Pyroptosis, a newly discovered form of programmed cell death, is characterized by cell swelling, the protrusion of large bubbles from the plasma membrane and cell lysis. This death pathway is ...mediated by the pore formation of gasdermin D (GSDMD), which is activated by human caspase-1/caspase-4/caspase-5 (or mouse caspase-1/caspase11), and followed with the releasing of both cell contents and proinflammatory cytokines. Pyroptosis was initially found to function as an innate immune effector mechanism to facilitate host defense against pathogenic microorganisms, and subsequent studies revealed that pyroptosis also plays an eventful role in inflammatory immune diseases and tumor resistance. Recent studies have also shown that pyroptosis is involved in the initiation, the progression and complications of atherosclerosis. Here, we provide an overview of the role of pyroptosis in atherosclerosis by focusing on three important participating cells: ECs, macrophages, and SMCs. In addition, we also summarized drugs and stimuli that regulate the progression of atherosclerosis by influencing cell pyroptosis.
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a severe neurodevelopmental disorder. To enhance the understanding of the gut microbiota structure in ASD children at different ages as well as the relationship ...between gut microbiota and fecal metabolites, we first used the 16S rRNA sequencing to evaluate the gut microbial population in a cohort of 143 children aged 2-13 years old. We found that the α-diversity of ASD group showed no significant change with age, while the TD group showed increased α-diversity with age, which indicates that the compositional development of the gut microbiota in ASD varies at different ages in ways that are not consistent with TD group. Recent studies have shown that chronic constipation is one of the most commonly obvious gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms along with ASD core symptoms. To further investigate the potential interaction effects between ASD and GI symptoms, the 30 C-ASD and their aged-matched TD were picked out to perform metagenomics analysis. We observed that C-ASD group displayed decreased diversity, depletion of species of Sutterella, Prevotella, and Bacteroides as well as dysregulation of associated metabolism activities, which may involve in the pathogenesis of C-ASD. Consistent with metagenomic analysis, liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC/MS) revealed some of the differential metabolites between C-ASD and TD group were involved in the metabolic network of neurotransmitters including serotonin, dopamine, histidine, and GABA. Furthermore, we found these differences in metabolites were associated with altered abundance of specific bacteria. The study suggested possible future modalities for ASD intervention through targeting the specific bacteria associated with neurotransmitter metabolism.
The onset of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) ranked fifth malignancies all over the world. Increasing evidences showed that the distribution of HCC was related to the incidence of chronic hepatitis B ...virus (HBV) infection and other factors, such as alcoholism, aflatoxin B1 ingestion and obesity. Recent studies demonstrated that gut dysbiosis plays an important role in liver diseases. However, the researches on gut microbiota of HBV and non-HBV non-HCV related HCC have not been reported. In this study, we investigated the differences between the gut microbiota of HBV related HCC (B-HCC) and non-HBV non-HCV related HCC (NBNC-HCC), finally found some potential bacteria, linking different pathological mechanism of both types of HCCs.
We carried out 16S rRNA analyses in a cohort of 33 healthy controls, 35 individuals with HBV related HCC (B-HCC) and 22 individuals with non-HBV non-HCV (NBNC) related HCC (NBNC-HCC). We found that the species richness of fecal microbiota of B-HCC patients was much higher than other two groups. Interestingly, the feces of NBNC-HCC patients harbored more potential pro-inflammatory bacteria (
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which results in decrease potential of anti-inflammatory short-chain fatty acids. The feces of NBNC-HCC patients had relatively fewer abundance of multiple biological pathways related to amino acid and glucose metabolism, but high level of transport and secretion in some types. However, the B-HCC patients had opposite results of bacterial composition and associated multiple biological pathways versus NBNC-HCC patients. Meanwhile, we found that aberrant network of gut microbiota occurred differently in B-HCC and NBNC-HCC patients.
Our study indicated that B-HCC and NBNC-HCC patients showed differential abundance of bacteria involved in different functions or biological pathways. We suggested the modification of specific gut microbiota may provide the therapeutic benefit for B-HCC and NBNC-HCC.
A growing corpus of evidence implicates the involvement of the commensal microbiota and immune cytokines in the initiation and progression of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Glucocorticoids have ...been widely used in the treatment of SLE patients, however, glucocorticoid treatment carries a higher risk of other diseases. Using the 16S rRNA technique, we investigated the differences between the gut microbiota associated with the immune cytokines of SLE and relevant glucocorticoid treatment in a female cohort of 20 healthy control subjects (HC), 17 subjects with SLE (SLE-G), and 20 SLE patients having undergone glucocorticoid treatment (SLE+G). We observed that the diversity and structure of the microbial community in SLE+G patients were significantly changed compared to that of SLE-G patients, whereas the gut microbial community of the SLE+G group showed a similarity with the HC group, which implicate that the shift in the gut microbiome could represent a return to homeostasis. Furthermore, the up-regulations of immune cytokines in SLE-G were identified as closely related to gut dysbiosis, which indicates that the overrepresented genera in SLE patients may play roles in regulating expression level of these immune cytokines. This associated analysis of gut microbiota, glucocorticoid therapy, and immune factors might provide novel and insightful clues revealing the pathogenesis of SLE patients.
The genetic variations and dysbiosis of gut microbiota are associated with ASD. However, the role of the microbiota in the etiology of ASD in terms of host genetic susceptibility remains unclear. ...This study aims to systematically explore the interplay between host genetic variation and gut microbiota in ASD children. Whole-exon sequencing was applied to 26 ASD children and 26 matched controls to identify the single nucleotide variations (SNVs) in ASD. Our previous study revealed alteration in gut microbiota and disorder of metabolism activity in ASD for this cohort. Systematic bioinformatic analyses were further performed to identify associations between SNVs and gut microbiota, as well as their metabolites. The ASD SNVs were significantly enriched in genes associated with innate immune response, protein glycosylation process, and retrograde axonal transport. These SNVs were also correlated with the microbiome composition and a broad aspect of microbial functions, especially metabolism. Additionally, the abundance of metabolites involved in the metabolic network of neurotransmitters was inferred to be causally related to specific SNVs and microbes. Furthermore, our data suggested that the interaction of host genetics and gut microbes may play a crucial role in the immune and metabolism homeostasis of ASD. This study may provide valuable clues to investigate the interaction of host genetic variations and gut microbiota in the pathogenesis of ASD.
The genetic variations and dysbiosis of gut microbiota are associated with ASD. However, the role of the microbiota in the etiology of ASD in terms of host genetic susceptibility remains unclear. ...This study aims to systematically explore the interplay between host genetic variation and gut microbiota in ASD children. Whole-exon sequencing was applied to 26 ASD children and 26 matched controls to identify the single nucleotide variations (SNVs) in ASD. Our previous study revealed alteration in gut microbiota and disorder of metabolism activity in ASD for this cohort. Systematic bioinformatic analyses were further performed to identify associations between SNVs and gut microbiota, as well as their metabolites. The ASD SNVs were significantly enriched in genes associated with innate immune response, protein glycosylation process, and retrograde axonal transport. These SNVs were also correlated with the microbiome composition and a broad aspect of microbial functions, especially metabolism. Additionally, the abundance of metabolites involved in the metabolic network of neurotransmitters was inferred to be causally related to specific SNVs and microbes. Furthermore, our data suggested that the interaction of host genetics and gut microbes may play a crucial role in the immune and metabolism homeostasis of ASD. This study may provide valuable clues to investigate the interaction of host genetic variations and gut microbiota in the pathogenesis of ASD.
The electromagnetic wave absorption performance (EWAP) can be significantly improved by incorporating a functionalized layered structure that maximally directs electromagnetic waves deeper into ...cementitious materials. These waves are absorbed by multicomponent absorbers. This study investigates the influence of different absorber contents, specifically, magnetite (3, 6, 10, and 15%) and copper (Cu)-powder (3, 6, and 9%), as well as functionalized layered structure on the EWAP of magnesium phosphate cement (MPC). The results indicate that the functionalized layered structure can effectively improve the EWAP of MPC. By concurrently employing conductive Cu-powder and magnetic loss magnetite absorbers in the absorbing layer, an increase is observed in the EWAP of MPC. Notably, our proposed MPC with a double-layered structure (MPC10–2b) demonstrates optimum EWAP characteristics with a peak reflection loss of −13.8 dB and bandwidnth below −10 dB across 15.5 GHz. Thus, a functionalized layered structure significantly improves the EWAP of cementitious material, satisfying both the optimal impedance matching and microwave dissipation design criteria for electromagnetic absorbing materials.
Keyphrase Extraction is an automatic task that involves identifying the key words or phrases that capture the main content of an article. It is useful for various downstream tasks, including text ...search, text clustering, and text classification. Embedding-based methods for keyphrase extraction have shown promising results by utilizing pre-trained language models to represent candidate phrases and documents separately. These methods then rank the candidate phrases based on the cosine similarity between the document and the candidate phrases embeddings. However, there are mainly two shortcomings in such methods: I) Redundancy errors, when there are partial repetitions of candidate keyphrases, the methods tend to use redundant long phrases as keyphrases; II) Low keyphrase coverage, such as some keyphrases used to describe locally important information are ignored. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised keyphrase extraction method called “MICRank”, which evaluates the importance of candidate keyphrases from three perspectives: global information, local information, and attribute information, and solved the aforementioned issues. The experimental results on six benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed MICRank method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised keyphrase extraction methods. In addition, this paper improves the judgment criterion of correct keyphrase extraction and introduces a new evaluation metric called S1@M (M ∈ {5,10,15}) to address the issue of synonyms being considered incorrect predictions.
•This study proposed novel two-layered periodic stepped absorbing structure (PSAS)•PSAS was composed of a mixture of Nano-Fe3O4 magnetic fluid and a resin geopolymer.•Absorption exceeded 90% at ...frequencies from 2 GHz to 18 GHz in 16 GHz bandwidth.•Performance attributed to multiple λ/4 resonances and edge diffraction effects.
It is challenging to achieve high-strength absorption and effectively broaden the absorbing bandwidth when using conventional flat microwave-absorbing cementitious materials. To address this challenge and achieve excellent microwave-absorptive performance, this study proposes a novel two-layered periodic stepped absorbing structure (PSAS) composed of a mixture of nano-Fe3O4 magnetic fluid and a resin geopolymer. Additionally, the incident angle-dependent absorption performance, the impact of geometrical parameters, and the shape of the unit cell were investigated. The results demonstrate that the absorption of the designed metamaterial absorber exceeds 90% in the total frequency range of 2–18 GHz. A mean reflection value of −18.3 dB was obtained in this study. The outstanding absorption performance of PSAS results from the cooperative effect of multiple λ/4 resonances and edge diffraction effects, which improve the impedance matching to the level of the free space in a broad frequency domain. Combining the effect of electromagnetic field regulation with metamaterial structure, the ultra-broadband absorption can be significantly enhanced by adjusting the geometrical parameters of the unit cell for absorption resonance.
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