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Abstract: The interactions between the cytokine interleukin (IL)-15 and the classical neurotransmitter GABA have been shown in IL15Rα receptor knockout mice by observations of memory deficits and reduction of GABA. To test the hypothesis that IL15 affects anxiety-like behavior, knockout mice without IL15, IL15Rα, or the co-receptor IL2Rγ were subjected to open-field and elevated plus maze tests. All three strains showed reduction of anxiety, with greater changes in the IL15Rα knockout mice than in the IL15 or IL2Rγ knockout mice. This unexpected observation is opposite to the reported increase of anxiety in mice lacking other proinflammatory cytokines or their receptors. The reduced anxiety was not associated with changes in associated serum cytokines. However, Western blotting, qPCR, and immunohistochemistry all showed that IL15Rα knockout mice had mild microgliosis and astrogliosis in the hippocampus. To determine whether this gliosis plays a role in decreasing anxiety, IL15Rα knockout mice were treated with minocycline, but this did not cause a change in open field performance. To determine whether IL15 plays a direct role in anxiety, wildtype mice were treated with IL15 by intraperitoneal injection. This also failed to cause a change in open field behavior under the experimental conditions tested. Thus, IL15Rα is essential for normal anxiety-like behavior, but inhibition of gliosis in the fearless IL15Rα knockout mice or IL15 treatment of normal mice did not acutely modulate behavioral performance as tested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

STM experiments in combination with DFT calculations demonstrate that the submonolayer Cu adlayer on Pt(1 1 1) has ideal bifunction in simultaneously activating both O 2 and CO. The Cu/Pt interface is identified as the active sites for the CO oxidation reaction. [Display omitted] • This work reports the first STM experiment of the adsorption and/or reaction of CO and O 2 on the Cu/Pt bimetallic surface. • High resolution STM directly observes that on Cu-Pt alloyed surface the adsorption of CO and O 2 are both significantly reduced. • Submonolayer Cu film on Pt shows extremely high activity to dissociate O 2 while the Pt region concomitantly preserves strong binding to CO. • The Cu/Pt interface serves as active sites for both O 2 dissociation and CO oxidation reactions. Considering the high activity in CO oxidation as well as the related reactions, the surface structure of Cu/Pt bimetallic system and its interaction with CO and O 2 molecules have been revisited with low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) in combination with density-functional theory calculations (DFT). The extensively concerned Cu/Pt subsurface alloy (Cu-SSA) is clearly demonstrated with relative deactivation to CO and drastically weakened binding to O. In contrast, the submonolayer Cu film on Pt(1 1 1) manifests a significant enhancement in activating the O 2 molecules while reserving the strong binding to CO at the uncovered Pt area. Detailed control experiments corroborated by DFT calculations revealed that the Cu/Pt interface serves as the critical sites for both O 2 activation and the CO oxidation reaction. Therefore, the submonolayer Cu film may register a more promising catalyst structure than the Cu-SSA configuration for the Cu/Pt bimetallic system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A high number of cancer-related deaths (up to 90) are due to metastasis and simple definition of metastasis is new colony formation of tumor cells in a secondary site. In tumor cells, epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) stimulates metastasis and invasion, and it is a common characteristic of malignant tumors. Prostate cancer, bladder cancer and renal cancer are three main types of urological tumors that their malignant and aggressive behaviors are due to abnormal proliferation and metastasis. EMT has been well-documented as a mechanism for promoting invasion of tumor cells and in the current review, a special attention is directed towards understanding role of EMT in malignancy, metastasis and therapy response of urological cancers. The invasion and metastatic characteristics of urological tumors enhance due to EMT induction and this is essential for ensuring survival and ability in developing new colonies in neighboring and distant tissues and organs. When EMT induction occurs, malignant behavior of tumor cells enhances and their tend in developing therapy resistance especially chemoresistance promotes that is one of the underlying reasons for therapy failure and patient death. The lncRNAs, microRNAs, eIF5A2, Notch-4 and hypoxia are among common modulators of EMT mechanism in urological tumors. Moreover, anti-tumor compounds such as metformin can be utilized in suppressing malignancy of urological tumors. Besides, genes and epigenetic factors modulating EMT mechanism can be therapeutically targeted for interfering malignancy of urological tumors. Nanomaterials are new emerging agents in urological cancer therapy that they can improve potential of current therapeutics by their targeted delivery to tumor site. The important hallmarks of urological cancers including growth, invasion and angiogenesis can be suppressed by cargo-loaded nanomaterials. Moreover, nanomaterials can improve chemotherapy potential in urological cancer elimination and by providing phototherapy, they mediate synergistic tumor suppression. The clinical application depends on development of biocompatible nanomaterials. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe a new no-reference blur index for still images based on a singular value curve (SVC). The algorithm is composed of two steps. First, the singular value decomposition is performed on the image to be blur-assessed. Then an image blur index is constructed from the singular value curve. Experimental results obtained on four simulated blur databases and on the Real Blur Image Database show that the proposed SVC algorithm achieves high correlation against human judgments when assessing the blur distortion of images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enhanced comprehensive performances of piezoelectric and temperature stability are obtained in 0.725Bi 1.05 Fe x O 3 -0.275BaTiO 3 -0.3%MnO 2 ceramics via tuning nonstoichiometric Fe content. The Fe content strongly affects the phase structure of ceramics, which possess rhombohedral-pseudocubic coexistence structure, boosting the high piezoelectricity in this system. The optimal comprehensive performances of ceramics are obtained at x ​= ​0.98 with a relatively large piezoelectricity (d 33 ∼158 ​pC/N) as well as a high Curie temperature (T C ∼523 ​°C). We found that the deficiency of Fe content gives rise to diffused phase boundary and oxygen vacancies, which induces strong thermal stability over a wide temperature range in the composition. This work discloses the Fe content play an important role in the crystal structure of BF-based materials. We expect that the investigation on nonstoinchiometry of Fe will lead an effective method to develop high-performance BiFeO 3 -based ceramics for lead-free electronic applications. [Display omitted] • The influence of doped Fe content in BF-BT ceramics on crystal structure has been investigated through the Rietvled refinement, especially on the distortion degree of phase. • The effect of Fe content on microstructure, especially the temperature stability of domain structure, was studied. • The BF x -BT-Mn ceramics have huge potential for application because of its excellent piezoelectric properties and high Curie temperature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dance action recognition is a hot research topic in computer vision. However, current skeleton-based action recognition methods face difficulties in capturing the adequate spatial structure and temporal variations of dance actions, resulting in lower recognition accuracy. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Fusion Adaptive Graph Transformer network (HFA-GTNet) for dance action recognition. A Hierarchical Spatial Attention (HSAtt) module is designed to extract different levels of spatial feature information from joint to parts to group, it can effectively learn high-order dependency relationships from local joints to global poses in dance actions. Secondly, to extract the joint variations in dance actions at different speeds, we have designed a Temporal Fusion Attention (TFAtt) module. This module learns the short-term and long-term temporal dependencies among joints across frames. Additionally, to capture the variations in motion patterns and dance styles among different dancers, we introduce an Adaptive Component (AdaptC). Finally, we evaluate our model on two self-built dance datasets, MSDanceAction and InDanceAction, and demonstrate its superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods in dance action recognition. • A novel attention mechanism is designed to model spatial correlations. • A three-branch module is proposed to capture temporal relations among all frames. • An component is introduced to handle the spatial and temporal variations. • Two different types dance action datasets are constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous deep learning-based single image dehazing methods are implemented by using real-valued convolutional neural network (RV-CNN), which ignore the phase information of the image, and tend to cause models to perform well on synthetic datasets but low generalization on real-world datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel Complex-Valued convolutional Dehazing Network (CVD-Net), which considers both amplitude and phase information of image for haze removal in real-world scenes. Specifically, we construct complex-valued transformation module, including complex-valued convolutional layer and residual block embedded into the middle of the network to extract features of image efficiently, and also design a complex-valued selected fusion module (CVSF) and complex-valued attention module (CVAM) to promote the interaction between different scale features for preserving image detailed information. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results show that the proposed CVD-Net can effectively remove the haze, and has good generalization in real-world hazy images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract CD4+ T cells, especially T-helper (Th) cells (Th1, Th2 and Th17) and regulatory T cells (Treg) play pivotal role in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis (MS), a demyelinating autoimmune disease occurring in central nervous system (CNS). Astragaloside IV (ASI, CAS: 84687-43-4) is one of the saponins isolated from Astragalus membranceus , a traditional Chinese medicine with immunomodulatory effect. So far, whether ASI has curative effect on experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), an animal model of MS, and how it affects the subsets of CD4+ T cells, as well as the underlying mechanism have not been clearly elucidated. In the present study, ASI was found to ameliorate the progression and hamper the recurrence of EAE effectively in the treatment regimens. It significantly reduced the demyelination and inflammatory infiltration of CNS in EAE mice by suppressing the percentage of Th1 and Th17 cells, which was closely associated with the inhibition of JAK/STAT and NF-κB signaling pathways. ASI also increased the percentage of Treg cells in spleen and CNS, which was accompanied by elevated Foxp3. However, in vitro experiments disclosed that ASI could regulate the differentiation of Th17 and Treg cells but not Th1 cells. In addition, it induced the apoptosis of MOG-stimulated CD4+ T cells probably through modulating STAT3/Bcl-2/Bax signaling pathways. Together, our findings suggested that ASI can modulate the differentiation of autoreactive CD4+ T cells and is a potential prodrug or drug for the treatment of MS and other similar autoimmune diseases. Highlights • ASI ameliorated EAE effectively in the treatment regimens. • ASI benefited chronic and relapsing-remitting EAE. • ASI regulated the differentiation of Th17 and Treg but not Th1 cells. • ASI induced apoptosis of MOG-stimulated CD4+ T cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graphical abstract Highlights • Pd 1 SAC exhibits expressively high butenes selectivity. • Hydrogenation reactions follows the pseudo Horiuti-Polanyi mechanism. • 1,3-butadiene adsorbs on Pd 1 in a mono-π mode, distinct from that on Pd bulk. • The proximity O atom is found to be crucial for facilitating H 2 dissociation. Abstract Supported metal single-atom catalysts (SACs) with maximized metal atom efficiency and unique catalytic properties have drawn tremendous attention in the catalysis field. In this work, we reported that in selective hydrogenation of 1,3-butadiene, graphene supported Pd 1 single atoms, synthesized by atomic layer deposition, exhibited expressively 100% butenes selectivity at 100% conversion at near ambient temperature, regardless of hydrogen partial pressures. The hydrogen reaction order was found to be about 1.2, indicating that hydrogenation dissociation is the rate-determining step. Combining with other structural characterization techniques, in situ X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy suggests that the Pd 1 single atom likely bonds to the graphene support through three Pd C and one Pd O C coordinations. Density functional theory calculations show that 1,3-butadiene adsorbs on Pd 1 via a mono-π adsorption mode (−0.98 eV), much stronger than that of H 2 (−0.30 eV), which makes Pd 1 to be predominantly covered with a 1,3-butadiene molecule during reaction, consistent very well with the results of H-D exchange reaction. Facilitated by the bridging O atom in the Pd O C coordination, H 2 dissociates at the 1,3-butadiene covered Pd 1 atom in the heterolytic way, then hydrogenates the adsorbed 1,3-butadiene molecule by following the pseudo Horiuti-Polanyi mechanism. Distinct from its adsorption on extended Pd surfaces, such mono-π adsorption of 1,3-butadiene on Pd 1 favors 1-butene formation, but impedes the secondary hydrogenation to butane owing to intensified steric hindrance, thus yielding the expressively high butenes selectivity over Pd 1 SAC. These findings pave a new way to rational design SACs catalyst in selective hydrogenation reactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spinel nickel ferrite (NiFe 2 O 4 ) emerges as a promising low-cost catalyst for water splitting but it usually shows low catalytic activity because of its limited number of active sites and poor conductivity. For the first time, herein we have successfully overcome its weaknesses using defect engineering approach by creating oxygen vacancies in NiFe 2 O 4 . The existence of oxygen vacancy not only shifts up the d-band center, strengthens the adsorption of H 2 O, and thus provides more active catalytic sites, but also tunes the electron configuration and creates massive number of defective donor states in the band gap to facilitate charge transfer processes. The optimal defective catalyst showed significantly enhanced catalytic OER performance with an OER overpotential as low as 0.35 V at 10 mA cm −2 and a Tafel slope of only ∼40 mV dec −1 . Moreover, the impressive specific mass and area current density of 17.5 A g −1 and 0.106 A m −2 at 1.58 V vs. RHE have been achieved, which are ∼23 and ∼36 times higher than that of defect-free counterpart, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Endothelial cells of cerebral microvessels are one of the components of blood-brain-barrier (BBB), which are connected by tight junctions (TJs). BBB disruption in cerebral diseases such as ischemic stroke, Alzhemer's disease, multiple sclerosis and traumatic brain injury is implicated to exacerbate the disease progression. Astragaloside IV (ASIV) isolated from Astragalus membranaceus prevents BBB breakdown in rodents induced with cerebral edema and experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis. However, its underlying molecular mechanism has not been elucidated yet. In present study, ASIV was found to prevent the leakage of BBB in LPS-induced mice, which was accompanied with increased zo-1 and occludin but reduced VCAM-1 in brain microvessels. Similarly, in brain endothelial cell line bEnd.3 cells, ASIV mitigated the increased permeability induced by LPS, as evidenced by increased TEER and reduced sodium fluorescein extravasation. ASIV also enhanced the expression of TJ proteins such as zo-1, occludin and claudin-5 in LPS stimulated bEnd.3 cells. Meanwhile, it inhibited the inflammatory responses and prevented the monocyte adhesion onto bEnd.3 cells upon LPS stimulation. Further study disclosed that ASIV could alleviate ROS level and activate Nrf2 antioxidant pathway in bEnd.3 cells. When Nrf2 was silenced, the protective effect of ASIV was abolished. In brain microvessels of LPS-induced mice, ASIV also enhanced the expression of Nrf2 antioxidant pathway related proteins. Collectively, our results demonstrated that ASIV protected the integrity of BBB in LPS-induced mice, the mechanism of which might be mediated via activating Nrf2 signaling pathway. The findings suggested that ASIV might be a potential neuroprotective drug acting on BBB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of multi-focus image fusion is to integrate the partially focused images into one single image which is focused everywhere. To achieve this purpose, higher order singular value decomposition (HOSVD) and edge intensity (EDI) based multi-focus image fusion method is proposed. The main characteristics of the proposed method includes: 1. an effective and robust sharpness measure based on edge intensity is presented; 2. considering the fact that HOSVD is an effective data-driven decomposition technique and shows the outstanding ability in the representation of high-dimensional data, it is used to decompose multi-focus images; and 3. a multi-strategy fusion rule based on sigmoid function is used to fuse the decomposition coefficients. Furthermore, several experiments are conducted to verify the superiority of the proposed fusion framework in terms of visual and statistical analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parkinson's disease (PD) is characterized by the progressive degeneration of dopaminergic neurons in substantia nigra pars compacta (SNpc). Mitochondrial dysfunction and cell apoptosis are suggested to be actively involved in the pathogenesis of PD. In the present study, the neuroprotective effect of amentoflavone (AF), a naturally occurring biflavonoid from Selaginella tamariscina , was examined in PD models both in vitro and in vivo. On SH-SY5Y cells, AF treatment dose-dependently reduced 1-methyl-4-phenylpyridinium (MPP + )-induced nuclear condensation and loss of cell viability without obvious cytotoxicity. It inhibited the activation of caspase-3 and p21 but increased the Bcl-2/Bax ratio. Further study disclosed that AF enhanced the phosphorylation of PI3K, Akt and ERK1/2 down-regulated by MPP + in SH-SY5Y cells, the effect of which could be blocked by LY294002, the inhibitor of PI3K. Consistently, AF alleviated the behavioral deterioration in pole and traction tests and rescued the loss of dopaminergic neurons in SNpc and fibers in striatum in methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP) induced mice. It also could enhance the activation of PI3K and Akt as well as Bcl-2/Bax ratio in SN. Moreover, AF alleviated gliosis as well as the gene expression levels of IL-1β and iNOS in SN. Collectively, these results suggested that AF protected dopaminergic neurons against MPTP/MPP + -induced neurotoxicity, which might be mediated through activation of PI3K/Akt and ERK signaling pathways in dopaminergic neurons and attenuation of neuroinflammation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background The development of liver fibrosis is the key stage toward a number of mortal complications of liver diseases, including cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. Canonical Wnt pathway is crucial in diverse biological processes and mediates the progression and regression of liver fibrosis. As a potent Wnt pathway agonist, roof plate-specific spondin-1 (R-spondin1) protein's role in the hepatic fibrosis has not been well elucidated. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether R-spondin1 contributed to hepatic stellate cells (HSC) activation, the key event in liver fibrogenesis. Materials and methods Tissue microarrays of human fibrotic liver samples, hepatocellular carcinoma samples, and normal hepatic tissue samples were constructed and immunostained for R-spondin1. Protein expression and transcriptional level of freshly isolated mice HSC were analyzed by Western blot assay and real-time polymerase chain reaction, respectively. Exogenous stimulation with recombinant R-spondin1 and Dickkopf-1 was performed to investigate the functionality. Nuclear β-catenin level and T-cell specific transcription factor activity were analyzed, and HSC proliferation was tested by Methyl-Thiazol-Tetrazolium bromide assay. Results Overexpression of R-spondin1 was observed in both fibrotic liver tissues and culture-activated HSC. Coculture with recombinant R-spondin1 induced a dose-dependent increase in both the transcription factor activity and the protein level of α-smooth muscle actin, collagen I, and nuclear β-catenin. Additionally, Dickkopf-1 repressed R-spondin1's effect on HSC. Conclusions These findings suggested that R-spondin1 might argument liver fibrogenesis by enhancing the canonical Wnt pathway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlight: [•] ALKO mice show more severe EAE symptoms in the late phase, associated with increased infiltrating cells and demyelination. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Single image dehazing has great significance in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised Dark Channel Attention optimized CycleGAN (DCA-CycleGAN) to deal with the challenging scene with uneven and dense haze concentration. Firstly, the DCA-CycleGAN adopts the dark channel as input and then generate attention through a DCA subnetwork to handle the nonhomogeneous haze. Secondly, in addition to the conventional global discriminator, we also leverage two local discriminators to enhance the dehazing performance on the local dense haze, and a new local adversarial loss calculated strategy is been proposed. Specifically, the dehazing generator consists of two subnetworks: an auto-encoder and a dark channel attention subnetwork. The auto-encoder consists of an encoder, a feature transformation module, and a decoder. The dark channel attention subnetwork has the same structure as the encoder and the feature transformation module to ensure the same receptive field, which utilizes the dark channel to generate attention map and fine-tune the auto-encoder. Experimental results against several state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that our method can generate better visual effects, and is effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease resulting from the degeneration of dopaminergic (DAergic) neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNpc) and subsequent deficit of dopamine in the striatum. PD is inversely associated with consumption of peppers; however, the constituent and the underlying mechanism remain unclear. This study aimed to investigate the effects of 7-ethoxy-4-methylcoumarin (EMC), a pepper constituent, on PD-like disorders in 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP)-induced mice and 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA)-exposed C. elegans. In this study, EMC was identified as an agonist of dopamine D2 receptor (DRD2) and increased the expression of P-CREB and BDNF in SH-SY5Y cells. In MPTP-treated PD mice, EMC was shown to apparently ameliorate the motor and gait disorders, and restore the depressed TH expression in SNpc and striatum. Meanwhile, it recovered the locomotor deficit caused by 6-OHDA in wild type N2 and CAT-2-transgenic UA57 of C. elegans , and relieved the degeneration of DAergic neurons resulting from 6-OHDA or with ageing. Moreover, EMC inhibited α-synuclein accumulation in C. elegans strain NL5901 overexpressing human α-synuclein gene. Taken together, EMC was identified as a novel DRD2 agonist and improved experimental PD in mice and C. elegans. These findings suggest that EMC may be beneficial to PD patients, further supporting that the consumption of peppers may have favorable effect on PD progression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]