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Arsenic can induce apoptosis, and its mechanism is being studied extensively. TNFR family members has gradually attracted the attention of researchers, called as death receptors and induce apoptosis. Some studies have shown that TNFR participates in arsenic-stimulated apoptosis, but some researchers believe that TNFR does not induce apoptosis. Therefore, we conducted a meta-analysis to evaluate this relationship to provide a reference for the prevention of arsenic poisoning.

Learning accurate object detectors often requires large-scale training data with precise object bounding boxes. However, labeling such data is expensive and time-consuming. As the crowd-sourcing labeling process and the ambiguities of the objects may raise noisy bounding box annotations, the object detectors will suffer from the degenerated training data. In this work, we aim to address the challenge of learning robust object detectors with inaccurate bounding boxes. Inspired by the fact that localization precision suffers significantly from inaccurate bounding boxes while classification accuracy is less affected, we propose leveraging classification as a guidance signal for refining localization results. Specifically, by treating an object as a bag of instances, we introduce an Object-Aware Multiple Instance Learning approach (OA-MIL), featured with object-aware instance selection and object-aware instance extension. The former aims to select accurate instances for training, instead of directly using inaccurate box annotations. The latter focuses on generating high-quality instances for selection. Extensive experiments on synthetic noisy datasets (i.e., noisy PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO) and a real noisy wheat head dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our OA-MIL. Code is available at https://github.com/cxliu0/OA-MIL., Comment: Accepted by ECCV 2022

Additional file 2: Figure S1. Detection of full-length APP levels in the patients’ CSF by western blot.

It is crucial to understand the robustness of text detection models with regard to extensive corruptions, since scene text detection techniques have many practical applications. For systematically exploring this problem, we propose two datasets from which to evaluate scene text detection models: ICDAR2015-C (IC15-C) and CTW1500-C (CTW-C). Our study extends the investigation of the performance and robustness of the proposed region proposal, regression and segmentation-based scene text detection frameworks. Furthermore, we perform a robustness analysis of six key components: pre-training data, backbone, feature fusion module, multi-scale predictions, representation of text instances and loss function. Finally, we present a simple yet effective data-based method to destroy the smoothness of text regions by merging background and foreground, which can significantly increase the robustness of different text detection networks. We hope that this study will provide valid data points as well as experience for future research. Benchmark, code and data will be made available at \url{https://github.com/wushilian/robust-scene-text-detection-benchmark}.

Supplementary file1 (DOCX 1179 KB)

One new coumarin, muralatin R, was isolated from the leaves of Murraya alata Drake (Rutaceae). Its structure was elucidated by extensive analysis of the NMR and MS data, along with the specific rotation comparison. Muralatin R was found to be capable of activating the transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) channel through desensitization mechanism. The results supply reference for clarification of the therapeutic basis and mechanism of action of Murraya plants for treating psychogenic pain or somatoform pain disorders.

Divalent cations Mg(2+) and Ba(2+) selectively and directly potentiate transient receptor potential vanilloid type 1 heat activation by lowering the activation threshold into the room temperature range. We found that Mg(2+) potentiates channel activation only from the extracellular side; on the intracellular side, Mg(2+) inhibits channel current. By dividing the extracellularly accessible region of the channel protein into small segments and perturbing the structure of each segment with sequence replacement mutations, we observed that the S1-S2 linker, the S3-S4 linker, and the pore turret are all required for Mg(2+) potentiation. Sequence replacements at these regions substantially reduced or eliminated Mg(2+)-induced activation at room temperature while sparing capsaicin activation. Heat activation was affected by many, but not all, of these structural alternations. These observations indicate that extracellular linkers and the turret may interact with each other. Site-directed fluorescence resonance energy transfer measurements further revealed that, like heat, Mg(2+) also induces structural changes in the pore turret. Interestingly, turret movement induced by Mg(2+) precedes channel activation, suggesting that Mg(2+)-induced conformational change in the extracellular region most likely serves as the cause of channel activation instead of a coincidental or accommodating structural adjustment.

Nanomaterials have been heavily studied in the past two decades. Previous findings have demonstrated that the characteristics of nanocomposites and the performance of nanomaterial-based devices are both determined by the interfacial characteristics of the nanomaterials. However, there are still some remaining challenges from interfacial characteristics to device applications, which are specified as follows: the difficulty in identifying the interfacial contacts of nanostructured surfaces, the instability of nanocomposite surfaces, and the under-researched mechanism of the correlation between interfacial characteristics and the performance of devices. Therefore, the main theme of this thesis is to investigate the interfacial contacts of nanostructured solid-liquid interfaces by direct observation, and to develop a stable nanocomposite based on which the direct observation of the interfacial contact can be better conducted, and to eventually investigate the effect of interfacial contacts on the performance of organic solar cells. As the previous identification of the solid-liquid interface is limited to a microscale range, a direct method of tracing the different wetting states of water was developed, on nanostructured surfaces. This method provided an answer to a long standing question of, whether there is a transition from Wenzel to Cassie states in the sliding angle drop on nanocomposite thin films. In order to complete the observation of the wetting states of water, a stable superhydrophobic nanocomposite thin film with hierarchical structure was developed. Furthermore, with the knowledge of identifying the wetting states and the preparing procedures of the nanocomposites, a surfactant-free small-molecule nanoparticle organic solar cell with a much improved fill factor was developed by spin coating. The inverse correlation of series resistance and parallel resistance was discovered, due to the morphology change and the variation of the charge carrier concentration near the donor-acceptor interface in small-molecule organic solar cells. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Rats were fed on a severely iodine deficient diet (iodine content 4.5 micrograms/100 g) similar to that being consumed by people living in a village with a high rate of endemic cretinism. After a period of 4 months, the thyroid and brain were studied in the adult and their fetuses at 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20 days of gestation, and in postnatal animals at 1, 5, 10, 20, 30 and 60 days of age. By comparison with a control group (diet with iodine content 54.7 micrograms/100 g) the experimental group showed marked goitres, a higher uptake of 125I by the thyroid, reduced serum T4, and reduction in brain weight. The cerebral and cerebellar histological findings showed that the density of brain cells had increased, and the mean neuron size was reduced. Furthermore, disappearance of the cerebellar EGL was delayed. These findings indicate that this animal model is likely to be suitable for the studies of endemic cretinism in man.

Disturbances of the sleep-wake cycle are highly prevalent and diverse. The aetiology of some sleep disorders, such as circadian rhythm sleep-wake disorders, is understood at the conceptual level of the circadian and homeostatic regulation of sleep and in part at a mechanistic level. Other disorders such as insomnia are more difficult to relate to sleep regulatory mechanisms or sleep physiology. To further our understanding of sleep-wake disorders and the potential of novel therapeutics, we discuss recent findings on the neurobiology of sleep regulation and circadian rhythmicity and its relation with the subjective experience of sleep and the quality of wakefulness. Sleep continuity and to some extent REM sleep emerge as determinants of subjective sleep quality and waking performance. The effects of insufficient sleep primarily concern subjective and objective sleepiness as well as vigilant attention, whereas performance on higher cognitive functions appears to be better preserved albeit at the cost of increased effort. We discuss age-related, sex and other trait-like differences in sleep physiology and sleep need and compare the effects of existing pharmacological and non-pharmacological sleep- and wake-promoting treatments. Successful non-pharmacological approaches such as sleep restriction for insomnia and light and melatonin treatment for circadian rhythm sleep disorders target processes such as sleep homeostasis or circadian rhythmicity. Most pharmacological treatments of sleep disorders target specific signalling pathways with no well-established role in either sleep homeostasis or circadian rhythmicity. Pharmacological sleep therapeutics induce changes in sleep structure and the sleep EEG which are specific to the mechanism of action of the drug. Sleep- and wake-promoting therapeutics often induce residual effects on waking performance and sleep, respectively. The need for novel therapeutic approaches continues not at least because of the societal demand to sleep and be awake out of synchrony with the natural light-dark cycle, the high prevalence of sleep-wake disturbances in mental health disorders and in neurodegeneration. Novel approaches, which will provide a more comprehensive description of sleep and allow for large-scale sleep and circadian physiology studies in the home environment, hold promise for continued improvement of therapeutics for disturbances of sleep, circadian rhythms and waking performance.