Introduction:
There is limited information about how racial and cultural similarities or differences between patient and caregiver may affect quality care. The purpose of this study was to explore ...caregiving and receiving experiences among older Chinese immigrants and their home health aides by using in-depth interviews in culturally concordant dyads in a community setting.
Methodology:
A purposive sample of 10 dyads of older Chinese immigrants and their home health aides were recruited using a snowball sampling method (N = 20). All interviews were audio recorded, transcribed, and coded for qualitative content analysis.
Results:
The majority of older adults were female (n = 8) and their average age was 76.8 years. The following themes emerged: companionship and rapport, reconciling the need for care services with the expectations of family, the value of matched gender, language, and ethnic foodculture, assisting with daily routines, and experiencing caregiving burden due to a dual role.
Discussion:
This study elucidated the dynamics between care recipients and their caregivers with shared cultural backgrounds.
Various laboratory-developed metabolomic methods lead to big challenges in inter-laboratory comparability and effective integration of diverse datasets.
As part of the Quartet Project, we establish a ...publicly available suite of four metabolite reference materials derived from B lymphoblastoid cell lines from a family of parents and monozygotic twin daughters. We generate comprehensive LC-MS-based metabolomic data from the Quartet reference materials using targeted and untargeted strategies in different laboratories. The Quartet multi-sample-based signal-to-noise ratio enables objective assessment of the reliability of intra-batch and cross-batch metabolomics profiling in detecting intrinsic biological differences among the four groups of samples. Significant variations in the reliability of the metabolomics profiling are identified across laboratories. Importantly, ratio-based metabolomics profiling, by scaling the absolute values of a study sample relative to those of a common reference sample, enables cross-laboratory quantitative data integration. Thus, we construct the ratio-based high-confidence reference datasets between two reference samples, providing "ground truth" for inter-laboratory accuracy assessment, which enables objective evaluation of quantitative metabolomics profiling using various instruments and protocols.
Our study provides the community with rich resources and best practices for inter-laboratory proficiency tests and data integration, ensuring reliability of large-scale and longitudinal metabolomic studies.
Semantic segmentation based on optical images can provide comprehensive scene information for intelligent vehicle systems, thus aiding in scene perception and decision making. However, under adverse ...weather conditions (such as fog), the performance of methods can be compromised due to incomplete observations. Considering the success of domain adaptation in recent years, we believe it is reasonable to transfer knowledge from clear and existing annotated datasets to images with fog. Technically, we follow the main workflow of the previous SDAT-Former method, which incorporates fog and style-factor knowledge into the teacher segmentor to generate better pseudo-labels for guiding the student segmentor, but we identify and address some issues, achieving significant improvements. Firstly, we introduce a consistency loss for learning from multiple source data to better converge the performance of each component. Secondly, we apply positional encoding to the features of fog-invariant adversarial learning, strengthening the model’s ability to handle the details of foggy entities. Furthermore, to address the complexity and noise in the original version, we integrate a simple but effective masked learning technique into a unified, end-to-end training process. Finally, we regularize the knowledge transfer in the original method through re-weighting. We tested our SDAT-Former++ on mainstream benchmarks for semantic segmentation in foggy scenes, demonstrating improvements of 3.3%, 4.8%, and 1.1% (as measured by the mIoU) on the ACDC, Foggy Zurich, and Foggy Driving datasets, respectively, compared to the original version.
In the current research context of precision treatment of malignant tumors, the advantages of immunotherapy are unmatched by conventional antitumor therapy, which can prolong progression-free ...survival and overall survival. The search for new targets and novel combination therapies can improve the efficacy of immunotherapy and reduce adverse effects. Since current research targets for immunotherapy mainly focus on lymphocytes, little research has been done on erythrocytes. Nucleated erythroid precursor stem cells have been discovered to play an essential role in tumor progression. Researchers are exploring new targets and therapeutic approaches for immunotherapy from the perspective of erythroid progenitor cells (EPCs). Recent studies have shown that different subtypes of EPCs have specific surface markers and distinct biological roles in tumor immunity. CD45
EPCs are potent myeloid-derived suppressor cell-like immunosuppressants that reduce the patient’s antitumor immune response. CD45
EPCs promote tumor invasion and metastasis by secreting artemin. A specific type of EPC also promotes angiogenesis and provides radiation protection. Therefore, EPCs may be involved in tumor growth, infiltration, and metastasis. It may also be an important cause of anti-angiogenesis and immunotherapy resistance. This review summarizes recent research advances in erythropoiesis, EPC features, and their impacts and processes on tumors.
Three dinuclear lanthanide complexes, Ln
2
(L)
2
(μ
3
-OAc)
4
(H
2
O)
2
⋅2H
2
O (Ln = La (1), Eu (2) and Dy (3), HL = N'-(2-hydroxybenzylidene) nicotinohydrazide), have been synthesized and ...characterized by IR, elemental analysis and X-ray single-crystal diffraction. Crystallographic study revealed that the representative complex 1 displays a discrete dinuclear structure with a distorted tricapped trigonal prismatic geometry around La(III) ion. The interaction of complexes 1-3 with CT-DNA was investigated by absorption spectra, fluorescence quenching and viscosity, which reveals that the complexes bind to CT-DNA with a moderate intercalative mode. The complexes exhibited obvious DNA cleavage activities in the presence of H
2
O
2
. All complexes could bind to human serum albumin (HSA) with medium affinity through static mode; thus, HSA could effectively transport complexes. Furthermore, three complexes exhibited specific cytotoxicity to A549 cancer cells in micromole magnitude than other cancer cells tested and less toxicity than cisplatin for normal human cells HUVEC, in which massive cell apoptosis was induced by complexes through producing DNA damage and suppressing DNA synthesis.
Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma
Basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) is a multifunctional factor in acceleration of cell proliferation, differentiation and transference, and therefore widely used in clinical applications. In this ...study, expression vector pWX-Nt03 harboring a codon-optimized bFGF gene was constructed and introduced into the tobacco chloroplasts by particle bombardment. After four rounds of selection, bFGF was proved to integrate into the chloroplast genome of regenerated plants and two of four transgenic plants were confirmed to be homoplastomic by PCR and Southern hybridization. ELISA assay indicated that bFGF represented approximately 0.1% of total soluble protein in the leaves of transplastomic tobacco plants. This is the first report of bFGF expression via chloroplast transformation in model plant, providing an additional option for the production of chloroplast-produced therapeutic proteins.
β-Glucosidase serves as the pivotal rate-limiting enzyme in the cellulose degradation process, facilitating the hydrolysis of cellobiose and cellooligosaccharides into glucose. However, the ...widespread application of numerous β-glucosidases is hindered by their limited thermostability and low glucose tolerance, particularly in elevated-temperature and high-glucose environments.
This study presents an analysis of a β-glucosidase gene belonging to the GH1 family, denoted
, which was isolated from the metagenomic repository of Hehua hot spring located in Tengchong, China. Subsequently, the gene was cloned and heterologously expressed in
BL21(DE3). Post expression, the recombinant β-glucosidase (LQBG8) underwent purification through a Ni affinity chromatography column, thereby enabling the in-depth exploration of its enzymatic properties.
LQBG8 had an optimal temperature of 70°C and an optimum pH of 5.6. LQBG8 retained 100 and 70% of its maximum activity after 2-h incubation periods at 65°C and 70°C, respectively. Moreover, even following exposure to pH ranges of 3.0-10.0 for 24 h, LQBG8 retained approximately 80% of its initial activity. Notably, the enzymatic prowess of LQBG8 remained substantial at glucose concentrations of up to 3 M, with a retention of over 60% relative activity. The kinetic parameters of LQBG8 were characterized using cellobiose as substrate, with
and
values of 28 ± 1.9 mg/mL and 55 ± 3.2 μmol/min/mg, respectively. Furthermore, the introduction of LQBG8 (at a concentration of 0.03 mg/mL) into a conventional cellulase reaction system led to an impressive 43.7% augmentation in glucose yield from corn stover over a 24-h period. Molecular dynamics simulations offered valuable insights into LQBG8's thermophilic nature, attributing its robust stability to reduced fluctuations, conformational changes, and heightened structural rigidity in comparison to mesophilic β-glucosidases.
In summation, its thermophilic, thermostable, and glucose-tolerant attributes, render LQBG8 ripe for potential applications across diverse domains encompassing food, feed, and the production of lignocellulosic ethanol.
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a fundamental function of intelligent robots. To reduce the influence of dynamic objects on SLAM in dynamic environments, this study pro-poses a visual ...SLAM based on sequential image segmentation, referred to as SIIS-SLAM. Based on ORB-SLAM3, SIIS-SLAM integrates the sequential image instance segmentation and optical flow dynamic detection module. The sequential image segmentation module is designed to eliminate the effectiveness of dynamic objects in the estimation of relative pose between sequential frames. Specifically, based on the coarse relative pose estimated by ORB-SLAM3 and the box coordinates of instances detected by Mask R-CNN, the sequential image segmentation module effectively improves the speed and accuracy of instance segmentation. Dynamic objects can be effectively detected by combining the instance segmentation results and optical flow module. Filtering the feature points in dynamic objects can improve the accuracy and robustness of SLAM. Experimental results demonstrate that SIIS-SLAM achieves the better accuracy in dynamic environments compared to ORB SLAM3 and other advanced methods.
Nitrate acts as a vital signal molecule in the modulation of plant growth and development. The phytohormones gibberellin (GA) is also involved in this process. However, the exact molecular mechanism ...of how nitrate and GA signaling pathway work together in regulating plant growth remains poorly understood. In this study, we found that a nitrate-responsive BTB/TAZ protein MdBT2 participates in regulating nitrate-induced plant growth in apple (Malus × domestica). Yeast two-hybridization, protein pull-down, and bimolecular fluorescence complementation (BiFC) assays showed that MdBT2 interacts with a DELLA protein MdRGL3a, which is required for the ubiquitination and degradation of MdRGL3a proteins via a 26S proteasome-dependent pathway. Furthermore, heterologous expression of MdBT2 partially rescued growth inhibition caused by overexpression of MdRGL3a in Arabidopsis. Taken together, our findings indicate that MdBT2 promotes nitrate-induced plant growth partially through reducing the abundance of the DELLA protein MdRGL3a.
PDF
