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Domesticated sheep have been exposed to artificial selection for the production of fiber, meat, and milk as well as to natural selection. Such selections are likely to have imposed distinctive selection signatures on the sheep genome. Therefore, detecting selection signatures across the genome may help elucidate mechanisms of selection and pinpoint candidate genes of interest for further investigation. Here, detection of selection signatures was conducted in three sheep breeds, Sunite (n=66), German Mutton (n=159), and Dorper (n=93), using the Illumina OvineSNP50 Genotyping BeadChip array. Each animal provided genotype information for 43 273 autosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). We adopted two complementary haplotype-based statistics of relative extended haplotype homozygosity (REHH) and the cross-population extended haplotype homozygosity (XP-EHH) tests. In total, 707, 755, and 438 genomic regions subjected to positive selection were identified in Sunite, German Mutton, and Dorper sheep, respectively, and 42 of these regions were detected using both REHH and XP-EHH analyses. These genomic regions harbored many important genes, which were enriched in gene ontology terms involved in muscle development, growth, and fat metabolism. Fourteen of these genomic regions overlapped with those identified in our previous genome-wide association studies, further indicating that these genes under positive selection may underlie growth developmental traits. These findings contribute to the identification of candidate genes of interest and aid in understanding the evolutionary and biological mechanisms for controlling complex traits in Chinese and western sheep.

Pasteurella multocida, a Gram-negative nonmotile coccobacillus, is the causative agent of fowl cholera, bovine hemorrhagic septicemia, enzoonotic pneumonia and swine atropic rhinitis. Two filamentous hemagglutinin genes, fhaB1 and fhaB2, are the potential virulence factors. In this study, an inactivation fhaB1 mutant of P. multocida in avian strain C48-102 was constructed by a kanamycin-resistance cassette. The virulence of the fhaB1 mutant and the wild type strain was assessed in chickens by intranasal and intramuscular challenge. The inactivation of fhaB1 resulted in a high degree of attenuation when the chickens were challenged intranasally and a lesser degree when challenged intramuscularly. The fhaB1 mutant and the wild type strain were investigated their sensitivity to the antibody-dependent classical complement-mediated killing pathway in 90% convalescent chicken serum. The fhaB1 mutant was serum sensitive as the viability has reduced between untreated serum and heat inactivated chicken serum (P

Recently, untrained neural networks (UNNs) have shown satisfactory performances for MR image reconstruction on random sampling trajectories without using additional full-sampled training data. However, the existing UNN-based approaches lack the modeling of physical priors, resulting in poor performance in some common scenarios (e.g., partial Fourier (PF), regular sampling, etc.) and the lack of theoretical guarantees for reconstruction accuracy. To bridge this gap, we propose a safeguarded k-space interpolation method for MRI using a specially designed UNN with a tripled architecture driven by three physical priors of the MR images (or k-space data), including transform sparsity, coil sensitivity smoothness, and phase smoothness. We also prove that the proposed method guarantees tight bounds for interpolated k-space data accuracy. Finally, ablation experiments show that the proposed method can characterize the physical priors of MR images well. Additionally, experiments show that the proposed method consistently outperforms traditional parallel imaging methods and existing UNNs, and is even competitive against supervised-trained deep learning methods in PF and regular undersampling reconstruction., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Background: Previous studies have found that patients with schizophrenia (SCZ), major depressive disorder (MDD), and bipolar disorder (BD) all have facial emotion recognition deficits, but the differences and similarities of these deficits in the three groups of patients under different social interaction situations are not clear. The present study aims to compare the ability of facial emotion recognition in three different conversation situations from a cross-diagnostic perspective., Methods: Thirty-three participants with SCZ, 35 participants with MDD, and 30 participants with BD were recruited, along with 31 healthy controls. A computer-based task was given to assess the ability of Facial Emotion Categorization (FEC) under three different conversational situations (praise, blame, and inquiry)., Results: In the "praise" situation, patients with SCZ, MDD and BD were all slower to recognize anger emotion than the healthy controls. In all three clinical groups, patients with SCZ recognized angry faces faster than those with MDD and BD on a continuum from happy faces to angry faces in the "inquiry" situation, while no significant difference was found in the latter two groups. In addition, no significant defect was found in the percentage and threshold of angry face recognition in all three patient groups., Conclusions: Our findings indicate that patients with SCZ, MDD, and BD share both common and distinct deficits in facial emotion recognition during social interactions, which may be beneficial for early screening and precise intervention for these mental disorders., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Marine oil spill pollution is one of the most serious marine pollution issues. Aiming at the problems of low accuracy and slow speed in the process of detecting the behavior of sunken and submerged oil by traditional methods, a technology of sunken & submerged oil tracking based on YOLO v4 (YOLO refers to 'you look only once') algorithm is proposed in this paper. The image data used in this study are pictures of real oil pollution moving under breaking waves, and they are collected in the laboratory. First, the YOLO v4 model under CSPDarknet53 framework was established. Then, in order to simplify the oil detection model and ensure the efficiency of the model, this research used Mosaic data enhancement, random flipping, and Gaussian noise fuzzy data enhancement, as well as Cosine Annealing Learning Rate, and Label Smoothing to improve the effect of deep learning model. After data enhancement, the final data set was divided into a training set and a test set proportionally. The training set had 878 pictures, and the test set had 1945 pictures. The test set contained the situation where oil droplets were completely occluded by waves, so that the detection accuracy was closer to the real situation. The results show that the oil droplet is hit and then sunk, forming 'sunken and submerged oil' under the action of breaking waves of wave heights of 10 cm, 15 cm, 20 cm, 25 cm and 30 cm. The submergence time enhances with the increase of wave height of breaking wave, that is, the residence time of oil droplet for 10 cm, 15 cm, 20 cm, 25 cm and 30 cm breaking waves is 2.32 s, 2.52 s, 2.62 s, 3.20s, 7.12 s, respectively. The deepest position of oil droplet under the water for 10 cm, 15 cm, 20 cm, 25 cm and 30 cm breaking waves is 0.165 m, 0.179 m, 0.226 m, 0.297 m, 0.428 m, respectively. However, the drift velocity and sinking velocity of oil droplet show nonlinear variation. The speed of sinking to the deepest is 0.208 m/s, 0.222 m/s, 0.212 m/s, 0.359 m/s, 0.303 m/s, respectively., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

In dynamic magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, low-rank plus sparse (L+S) decomposition, or robust principal component analysis (PCA), has achieved stunning performance. However, the selection of the parameters of L+S is empirical, and the acceleration rate is limited, which are common failings of iterative compressed sensing MR imaging (CS-MRI) reconstruction methods. Many deep learning approaches have been proposed to address these issues, but few of them use a low-rank prior. In this paper, a model-based low-rank plus sparse network, dubbed L+S-Net, is proposed for dynamic MR reconstruction. In particular, we use an alternating linearized minimization method to solve the optimization problem with low-rank and sparse regularization. Learned soft singular value thresholding is introduced to ensure the clear separation of the L component and S component. Then, the iterative steps are unrolled into a network in which the regularization parameters are learnable. We prove that the proposed L+S-Net achieves global convergence under two standard assumptions. Experiments on retrospective and prospective cardiac cine datasets show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art CS and existing deep learning methods and has great potential for extremely high acceleration factors (up to 24×)., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest, (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Purpose: The aim of this work is to implement real-time 3D MR thermometry for high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) monitoring., Methods: Volumetric MR thermometry was implemented based on a 3D echo-shifted sequence with short TR to improve temperature sensitivity. The 3D acquisition was accelerated in two phase encoding directions with controlled aliasing in volumetric parallel imaging (CAIPIRINHA). Image reconstruction was run in an open source reconstruction platform (Gadgetron)., Results: Phantom experiments showed the proposed volumetric thermometry was comparable to the fiber optical thermometer. In-vivo animal experiments in rabbit thigh showed that the temperature error before and after 4× acceleration was less than 0.65 °C. Finally, real-time 3D thermometry with temporal resolution ~3 s and spatial resolution 2 × 2 × 5 mm 3 (spatial coverage 192 × 192 × 80 mm 3 ) was achieved with Gadgetron reconstruction., Conclusion: Real-time temperature monitoring was achieved in-vivo by using parallel imaging accelerated 3D echo-shifted sequence with Gadgetron reconstruction., (Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

This study aims to develop and evaluate a new method for fast high resolution T1 mapping of the brain based on the Look-Locker technique. Single-shot turboflash sequence with high temporal acceleration is used to sample the recovery of inverted magnetization. Multi-slice interleaved acquisition within one inversion slab is used to reduce the number of inversion pulses and hence SAR. Accuracy of the proposed method was studied using simulation and validated in phantoms. It was then evaluated in healthy volunteers and stroke patients. In-vivo results were compared to values obtained by inversion recovery fast spin echo (IR-FSE) and literatures. With the new method, T 1 values in phantom experiments agreed with reference values with median error <3%. For in-vivo experiments, a T1 map was acquired in 3.35s and the T1 maps of the whole brain were acquired in 2min with two-slice interleaving, with a spatial resolution of 1.1×1.1×4mm 3 . The T 1 values obtained were comparable to those measured with IR-FSE and those reported in literatures. These results demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed method for fast T1 mapping of the brain in both healthy volunteers and stroke patients at 3T., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background: The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the expression of Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) and its receptor Tropomyosin-related kinase B (TrkB) is correlated with the clinical progression of salivary adenoid cystic carcinoma (SACC) and whether the BDNF/TrkB axis is associated with the induction of epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) in SACC cells., Method: The expression of BDNF, TrkB, and E-cadherin (an EMT biomarker) in 76 primary SACC specimens and 20 normal salivary gland tissues was analyzed by immunohistochemistry. Additionally, the expression of BDNF, TrkB, and E-cadherin in SACC cell lines (SACC-83 and SACC-LM) was analyzed by RT-PCR and Western blotting. The biological role of the BDNF/TrkB axis in the EMT progression of SACC was evaluated after treatment with increased levels of BDNF and by inhibiting TrkB activity in SACC-83 cell line. The progression of SACC cells through EMT was assessed by RT-PCR, Western blotting, photography, migration and invasion assays., Results: Elevated expression of TrkB (92.1%) and BDNF (89.5%), and downregulated expression of E-cadherin (47.4%) was found in SACC specimens, which was significantly correlated with the invasion and metastasis in SACC (P<0.05). The high expression of TrkB and the low expression of E-cadherin was significantly correlated with the poor prognosis of SACC patients (P<0.05). The expression of TrkB was inversely correlated with the expression of E-cadherin in both SACC cases and cell lines (P<0.05). Increasing BDNF levels after treatment with exogenous recombinant human BDNF (rhBDNF) at 100 ng/ml significantly promoted the activation of TrKB and the progression of EMT in SACC cells. While obstruction of TrkB by its inhibitor, k252a (100 nM), significantly inhibited the EMT progression of SACC cells., Conclusions: These results suggest that BDNF-mediated TrkB activation contributes to the EMT progression and the poor prognosis in SACC. The present study demonstrated that the BDNF/TrkB axis promotes the migration and invasion of SACC cells via EMT in vitro. Targeting the inactivation of the BDNF/TrkB axis may be a potential strategy for the treatment of SACC., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Transcriptions occur in mouse preimplantation embryos as early as one-cell stage. However, our understanding on gene expression at this stage is lacking. The present study applied suppression subtractive hybridization (SSH) to compared gene expression profiles of mouse zygote and oocyte. Forty-four differentially expressed genes were selected and shown positive signals by reverse dot-blot hybridization. DNA sequences comparison of these putative clones with the GenBank/EMBL databases using BLAST search identified 38 clones with >90% identity to known genes and six novel clones with less than 70% homology to the databases. Eleven out of the 44 differentially expressed clones were either originally isolated from male embryo or testis-specific genes, suggesting that these genes may be derived from paternal genome. Five differentially expressed genes of interest, including bromodomain-containing protein BP75, spindlin, radixin, pituitary tumor-transforming gene (PTTG), and proteoglycan core protein (serglycin) were further studied by semi-quantitative RT-PCR. It is noted that spindlin which involves in cell division is highly expressed in zygote, suggesting that this protein may play an important role in zygotic gene activation (ZGA) and early stage development in 1-cell stage mouse embryos.

Fertilization and development of mouse embryos occur in the ampullae of oviduct. We hypothesize that fetal-maternal communication exists in the preimplantation period, allowing optimal development of embryos. It is known that embryotrophic factors from oviduct affect the development of embryos. Although embryos affect their own transport in the oviduct, the mechanism of action is unknown. As a step toward understanding the action of embryos on oviductal physiology, we adopted suppression subtractive hybridization (SSH) to compare the gene expression in the mouse oviduct containing early embryos with that of oviduct containing oocytes. Ten to twelve 1-cell mouse embryos were transferred to one oviduct of a foster mother and similar number of oocytes were transferred to the contralateral oviduct. The animals were sacrificed after 48 h and their oviducts were excised for mRNA study. Using SSH, we screened out 250 putative positive clones from the subtracted embryo-containing oviduct library and 97 of them were screened positive by reverse dot-blot analysis. DNA sequence analysis identified genes that shared high homology with sequences in GenBank/EMBL database with unknown functions. Overall, 13 of the 90 high-quality sequences (14%) were homologous to 6 different genes previously described. Reverse Northern analysis confirmed that the expression of these genes were higher in the embryo-containing oviduct than in the oocyte-containing oviduct. About 12% of these clones (11/90) were novel. This article is the first to report identification of genes in the oviduct that are upregulated in the presence of embryos during the preimplantation period., ((c)2002 Elsevier Science (USA).)