical examples, we demonstrate the remarkable performance of the proposed approach.
Aims
Antibiotic adjuvants can give a second life to the antibiotics to which bacteria are highly resistant. We evaluated the antimicrobial effects of extracts from Pithecellobium clypearia against ...methicillin‐resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and also the potential for synergy with several antibiotics.
Methods and Results
For this study, four extracts from P. clypearia were tested on MRSA using the broth microdilution method for activity assessment. The ethyl acetate fraction (S20b) had the strongest antibacterial activity against MRSA among the fractions tested. In all, 14 compounds such as gallic acid and luteolin in S20b were analysed by UFLC‐Q‐TOF‐MS/MS. S20b combined with erythromycin showed synergy effects against MRSA and combined with ceftriaxone sodium and levofloxacin showed additive effects against MRSA. Electron microscopy showed that extract S20b damaged the MRSA cell wall and K+ efflux measurements indicated that extract S20b increased cell membrane permeability. Moreover, S20b suppression of PBP2a expression was assessed by Western blot. Furthermore, an in vivo study was used to investigate the therapeutic potential of S20b based on a mouse pneumonia model.
Conclusions
The in vitro study results have shown that S20b not only inhibits MRSA growth directly but also reduces the resistance of MRSA to the evaluated antibacterial agents. Based on the in vivo study, it can be concluded that S20b can treat pneumonia in the mouse model.
Significance and Impact of the Study
This study is the first research to demonstrate that S20b can inhibit MRSA growth and reduce drug resistance of clinical isolates to antibiotics. S20b has the potential to be used as a therapeutic agent against MRSA and treatment for MRSA pneumonia.
The automatic recognition of the modulation format of a detected signal, the intermediate step between signal detection and demodulation, is a major task of an intelligent receiver, with various ...civilian and military applications. Obviously, with no knowledge of the transmitted data and many unknown parameters at the receiver, such as the signal power, carrier frequency and phase offsets, timing information and so on, blind identification of the modulation is a difficult task. This becomes even more challenging in real-world scenarios with multipath fading, frequency-selective and time-varying channels. With this in mind, the authors provide a comprehensive survey of different modulation recognition techniques in a systematic way. A unified notation is used to bring in together, under the same umbrella, the vast amount of results and classifiers, developed for different modulations. New problems that have appeared as a result of emerging wireless technologies are outlined. Finally, open problems and possible directions for future research are briefly discussed.
The Cloud and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) instruments on NASA's Terra, Aqua and Soumi NPP satellites are used to provide a long-term measurement of Earth's energy budget. To accomplish ...this, the radiances measured by the instruments must be inverted to fluxes by the use of a scene-type-dependent angular distribution model (ADM). For permanent snow scenes over Antarctica, shortwave (SW) ADMs are created by compositing radiance measurements over the full viewing zenith and azimuth range. However, the presence of small-scale wind blown roughness features called sastrugi cause the BRDF (bidirectional reflectance distribution function) of the snow to vary significantly based upon the solar azimuth angle and location. This can result in monthly regional biases between −12 and 7.5 Wm−2 in the inverted TOA (top-of-atmosphere) SW flux. The bias is assessed by comparing the CERES shortwave fluxes derived from nadir observations with those from all viewing zenith angles, as the sastrugi affect fluxes inverted from the oblique viewing angles more than for the nadir viewing angles. In this paper we further describe the clear-sky Antarctic ADMs from Su et al. (2015). These ADMs account for the sastrugi effect by using measurements from the Multi-Angle Imaging Spectro-Radiometer (MISR) instrument to derive statistical relationships between radiance from different viewing angles. We show here that these ADMs reduce the bias and artifacts in the CERES SW flux caused by sastrugi, both locally and Antarctic-wide. The regional monthly biases from sastrugi are reduced to between −5 and 7 Wm−2, and the monthly-mean biases over Antarctica are reduced by up to 0.64 Wm−2, a decrease of 74 %. These improved ADMs are used as part of the Edition 4 CERES SSF (Single Scanner Footprint) data.
In addition to the traditional existed static model, the dynamic model is proposed to investigate the thickness (d) dependence of tribo-dielectric layer (TDL) with the device performance in the ...triboelectric nanogenerators (Tengs) in this work. With the involvement of one material parameter, i.e., electron-hole recombination rate (r) near the TDL in our developed dynamic model, the d dependence of TDL for the effective surface charge (Q s ) and output current (I) in the Tengs is derived. The maximum I (I max ) with the optimized TDL thickness (d max ) is further obtained with the consideration of different r. It can be found that the larger value of r in the material results in the smaller value of I max and the larger value of d max . At the same time, the theoretical dynamic model is compared with the experimental data. With the designed spin coating speed and time for the TDL deposition, the Tengs with different d is demonstrated and studied experimentally. The experimental data and the theoretical dynamic model agree very well with each other.
Miniature inverted-repeat transposable elements (MITEs) are predicted to play important roles on genome evolution. We developed a BLASTN-based approach for de novo identification of MITEs and ...systematically analyzed MITEs in rice genome. The genome of rice cultivar Nipponbare (Oryza sativa ssp. japonica) harbors 178,533 MITE-related sequences classified into 338 families. Pairwise nucleotide diversity and phylogenetic tree analysis indicated that individual MITE families were resulted from one or multiple rounds of amplification bursts. The timing of amplification burst varied considerably between different MITE families or subfamilies. MITEs are associated with 23,623 (58.2%) genes in rice genome. At least 7,887 MITEs are transcribed and more than 3,463 were transcribed with rice genes. The MITE sequences transcribed with rice coding genes form 1,130 pairs of potential natural sense/antisense transcripts. MITEs generate 23.5% (183,837 of 781,885) of all small RNAs identified from rice. Some MITE families generated small RNAs mainly from the terminals, while other families generated small RNAs predominantly from the central region. More than half (51.8%) of the MITE-derived small RNAs were generated exclusively by MITEs located away from genes. Genome-wide analysis showed that genes associated with MITEs have significantly lower expression than genes away from MITEs. Approximately 14.8% of loci with full-length MITEs have presence/absence polymorphism between rice cultivars 93-11 (O. sativa ssp. indica) and Nipponbare. Considering that different sets of genes may be regulated by MITE-derived small RNAs in different genotypes, MITEs provide considerable diversity for O. sativa.
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the leading malignancies worldwide. Myocyte enhancer factor 2C (MEF2C) was traditionally regarded as a development-associated factor and was recently reported ...to be an oncogene candidate. We have previously reported overexpression of MEF2C in HCC; however, the roles of MEF2C in HCC remain to be clarified. In this study, HCC cell lines and a xenograft mouse model were used to determine the functions of MEF2C in vitro and in vivo, respectively. Specific plasmids and small interfering RNA were used to upregulate and downregulate MEF2C expression, respectively. Functional assays were performed to assess the influence of MEF2C on cell proliferation, and VEGF-induced vasculogenic mimicry, migration/invasion as well as angiogenesis. Co-immunoprecipitation was conducted to identify the interaction of MEF2C and β-catenin. Human HCC tissue microarrays were used to investigate correlations among MEF2C, β-catenin and involved biomarkers. MEF2C was found to mediate VEGF-induced vasculogenic mimicry, angiogenesis and migration/invasion, with involvement of the p38 MAPK and PKC signaling pathways. However, MEF2C itself inhibited tumor growth in vitro and in vivo. MEF2C was upregulated by and directly interacted with β-catenin. The nuclear translocation of β-catenin blocked by MEF2C was responsible for MEF2C-mediated growth inhibition. The nuclear translocation of MEF2C was associated with intracellular calcium signaling induced by β-catenin. HCC microarrays showed correlations of nuclear MEF2C with the angiogenesis-associated biomarker, CD31, and cytosolic MEF2C with the proliferation-associated biomarker, Ki-67. MEF2C showed double-edged activities in HCC, namely mediating VEGF-induced malignancy enhancement while inhibiting cancer proliferation via blockade of Wnt/β-catenin signaling. The overall effect of MEF2C in HCC progression regulation was dictated by its subcellular distribution. This should be determined prior to any MEF2C-associated intervention in HCC.
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