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Selenium (Se), is an essential trace element in the diet of fish and aquatic animals needed for growth, thyroid hormone metabolism, antioxidant activity, and immunity. Thus, this study has evaluated the dietary selenium yeast (Se-yeast) impact on the growth performance, antioxidant capacity, and gut bacterial community of zebrafish, Danio rerio. The fish with an average weight of 0.247 g ± 0.005 were distributed in 12 glass aquariums. 30 fish per aquarium in three replicates per group were exposed to different dietary Se-yeast concentrations: 0.3 mg/kg (control), 0 mg/kg, 3 mg/kg, and 30 mg/kg for three weeks. The result indicated a higher body weight gain and specific growth rate in the 3 mg/kg group in all groups. Se significantly accumulated in the liver, muscle, gill, and gut. The antioxidant genes superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1), catalase (CAT), and glutathione peroxidase 1 (GPx1), and the gut marker genes: solute carrier family 15 member 1b (slc15a1b), fatty acid binding protein 2 (fabp2), cytochrome P450 family 8 subfamily B member 1 (cyp8b1), and cytochrome P450 family 3 subfamily A, polypeptide 65 (cyp3a65) were significantly expressed in the gut tissue. The 16 s rRNA sequencing showed a significant difference at phyla Proteobacteria, Fusobacteria, Firmicutes, and Actinobacteria and Cetobacterium, Aeromonas, mycobacterium, and Lactobacillus at the genus level. It was concluded that dietary Se 3 mg/kg can promote growth performance and antioxidant status, furthermore, dietary Se yeast has a significant impact on the gut microbiota of D. rerio.

Several cardiovascular illnesses are associated with aberrant activation of cellular pyroptosis, ferroptosis, necroptosis, cuproptosis, disulfidptosis, and macrophage polarisation as hallmarks contributing to vascular damage and abnormal cardiac function. Meanwhile, these three novel forms of cellular dysfunction are closely related to mitochondrial homeostasis. Mitochondria are the main organelles that supply energy and maintain cellular homeostasis. Mitochondrial stability is maintained through a series of regulatory pathways, such as mitochondrial fission, mitochondrial fusion and mitophagy. Studies have shown that mitochondrial dysfunction (e.g., impaired mitochondrial dynamics and mitophagy) promotes ROS production, leading to oxidative stress, which induces cellular pyroptosis, ferroptosis, necroptosis, cuproptosis, disulfidptosis and macrophage M1 phenotypic polarisation. Therefore, an in-depth knowledge of the dynamic regulation of mitochondria during cellular pyroptosis, ferroptosis, necroptosis, cuproptosis, disulfidptosis and macrophage polarisation is necessary to understand cardiovascular disease development. This paper systematically summarises the impact of changes in mitochondrial dynamics and mitophagy on regulating novel cellular dysfunctions and macrophage polarisation to promote an in-depth understanding of the pathogenesis of cardiovascular diseases and provide corresponding theoretical references for treating cardiovascular diseases.

Background: Empagliflozin (EMPA) ameliorates reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation in human endothelial cells (ECs) exposed to 10 % stretch, but the underlying mechanisms are still unclear. Pathological stretch is supposed to stimulate protein kinase C (PKC) by increasing intracellular calcium (Ca2+), therefore activating nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate oxidase (NOX) and promoting ROS production in human ECs. We hypothesized that EMPA inhibits stretch-induced NOX activation and ROS generation through preventing PKC activation. Methods: Human coronary artery endothelial cells (HCAECs) were pre-incubated for 2 h before exposure to cyclic stretch (5 % or 10 %) with either vehicle, EMPA or the PKC inhibitor LY-333531 or PKC siRNA. PKC activity, NOX activity and ROS production were detected after 24 h. Furthermore, the Ca2+ chelator BAPTA-AM, NCX inhibitor ORM-10962 or NCX siRNA, sodium/potassium pump inhibitor ouabain and sodium hydrogen exchanger (NHE) inhibitor cariporide were applied to explore the involvement of the NHE/Na+/NCX/Ca2+ in the ROS inhibitory capacity of EMPA. Results: Compared to 5 % stretch, 10 % significantly increased PKC activity, which was reduced by EMPA and PKC inhibitor LY-333531. EMPA and LY-333531 showed a similar inhibitory capacity on NOX activity and ROS generation induced by 10 % stretch, which was not augmented by combined treatment with both drugs. PKC-β knockdown inhibits the NOX activation induced by Ca2+ and 10 % stretch. BAPTA, pharmacologic or genetic NCX inhibition and cariporide reduced Ca2+ in static HCAECs and prevented the activation of PKC and NOX in 10%-stretched cells. Ouabain increased ROS generation in cells exposed to 5 % stretch. Conclusion: EMPA reduced NOX activity via attenuation of the NHE/Na+/NCX/Ca2+/PKC axis, leading to less ROS generation in HCAECs exposed to 10 % stretch.

An ultrasonic thyroid nodule segmentation model based on conditional segmentation adversarial network (cSegAN) was proposed to achieve more accurate segmentation of thyroid nodules. The model is composed of two parts: a segmenter network and a discriminator network. The segmenter network design uses a multi-expansion rate convolution block to accurately locate the nodule area, learn to extract the depth and shallow feature information of the nodule, and obtain binary mask of nodule area; the discriminator network compares the gap between the segmentation result and the gold standard to evaluate the segmentation result. Through multiple adversarial training, the experimental results show that the pixel accuracy of the proposed model reaches 0.953 1, which is better than other segmentation models, and can achieve ultrasonic thyroid nodule segmentation more accurately.

Selenium plays a vital role in cancer prevention, antioxidation, and the growth of humans and other vertebrates. Excessive selenium can cause liver injury and metabolic disorders, which can lead to hepatic disease, but few studies have shown the effects of excessive selenium on liver development and its mechanism in zebrafish embryos. In this study, liver development and glucolipid metabolism were investigated in selenium-stressed zebrafish embryos. Under selenium treatment, transgenic fabp10a-eGFP zebrafish embryos showed reduced liver size, and wild-type zebrafish embryos exhibited steatosis and altered lipid metabolism-related indexes and glucose metabolism-related enzyme activities. In addition, selenium-stressed embryos exhibited damaged mitochondria and inhibited autophagy in the liver. An autophagy inducer (rapamycin) alleviated selenium-induced liver injury and restored the expression of some genes related to liver development and glucolipid metabolism. In summary, our research evaluated liver developmental toxicity and metabolic disorders under selenium stress, and confirmed that autophagy and oxidative stress might involve in the selenium-induced hepatic defects.

Data privacy and security concerns have attracted significant attention, leading to the frequent occurrence of data silos in deep learning. To address this issue, federated learning (FL) has emerged. However, simple federated learning frameworks still face two security risks during the training process. Firstly, sharing local gradients instead of private datasets among users does not completely eliminate the possibility of data leakage. Secondly, malicious servers could obtain inaccurate aggregation parameters by forging or simplifying the aggregation process, ultimately leading to model training failures. To address these issues and achieve high-performance training models, we have designed a verifiable federated learning scheme called CVFL, where users exist in a serial manner to resist inference attacks and further protect the privacy of user dataset information through serial encryption. We ensure the secure aggregation of models through a verification protocol based on Lagrange interpolation functions. The serial transmission of local gradients effectively reduces the communication burden on cloud servers, and our verification protocol avoids the computational overhead caused by a large number of encryption and decryption operations without sacrificing model accuracy. Experimental results on the MNIST dataset demonstrate that, after 10 epochs of training with 100 users, our solution achieves a model accuracy of 90.63% for MLP architecture under IID data distribution and 87.47% under non-IID data distribution. For CNN architecture, our solution achieves a model accuracy of 96.72% under IID data distribution and 93.53% under non-IID data distribution. Experimental evaluations corroborate the practical performance of the presented scheme with high accuracy and efficiency.

Aiming at the exposure to radiation dosage in CT imaging possessing cancer-inducing potential, and the use of a single data resulting in the residual noise and excessive smoothness of the structure in reconstruction results, a multi-stage joint denoising model for low-dose CT images based on two different data domains is proposed. In the first stage of the generator, the residual U-net model was used to recover the low-dose projection data. and the multi-scale information was added to the up-sampling by embedding skip connections in the coding and decoding process to accelerate the training convergence speed. After noise removal, the projection data was switched from frequency space to spatial domain by means of filtering back projection. In the second stage, multi-scale convolution was used to denoise CT reconstructed images again to enrich the convolution diversity and improve the reconstruction accuracy. VGG network was introduced to capture the perceptual difference between CT images of different doses, and the ability of network representation was enhanced. Experimental results show that the proposed method has a higher PSNR, and compared with the single domain transformation, it can effectively use the complementary effect of the projection data and image data to suppress noise and artifact, and improve the reconstruction effect.

Using diamond anvil cell and high temperature experiments, this work proves that the interaction between deep hydrogen rich fluids and reduced carbon minerals may be an efficient mechanism for producing abiotic hydrocarbons at the upper mantle’s pressures and temperatures.

In this paper we proposed a knowledge tracing method based on Transformer structure, improved the embedded representation of interactive records, designed a gate unit suitable for this model, and optimized the input processing of self-attention sublayer to improve the predictive performance of deep knowledge tracing model. The experimental results on four commonly used public data sets show that compared with previous methods, the model proposed in this paper can better reflect learners’ mastery of knowledge points, and has better performance on data sets with large sample sizes.

In order to more accurately and comprehensively characterize the changes and development rules of lesion characteristics in pulmonary medical images in different periods, the study was conducted to predict the evolution of pulmonary nodules in the longitudinal dimension of time, and a benign and malignant prediction model of pulmonary lesions in different periods was constructed under multiscale three-dimensional (3D) feature fusion. According to the sequence of computed tomography (CT) images of patients at different stages, 3D interpolation was conducted to generate 3D lung CT images. The 3D features of different size lesions in the lungs were extracted using 3D convolutional neural networks for fusion features. A time-modulated long short-term memory was constructed to predict the benign and malignant lesions by using the improved time-length memory method to learn the feature vectors of lung lesions with temporal and spatial characteristics in different periods. The experiment shows that the area under the curve of the proposed method is 92.71%, which is higher than that of the traditional method.

In this study, the remote sensing images of the 30 km buffer zone from Zhaoyuan to Baidu of the Songhua River, which is rich in land use types and frequent in human activities, were selected as the research object to analyze land use change and driving factors. The objective of this research is to evaluate the ecological risk of watershed landscapes and provide a basis for watershed ecological environment protection and planning. On this basis, the landscape pattern index data were extracted, and a three-dimensional comprehensive index system of the natural, social and landscape pattern was constructed. In addition, based on the spatial principal component analysis (SPCA), data fusion was carried out to improve the accuracy and comprehensiveness of landscape ecological risk assessment results. The risk level of watershed landscape ecology was divided into low ecological risk, medium-low ecological risk, medium ecological risk, medium-high ecological risk, and high ecological risk by the Natural Breaks method. According to the results of the landscape ecological risk assessment and the characteristics of risk sources in each risk level area, the ecological protection and planning enlightenment suitable for each risk level area were obtained. The research content can provide ideas and evidence for environmental managers to formulate ecological risk protection strategies and reduce the impact of ecological risk threats.

Lung cancer is one of main causes of cancer mortality and 83% of lung cancer cases are classified as non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Patients with NSCLC usually have a poor prognosis and one of the leading causes is drug resistance. With the progress of drug therapy, the emergence and development of drug resistance affected the prognosis of patients severely. Accumulating evidence reveals that long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), as “dark matters” of the human genome, is of great significance to drug resistance in NSCLC. Herein, we review the role of lncRNAs in drug resistance in NSCLC.

Abstract Background It has been shown that intracranial atherosclerotic stenosis (ICAS) has heterogeneous features in terms of plaque instability and vascular remodeling. Therefore, quantitative information on the changes of intracranial atherosclerosis and lenticulostriate arteries (LSAs) may potentially improve understanding of the pathophysiological mechanisms underlying stroke and may guide the treatment and work-up strategies. Our present study aimed to use a novel whole-brain high-resolution cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging (WB-HRCMR) to assess both ICAS plaques and LSAs in recent stroke patients. Methods Twenty-nine symptomatic and 23 asymptomatic ICAS patients were enrolled in this study from Jan 2015 through Sep 2017 and all patients underwent WB-HRCMR. Intracranial atherosclerotic plaque burden, plaque enhancement volume, plaque enhancement index, as well as the number and length of LSAs were evaluated in two groups. Enhancement index was calculated as follows: ([Signal intensity (SI)plaque/SInormal wall on post-contrast imaging] − [SIplaque/SInormal wall on matched pre-contrast imaging])/(SIplaque / SInormal wall on matched pre-contrast imaging). Logistic regression analysis was used to investigate the independent high risk plaque and LSAs features associated with stroke. Results Symptomatic ICAS patients exhibited larger enhancement plaque volume (20.70 ± 3.07 mm3 vs. 6.71 ± 1.87 mm3 P = 0.001) and higher enhancement index (0.44 ± 0.08 vs. 0.09 ± 0.06 P = 0.001) compared with the asymptomatic ICAS. The average length of LSAs in symptomatic ICAS (20.95 ± 0.87 mm) was shorter than in asymptomatic ICAS (24.04 ± 0.95 mm) (P = 0.02). Regression analysis showed that the enhancement index (100.43, 95% CI − 4.02-2510.96; P = 0.005) and the average length of LSAs (0.80, 95% CI − 0.65-0.99; P = 0.036) were independent factors for predicting of stroke. Conclusion WB-HRCMR enabled the comprehensive quantitative evaluation of intracranial atherosclerotic lesions and perforating arteries. Symptomatic ICAS had distinct plaque characteristics and shorter LSA length compared with asymptomatic ICAS.

The effects of storage temperature on the physicochemical properties and qualities of red brown rice were investigated in this study. The samples were vacuum-packed in nylon/polyethylene pouches and stored at 15 °C, 25 °C and 35 °C for 12 weeks. The moisture content decreased as storage time was prolonged. Rice stored at 15 °C and 25 °C had a lower falling range of water content compared to the samples stored at 35 °C. Free fatty acid values increased fastest when samples were stored at a high temperature, and the rise can be effectively delayed at low temperatures. The pH of residual cooking water and adhesiveness decreased, while the heating water absorption rate and hardness increased during storage for red and brown rice. Low-field nuclear magnetic resonance results indicate that water molecules migrated, the binding force of H protons became stronger and the bonds between molecules became closer with increased storage duration. Temperature had an obvious correlation with starch granules and protein structure, characterized by a scanning electron microscope and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. Low temperatures significantly retarded those changes. The results indicate that storage temperature is a vital factor affecting the physicochemical properties and qualities of red brown rice and provided reference and theoretical basis for the actual storage of red brown rice.

Automobile side door glass squeaks and rattles during use. This abnormal noise can make the driver and occupants irritable and reduce the comfort of the automobile. This reduces the sales of this automobile. This paper analyzes and determines the cause of squeak and rattle during the lifting and lowering process of the side door glass of an automobile. The noise is due to four reasons. One is that the distance between the inner waterproof belt and the automobile side door glass of the automobile is unreasonable, causing excessive friction between the automobile side door glass and the inner waterproof belt during the automobile side door glass up and down movement. Other factors affecting squeak and rattle may be the distance between the automobile side door sheet metal and the automobile side door glass, the thickness of the automobile side door glass and the characteristics of the inner waterproof belt. The first two dimensions are analyzed using the 6 sigma method, and the structure of the inner waterproof belt is improved and the flocking position is adjusted. The squeak and rattle phenomenon is explained using the implicit dynamic analysis method ABAQUS, and the compression load deflection after the installation of the inner waterproof belt is 3–9 N/100 mm. This research completely solves the squeak and rattle problem caused by the up and down movement of the side door glass of the automobile. This research has significance for solving practical engineering problems.

Abstract Thaumatin-like protein (TLP) is present as a large family in plants, and individual members play different roles in various responses to biotic and abiotic stresses. Here we studied the role of 33 putative grape (Vitis vinifera L.) TLP genes (VvTLP) in grape disease resistance. Heat maps analysis compared the expression profiles of 33 genes in disease resistant and susceptible grape species infected with anthracnose (Elsinoe ampelina), powdery mildew (Erysiphe necator) or Botrytis cinerea. Among these 33 genes, the expression level of TLP29 increased following the three pathogens inoculations, and its homolog from the disease resistant Chinese wild grape V. quinquangularis cv. ‘Shang-24’, was focused for functional studies. Over-expression of TLP29 from grape ‘Shang-24’ (VqTLP29) in Arabidopsis thaliana enhanced its resistance to powdery mildew and the bacterium Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato DC3000, but decreased resistance to B. cinerea. Moreover, the stomatal closure immunity response to pathogen associated molecular patterns was strengthened in the transgenic lines. A comparison of the expression profiles of various resistance-related genes after infection with different pathogens indicated that VqTLP29 may be involved in the salicylic acid and jasmonic acid/ethylene signaling pathways.

In order to study the influence of the pressure load generated during the pulsation of cavitation bubbles on the oblique 45-degree curved surface boundary. The curved surface boundaries have different curvatures. This study also designs a multi-angle bracket to make the oblique boundary oblique 45 degrees. This research uses high-voltage electric discharge to generate electric spark bubbles, which act as cavitation bubbles. When the explosion source is at different distances from the oblique 45-degree boundary, a high-speed camera is used to capture the pulsation process of electric spark bubbles. A pressure sensor is used to measure the pulsating load of the electric spark bubbles on the oblique 45-degree boundary during the pulsation process. In this study, we use the dimensionless parameter ζ to represent the curvature of the oblique 45-degree boundary. The dimensionless parameter γ is used to represent the shortest distance between the explosion source and the oblique 45-degree boundary. It is found through experiments that the oscillation characteristics and pulsating load of electric spark bubbles will be affected by ζ and γ. This study summarized six types of unique bubble pulse shapes from 44 groups of experiments. They are “mushroom shape without jet”, “mound shape with jet”, “jellyfish shape with jet”, “oval shape with jet”, “drop shape without jet”, and “spherical shape without jet”. In this paper, the ABAQUS/Explicit is used to simulate the ring-shaped bubble that is not clearly captured by the high-speed camera. Finally, the study summarizes the shock wave load generated during the explosion, the first pulsation load, and the second pulsation load of electric spark bubbles, and finds an obvious overall trend of change.

It is well known that the bubble dynamics and load characteristics of cavitation bubbles depend to a great extent on their proximity to the boundary. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between the boundary curvature and bubble dynamics, as well as the load characteristics, and summarize the relevant change laws. This study takes three hemispheres of different curvatures and one flat board as its main research boundaries. The hemisphere was chosen as the curved surface boundary because the hemisphere represents the simplest type of curved surface boundary. This method allowed us to easily observe the experimental results and summarize the change laws of bubble dynamics and load characteristics. A high voltage electricity of 400 V was used to produce stable and repeatable electric spark bubbles in this experiment. Since the pulsation time of the bubbles is very short, we used a high-speed camera to acquire the necessary photographs. We also used a Hopkinson bar (HPB) to measure the bubble collapse load. Suppose that the dimensionless parameter of curvature is ζ and the dimensionless parameter of the explosion distance is γ. By summarizing the 44 groups of the experimental results under different combinations of ζ and γ, we found that the cavitation bubble dynamics and loading characteristics are affected by ζ. With an increase of ζ, the shockwave load and bubble collapse load will decrease. In addition, in terms of load characteristics, this study further verified the change trend of the shockwave load and bubble collapse load with γ. For the bubble shrink shape, this paper illustrates the relationship between the bubble’s shrink shape and its shrinkage speed. Four typical bubble shrink shapes are summarized. The effects of different ζ and γ values on the jet are preliminarily explored using the experimental results, and, by considering the experimental results, the developmental trends of the time of the bubble’s first pulsation period are discussed.

Ethylene response factor (ERF) transcription factors play important roles in regulating immune responses in plants. In our study, we characterized a member of the ERF transcription factor family, VaERF20, from the Chinese wild Vitis genotype, V. amurensis Rupr “Shuangyou”. Phylogenetic analysis indicated that VaERF20 belongs to group IXc of the ERF family, in which many members are known to contribute to fighting pathogen infection. Consistent with this, expression of VaERF20 was induced by treatment with the necrotrophic fungal pathogen Botrytis cinerea (B. cinerea) in “Shuangyou” and V. vinifera “Red Globe”. Arabidopsis thaliana plants over-expressing VaERF20 displayed enhanced resistance to B. cinerea and the bacterium Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato (Pst) DC3000. Patterns of pathogen-induced reactive oxygen species (ROS) accumulation were entirely distinct in B. cinerea and PstDC3000 inoculated plants. Examples of both salicylic acid (SA) and jasmonic acid/ethylene (JA/ET) responsive defense genes were up-regulated after B. cinerea and PstDC3000 inoculation of the VaERF20-overexpressing transgenic A. thaliana plants. Evidence of pattern-triggered immunity (PTI), callose accumulation and stomatal defense, together with increased expression of PTI genes, was also greater in the transgenic lines. These data indicate that VaERF20 participates in various signal transduction pathways and acts as an inducer of immune responses.