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Background: Gliotoxin, a secondary metabolite isolated from marine-derived Aspergillus fumigatus, has demonstrated anti-tumor properties in several cancers. Ferroptosis, a recently discovered type of programmed cell death that depends on the accumulation of iron and lipid peroxides, participates in the occurrence and development of various diseases, including cancer. A recent patent, US20200383943, has suggested that the promotion of ferroptosis is a method of cancer treatment. Therefore, the development of drugs that induce ferroptosis in cancer cells would constitute a novel therapeutic approach. Objective: Gliotoxin is a natural compound which has exhibited anti-tumor properties in multiple cancers, however, studies of the effect of gliotoxin on esophageal cancer are lacking. Although cancer treatment has shown great progress, including traditional surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and immunotherapy, the prognosis of esophageal cancer is still poor. Therefore, the development of new treatment approaches for esophageal cancer is necessary. Methods: The effects of gliotoxin on esophageal cancer cells were determined by functional assays, such as CCK-8, wound healing and transwell assays. We used online tools to predict the target genes of gliotoxin, followed by further verification using Western blotting assays. To assess the role of gliotxin in inducing ferroptosis in esophageal cancer, we detected characteristics associated with ferroptosis including ROS, MDA, GSH and Fe2+. Results: Using online tools SEA and SwissTargetPrediction, we predicted that SUV39H1 was the gliotoxin target gene. Furthermore, in esophageal cancer tissues, SUV39H1 was expressed at higher levels than in normal tissues, while in patients with Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma (ESCC), high expression levels of SUV39H1 indicated a poor prognosis. In vitro, we observed that gliotoxin increased ESCC cell death and inhibited cell migration. We treated ESCC cells with pan-caspase inhibitor Z-VAD-FMK or ferroptosis inhibitors, including Fer-1 and DFO. Our results showed that Fer-1 and DFO reduced the toxic effects of gliotoxin, while Z-VAD-FMK did not. Furthermore, gliotoxin treatment reduced tumor weight and volume in the xenograft tumor mouse model. Conclusion: In summary, our findings indicate that gliotoxin downregulated SUV39H1 expression in ESCC cells and induced ferroptosis, suggesting a novel natural therapy for ESSC.

StarCraft II (SC2) poses a grand challenge for reinforcement learning (RL), of which the main difficulties include huge state space, varying action space, and a long time horizon. In this work, we investigate a set of RL techniques for the full-length game of StarCraft II. We investigate a hierarchical RL approach involving extracted macro-actions and a hierarchical architecture of neural networks. We investigate a curriculum transfer training procedure and train the agent on a single machine with 4 GPUs and 48 CPU threads. On a 64x64 map and using restrictive units, we achieve a win rate of 99% against the level-1 built-in AI. Through the curriculum transfer learning algorithm and a mixture of combat models, we achieve a 93% win rate against the most difficult non-cheating level built-in AI (level-7). In this extended version of the paper, we improve our architecture to train the agent against the cheating level AIs and achieve the win rate against the level-8, level-9, and level-10 AIs as 96%, 97%, and 94%, respectively. Our codes are at https://github.com/liuruoze/HierNet-SC2. To provide a baseline referring the AlphaStar for our work as well as the research and open-source community, we reproduce a scaled-down version of it, mini-AlphaStar (mAS). The latest version of mAS is 1.07, which can be trained on the raw action space which has 564 actions. It is designed to run training on a single common machine, by making the hyper-parameters adjustable. We then compare our work with mAS using the same resources and show that our method is more effective. The codes of mini-AlphaStar are at https://github.com/liuruoze/mini-AlphaStar. We hope our study could shed some light on the future research of efficient reinforcement learning on SC2 and other large-scale games., Comment: 48 pages,21 figures

Adventitious root formation is a bottleneck for the mass propagation of microshoots, and nitrate is an essential nutrient regulating adventitious roots. WOX11 is involved in adventitious rooting. But the crosstalk between nitrate and WOX11 is completely unknown. In this study, MdWOX11 transgenic apple microshoots were grown on different nitrate treatments. Low nitrate promotes adventitious rooting in overexpressed microshoots more than wild type and RNA interference microshoots. In contrast, medium nitrate significantly inhibits it in overexpressed and RNA interference microshoots compared with wild type microshoots. Stem anatomy indicated that medium nitrate delays root primordia formation compared with low nitrate. Methyl jasmonate and zeatin riboside played positive and negative roles in adventitious rooting, respectively. Transcriptomic analysis was conducted to understand the molecular mechanisms behind the phenotypes better. Hormone signalling, sugar metabolism, nitrogen metabolism, cell cycle and root development pathway-related genes were selected for their potential involvement in adventitious rooting. Results suggest that nitrogen signaling and MdWOX11 expression affect cytokinin accumulation and response to cytokinin through regulating the expression of genes related to cytokinin synthesis and transduction pathways, which ultimately affect adventitious rooting. This study provided important insights into the complicated networks involved in adventitious rooting in transgenic microshoots under nitrate treatments.

In recent years, with the development of social economy, cultural productivity has become more and more important in China's overall economic pattern. Tibetan has a long history, has a unique natural resources and cultural resources, is a product development provides an important material, on the other hand due to their own culture, the thought of aesthetic and improve, a single, homogeneous product on the market can't meet the demand of people, be badly in need of new design ideas to develop Tibetan gen products, The topic will be studied from the perspective of practical application. This paper focuses on the research of Tibetan local cultural and creative industry. Firstly, a large number of Tibet-related domestic and foreign literature are consulted to understand the current situation of tibet-related research. On this basis, the development trend of cultural and creative industry and successful cases related to cultural and creative products are analyzed and studied, providing ideas for the following product design. Secondly, in the study of Tibetan culture, the historical culture, geographical environment and artistic characteristics of The Tibetan are introduced. Through the analysis of Tibetan decorative arts, color patterns and other related cultural and creative case experience, the cultural and creative products of the Tibetan are designed. Finally, based on the analysis of relevant elements of Tibetan decorative art, Tibetan colors and patterns are extracted and summarized to achieve the combination of ethnic decorative art and modern design concepts, and the new design mode is integrated into Tibetan cultural and creative product design. This paper hopes to promote the inheritance of national culture and the development of Tibetan cultural industry through this design research.

Dunhuang art has a long history and has a high artistic value and cultural system in the long river of history. The value of Dunhuang frescoes to Chinese art is self-evident. In recent years, many of its artistic elements and forms have been gradually explored and developed. The patterns and color elements in Dunhuang frescoes also provide modern design with unique inspiration and artistic expression forms, which are of high exploration value. Dunhuang murals, with their unique expressive force and incomparable artistic charm, have a wide impact on all kinds of art industries, especially in the field of illustration design has a unique revelation. Illustration is now more and more widely used in all kinds of modern design, widely loved by the public. However, as a modern Chinese style illustration art in the same line with Dunhuang fresco, its reference and research value has not been fully explored. The further combing of the elements of Dunhuang murals strengthens the application of color in the field of illustration, provides a lot of reference for the exploration of the field of Chinese style illustration in the future, and also lays a foundation for the exploration of folk art and culture in the future. This paper explores the possibility of Chinese style illustration by studying the application of Dunhuang frescoes in modern Chinese style illustration, inspiring and promoting Chinese people to explore the new trend of contemporary illustration by using our excellent traditional culture.

We present an extremely simple Ultra-Resolution Style Transfer framework, termed URST, to flexibly process arbitrary high-resolution images (e.g., 10000x10000 pixels) style transfer for the first time. Most of the existing state-of-the-art methods would fall short due to massive memory cost and small stroke size when processing ultra-high resolution images. URST completely avoids the memory problem caused by ultra-high resolution images by (1) dividing the image into small patches and (2) performing patch-wise style transfer with a novel Thumbnail Instance Normalization (TIN). Specifically, TIN can extract thumbnail features' normalization statistics and apply them to small patches, ensuring the style consistency among different patches. Overall, the URST framework has three merits compared to prior arts. (1) We divide input image into small patches and adopt TIN, successfully transferring image style with arbitrary high-resolution. (2) Experiments show that our URST surpasses existing SOTA methods on ultra-high resolution images benefiting from the effectiveness of the proposed stroke perceptual loss in enlarging the stroke size. (3) Our URST can be easily plugged into most existing style transfer methods and directly improve their performance even without training. Code is available at https://git.io/URST., Accepted to AAAI 2022

Background: The screening efficiency of Erythrocyte indices varies in different regions. This study aimed to analyze the application efficiency of 11 Erythrocyte indices in Jiujiang prefecture. Methods: A total of 2379 patients with suspected thalassanemia were enrolled in Jiujiang Maternal and Child Health Hospital. Thalassanemia genes were detected by reverse dot blot hybridization. In addition, receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) was used to analyze and calculate the sensitivity, specificity, Youden's Index(YI), positive likelihood ratio(+LR) , negative likelihood ratio(-LR) and area under curve (AUC) of the Erythrocyte indices. Results: 1)Thalassanemia carriers in Jiujiang prefecture mainly involved α- thalassanemia and β-thalassanemia, with the detection rate of 11.60%%. Thereinto, --SEA/αα(50.35%%) and -α3.7/αα(39.86%%) predominated in α-Thalassanemia, while the commonest gene mutation types of β-Thalassanemia were βIVS-II-654/βN, βCD41-42/βN, and βCD17/βN, accounting for 64.29%,15.87% and 9.542%, respectively. 2) Of 11 erythrocyte indices, Green and King (G&K) exhibited the highest diagnostic efficiency, with the AUC above 90%, a high sensitivity and a good specificity, which followed by England and Fraser (E&F), Sirdah(SI), Jayabose (RDW index) and Ricerca(RI). while Bessman), Ehsani(EI), Srivastava(Sriv), Shine and Lal (S&L), MentzIer(MI) and RBC count(in million) possessed a lower application value for thalassanemia screening. Conclusion: 1)Analysis of thalassanemia genotypes can provide a theoretical basis for thalassanemia screening, prenatal diagnosis and genetic counseling. 2)Compared with other erythrocyte indices, Green and King (G&K) showed higher application value for thalassanemia screening, with the largest AUC above 90%. which is considered feasible for thalassanemia screening in Jiujiang prefecture, Jiangxi province.

Voriconazole remains the mainstay for the treatment of invasive fungal infections in heart transplant patients and can significantly increase tacrolimus exposure because of drug-drug interaction (DDI). However, the magnitude of this DDI is highly variable and difficult to predict. The purpose of this study was to present the characteristics of the DDI between tacrolimus and voriconazole, and further identify the various predictors of tacrolimus dose modification.We retrospectively enrolled 69 heart transplant recipients who did not use voriconazole as the control and 68 patients received voriconazole treatment in voriconazole group. CYP3A4*1G, CYP3A5*3 and CYP2C19*2 or *3 were thereafter genotyped by Sanger sequencing. The dose of tacrolimus required to achieve the therapeutic concentrations and tacrolimus dose-corrected trough concentration (CThe DDI between tacrolimus and voriconazole displayed a large interindividual variability with more than 10-fold changes in tacrolimus dose (range 1.28-13.00) and CThe findings of this study have identified the various important factors to adjust tacrolimus dosage when co-administrated with voriconazole in individual patients. CYP2C19 genotype and haematocrit should be considered when tailoring tacrolimus dose.

The end of the 19th century in the early 20th century, in order to solve the problem of the design, in places such as Europe and the United States the rise of modernism design movement, it has changed the previous design for the upper classes, such as noble as the service object, did it for the first time to serve the broad masses of the people, is a subversive design movement, for after laid a solid foundation for the industrial production. The purpose of modernism design is to emphasize that design should change with the changes of The Times, in line with the development of post-war society at that time, and also produced a variety of artistic styles. Constructivism in Russia, styleism in The Netherlands, Bauhaus in Germany and industrial design in the United States all paid attention to the characteristics of materials and the application of new technologies in their design, advocating the design ideas of "form serves function" and "less is more". Among them, the article mainly discusses the influence of Russian constructivism and Dutch style school on modernist design, and lists the evolution of German and Japanese design under the influence of contemporary art trend.

Art and design are homologous, and both permeate and influence each other. New thoughts and developments in the field of art will quickly penetrate and influence the field of design. Although in the early days of arts and crafts of representative John ru skin tried to painting, sculpture, and other art forms of "great art" and represents the design apart from the "art", but in the process of the development of modern art movement appeared in a series of design, such as modernism, post-modernism, contemporary art, etc., there is a art and design influence each other. This paper selects typical contemporary art schools and discusses their influence and significance on modernism with cases.

Colorado potato beetle (CPB; Leptinotarsa decemlineata) is a destructive quarantine pest that develops broad physiological adaptations to potato plants. During feeding, CPB deposits a copious amount of wet frass onto the surface of leaves and stems that remains in place for long periods. Insect behaviors such as feeding, crawling and oviposition are able to mediate plant defenses. However, the specific role of CPB defecation-associated cues in manipulating plant defenses remains unclear.CPB larval frass significantly suppressed potato polyphenol oxidase activity and enhanced larval growth on treated potato plants. The incorporation of antibiotics into larval frass triggered higher jasmonic acid (JA)-regulated defense responses in potato plants compared with antibiotic-free frass. Four bacterial symbionts belonging to the genera Acinetobacter, Citrobacter, Enterobacter and Pantoea were isolated from larval frass and suppressed plant defenses. After reinoculation of these bacteria into axenic larvae, Acinetobacter and Citrobacter were found to be highly abundant in the frass, whereas Enterobacter and Pantoea were less abundant probably due to the negative effect of potato steroidal glycoalkaloids (SGA) such as α-solanine. Furthermore, direct application of Acinetobacter and Citrobacter to wounded potato plants significantly inhibited the expression of genes associated with the JA-mediated defense signaling pathway and SGA biosynthesis.Our findings demonstrate that CPB exploits frass-associated bacteria as a deceptive strategy of plant defense suppression, adding an interesting dimension to our understanding of how CPB successfully specializes on potato plants. © 2022 Society of Chemical Industry.

We studied the influences that 3d transition metals have on the cohesive energies, structural changes and operating voltages of P2-NaxMO2 during discharge based on first-principles calculations.

In this report, we present our champion solution to the WSDM2023 Toloka Visual Question Answering (VQA) Challenge. Different from the common VQA and visual grounding (VG) tasks, this challenge involves a more complex scenario, i.e. inferring and locating the object implicitly specified by the given interrogative question. For this task, we leverage ViT-Adapter, a pre-training-free adapter network, to adapt multi-modal pre-trained Uni-Perceiver for better cross-modal localization. Our method ranks first on the leaderboard, achieving 77.5 and 76.347 IoU on public and private test sets, respectively. It shows that ViT-Adapter is also an effective paradigm for adapting the unified perception model to vision-language downstream tasks. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/czczup/ViT-Adapter/tree/main/wsdm2023., Comment: Technical report in WSDM Cup 2023

Brain connectome analysis commonly compresses high-resolution brain scans (typically composed of millions of voxels) down to only hundreds of regions of interest (ROIs) by averaging within-ROI signals. This huge dimension reduction improves computational speed and the morphological properties of anatomical structures; however, it also comes at the cost of substantial losses in spatial specificity and sensitivity, especially when the signals exhibit high within-ROI heterogeneity. Oftentimes, abnormally expressed functional connectivity (FC) between a pair of ROIs caused by a brain disease is primarily driven by only small subsets of voxel pairs within the ROI pair. This article proposes a new network method for detection of voxel-pair-level neural dysconnectivity with spatial constraints. Specifically, focusing on an ROI pair, our model aims to extract dense sub-areas that contain aberrant voxel-pair connections while ensuring that the involved voxels are spatially contiguous. In addition, we develop sub-community-detection algorithms to realize the model, and the consistency of these algorithms is justified. Comprehensive simulation studies demonstrate our method's effectiveness in reducing the false-positive rate while increasing statistical power, detection replicability, and spatial specificity. We apply our approach to reveal: (i) voxel-wise schizophrenia-altered FC patterns within the salience and temporal-thalamic network from 330 participants in a schizophrenia study; (ii) disrupted voxel-wise FC patterns related to nicotine addiction between the basal ganglia, hippocampus, and insular gyrus from 3269 participants using UK Biobank data. The detected results align with previous medical findings but include improved localized information., Comment: 25 pages, 6 figures

Supplementary Material 1

Large language models (LLMs) have notably accelerated progress towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), with their impressive zero-shot capacity for user-tailored tasks, endowing them with immense potential across a range of applications. However, in the field of computer vision, despite the availability of numerous powerful vision foundation models (VFMs), they are still restricted to tasks in a pre-defined form, struggling to match the open-ended task capabilities of LLMs. In this work, we present an LLM-based framework for vision-centric tasks, termed VisionLLM. This framework provides a unified perspective for vision and language tasks by treating images as a foreign language and aligning vision-centric tasks with language tasks that can be flexibly defined and managed using language instructions. An LLM-based decoder can then make appropriate predictions based on these instructions for open-ended tasks. Extensive experiments show that the proposed VisionLLM can achieve different levels of task customization through language instructions, from fine-grained object-level to coarse-grained task-level customization, all with good results. It's noteworthy that, with a generalist LLM-based framework, our model can achieve over 60\% mAP on COCO, on par with detection-specific models. We hope this model can set a new baseline for generalist vision and language models. The demo shall be released based on https://github.com/OpenGVLab/InternGPT. The code shall be released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/VisionLLM., Comment: Technical Report

Action detection is a challenging video understanding task, requiring modeling spatio-temporal and interaction relations. Current methods usually model actor-actor and actor-context relations separately, ignoring their complementarity and mutual support. To solve this problem, we propose a novel network called Multi-Relation Support Network (MRSN). In MRSN, Actor-Context Relation Encoder (ACRE) and Actor-Actor Relation Encoder (AARE) model the actor-context and actor-actor relation separately. Then Relation Support Encoder (RSE) computes the supports between the two relations and performs relation-level interactions. Finally, Relation Consensus Module (RCM) enhances two relations with the long-term relations from the Long-term Relation Bank (LRB) and yields a consensus. Our experiments demonstrate that modeling relations separately and performing relation-level interactions can achieve and outperformer state-of-the-art results on two challenging video datasets: AVA and UCF101-24., Comment: 6 pages

Supplementary Material 6

The combination of audio and vision has long been a topic of interest in the multi-modal community. Recently, a new audio-visual segmentation (AVS) task has been introduced, aiming to locate and segment the sounding objects in a given video. This task demands audio-driven pixel-level scene understanding for the first time, posing significant challenges. In this paper, we propose AVSegFormer, a novel framework for AVS tasks that leverages the transformer architecture. Specifically, we introduce audio queries and learnable queries into the transformer decoder, enabling the network to selectively attend to interested visual features. Besides, we present an audio-visual mixer, which can dynamically adjust visual features by amplifying relevant and suppressing irrelevant spatial channels. Additionally, we devise an intermediate mask loss to enhance the supervision of the decoder, encouraging the network to produce more accurate intermediate predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AVSegFormer achieves state-of-the-art results on the AVS benchmark. The code is available at https://github.com/vvvb-github/AVSegFormer., Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures

Supplementary Material 3

Quercetin (QUE) is a widely studied nutraceutical with a number of potential therapeutic properties. Although QUE is abundant in the plant kingdom, its poor solubility (≤20 μg/mL) and poor oral bioavailability have impeded its potential utility and clinical development. In this context, cocrystallization has emerged as a useful method for improving the physicochemical properties of biologically active molecules. We herein report a novel cocrystal of the nutraceutical quercetin (QUE) with the coformer pentoxifylline (PTF) and a solvate of a previously reported structure between QUE and betaine (BET). We also report the outcomes of in vitro and in vivo studies of QUE release and absorption from a panel of QUE cocrystals: betaine (BET), theophylline (THP), l-proline (PRO), and novel QUEPTF. All cocrystals were found to exhibit an improvement in the dissolution rate of QUE. Further, the QUE plasma levels in Sprague–Dawley rats showed a 64-, 27-, 10- and 7-fold increase in oral bioavailability for QUEBET·MeOH, QUEPTF, QUEPRO, and QUETHP, respectively, compared to QUE anhydrate. We rationalize our in vivo and in vitro findings as the result of dissolution–supersaturation–precipitation behavior.

Supplementary Material 5

Supplementary Material 4

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are considered biofertilizers for sustainable agriculture due to their ability to facilitate plant uptake of important mineral elements, such as nitrogen (N). However, plant mycorrhiza-dependent N uptake and interplant transfer may be highly context-dependent, and whether it is affected by aboveground herbivory remains largely unknown. Here, we used 15N labeling and tracking to examine the effect of aboveground insect herbivory by Spodoptera frugiperda on mycorrhiza-dependent N uptake in maize (Zea mays L.). To minimize consumption differences and 15N loss due to insect chewing, insect herbivory was simulated by mechanical wounding and oral secretion of S. frugiperda larvae. Inoculation with Rhizophagus irregularis (Rir) significantly improved maize growth, and N/P uptake. The 15N labeling experiment showed that maize plants absorbed N from soils via the extraradical mycelium of mycorrhizal fungi and from neighboring plants transferred by common mycorrhizal networks (CMNs). Simulated aboveground leaf herbivory did not affect mycorrhiza-mediated N acquisition from soil. However, CMN-mediated N transfer from neighboring plants was blocked by leaf simulated herbivory. Our findings suggest that aboveground herbivory inhibits CMN-mediated N transfer between plants but does not affect N acquisition from soil solutions via extraradical mycorrhizal mycelium.

To observe the effect of navel acupuncture on bladder emptying function in patients with urinary retention after stroke based on the conventional treatment.A total of 106 patients with urinary retention after stroke were randomly divided into an observation group (53 cases, 3 cases dropped off) and a control group (53 cases, 3 cases dropped off). Patients in the control group were treated with drugs, catheterization and bladder function rehabilitation training. On the basis of the treatment in the control group, the observation group was treated with navel acupuncture, 30 min each time, once every other day, for 4 weeks. The bladder residual urine volume, spontaneous urination volume and catheterization times before and after treatment were compared between the two groups, and the clinical efficacy was evaluated.After treatment, in the two groups, the bladder residual urine volume and catheterization times were lower than those before treatment (On the basis of conventional treatment, navel acupuncture can effectively improve the bladder emptying function of patients with urinary retention after stroke.

A prism-shaped cage was obtained via the Friedel-Crafts reaction in a 2:3 mixture of trisfuryl and bis-isopropenyl precursors, in a remarkable yield of 40% considering six C-C bonds formed in a one-pot manner. The cage contains two π-electron rich trisfuryl platforms bridged in a face-to-face manner with three

There is an urgent need to develop flexible yarn-type supercapacitors with excellent electrochemical and mechanical properties for flexible energy storage devices in portable and wearable electronics. In this study, graphene oxide (GO) nanosheets and polyacrylonitrile (PAN)-GO nanofibres were coated on the surface of Ni-plated cotton yarn (NCY) via conjugate electrospinning technology, followed by chemical deposition of a polypyrrole (PPy) layer through in situ polymerisation of pyrrole, obtaining a flexible wearable PPy@GO/PAN-GO@Ni-coated cotton core-spun yarn (PGPG/NCY) electrode. The synergetic effect of NCY, GO/PAN-GO nanofibres, and PPy nanoparticles imparted a hierarchically porous structure, good conductivity, and high tensile strength (71.43 MPa) to this electrode. A flexible symmetric all-solid-state two-ply yarn supercapacitor based on PGPG/NCY electrodes was assembled. This yarn supercapacitor exhibited a high areal specific capacitance (28.34 mF cm−2) and high energy density (3.98 μWh cm−2), which are superior to those of other yarn supercapacitors. The capacitance retention of this yarn supercapacitor remained at 90.2% after 1000 cyclic voltammetry cycles and 100% at different bending angles; the yarn supercapacitor exhibited high electrochemical performance and cycling stability. Thus, the proposed high-performance yarn supercapacitor based on PGPG/NCY electrodes is promising and widely applicable in wearable devices.

Thirty-one new 4H-chromene derivatives were designed and synthesized. Their structures were identified with IR, 1H NMR, 13C NMR, and HRMS. The crystal structure of compound 2a was determined by single-crystal X-ray diffraction. Their antifungal activities were evaluated against Pyricularia oryzae, Erysiphe graminis, Coniella diplodiella, Pseudoperonospora cubensis, and Sclerotinia sclerotiorum. These results demonstrated that most compounds exhibited remarkable inhibitory activities at 20 μg/mL. Compounds 4b and 4c displayed excellent antifungal activity against S. sclerotiorum and possessed better efficacy than fluopyram. At the same time, the inhibitory activity of the bioactive compounds was evaluated against succinate dehydrogenase (SDH). The results showed that these compounds possessed outstanding activity. Compounds 4b and 4c displayed better inhibitory activity than fluopyram. The molecular modeling results revealed that compound 4c had stronger affinity to SDH than fluopyram. It is the first time that the inhibitory activity of 4H-chromene analogs against SDH has been reported.

This study mainly explored the effects of low-concentration salts (0.1, 0.5 mM NaCl and Na2 SO4 ) on the gel, rheological and structural properties of fish gelatin (FG)-κ-carrageenan (κC) polyelectrolyte hydrogels. The results showed that κC could increase the gel strength, hardness, and chewiness of the FG-κC polyelectrolyte hydrogels, while the addition of salts had a negative effect. The rheological behaviors showed that the addition of salts reduced the apparent viscosity, gel, and melting points of the FG-κC polyelectrolyte hydrogels. Compared with NaCl, Na2 SO4 -treated FG-κC had lower gel strength, hardness, viscosity, gelation, and melting points, while the addition of salts increased the fluorescence intensity by unfolding FG molecules. The secondary structure analysis results showed that the addition of NaCl and Na2 SO4 decreased α-helix and β-sheet contents of FG-κC by destroying the hydrogen bond of FG-κC.

Incremental few-shot semantic segmentation (IFSS) targets at incrementally expanding model's capacity to segment new class of images supervised by only a few samples. However, features learned on old classes could significantly drift, causing catastrophic forgetting. Moreover, few samples for pixel-level segmentation on new classes lead to notorious overfitting issues in each learning session. In this paper, we explicitly represent class-based knowledge for semantic segmentation as a category embedding and a hyper-class embedding, where the former describes exclusive semantical properties, and the latter expresses hyper-class knowledge as class-shared semantic properties. Aiming to solve IFSS problems, we present EHNet, i.e., Embedding adaptive-update and Hyper-class representation Network from two aspects. First, we propose an embedding adaptive-update strategy to avoid feature drift, which maintains old knowledge by hyper-class representation, and adaptively update category embeddings with a class-attention scheme to involve new classes learned in individual sessions. Second, to resist overfitting issues caused by few training samples, a hyper-class embedding is learned by clustering all category embeddings for initialization and aligned with category embedding of the new class for enhancement, where learned knowledge assists to learn new knowledge, thus alleviating performance dependence on training data scale. Significantly, these two designs provide representation capability for classes with sufficient semantics and limited biases, enabling to perform segmentation tasks requiring high semantic dependence. Experiments on PASCAL-5i and COCO datasets show that EHNet achieves new state-of-the-art performance with remarkable advantages.

Herein, we report the self-assembly of an anionic homochiral octahedral cage by condensing six Ga3+ cations and four trisacylhydrazone ligands. The robust nature of the hydrazone bond renders the cage stable in water, where it can take advantage of the hydrophobic effect for host-guest recognition. In addition to the internal binding site, namely, the inner cavity, the octahedral cage possesses four "windows", each of which represents an external binding site allowing peripheral complexation. These internal and external binding sites endow the cage with the capability to bind a broad range of guests whose sizes could either be smaller than or exceed the volume of the cage's inner cavity. Upon accommodation of a chiral guest, one of the two cage enantiomers becomes more favored than the other, producing circular-dichroism (CD) signals. The CD signal intensity of the cage is observed to be proportional to the ee value of the chiral guest, allowing a quantitative determination of the latter.

Immunological detection of small molecules in a point-of-care (POC) format is of great significance yet remains challenging for accurate visual discrimination and quantitative analysis. Here, we report a novel hue recognition competitive fluorescent lateral flow immunoassay (HCLFIA) strip that allows both visual and quantitative detection of aflatoxin M

Panoptic segmentation involves a combination of joint semantic segmentation and instance segmentation, where image contents are divided into two types: things and stuff. We present Panoptic SegFormer, a general framework for panoptic segmentation with transformers. It contains three innovative components: an efficient deeply-supervised mask decoder, a query decoupling strategy, and an improved post-processing method. We also use Deformable DETR to efficiently process multi-scale features, which is a fast and efficient version of DETR. Specifically, we supervise the attention modules in the mask decoder in a layer-wise manner. This deep supervision strategy lets the attention modules quickly focus on meaningful semantic regions. It improves performance and reduces the number of required training epochs by half compared to Deformable DETR. Our query decoupling strategy decouples the responsibilities of the query set and avoids mutual interference between things and stuff. In addition, our post-processing strategy improves performance without additional costs by jointly considering classification and segmentation qualities to resolve conflicting mask overlaps. Our approach increases the accuracy 6.2\% PQ over the baseline DETR model. Panoptic SegFormer achieves state-of-the-art results on COCO test-dev with 56.2\% PQ. It also shows stronger zero-shot robustness over existing methods. The code is released at \url{https://github.com/zhiqi-li/Panoptic-SegFormer}., Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2022

BACKGROUND Co-morbidity of SRY gene turner syndrome (TS) with positive SRY gene and non-classical congenital adrenal hyperplasia (NCAH) is extremely rare and has never been reported to date. CASE SUMMARY In this article, we present a 14-year-old girl who was referred to our hospital with short stature (weight of 43 kg and height of 143 cm, < -2 SD) with no secondary sexual characteristics (labia minora dysplasia). Laboratory tests indicated hypergonadotropic hypogonadism with significantly increased androstenedione and 17-hydroxyprogesterone (17-OHP) levels. This was accompanied by the thickening of the extremity of the left adrenal medial limb. The patient’s karyotype was 45,X/46,X, +mar, and cytogenetic analysis using multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification and high-throughput sequencing indicated that the SRY gene was positive with compound heterozygous mutations in CYP21A2 as the causative gene for congenital adrenal hyperplasia. The sites of the suspected candidate mutations were amplified and verified using Sanger sequencing. The patient was finally diagnosed as having SRY positive TS with NCAH. The patient and her family initially refused medical treatment. At her most recent follow-up visit (age = 15 years old), the patient presented facial hair, height increase to 148 cm, and weight of 52 kg, while androstenedione and 17-OHP levels remained high. The patient was finally willing to take small doses of hydrocortisone (10 mg/d). CONCLUSION In conclusion, upon evaluation of the patient mentioned in the report, we feel that 17-OHP measurement and cytogenetic analysis are necessary for TS patients even in the absence of significant virilization signs. This will play a significant role in guiding diagnosis and treatment.

Adsorption is one of the most promising methods for gaseous mercury (Hg0) uptake from industrial flue gas, and the designing and synthesis of a sorbent are of significance for utilization. However,...

Condensation of an inherently C3 -symmetric polychlorotriphenylmethyl (PTM) radical trisaldehyde with tris(2-aminoethyl)amine (TREN) yields a [4+4] tetrahedral radical cage as a racemic pair of homochiral enantiomers in 75 % isolated yield. The structure was characterized by X-ray crystallography, confirming the homochirality of each cage framework. The homochirality results from intramolecular [CH⋅⋅⋅π] and hydrogen-bonding interactions within the cage framework. The four PTM radicals in a cage undergo weak through-space coupling. Magnetic measurements demonstrated that each cage bears 3.58 spins.

Alpha-sheet is believed to be a significant structural compo-nent, formed in the fibrillation process of the amyloid pep-tide. However, the knowledge about the role of a-sheet played in the amyloidosis and toxicity is lack. In this work, we modi-fied a short peptide derived from the core region of human islet amyloid polypetide(hIAPP, hIAPP18–27) with an alternating D-amino acid replacement and investigated the effects of the L/D alternating peptide on the fibrillar aggregation and the membrane damage of hIAPP using NMR, ThT fluorescence assay, circular dichroism(CD), transmission electron microscopy(TEM) and leakage assay, and com-pared the results with those of hIAPP18–27 without D-amino acid re-placement. We show that the short peptide with alternating L- and D-amino acids forms an a-sheet structure and is more potent in pro-moting the fibrillation of hIAPP and reducing the ability of hIAPP to disrupt the membrane composed of POPG and POPC[1-palmitoyl-2-oleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phospho-(1′-rac-glycerol) and 1-palmitoyl-2-oleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine] 1:4 lipids than the short pep-tide with all L-amino acids in a random coil structure. The higher po-tency of the D/L alternating peptide in these activities is attributed to its ability to induce the a-sheet-like structure in the core region of hIAPP and block the interaction of hIAPP with the membrane more effectively.

By performing Friedel-Crafts reaction with a mixture of 1,3,5-tri(furan-2-yl) benzene (TFB) and acetone, we successfully synthesized a cylinder-shaped macrocycle. The isolated yield of 36% is relatively high, considering that twelve C-C bonds are formed simultaneously. The structure of this macrocycle was confirmed using 1H NMR spectroscopy, mass spectrometry and X-ray crystallography. This macrocycle is able to recognize a variety of cationic guests driven by cation-dipole and CH-π interactions.

Background: Osteoporosis is the most common bone metabolic disease. Abnormal osteoclast formation and resorption play a fundamental role in osteoporosis pathogenesis. Recent researches have greatly broadened our understanding of molecular mechanisms of osteoporosis. However, the molecular mechanisms leading to osteoporosis are still not entirely clear. Objective: The purpose of this work is to study the critical regulatory genes, functional modules, and signaling pathways. Methods: Differential expression analysis, network topology-based analysis, and overrepresentation enrichment analysis (ORA) were used to identify differentially expressed genes (DEGs), gene subnetworks, and signaling pathways related to osteoporosis, respectively. Results: Differential expression analysis identified DEGs, such as POGLUT1, DAPK3 and NFKBIA, associated with osteoclastogenesis, which highlighted Notch, apoptosis and NF-kB signaling pathways. Network topology-based analysis identified the upregulated subnetwork characterized by EXOSC8 and DIS3L from the RNA exosome complex, and the downregulated subnetwork composed of histone deacetylases and the cofactors, MORF4L1 and JDP2. Furthermore, the overrepresentation enrichment analysis highlighted that corticotrophin-releasing hormone signaling pathway might affect osteoclastogenesis through its component NR4A1, and suppressing osteoclast differentiation and osteoclast bone resorption with urocortin (UCN). Conclusion: Our systematic analysis not only discovered novel molecular mechanisms but also proposed potential drug targets for osteoporosis.

Layered oxide materials are regarded to be the most promising high-performance cathode materials for sodium-ion batteries owing to their high working voltage and facile synthesis. Here, we study the influences of 3d transition metals on the cohesive energies, structural changes and operating voltages of P2-Na