Ankylosing spondylitis (AS) is a chronic inflammation of the sacroiliac joints, spine and peripheral joints. The aetiology of ankylosing spondylitis is still unclear. Previous studies have indicated ...that genetics factors such as human leukocyte antigen HLA-B27 associates to AS susceptibility. We carried out a case-control study to determine whether the genetic polymorphisms of ORAI1 gene, a major component of store-operated calcium channels that involved the regulation of immune system, is a susceptibility factor to AS in a Taiwanese population. We enrolled 361 AS patients fulfilled the modified New York criteria and 379 controls from community. Five tagging single nucleotides polymorphisms (tSNPs) at ORAI1 were selected from the data of Han Chinese population in HapMap project. Clinical statuses of AS were assessed by the Bath Ankylosing Spondylitis Disease Activity Index (BASDAI), Bath Ankylosing Spondylitis Functional Index (BASFI), and Bath Ankylosing Spondylitis Global Index (BAS-G). Our results indicated that subjects carrying the minor allele homozygote (CC) of the promoter SNP rs12313273 or TT homozygote of the SNP rs7135617 had an increased risk of HLA-B27 positive AS. The minor allele C of 3'UTR SNP rs712853 exerted a protective effect to HLA-B27 positive AS. Furthermore, the rs12313273/rs7135617 pairwise allele analysis found that C-G (OR 1.69, 95% CI 1.27, 2.25; p = 0.0003) and T-T (OR 1.75, 95% CI 1.36, 2.27; p<0.0001) haplotypes had a significantly association with the risk of HLA-B27-positive AS in comparison with the T-G carriers. This is the first study that indicate haplotypes of ORAI1 (rs12313273 and rs7135617) are associated with the risk of HLA-B27 positive AS.
Many real-world systems, such as electric power and transportation, satisfy the flow conservation law, and can be considered to be multistate flow networks (MFN). Reliability is a popular index for ...evaluating MFN performance, and the sum-of-disjoint products (SDP) technique is a popular tool for evaluating MFN reliability. An improved SDP (iSDP) is proposed in this study by adding simplification procedures to reduce the number of multiplications and summations to increase the efficiency of the SDP; the validity and effectiveness of the iSDP is also demonstrated in this study. The iSDP's computational complexity is also analyzed, and one benchmark example is given to illustrate how MFN reliability is determined using the proposed iSDP method. In addition, computational experiments with two MFN are conducted to test the performance of the iSDP method, along with comparisons to the existing best-known SDP method.
Phthalate esters (PAEs) are one of the most widely used plasticizers in polymer products and humans are increasingly exposed to them. The constant exposure to PAEs-contained products has raised some ...concerns against human health. Thus, the impacts of PAEs and their metabolites on human health require a comprehensive study for a better understanding of the associated risks. Here, we attempt to review eight main health effects of PAE exposure according to the most up-to-date studies. We found that epidemiological studies demonstrated a consistent association between PAE exposure (especially DEHP and its metabolites) and a decrease in sperm quality in males and symptom development of ADHD in children. Overall, we found insufficient evidence and lack of consistency of the association between PAE exposure and cardiovascular diseases (hypertension, atherosclerosis, and CHD), thyroid diseases, respiratory diseases, diabetes, obesity, kidney diseases, intelligence performance in children, and other reproductive system-related diseases (anogenital distance, girl precocious puberty, and endometriosis). Future studies (longitudinal and follow-up investigations) need to thoroughly perform in large-scale populations to yield more consistent and powerful results and increase the precision of the association as well as enhance the overall understanding of potential human health risks of PAEs in long-term exposure.
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•Associations between PAEs and lower sperm quality in males and ADHD in children were consistently revealed.•Those associations were confirmed by cohort or longitudinal studies.•Inadequate evidence of the association between PAE exposure and other human diseases.
Although most H. pylori infectors are asymptomatic, some may develop serious disease, such as gastric adenocarcinoma, gastric high-grade B cell lymphoma and peptic ulcer disease. Epidemiological and ...basic studies have provided evidence that infection with H. pylori carrying specific virulence factors can lead to more severe outcome. The virulence factors that are associated with gastric adenocarcinoma development include the presence, expression intensity and types of cytotoxin-associated gene A (CagA, especially EPIYA-D type and multiple copies of EPIYA-C) and type IV secretion system (CagL polymorphism) responsible for its translocation into the host cells, the genotypes of vacuolating cytotoxin A (vacA, s1/i1/m1 type), and expression intensity of blood group antigen binding adhesin (BabA, low-producer or chimeric with BabB). The presence of CagA is also related to gastric high-grade B cell lymphoma occurrence. Peptic ulcer disease is closely associated with cagA-genopositive, vacA s1/m1 genotype, babA2-genopositive (encodes BabA protein), presence of duodenal ulcer promoting gene cluster (dupA cluster) and induced by contact with epithelium gene A1 (iceA1), and expression status of outer inflammatory protein (OipA). The prevalence of these virulence factors is diverse among H. pylori isolated from different geographic areas and ethnic groups, which may explain the differences in disease incidences. For example, in East Asia where gastric cancer incidence is highest worldwide, almost all H. pylori isolates were cagA genopositive, vacA s1/i1/m1 and BabA-expressing. Therefore, selection of appropriate virulence markers and testing methods are important when using them to determine risk of diseases. This review summarizes the evidences of H. pylori virulence factors in relation with gastroduodenal diseases and discusses the geographic differences and appropriate methods of analyzing these virulence markers.
In this paper, the influence of annealing temperature on amorphous indium‐zinc‐tungsten‐oxide (a‐IZWO) thin‐film transistors (TFTs) is investigated. As the annealing temperature increases, the IZWO ...films maintain an amorphous state, which is conducive to the uniformity of the TFT. The field effect mobility of the device increases as a function of annealing temperature and reaches 16.2 cm2 V−1 s−1 at 300 °C, along with an on/off current ratio of 1.6 × 108. Meanwhile, the corresponding positive bias stability is improved, as confirmed by the fact that the threshold voltage shift value reduces to 0.4 V after being stressed for 1500 s. This result can be ascribed to the decrease in electrons captured by the deep defects in a‐IZWO TFTs.
The influence of annealing temperature on amorphous indium‐zinc‐tungsten‐oxide thin‐film transistors is investigated. As the annealing temperature increases, the field effect mobility of the device increases as a function of annealing temperature. Meanwhile, the corresponding positive bias stability is improved. This result can be ascribed to the decrease in electrons captured by the deep defects in a‐IZWO TFTs.
•Existing studies are without considering the total budget of the entire network.•Propose a more reliable binary-state network under the budget limit.•Propose the first accurate algorithm for the ...proposed problem.•Propose the first BAT-algorithm for the proposed problem.•Propose stepwise vectors for BAT.
Everyday life is driven by various network, such as supply chains for distributing raw materials, semi-finished product goods, and final products; Internet of Things (IoT) for connecting and exchanging data; utility networks for transmitting fuel, power, water, electricity, and 4 G/5 G; and social networks for sharing information and connections. The binary-state network is a basic network, where the state of each component is either success or failure, i.e., the binary-state. Network reliability plays an important role in evaluating the performance of network planning, design, and management. Because more networks are being set up in the real world currently, there is a need for their reliability. It is necessary to build a reliable network within a limited budget. However, existing studies are focused on the budget limit for each minimal path (MP) in networks without considering the total budget of the entire network. We propose a novel concept to consider how to build a more reliable binary-state network under the budget limit. In addition, we propose an algorithm based on the binary-addition-tree algorithm (BAT) and stepwise vectors to solve the problem efficiently.
We present the Natural Questions corpus, a question answering data set. Questions
consist of real anonymized, aggregated queries issued to the Google search
engine. An annotator is presented with a ...question along with a Wikipedia page
from the top 5 search results, and annotates a long answer (typically a
paragraph) and a short answer (one or more entities) if present on the page, or
marks null if no long/short answer is present. The public release consists of
307,373 training examples with single annotations; 7,830 examples with 5-way
annotations for development data; and a further 7,842 examples with 5-way
annotated sequestered as test data. We present experiments validating quality of
the data. We also describe analysis of 25-way annotations on 302 examples,
giving insights into human variability on the annotation task. We introduce
robust metrics for the purposes of evaluating question answering systems;
demonstrate high human upper bounds on these metrics; and establish baseline
results using competitive methods drawn from related literature.
Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) refer to a group of noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) that has a transcript of more than 200 nucleotides in length in eukaryotic cells. The lncRNAs regulate gene expression at ...epigenetic, transcriptional, and post-transcriptional levels by multiple action modes. In this review, we describe the diverse roles reported for lncRNAs, and discuss how they could mechanistically be involved in the development of central nervous system (CNS) and neurodegenerative diseases. Further studies on the function of lncRNAs and their mechanism will help deepen our understanding of the development, function, and diseases of the CNS, and provide new ideas for the design and development of some therapeutic drugs.
Natural systems are often complex and dynamic (i.e. nonlinear), making them difficult to understand using linear statistical approaches. Linear approaches are fundamentally based on correlation. ...Thus, they are ill-posed for dynamical systems, where correlation can occur without causation, and causation may also occur in the absence of correlation. “Mirage correlation” (i.e., the sign and magnitude of the correlation change with time) is a hallmark of nonlinear systems that results from state dependency. State dependency means that the relationships among interacting variables change with different states of the system. In recent decades, nonlinear methods that acknowledge state dependence have been developed. These nonlinear statistical methods are rooted in state space reconstruction, i.e. lagged coordinate embedding of time series data. These methods do not assume any set of equations governing the system but recover the dynamics from time series data, thus called empirical dynamic modeling (EDM). EDM bears a variety of utilities to investigating dynamical systems. Here, we provide a step-by-step tutorial for EDM applications with rEDM, a free software package written in the R language. Using model examples, we aim to guide users through several basic applications of EDM, including (1) determining the complexity (dimensionality) of a system, (2) distinguishing nonlinear dynamical systems from linear stochastic systems, and quantifying the nonlinearity (i.e. state dependence), (3) determining causal variables, (4) forecasting, (5) tracking the strength and sign of interaction, and (6) exploring the scenario of external perturbation. These methods and applications can be used to provide a mechanistic understanding of dynamical systems.
Aged black garlic (BG) is a functional food in global markets; however, very few studies have ventured into comprehensive profiling of BG metabolomes during the aging process. Herein, we exploited ...UHPLC-Orbitrap HRMS for a comparative metabolomics analysis. During the heat treatment, organosulfur compounds such as allicin, diallyl disulfide, ajoene,
-allyl-l-cysteine (SAC), and γ-glutamyl-SAC were downregulated. Plenty of glycerophospholipids together with shikimate, aromatic amino acids, and vitamin B6 vitamers were significantly augmented; tryptophan was however consumed to generate downstream products manifested in nicotinate metabolism and aminobenzoate degradation. These secondary metabolites serve as signaling mediators or protectants against extreme thermal exposure. Besides, Heyns compounds and Amadori-rearrangement byproducts with potential mutagenic effects were concentrated. Together, our findings expand the known metabolome space of BG processing and better elucidate the reactivities of the key metabolites. We provide in-depth insights into the biochemical changes of BG that enable further functional or toxicological investigations of this popular food.
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