Viral nervous necrosis disease, caused by nervous necrosis virus (NNV), is one of the most serious diseases in many marine and freshwater fish species worldwide. To better understand the antiviral ...ability and immunoregulatory function of sea perch (Lateolabrax japonicus) interferon (IFN) to NNV infection, three type I IFN genes (IFNc, IFNd and IFNh) and two type II IFN genes (IFNγ and IFNγ rel) were cloned and characterized in this study. Tissue distribution analysis showed that all five IFNs were high expressed in immune organs of sea perch. The transcription levels of IFNc, IFNd and IFNh were significantly up-regulated in both LJB cells in response to Poly I:C treatment or red-spotted grouper nervous necrosis virus (RGNNV) infection and head kidney leukocytes (HKLs) treated with Poly I:C, while the expression of IFNγ and IFNγ rel were only detected in HKLs. Furthermore, promoter activity analysis showed that overexpression of IRF7 significantly enhanced the promoter activities of IFNc, IFNd and IFNh, whereas IRF1 and IRF3 overexpression only induced IFNh promoter activity. In vitro study, IFNc, IFNd, IFNh and IFNγ possessed significant antiviral activities against RGNNV. In addition, overexpressed IFNc and IFNγ up-regulated the expression of antigen presentation cell markers MHCII-α and MHCII-β in LJF cells, indicating IFNc and IFNγ might be involved in antigen presentation. Taken together, our study may provide the basis for exploring the interaction between viruses and the IFN system in sea perch.
•Genetic structures and expression patterns of sea perch type I and type II IFNs were analyzed.•Antiviral activities of both type I and type II IFNs against RGNNV were analyzed.•Both IFNc and IFNγ played positive roles in the regulation of antigen presentation.
The regimen of nivolumab plus ipilimumab (NI) has been recommended by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology-Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma (Version ...1.2022) and Chinese Guidelines for the Clinical Diagnosis and Treatment of Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma (2021 edition) as the first-line treatment for Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma (MPM). But whether immunotherapy has a financial advantage over conventional chemotherapy (pemetrexed plus cisplatin/carboplatin, C) is uncertain. Based on survival and safety data from the CheckMate 743 clinical trial (NCT02899299), a partitioned survival model was constructed using TreeAge Pro2022 software. The model cycle was set to 1 month and the study period was 10 years. The output indicators included total cost, quality-adjusted life year (QALY) and incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER). One-way and probabilistic sensitivity analyses were used to assess the robustness of the results, considering only direct medical costs. The ICER for group NI versus Group C was $375,656/QALY in all randomized patients, $327,943/QALY in patients with epithelioid histology, and $115,495/QALY in patients with non-epithelioid histology. The ICERs of all three different populations all exceeded the willingness-to-pay threshold (three times the per capita gross domestic product of China in 2021). The results of univariate sensitivity analysis showed that the price of pemetrexed and nivolumab had great influence on the analysis results. The results of the probabilistic sensitivity analysis show that the probability of the NI scheme being more economical in all three different populations was 0.
Pangolin is a mysterious animal in the Family Pholidota, Mammalia. Malayan pangolin (Manis javanica) is one of eight existing species and is listed in Manis. With the number of wild pangolins (Manis ...spp.) rapidly decreasing, captive breeding has become an important way to protect them from extinction. The research on mating behavior of pangolins is an important content to understand its reproductive characteristics and develop breeding management. From 2016 to 2022, a total of 360 mating events were observed in six males and 24 females through closed circuit television (CCTV) surveillance. The results show that males do not engage in complex courtship behavior before mating. In addition, we found that male pangolins adopted a ventrolateral mating position. Once males selected the side (left/right) of the female pangolin from which to approach to mate, they usually remained on the same side for subsequent mating, suggesting that male pangolins may have a preference in mating position. Finally, all mating events were observed at 1.72 ± 1.47 (n = 83, Mean ± SD) days after cohabitation and adjustment time before mating (from the male touching the female to intromission) took 4.98 ± 3.86 mins (n = 323). During mating, males hugged females and remained still for 47.37 ± 10.08 seconds (n = 323), which is the ejaculation and post-ejaculation quiescent time. Remarkably, we observed for the first time two peak mating times, 19:00 to 22:00 and 1:00 to 3:00, suggesting that they may have a preference for mating times. This study provides new insight into the mating behavior of M. javanica and contributes to the development of scientific conservation measures to improve the reproductive capacity of M. javanica.
High-quality rice varieties are planted widely in southern China. However, the changes in grain quality in the different high-quality rice varieties released in recent years are unclear. This study ...compared the grain quality changes and status of those varieties and presented proposals for future breeding. In the past 11 years, high-quality indica has significantly improved chalky rice rate (CRR), chalkiness degree (CD) but decreased head rice rate (HRR); amylose content (AC), gel consistency (GC) and length-to-width ratio (LWR) were improved only in indica hybrid rice. Most high-quality rice varieties grown in southern China are primarily indica rice. In contrast to indica rice, japonica rice had increased milling recovery, cooking and eating qualities (CEQ), but worsened significantly the physical appearance. For japonica rice, hybrid varieties exhibited a marked improvement in the rice quality for lower AC, higher GC and LWR compared with inbred varieties. A higher grain quality was observed in inbred varieties for indica rice due to lower CRR, CD and AC, higher HRR and GC. Our results suggested that we should be focused on improving the physical appearance quality for japonica rice and milling recovery, particularly CEQ for indica rice, for future high-quality rice breeding.
•High-quality indica rice has significantly improved chalky rice rate and degree of chalkiness over time.•High-quality japonica rice had increased milling recovery and CEQ compared with high-quality indica rice.•High-quality japonica hybrid rice significantly improved grain quality and that was observed in indica inbred rice.
The neuroprotective effect of ceria nanoparticles in the context of brain disorders has been explained by their antioxidant effect. However, the in‐depth mechanism remains unknown. As resident immune ...cells in the brain, microglia exert a variety of functional reprogramming termed as polarization in response to stress stimuli. Herein, custom‐made ceria nanoparticles were developed and found to scavenge multiple reactive oxygen species with extremely high efficiency. These nanoparticles drove microglial polarization from a pro‐inflammatory phenotype to an anti‐inflammatory phenotype under pathological conditions. Pretreatment of these nanoparticles changed the microglial function from detrimental to protective for the neuronal cells by blocking the pro‐inflammatory signaling. This work not only helps to elucidate the mechanism of ceria‐nanoparticle‐mediated neuroprotection but also provides a new strategy to rebalance the immuno‐environment by switching the equilibrium of the phenotypic activation of microglia.
Remodeling the immuno‐environment in brain disorders: Custom‐made ceria nanoparticles (CeNP‐PEG) can simultaneously eradicate diverse reactive oxygen species (ROS) with high efficiency and velocity and shift microglial polarization from a pro‐inflammatory M1‐phenotype to an anti‐inflammatory M2‐phenotype after stress stimuli. In this way, the pro‐inflammatory signaling pathway in neuronal cells is blocked and the immuno‐environment is converted from detrimental to protective.
Abstract
Background
In recent years, the physical fitness situation of college students is worrying in China. Exercise motivation is of great importance for the physical activity and physical ...fitness. However, existing studies have paid limited attention to the specific effect between exercise motivation, physical activity and physical fitness, and even less to the different genders and exercise motivation dimensions. This study aimed to investigate the promoting effect of sport motivation on physical fitness with different gender and dimension in college students.
Methods
Physical fitness levels of 2544 college students in Wuhan and Jingzhou city were measured. Exercise motivation and physical activity was assessed using the Chinese version of the motives for physical activities measure-revised scale and the physical activity survey scale, respectively. Correlation analysis and structural equation model were used to explore the relationship between exercise motivation, physical activity and physical fitness. Bootstrap method was used to test the mediating effect. Multilevel regression analysis was used to examine the effects of different dimensions of exercise motivation on PF.
Results
The exercise motivation of college students was directly related to physical fitness (effect value: 0.307) or indirectly related through the mediating effect of physical activity (effect value: 0.092). The mediation effect percentage of physical activity on exercise motivation and physical fitness in male (51.20%) was greater than female (27.18%), and the standardized regression coefficient of the health dimension to PF was β = 0.151,
P
< 0.001, and the competence dimension to PF was β = 0.189,
P
< 0.001.
Conclusions
The exercise motivation of college students can directly influence PF or indirectly influence PF through the mediating effect of PA. The promoting effect of exercise motivation and PA on PF in college students is related to gender and dimensions of exercise motivation. Therefore, we can improve physical fitness levels of college students by promoting their exercise motivation (especially for health motivation and competence motivation) and increasing their participation in physical activity. This study provides new strategies for improving physical fitness in college students.
Products with complex free-form surfaces, such as aerospace impellers and automotive engines, are typically manufactured with ball-end milling. The machined surface topography is critical to these ...key components’ performance in harsh environments. Accurate prediction of the machined surface topography is essential to obtaining the optimized process parameters to achieve the best possible surface quality. An improved Z-MAP method based on the sequential quadratic programming (SQP) algorithm is proposed for efficient ball-end milling surface topography simulation in this paper. Compared to the traditional Z-MAP method, this improved method does not discretize the cutter edge and does not require a strict time-step limit. At each simulation time interval, the workpiece surface grid points falling into the cutting-edge instantaneous sweep polygon are searched to reduce the computation scale. An optimization problem, which combines these grid points’ coordinates with the cutting-edge trajectory model, is established for the accurate cutting time and cutting-edge element. The SQP algorithm is used to solve this optimization problem due to its global search capability. The surface topography is then updated by comparing the height of the cutting-edge element with the corresponding grid point. Experimental results indicate that the simulated surface topography is consistent with the measured surface topography. The proposed method achieves the same level of accuracy as the traditional method while requiring less computing time. The proposed method for fast surface topography in ball-end milling shows potential in optimizing process parameters to guarantee the surface quality of critical components.
Deep neural networks, including recurrent networks, have been successfully applied to human activity recognition. Unfortunately, the final representation learned by recurrent networks might encode ...some noise (irrelevant signal components, unimportant sensor modalities, etc.). Besides, it is difficult to interpret the recurrent networks to gain insight into the models' behavior. To address these issues, we propose two attention models for human activity recognition: temporal attention and sensor attention. These two mechanisms adaptively focus on important signals and sensor modalities. To further improve the understandability and mean Fl score, we add continuity constraints, considering that continuous sensor signals are more robust than discrete ones. We evaluate the approaches on three datasets and obtain state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, qualitative analysis shows that the attention learned by the models agree well with human intuition.
High pressure induces dramatic changes and novel phenomena in condensed volatiles1'2 that are usually not preserved after recovery from pressure vessels. Here we report a process that pressurizes ...volatiles into nanopores oftypel glassy carbon precursors, converts glassy carbon into nanocrystalline diamond by heating and synthesizes free-standing nanostructured diamond capsules (NDCs) capable of permanently preserving volatiles at high pressures, even after release back to ambient conditions for various vacuum-based diagnostic probes including electron microscopy. As a demonstration, we perform a comprehensive study of a high-pressure argon sample preserved in NDCs. Synchrotron X-ray diffraction and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy show nanometre-sized argon crystals at around 22.0 gigapascals embedded in nanocrystalline diamond, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy provides quantitative compositional analysis and electron energy-loss spectroscopy details the chemical bonding nature of high-pressure argon. The preserved pressure ofthe argon sample inside NDCs can be tuned by controlling NDC synthesis pressure. To test the general applicability ofthe NDC process, we show that high-pressure neon can also be trapped in NDCs and that type2 glassy carbon can be used as the precursor container material. Further experiments on other volatiles and carbon allotropes open the possibility of bringing high-pressure explorations on a par with mainstream condensedmatter investigations and applications.
•An efficient GPU-based DEM-FEM for the interactions between tire and granular terrain is proposed.•Including a new and efficient parallel algorithm for contact search between large-scale ...particles.•Including a novel and efficient parallel algorithm for contact search between particles and complex tread.•The model is consistent with the experiment, and the accuracy and validity of the results are verified.•Compared with CPU-based DEM-FEM calculation, a speedup of 84.9 can be obtained.
Numerical methods have become useful tools for predicting vehicle mobility performance on granular terrain. However, due to the large number of soil particles and complex contact search in tire-granular terrain simulation, time-consuming calculation has become the most critical problem restricting the application of these methods. In this study, an efficient GPU-based DEM-FEM for simulation of the interactions between an off-road tire and granular terrain is implemented to improve computational efficiency. In this method, the main body of calculation is executed on GPU and programmed into an in-house developed code CDFP. The new GPU-based computing framework consists of 14 kernels, including efficient contact calculation between large-scale particles, novel contact calculation between particles and complex tread, contact calculation between particles and boundary wall, internal force calculation of finite elements, and information update. As a result, the efficient contact search and the complex interactions between an off-road tire and granular terrain are accomplished. Based on the self-developed single-wheel test device, an accurate simulation model consistent with the experiment is established. The validity of the proposed method is verified by comparing the simulation results with the experimental results. Finally, the discussion of computational efficiency shows that the proposed GPU-based DEM-FEM can be a powerful tool to simulate the interactions between an off-road tire and granular terrain.
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