Cadmium (Cd) tolerance mechanisms in plant are mainly divided into two categories: evasion mechanism and tolerance mechanism. However, due to the complexity of the mechanism of Cd absorption and ...accumulation in crops, there are still disputes and controversies about Cd toxicity to plants and the mechanism of Cd tolerance in plants. The Cd absorption and accumulation mechanism in edible parts of pepper remains unknown. The present study characterized three pepper cultivars with different cadmium tolerance under cadmium stress. One high-Cd-accumulation type (X55), a medium-Cd-accumulation type (Daguo 99) and a low-Cd-accumulation type (Luojiao 318) were selected to study distribution characteristics of Cd in subcellular fractions of the three pepper varieties as well as expression difference of key Cd accumulation and tolerance genes under different cadmium levels. The results showed that under Cd stress, X55 and Daguo 99 mainly migrated Cd from root to stems and leaves, while Luojiao318 migrated it to the fruit. The Cd concentration in the subcellular fractions of pepper roots, stems, leaves and fruits was as follow: cell wall (F1) > organelle (F2) > cell soluble fraction (F3). The roots, stems and leaf cells of X55 have strong Cd compartmentalization capacity. The fruit cells of Daguo 99 have strong Cd compartmentalization capacity, while the roots of Luojiao318 have strong ability to inhibit Cd absorption. Under Cd stress, HMA1, HMA2 and NRAMP1-6 were up-regulated in roots, stems and fruits of the three varieties. FTP1-2 and FTP1-3 genes were significantly up-regulated in different materials, except the roots of Daguo 99. Under Cd treatment, PCS gene expression of pepper showed an order of that of X55 > Luojiao 318 >Daguo 99. The present study revealed that the cell wall of pepper played an important role in Cd separation and resistance. The difference in Cd accumulation ability of the pepper varieties may be related to differences in main expression sites and expression levels of HMA, NRAMP, FTP and PCS genes.
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•Under Cd stress, Luojiao318 mainly migrated Cd to fruit.•Cd restricted to the cell wall is the detoxification mechanism exposed to Cd.•PCS gene played an important role in Cd detoxification mechanism of pepper.•Higher expression of NRAMP2, 3 &6 in fruit maybe the reason for higher Cd in fruit.
The shortage of organs for transplantation is a major barrier to the treatment of organ failure. Although porcine organs are considered promising, their use has been checked by concerns about the ...transmission of porcine endogenous retroviruses (PERVs) to humans. Here we describe the eradication of all PERVs in a porcine kidney epithelial cell line (PK15). We first determined the PK15 PERV copy number to be 62. Using CRISPR-Cas9, we disrupted all copies of the PERV pol gene and demonstrated a >1000-fold reduction in PERV transmission to human cells, using our engineered cells. Our study shows that CRISPR-Cas9 multiplexability can be as high as 62 and demonstrates the possibility that PERVs can be inactivated for clinical application of porcine-to-human xenotransplantation.
I investigate whether management earnings forecasts fully reflect the implications of accruals for future earnings. I find that managers overestimate accrual persistence in range forecasts but not in ...point forecasts and that managers’ accrual-related forecast bias in range forecasts increases with forecast range and forecast horizon. My results suggest that managers overestimate accrual persistence when faced with greater difficulty forecasting earnings. Moreover, I find that managers’ accrual-related forecast bias in range forecasts is somewhat affected by managerial opportunism and fear of litigation. Finally, I find accrual mispricing for firms issuing range forecasts but not for firms issuing point forecasts.
Gastric cancer (GC) is a malignancy with poor prognosis. NDUFA4 is reported to correlate with the progression of GC. However, its underlying mechanism in GC is unknown. Our study was to reveal the ...pathogenic mechanism of NDUFA4 in GC. NDUFA4 expression was explored in single-cell and bulk RNA-seq data as well as GC tissue microarray. Mitochondrial respiration and glycolysis were estimated by oxygen consumption rate and extracellular acidification rate, respectively. The interaction between NDUFA4 and METTL3 was validated by RNA immunoprecipitation. Flow cytometry was used to estimate cell cycle, apoptosis and mitochondrial activities. NDUFA4 was highly expressed in GC and its high expression indicated a poor prognosis. The knockdown of NDUFA4 could reduce cell proliferation and inhibit tumor growth. Meanwhile, NDUFA4 could promote glycolytic and oxidative metabolism in GC cells, whereas the inhibition of glycolysis suppressed the proliferation and tumor growth of GC. Besides, NDUFA4 inhibited ROS level and promoted MMP level in GC cells, whereas the inhibition of mitochondrial fission could reverse NDUFA4-induced glycolytic and oxidative metabolism and tumor growth of GC. Additionally, METTL3 could increase the m6A level of NDUFA4 mRNA via the m6A reader IGF2BP1 to promote NDUFA4 expression in GC cells. Our study revealed that NDUFA4 was increased by m6A methylation and could promote GC development via enhancing cell glycolysis and mitochondrial fission. NDUFA4 was a potential target for GC treatment.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have gained great success in various fields, such as computer vision and natural language processing. Besides, with the breakthrough in unsupervised learning, ...generative adversarial network (GAN) is recently utilized to generate virtual data from limited data sets. The generative model of GAN has impressive applications, such as style transfer and image super-resolution. However, the promising performance of CNN and GAN comes at the cost of prohibitive computation complexity. The convolution (CONV) in CNN and the transposed CONV (TCONV) in GAN are the two operations that dominant the overall complexity. The prior works exploit the fast algorithms, Winograd and fast Fourier transform (FFT), to reduce the complexity of spatial CONV. However, Winograd only supports fixed filter size while FFT has high transform overhead. Moreover, very few works apply fast algorithms to accelerate GAN models. In this article, a reconfigurable and low-complexity accelerator on ASIC for both CNN and GAN is proposed to address these problems. First, by exploiting Fermat number transform (FNT), we propose two FNT-based fast algorithms to reduce the complexity of CONV and TCONV computations, respectively. Then the architectures of the FNT-based accelerator are presented to implement the proposed fast algorithms. The methodology to determine the design parameters and optimize the dataflow is also described for obtaining maximum performance and optimal efficiency. Moreover, we implement the proposed accelerator on 65 nm 1P9M technology and evaluate it on various CNN and GAN models. The post-layout results show that our design achieves a throughput of 288.0 GOP/s on VGG-16 with 25.11 GOP/s/mm 2 area efficiency, which is superior to the state-of-the-art CNN accelerators. Furthermore, at least <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">1.7\times </tex-math></inline-formula> speedup over the existing accelerators is obtained on GAN. The resulting energy efficiency is <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">275.3\times </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">12.5\times </tex-math></inline-formula> of CPU and GPU.
Puerarin can protect chondrocytes, whereby ameliorating osteoarthritis. Puerarin also promotes autophagy. Autophagy maintains chondrocyte homeostasis. The role of autophagy in puerarin-protected ...chondrocytes is unknown. Puerarin promoted chondrocyte autophagy. Puerarin-protected chondrocytes were reversed by autophagy inhibitors and Beclin1 inhibitor. 3-MA or Beclin1 inhibitor in vivo reversed puerarin-ameliorated cartilage damage of osteoarthritis mice. Thus, puerarin can protect chondrocytes through Beclin1-dependent autophagy activation.
•The CeO2–ZrO2 hollow nanospheres had strong affinity and selectivity to arsenic.•The adsorbent showed excellent ability to remove arsenic at low concentrations.•The adsorption mechanism was ...investigated by FTIR and XPS.•The adsorbent showed potential application for drinking water treatment.
Arsenic contaminated natural water is commonly used as drinking water source in some districts of Asia. To meet the increasingly strict drinking water standards, exploration of efficient arsenic removal methods is highly desired. In this study, hierarchically porous CeO2–ZrO2 nanospheres were synthesized, and their suitability as arsenic sorbents was examined. The CeO2–ZrO2 hollow nanospheres showed an adsorption capacity of 27.1 and 9.2mgg−1 for As(V) and As(III), respectively, at an equilibrium arsenic concentration of 0.01mgL−1 (the standard for drinking water) under neutral conditions, indicating a high arsenic removal performance of the adsorbent at low arsenic concentrations. Such a great arsenic adsorption capacity was attributed to the high surface hydroxyl density and presence of hierarchically porous network in the hollow nanospheres. The analysis of Fourier transformed infrared spectra and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy demonstrated that the adsorption of arsenic on the CeO2–ZrO2 nanospheres was completed through the formation of a surface complex by substituting hydroxyl with arsenic species. In addition, the CeO2–ZrO2 nanospheres were able to remove over 97% arsenic in real underground water with initial arsenic concentration of 0.376mgL−1 to meet the guideline limit of arsenic in drinking water regulated by the World Health Organization without any pre-treatment and/or pH adjustment.
The role of long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) in adult hearts is unknown; also unclear is how lncRNA modulates nucleosome remodelling. An estimated 70% of mouse genes undergo antisense transcription, ...including myosin heavy chain 7 (Myh7), which encodes molecular motor proteins for heart contraction. Here we identify a cluster of lncRNA transcripts from Myh7 loci and demonstrate a new lncRNA-chromatin mechanism for heart failure. In mice, these transcripts, which we named myosin heavy-chain-associated RNA transcripts (Myheart, or Mhrt), are cardiac-specific and abundant in adult hearts. Pathological stress activates the Brg1-Hdac-Parp chromatin repressor complex to inhibit Mhrt transcription in the heart. Such stress-induced Mhrt repression is essential for cardiomyopathy to develop: restoring Mhrt to the pre-stress level protects the heart from hypertrophy and failure. Mhrt antagonizes the function of Brg1, a chromatin-remodelling factor that is activated by stress to trigger aberrant gene expression and cardiac myopathy. Mhrt prevents Brg1 from recognizing its genomic DNA targets, thus inhibiting chromatin targeting and gene regulation by Brg1. It does so by binding to the helicase domain of Brg1, a domain that is crucial for tethering Brg1 to chromatinized DNA targets. Brg1 helicase has dual nucleic-acid-binding specificities: it is capable of binding lncRNA (Mhrt) and chromatinized--but not naked--DNA. This dual-binding feature of helicase enables a competitive inhibition mechanism by which Mhrt sequesters Brg1 from its genomic DNA targets to prevent chromatin remodelling. A Mhrt-Brg1 feedback circuit is thus crucial for heart function. Human MHRT also originates from MYH7 loci and is repressed in various types of myopathic hearts, suggesting a conserved lncRNA mechanism in human cardiomyopathy. Our studies identify a cardioprotective lncRNA, define a new targeting mechanism for ATP-dependent chromatin-remodelling factors, and establish a new paradigm for lncRNA-chromatin interaction.
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Consumption of water having excessive arsenic (As) contamination can cause adverse health effects on human beings. In this study, novel ultra-large zirconium oxide (ZrO2) nanosheets ...were successfully synthesized using graphene oxide (GO) templates and their adsorption-ability was studied for arsenite (As(III)). Owing to higher values of surface area, numbers of available hydroxyl groups and strong chemisorption binding affinity towards As(III), the synthesized novel ultra-large ZrO2 nanosheets showed high adsorption-ability for As(III) over a wide pH range. Experimental results demonstrated that the maximum adsorption-ability of the ZrO2 nanosheets for As(III) reached to 74.9 mg/g at pH 6. BET, zeta potential, effect of initial pH, FTIR and XPS have been used to analyze the As(III) adsorption process on the ZrO2 nanosheets. The experiments for effects of co-existing ions indicated that ZrO2 nanosheets possessed good anti-interference ability towards co-existing ions. Furthermore, the ZrO2 nanosheets demonstrated very fast and excellent treatment of simulated real As(III) polluted water, consequently the effluent concentration met the standard regulated by World Health Organization. This study suggested that the as-prepared ZrO2 nanosheets could be potentially applied in practical drinking water treatment.
To investigate the relationships between sagittal parameters and health-related quality of life (HRQOL) scores following anterior cervical hybrid decompression and fusion (ACHDF) of multilevel ...cervical spondylotic myelopathy (CSM) and to study the impact of the T1 slope (T1 s).
In total, 42 patients with complete radiographic measurements following ACHDF in the Spine Surgery Department of the First Affiliated Hospital of Fujian Medical University from August 2014 to January 2017 were retrospectively analysed. Radiographic measurements included C2-7 lordosis, T1 s, C2-7 sagittal vertical axis (SVA), cervical tilting and cranial tilting. The neck disability index (NDI) was used to evaluate the HRQOL. Spearman's correlation coefficients were calculated between pairs of cervical sagittal parameters and NDI scores.
Preoperative NDI scores were correlated with preoperative T1 s (r = 0.413); follow-up NDI scores were correlated with follow-up T1 s (r = 0.534). The regression analysis indicated that a preoperative T1 s value of 42.36° corresponded to a preoperative NDI score of 25 (r
= 0.171, P < 0.001). A follow-up T1 s value of 48.61° corresponded to a follow-up NDI score of 25 (r
= 0.421, P < 0.01). The differences in C2-7 SVA and cranial tilting before and after the operation were statistically significant (P < 0.05).
This study showed that the sagittal balance of the cervical vertebrae changed significantly after ACHDF, showing a forward trend. The sagittal parameters after ACHDF were related to clinical prognosis. An excessive T1 s can be considered a risk factor. The T1 s could provide a reference value to determine the correction of the sagittal balance of the cervical spine.
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