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Seed soaking is an important process in rice cultivation. Allowing seeds to absorb sufficient water before sowing improves their germinability, germination vigor, and seedling emergence. The use of converter slag, which is a fertilizer and soil amendment, can increase crop yields and suppress diseases. However, there are no reports on the effect of the converter slag on initial rice plant growth when applied at the seed soaking stage. In this study, we investigated the effects of soaking rice seeds in two types of converter slag suspensions on the early growth of rice plants from germination to seedling emergence. We conducted laboratory tests with simulated cultivation processes (germination forcing and root-elongation forcing). The seeds soaked in converter slag suspensions showed improved germinability and coleoptile elongation under anaerobic conditions, as well as improved rooting ability and seminal root elongation under aerobic conditions. Seeds soaked in converter slag suspensions and water were sown using five sowing methods (standard seedling raising; Japanese-type direct sowing at surface, shallow, and deep soil depths; and Italian-type direct sowing). Overall, the seedlings that grew from seeds treated with the converter slag suspensions showed faster seedling emergence and better growth. These results show that soaking seeds in Ca2+-rich converter slag suspensions can promote the early growth of rice plants by avoiding low-oxygen disorders and improve subsequent seedling establishment. Thus, converter slag suspensions are suitable for germination but unsuitable for microbial growth due to high alkaline conditions (pH 11–11.5), which may omit both water changes and germination forcing process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) play a critical role in a variety of human diseases such as cancer. Here, to elucidate a novel function of a lncRNA called LINC00173, we investigated its binding partner, target gene, and its regulatory mechanism in lung adenocarcinoma, including the A549 cell line and patients. In the A549 cell line, RNA immunoprecipitation (RIP) assays revealed that LINC00173 efficiently binds to SNAIL. RNA-seq and RT-qPCR analyses revealed that the expression of FHIT was decreased upon LINC00173 depletion, indicating that FHIT is a target gene of LINC00173. Overexpression of SNAIL suppressed and depletion of SNAIL increased the expression of FHIT, indicating that SNAIL negatively regulates FHIT. The downregulation of FHIT expression upon LINC00173 depletion was restored by additional SNAIL depletion, revealing a LINC00173-SNAIL-FHIT axis for FHIT regulation. Data from 501 patients with lung adenocarcinoma also support the existence of a LINC00173-SNAIL-FHIT axis, as FHIT expression correlated positively with LINC00173 (p = 1.75 × 10−6) and negatively with SNAIL (p = 7.00 × 10−5). Taken together, we propose that LINC00173 positively regulates FHIT gene expression by binding to SNAIL and inhibiting its function in human lung adenocarcinoma. Thus, this study sheds light on the LINC00173-SNAIL-FHIT axis, which may be a key mechanism for carcinogenesis and progression in human lung adenocarcinoma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: While chronic kidney disease (CKD) is one of the most important contributors to mortality from non-communicable diseases, the number of nephrologists is limited worldwide. Medical cooperation is a system of cooperation between primary care physicians and nephrological institutions, consisting of nephrologists and multidisciplinary care teams. Although it has been reported that multidisciplinary care teams contribute to the prevention of worsening renal functions and cardiovascular events, there are few studies on the effect of a medical cooperation system. Methods: We aimed to evaluate the effect of medical cooperation on all-cause mortality and renal prognosis in patients with CKD. One hundred and sixty-eight patients who visited the one hundred and sixty-three clinics and seven general hospitals of Okayama city were recruited between December 2009 and September 2016, and one hundred twenty-three patients were classified into a medical cooperation group. The outcome was defined as the incidence of all-cause mortality, or renal composite outcome (end-stage renal disease or 50% eGFR decline). We evaluated the effects on renal composite outcome and pre-ESRD mortality while incorporating the competing risk for the alternate outcome into a Fine–Gray subdistribution hazard model. Results: The medical cooperation group had more patients with glomerulonephritis (35.0% vs. 2.2%) and less nephrosclerosis (35.0% vs. 64.5%) than the primary care group. Throughout the follow-up period of 5.59 ± 2.78 years, 23 participants (13.7%) died, 41 participants (24.4%) reached 50% decline in eGFR, and 37 participants (22.0%) developed end-stage renal disease (ESRD). All-cause mortality was significantly reduced by medical cooperation (sHR 0.297, 95% CI 0.105–0.835, p = 0.021). However, there was a significant association between medical cooperation and CKD progression (sHR 3.069, 95% CI 1.225–7.687, p = 0.017). Conclusion: We evaluated mortality and ESRD using a CKD cohort with a long-term observation period and concluded that medical cooperation might be expected to influence the quality of medical care in the patients with CKD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diamond exhibits large application potential in the field of power electronics, owing to its excellent and desirable electronic properties. However, the main obstacles to its development originate from the small‐sized single‐crystal wafers and the instability of the electrical conductivity. This work presents a metal‐oxide‐semiconductor field‐effect transistor (MOSFET) on a diamond substrate derived from a five‐inch (110) highly preferred polycrystalline diamond film. The MOSFETs with excellent performance are fabricated by combining an H‐terminated channel and an epitaxially grown boron‐doped layer as the source/drain contacts of the diamond devices. According to the electrical statistical results of ≈110 devices on the polycrystalline diamond substrate, 44% of devices show normally‐off operation with a maximum current density of 400 mA mm−1, while 56% of devices demonstrate normally‐on operation with a maximum current density of 525 mA mm−1. The normally‐off characteristics are more related to the higher amounts of nitrogen concentration than the grain boundaries. The stable boron‐doped source and drain provide a high concentration of holes, which facilitate transport in the surface p‐type channel induced by the H‐termination. The characteristics of the MOSFETs are inspiring for the fabrication of complementary inverter circuits on large diamond wafers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) participate in carcinogenesis and cancer malignancies. Transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) is involved in various cellular processes including cancer progression. We performed comprehensive RNA sequencing analyses to identify lncRNAs regulated by TGF-β and found that lincNMR (long intergenic noncoding RNA–nucleotide metabolism regulator, also identified as MAP3K9-DT) was induced by TGF-β in various cell lines. There are several variants of lincNMR (hereafter lincNMRs) in the lincNMR/MAP3K9-DT locus, and their expression was increased by TGF-β. TGF-β-mediated induction of lincNMRs was decreased by depletion of Smad2/3 in Huh7, suggesting that the TGF-β–Smad pathway is involved in lincNMRs expression. We also found that APOBEC3B but not other APOBEC family members were a target gene of lincNMRs. APOBEC3B, a cytidine deaminase, promotes C to U mutation and highly expressed in various human cancers. Although it is associated with cancer progression, regulatory mechanisms of APOBEC3B expression have not been fully elucidated. We performed RNA immunoprecipitation assays and proved that lincNMRs bound to endogenous Smad2 in Huh7 cells. The increased activity of the promoter of APOBEC3B induced by overexpression of Smad2/3 was inhibited by depletion of lincNMRs. These data suggest that lincNMRs participate in APOBEC3B expression by collaborating with TGF-β–Smad pathway. High expression of lincNMRs was positively correlated with high expression of APOBEC3B in various cancer cell lines. Overexpression of APOBEC3B as well as lincNMR was found in human cancers such as hepatic and lung cancers and was associated with their poor prognosis, suggesting that lincNMR may contribute to tumor malignancy via enhanced expression of APOBEC3B. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, we study the application of multimodal analogical reasoning to image retrieval. Multimodal analogy questions are given in a form of tuples of words and images, e.g., "cat":"dog"::[an image of a cat sitting on a bench]:?, to search for an image of a dog sitting on a bench. Retrieving desired images given these tuples can be seen as a task of finding images whose relation between the query image is close to that of query words. One way to achieve the task is building a common vector space that exhibits analogical regularities. To learn such an embedding, we propose a quadruple neural network called multimodal siamese network. The network consists of recurrent neural networks and convolutional neural networks based on the siamese architecture. We also introduce an effective procedure to generate analogy examples from an image-caption dataset for training of our network. In our experiments, we test our model on analogy-based image retrieval tasks. The results show that our method outperforms the previous work in qualitative evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This letter reports the successful demonstration of large-current and high-voltage (001) vertical-type two-dimensional hole gas (2DHG) diamond trench metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) with a p−-drift layer. The fabricated transistor demonstrated a maximum drain current density of 210 mA/mm, a field-effect-mobility of 61 cm2V−1s−1, and a specific on-resistance of 23 $\text{m}\Omega $ cm2. Moreover, a high breakdown voltage of 580 V with a gate-drain length of 10 $\mu \text{m}$ was obtained, which is the highest value reported for a vertical-type diamond MOSFET to date. These characteristics indicate that a vertical-type diamond MOSFET using a p−-drift layer may be used to realize a p-channel power device with a high breakdown voltage and low on-resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 69-year-old man with refractory lung adenocarcinoma was treated with gemcitabine and vinorelbine. Dyspnea and hypertension developed after the 17th cycle of chemotherapy. Laboratory findings revealed intravascular hemolysis and renal dysfunction. Thrombotic microangiopathy (TMA) was confirmed by renal biopsy. Antihypertensive and steroid therapies were ineffective. After plasmapheresis, intravascular hemolysis and renal dysfunction gradually improved. However, the disease progressed, and he died 6 months after TMA diagnosis. Autopsy revealed similar pathological findings to those of the renal biopsy. It is important to discontinue gemcitabine at the onset of TMA and consider TMA when using gemcitabine for long periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diamonds are highly favored materials in high-temperature and high-power operations owing to their excellent characteristics, and diamond p-channel field-effect transistors (p-FETs) considerably aid in the improvement of CMOS technology, providing high performance, which is essential for inverter operations. This study demonstrates a low ON-resistance (001) vertical-type two-dimensional hole gas (2-DHG) diamond metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) with a trench gate structure. The active area of the device reduced after introducing a trench gate structure that can significantly improve the device integration and high-current operation. The maximum drain current density (ID) exceeds 20 kA/cm2 at VDS = −50 V and VGS = −20 V, which is the highest value obtained for (001) vertical-type diamond MOSFETs. This vertical-type diamond trench MOSFET can obtain the lowest ON-resistance (RONS) of 2.5 mΩ⋅ cm2, which is comparable to that of SiC and GaN vertical-type n-channel FETs (n-FETs). It can be potentially used as a p-channel power FET in a complementary inverter. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that the trench contact depth to the p+ diamond substrate significantly impacts the static characteristics of a device using the ATLAS device simulation. This result significantly contributes to the improvement of the rising drain current in the low-voltage region of the vertical-type diamond FET, which can be used in the future as p-channel power devices for the next generation of complementary inverters using GaN or SiC MOSFETs as n-channels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 63-year-old man with pulmonary adenocarcinoma was treated with nivolumab. High fever developed within several hours after the first administration of nivolumab; subsequently, serum creatinine levels kept increasing daily. We diagnosed acute kidney injury (AKI) as an immune-related adverse event; the patient was initially treated with 50 mg prednisolone, and the dose was then tapered. Renal biopsy pathologically revealed tubulointerstitial inflammation with strong infiltration of only T cells that were CD3+, CD4+, and CD8+. The infiltration of CD163+ M2 macrophage was also observed. AKI within 1 week after the administration of nivolumab seems to be rare; therefore, the present case provides important findings useful in daily clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We attempted to predict activity/dominance for soccer games, where activity is defined as the degree of activity of the game as perceived by the viewer, whereas dominance is the degree at which the viewer perceives a particular team to dominate over the other team. Such activity/dominance information would help a layman viewer understand the game. It would also enable construction of an automatic digest creation system that extracts scenes having high activity/dominance. There are two facets of this study: 1. The main part of the underlying prediction model consists of a Stick-Breaking Hidden Markov Model, where the data automatically estimates the number of states of the Markov process behind the data. 2. The data used in this paper is vector time-series data consisting of player, referee, and ball positions, together with team information, acquired by a set of fixed cameras. The problem was approached with a Bayesian framework where learning and prediction were implemented by three different methods: Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Expectation Maximization, and Variational Bayes. The proposed method was tested using a dataset consisting of 10 professional soccer games and was compared against standard regression methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Study objectives: To examine whether or not the presence of mist or fog affects respiratory conditions in asthmatic children. DESIGN: A retrospective study. Preparation and methods: There were 754 visits by children with asthma to the emergency room at night (between 18:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m.) during a two-year period. Meteorological data were checked at a local fire station and regional meteorological observatory. We evaluated the relation between meteorological data and the number of emergency room visits of asthmatic children. RESULTS: The mean number of asthmatic children who visited the emergency room was higher on misty or foggy nights than on clear nights (1.2±1.2 people/ night vs. 0.8±0.9 people/night, p<0.0001). Mist and fog had an increased odds ratio (OR) of emergency room visits of asthmatic children (1.74, p<0.001). In addition, increased OR was found for high atmospheric temperature (4.39, p<0.0001). Multivariate analysis showed mist and fog (p<0.0001), average atmospheric temperature (p<0.0001), and day-to-day change of temperature (p<0.05) were related to the number of asthmatic children (n=731, r=0.428, p<0.0001). CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that the presence of mist and fog causes the exacerbation of asthma in children. It is not clear which is related to the high frequency of emergency room visits of asthmatic children, airborne water droplets or the meteorological condition that causes mist or fog, but the prophylaxis for exacerbation may decrease the frequency of emergency room visits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the identification of mesodermal-specific carrier DNA (cDNA) or transcript (MEST) in mouse embryonic metanephros. Information on the suppression subtractive hybridization-PCR of cDNA; Localization of the highest expression of MEST; Mechanisms involved in the decrease in explant size and nephron population.

Background. Atherosclerotic diseases are the major cause of mortality and morbidity in patients on haemodialysis (HD). Furthermore, the prognosis of diabetic patients on HD is especially poor due to atherosclerotic complications. Because homocysteine (Hcy), a sulfur‐containing amino acid, is emerging as an important risk factor for atherosclerosis in patients with end‐stage renal disease, we examined the significance of serum Hcy levels in diabetic patients on HD. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Presents information on a study which assessed the conjoint role of two metalloproteinases and their selective inhibitor in the organogenesis of the embryonic metanephros. Interlinked processes which influence organogenesis during embryonic life; Materials and methods used; Results and discussion.

Provides information on a study which investigates the isolation of rat fibrillin-1 cDNA and its relevance in metanephric development. Components of the extracellular matrix of the rat kidney; Experiment methodologies; Characterization of fibrillin-1 cDNA.