Background
Autophagy is a lysosomal degradation pathway that is essential for cell survival, differentiation, and homeostasis. This study aimed to investigate the contribution of autophagy to the ...pathogenesis of CRS with nasal polyps (CRSwNP).
Methods
The expression of autophagic proteins microtubule‐associated protein 1 light chain 3B (LC3B)‐II, autophagy‐related proteins (Atg), and Beclin 1, substrate proteins (p62 and ubiquitinated proteins), and apoptotic signaling molecules cysteine‐aspartic protease‐3 and cysteine‐aspartic protease‐8, and poly‐ADP‐ribose polymerase in the sinonasal mucosa and nasal epithelial cells (NECs) was detected by immunohistochemistry and Western blotting. Autophagic vacuoles were observed with transmission electron microscopy. BEAS‐2B cells and NECs were treated with rapamycin, bafilomycin A1, or various cytokines. In some experiments, cultured NECs were transfected with small interfering RNA targeting p62 (sip62) or Atg5 (siAtg5). Cultured cells were analyzed with Western blotting and flow cytometry.
Results
Although autophagic protein expression and autophagic vacuole formation were increased in both eosinophilic and noneosinophilic CRSwNP, particularly in NECs, there was also an up‐regulation of substrate proteins and apoptotic signaling molecules. IFN‐γ, but not IL‐4, IL‐13, or IL‐17A, simultaneously enhanced LC3B‐II and p62 levels as well as cell apoptosis in BEAS‐2B cells and/or normal NECs. Bafilomycin A1 up‐regulated the levels of LC3B‐II and p62 in polyp NECs and IFN‐γ‐treated normal NECs. IFN‐γ‐induced apoptosis of normal NECs was exaggerated by bafilomycin A1 and siAtg5. Sip62 suppressed apoptosis of polyp NECs and IFN‐γ‐treated NECs. IFN‐γ protein levels were increased in both eosinophilic and noneosinophilic CRSwNP.
Conclusions
IFN‐γ induces activated but insufficient autophagy and thus contributes to a degree to p62‐dependent apoptosis of NECs in CRSwNP.
HUBS: Hot Universe Baryon Surveyor Cui, W.; Chen, L.-B.; Gao, B. ...
Journal of low temperature physics,
04/2020, Volume:
199, Issue:
1-2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Hot Universe Baryon Surveyor (HUBS) is proposed in China as a major X-ray mission for the next decade. It is designed to be highly focused scientifically, with two primary objectives: (1) detecting ...X-ray emission from hot baryons in intergalactic medium and circumgalactic medium (CGM), and characterizing their physical and chemical properties; (2) studying, based on the observations, the accretion and feedback processes that are thought to be highly relevant to the heating and chemical enrichment of the baryons in the CGM. Because of very low densities, the signal is expected to be very weak and thus technically difficult to detect. On the other hand, the spectrum of the emission is expected to be line rich, so it would be effective for detecting the hot baryons in bright emission lines. For that, an instrument with high spectral resolution, large effective area and large field of view (FoV) would be required. HUBS will couple a TES-based X-ray imaging spectrometer to a large FoV X-ray telescope to satisfy these requirements. A preliminary design of HUBS is presented.
Topological insulators (TI) are a class of materials exhibiting unique quantum transport properties with potential applications in spintronics and quantum computing. To date, all of the ...experimentally confirmed TIs are inorganic materials. Recent theories predicted the possible existence of organic TIs (OTI) in two-dimensional (2D) organometallic frameworks. However, those theoretically proposed structures do not naturally exist and remain to be made in experiments. Here, we identify a recently experimentally made 2D organometallic framework, consisting of π-conjugated nickel-bis-dithiolene with a chemical formula Ni3C12S12, which exhibits nontrivial topological states in both a Dirac band and a flat band, therefore confirming the existence of OTI.
Immunity acquired from infection or vaccination protects humans from symptomatic hepatitis E. However, whether the risk of hepatitis E virus (HEV) infection is reduced by the immunity remains ...unknown. To understand this issue, a cohort with 12 409 participants randomized to receive the hepatitis E vaccine Hecolin® or placebo were serologically followed up for 2 years after vaccination. About half (47%) of participants were initially seropositive. A total of 139 infection episodes, evidenced by four-fold or greater rise of anti-HEV level or positive seroconversion, occurred in participants who received three doses of treatment. Risk of infection was highest among the baseline seronegative placebo group participants (2.04%). Pre-existing immunity and vaccine-induced immunity lower the risk significantly, to 0.52% and 0.30%, respectively. In conclusion, both vaccine-induced and naturally acquired immunity can effectively protect against HEV infection.
Nanostructure arrays such as nanowire, nanopillar, and nanocone arrays have been proposed to be promising antireflection structures for photovoltaic applications due to their great light trapping ...ability. In this paper, the optical properties of Si nanopillar and nanocone arrays in visible and infrared region were studied by both theoretical calculations and experiments. The results show that the Mie resonance can be continuously tuned across a wide range of wavelength by varying the diameter of the nanopillars. However, Si nanopillar array with uniform diameter exhibits only discrete resonance mode, thus can't achieve a high broadband absorption. On the other hand, the Mie resonance wavelength in a Si nanocone array can vary continuously as the diameters of the cross sections increase from the apex to the base. Therefore Si nanocone arrays can strongly interact with the incident light in the broadband spectrum and the absorbance by Si nanocone arrays is higher than 95% over the wavelength from 300 to 2000 nm. In addition to the Mie resonance, the broadband optical absorption of Si nanocone arrays is also affected by Wood-Rayleigh anomaly effect and metal impurities introduced in the fabrication process.
Summary
Background
Transient elastography is a non‐invasive method for staging liver fibrosis. The meta‐analysis using the hierarchical models to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of transient ...elastography for the staging of liver fibrosis in patients with chronic hepatitis B was rarely reported.
Aim
A meta‐analysis using the hierarchical models was performed to assess transient elastography for diagnosing and stage liver fibrosis in patients with chronic hepatitis B.
Methods
Electronic databases were searched and studies were identified to assess the diagnostic accuracy of transient elastography in CHB patients for staging fibrosis F ≥ 2, F ≥ 3 and F = 4 with liver biopsy as a reference standard. The hierarchical summary receiver operating characteristic curve and the bivariate models were performed to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of transient elastography, and meta‐regression analyses were performed to explore the heterogeneity. The quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies‐2 tool was used to assess the quality of studies.
Results
Twenty‐seven studies with a total of 4386 patients were included in the meta‐analysis. The summary sensitivity of transient elastography for staging fibrosis F ≥ 2, F ≥ 3 and F = 4 was 0.806 (95% CI, 0.756–0.847), 0.819 (95% CI, 0.748–0.874) and 0.863 (95% CI, 0.818–0.898), respectively, and the summary specificity was 0.824 (95% CI, 0.761–0.873), 0.866 (95% CI, 0.824–0.899) and 0.875 (95% CI, 0.840–0.903), respectively. The corresponding area under the summary receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.88 (95% CI, 0.85–0.91), 0.91 (95% CI, 0.88–0.93) and 0.93 (95% CI, 0.91–0.95), respectively. Meta‐regression showed that patient age contributed to heterogeneity.
Conclusions
Transient elastography performs well to diagnose liver fibrosis in patients with chronic hepatitis B, which may reduce the use of liver biopsy.
As a popular signal modeling technique, sparse representation (SR) has achieved great success in image fusion over the last few years with a number of effective algorithms being proposed. However, ...due to the patch-based manner applied in sparse coding, most existing SR-based fusion methods suffer from two drawbacks, namely, limited ability in detail preservation and high sensitivity to misregistration, while these two issues are of great concern in image fusion. In this letter, we introduce a recently emerged signal decomposition model known as convolutional sparse representation (CSR) into image fusion to address this problem, which is motivated by the observation that the CSR model can effectively overcome the above two drawbacks. We propose a CSR-based image fusion framework, in which each source image is decomposed into a base layer and a detail layer, for multifocus image fusion and multimodal image fusion. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed fusion methods clearly outperform the SR-based methods in terms of both objective assessment and visual quality.
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