•We examined Chinese translation activations in a lexical decision task with English prime and target words.•No behavioural evidence for hidden repetition priming in masked priming.•Chinese ...translations of English targets words are activated.•Masked English primes do not activate their Chinese translations.•Computational modelling work supported the interpretation of the experimental findings.
Electrophysiological and behavioural evidence suggests that Chinese translations of English words are automatically activated when Chinese-English bilinguals read English words (e.g., Thierry & Wu, 2007; Wu & Thierry, 2010; Zhang, van Heuven, & Conklin, 2011). The present study investigated the impact of translation activation in three behavioural experiments with in total 118 Chinese-English bilinguals. First, we investigated whether Chinese phonology was the source of the effects of Chinese character repetition in the Chinese translations of English masked primes and targets (hidden repetition priming) observed in Zhang et al.’s (2011), and whether these hidden repetition priming effects were affected by Chinese morpheme complexity and prime duration. However, we failed to find any evidence of hidden repetition priming. An exact replication of Zhang et al. (2011) was conducted next, which again provided no evidence for hidden repetition priming. However, cross-language priming data collected with the same group of participants did reveal masked translation priming and crucially Chinese character repetition priming with masked Chinese primes and English targets (partially hidden repetition priming), indicating that the activation of Chinese translations in the masked priming paradigm is limited to English target words. Computational modeling work provided further support that translation form activation is limited to target words in the masked priming paradigm.
Plants are exposed to any number of potentially adverse environmental conditions such as water deficit, high salinity, extreme temperature, submergence, etc. These abiotic stresses adversely affect ...the plant growth and productivity. Nowadays various strategies are employed to generate plants that can withstand these stresses. In recent years, seed priming has been developed as an indispensable method to produce tolerant plants against various stresses. Seed priming is the induction of a particular physiological state in plants by the treatment of natural and synthetic compounds to the seeds before germination. In plant defense, priming is defined as a physiological process by which a plant prepares to respond to imminent abiotic stress more quickly or aggressively. Moreover, plants raised from primed seeds showed sturdy and quick cellular defense response against abiotic stresses. Priming for enhanced resistance to abiotic stress obviously is operating via various pathways involved in different metabolic processes. The seedlings emerging from primed seeds showed early and uniform germination. Moreover, the overall growth of plants is enhanced due to the seed-priming treatments. The main objective of this review is to provide an overview of various crops in which seed priming is practiced and about various seed-priming methods and its effects.
Abiotic stresses, including drought, salinity, extreme temperature, and pollutants, are the main cause of crop losses worldwide. Novel climate-adapted crops and stress tolerance-enhancing compounds ...are increasingly needed to counteract the negative effects of unfavorable stressful environments. A number of natural products and synthetic chemicals can protect model and crop plants against abiotic stresses through induction of molecular and physiological defense mechanisms, a process known as molecular priming. In addition to their stress-protective effect, some of these compounds can also stimulate plant growth. Here, we provide an overview of the known physiological and molecular mechanisms that induce molecular priming, together with a survey of the approaches aimed to discover and functionally study new stress-alleviating chemicals.
Plants can acquire an improved resistance against pathogen attacks by exogenous application of natural or artificial compounds. In a process called chemical priming, application of these compounds ...causes earlier, faster and/or stronger responses to pathogen attacks. The primed defense may persist over a stress-free time (lag phase) and may be expressed also in plant organs that have not been directly treated with the compound. This review summarizes the current knowledge on the signaling pathways involved in chemical priming of plant defense responses to pathogen attacks. Chemical priming in induced systemic resistance (ISR) and systemic acquired resistance (SAR) is highlighted. The roles of the transcriptional coactivator NONEXPRESSOR OF PR1 (NPR1), a key regulator of plant immunity, induced resistance (IR) and salicylic acid signaling during chemical priming are underlined. Finally, we consider the potential usage of chemical priming to enhance plant resistance to pathogens in agriculture.
Mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) are a promising cell therapy due to their immunomodulatory function, which is mediated by extracellular vesicles (EVs). However, EV clinical translation has been ...unsuccessful due in part to EV functional heterogeneity. Priming MSCs with inflammatory signals can enhance immunomodulatory function, but priming approaches have not been investigated to increase the efficiency of EV manufacturing and reduce heterogeneity. MSCs expanded at a clinical scale are typically discarded after being primed and producing a single EV batch such that every batch incurs the full expansion cost. Thus, development of an approach to generate multiple batches of EVs from a single production of primed MSCs (termed “cyclical priming”) could address these challenges.
Adipose-derived MSCs were expanded in serum-containing (MSC-GM) or chemically defined (CDM) media and primed with 50 ng/mL interferon-gamma (IFN-γ)/tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α). The effects of priming and recovery were screened using a modified Cell Painting assay (nuclei, actin, endoplasmic reticulum, mitochondria stains) followed by high content imaging and multivariate morphological analysis. Indoleamine 2,3-dioxgenase (IDO) activity served as a functional screen across priming cycles and acridine orange/propidium iodide (AO/PI) staining was used to quantify viability.
We have shown MSC morphological response predicts function and 50 ng/mL IFN-γ/TNF-α priming increases EV yield and potency in a bioreactor. Morphological profiling distinguished primed and recovered groups, which became larger and more elongated (Fig 1). Cyclical priming sustained higher IDO activity and viability compared to traditional priming (primed cycle 1) through 144 hours in culture (Figs 2, 3). CDM groups maintained similar IDO activity and higher live count and viability in late culture (Fig 3). This is the first demonstration of cyclical priming, which could be implemented in EV manufacturing. Furthermore, screening cyclical priming informs future larger scale experiments involving production of EVs in bioreactors and omics characterization and functional evaluation of EVs from multiple priming cycles towards understanding mechanisms of priming. This work advances methods to increase EV production from a single batch of cells, minimizing process cost and reducing batch-batch heterogeneity of cell products, which facilitates clinical translation of MSC-based therapies.
The question whether nonconscious processing could involve higher-level, semantic representations is of broad interest. Here, we demonstrate semantic processing of task-relevant and task-irrelevant ...features of nonconscious primes within a novel, empirical test bed. In two experiments, musicians were visually primed with musical note triads varying in mode (i.e., major vs minor) and position (i.e., the arrangement of notes within a triad). The task required to discriminate only the mode in the following auditory target chord. In two experimental blocks, primes were either consciously visible or masked, respectively. Response times for auditory discrimination of the modes (relevant dimension) of heard triads were measured. Crucially, the targets also varied with respect to mode and position, creating different grades of congruency with the visual primes. Based on the Theory of Event Coding, we expected and found interactions between relevant and irrelevant semantic characteristics of masked primes, illustrating that even irrelevant prime meaning was processed. Moreover, our results indicated that both task-relevant and task-irrelevant prime characteristics are processed in nonconscious conditions only, and that practice in ignoring uninformative conscious primes can be transferred to a subsequent block. In conclusion, this study demonstrates cross-modal, automatic semantic processing using a novel approach to study such effects.
Concerns have been raised recently about the replicability of behavioral priming effects, and calls have been issued to identify priming methodologies with effects that can be obtained in any context ...and with any population. I argue that such expectations are misguided and inconsistent with evolutionary understandings of the brain as a computational organ. Rather, we should expect priming effects to be highly sensitive to variations in experimental features and subject populations. Such variation does not make priming effects frivolous or capricious but instead can be predicted a priori. However, absent theories specifying the precise contingencies that lead to such variation, failures to replicate another researcher's findings will necessarily be ambiguous with respect to the inferences that can be made. Priming research is not yet at the stage where such theories exist, and therefore failures are uninformative at the current time. Ultimately, priming researchers themselves must provide direct replications of their own effects; researchers have been deficient in meeting this responsibility and have contributed to the current state of confusion. The recommendations issued in this article reflect concerns both with the practice of priming researchers and with the inappropriate expectations of researchers who have failed to replicate others' priming effects.
Previous masked translation priming studies, especially those with different-script bilinguals, have shown that cognates provide more priming than noncognates, a difference attributed to cognates' ...phonological similarity. In our experiments employing a word naming task, we examined this issue for Chinese-Japanese bilinguals in a slightly different way, using same-script cognates as primes and targets. In Experiment 1, significant cognate priming effects were observed. The sizes of the priming effects were, however, statistically not different for phonologically similar (e.g., 信赖/xin4lai4/-信頼/shiNrai/) and dissimilar cognate pairs (e.g., 保证/bao3zheng4/-保証 /hoshoR/), suggesting no impact of phonological similarity. In Experiment 2, using exclusively Chinese stimuli, we demonstrated a significant homophone priming effect using two-character logographic primes and targets, indicating that phonological priming is possible for two-character Chinese targets. However, priming only emerged for pairs that had the same tone pattern (e.g., 守卫/shou3wei4/-首位/shou3wei4/), suggesting that a match in lexical tone is crucial for observing phonologically based priming in that situation. Therefore, Experiment 3 involved phonologically similar Chinese-Japanese cognate pairs in which the similarity of their suprasegmental phonological features (i.e., lexical tone and pitch-accent information) was varied. Priming effects were statistically not different for tone/accent similar pairs (e.g., 关心/guan1xin1/-関心/kaNsiN/) and dissimilar pairs (e.g., 满足/man3zu2/-満足/maNzoku/). Our results indicate that phonological facilitation is not involved in producing cognate priming effects for Chinese-Japanese bilinguals. Possible explanations, based on underlying representations of logographic cognates, are discussed.
•We found cumulative priming effects between Chinese and English passives.•Between-language cumulative priming is not sensitive to surface word order.•We found within-language cumulative priming in ...Chinese datives and passives.•Implicit learning is a universal mechanism of syntactic processing.
Implicit learning models suggest that speakers adapt syntactic knowledge in response to prior syntactic experience and such adaptation is sensitive to surface structures (word order) (e.g., Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006; Reitter, Keller, & Moore, 2011). To determine the scope of syntactic processing to which an implicit learning mechanism is applicable and its sensitivity to surface structures, we investigated cumulative priming and inverse frequency effects across different constructions in a between- language context of Chinese and English (Experiment 1) and in a within- language context of Chinese (Experiment 2). Our results showed that Chinese speakers integrated cumulative experience in Chinese into production of not only Chinese but also of English and that such adaptation was not sensitive to surface word order at least in a between- language context. These findings suggest that an implicit learning mechanism is a universal, language-unspecific processing mechanism that is not sensitive to surface syntactic structures. We discuss these findings in terms of theories of structural priming and bilingual syntactic processing and consider the need for a model that accommodates our findings.
Despite the activation of T lymphocytes by antigen‐presenting cells being responsible for eliciting antigen‐specific immune responses, their crosstalking suffers from temporospatial limitations and ...endogenous influencing factors, which restrict the generation of a strong antitumor immunity. Here, cascade cell membrane coating is reported to prepare biomimetic nanoparticles (BNs) that can manipulate the cross‐priming of T cells. BNs are obtained from coating nanoparticulate substrates with cell membranes extracted from dendritic cells (DCs) that are pre‐pulsed with cancer cell membrane‐coated nanoparticles. With a DC membrane that presents an array of cancer cell membrane antigen epitopes, BNs inherit the intrinsic membrane function of DCs, which can directly cross‐prime T cells and provoke robust yet antigen‐specific antitumor responses in multiple mouse models. Combination with clinical anti‐programmed death‐1 antibodies demonstrates a robust way of BNs to achieve desirable tumor regression and survival rate. This work spotlights the impact of nanoparticles on direct cross‐priming of T cells and supports a unique yet modulate platform for boosting an effective adaptive immunity for immunotherapy.
The activation of T lymphocytes by antigen‐presenting cells is responsible for eliciting antigen‐specific immune responses, which plays a critical role in immunotherapy. Here, the manipulation of cross‐priming of T cells using biomimetic nanoparticles enabled by cascade cell membrane coating, which provides a unique yet modulate platform for boosting an effective adaptive immunity for immunotherapy, is described.
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