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Endometriosis (EM) is a chronic, estrogen-dependent inflammatory disease. Presently, the pathophysiology of EM is still unclear, and numerous studies have established that the immune system plays a major role in the pathophysiology of EM. Six microarray datasets were downloaded from the GEO public database. A total of 151 endometrial samples (72 ectopic endometria and 79 controls) were included in this study. CIBERSORT and ssGSEA were applied to calculate the immune infiltration of EM and control samples. Moreover, we validated four different correlation analyses to explore immune microenvironment of EM and finally identified M2 macrophage-related hub genes and further conducted the specific immunologic signaling pathway analysis by GSEA. The logistic regression model was investigated by ROC and further validated by two external datasets. From the results of the two immune infiltration assays, we concluded that M2 macrophages, regulatory T cells (Tregs), M1 macrophages, activated B cells, T follicular helper cells, activated dendritic cells, and resting NK cells have a significant difference between control and EM tissues. Through multidimensional correlation analysis, we found that macrophages play an important central role in cell-to-cell interactions, especially M2 macrophages. Four immune-related hub genes, namely FN1, CCL2, ESR1, and OCLN, are closely related to M2 macrophages and play a crucial role in the occurrence and immune microenvironment of endometriosis. The combined AUC of ROC prediction model in test and validation sets were 0.9815 and 0.8206, respectively. We conclude that M2 macrophages play a central role in the immune-infiltrating microenvironment of EM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is a regulator for the formation and maintenance of chronic pain in various chronic disorders and has been shown to increase in the serum of women with endometriosis. However, BDNF expression in the peritoneal fluid (PF) and ectopic lesions and its role in endometriosis pain remain unclear. Thus, this study aims to determine the BDNF concentrations in serum and PFs and BDNF expression levels in ectopic lesions and endometriotic stromal cells (ESCs) of women with endometriosis (n = 60). The obtained results were then compared with those of women without endometriosis (n = 38). Brain-derived neurotrophic factor concentrations in serum and PF, as well as the BDNF expression levels in ectopic lesions and endometriotic cells, were evaluated through enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, immunohistochemical staining, quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction, and Western blot analysis. As a result, BDNF concentrations in serum and PF were significantly higher in women with endometriosis with pain (2284.3 ± 51.5 pg/mL, n = 23; 58.8 ± 6.4 pg/mL, n = 16) than in women with endometriosis without pain (1999.8 ± 61.1 pg/mL, n = 37; 31.7 ± 2.9 pg/mL, n = 25; P < .01). Moreover, BDNF messenger RNA (mRNA) expression levels in ectopic lesions (8.97 ± 1.44, n = 29) were significantly higher than eutopic (0.97 ± 0.14, n = 16; P < .01) and control endometrium (1.23 ± 0.19, n = 18; P < .01) and were correlated with endometriosis pain (P < .05). Furthermore, increased BDNF mRNA and protein expression levels in ESCs induced by estradiol or interleukin 1β were removed using a phosphorylated extracellular-regulated protein kinase 1/2 inhibitor. These results suggest that BDNF may play an important role in the pathogenesis of endometriosis pain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this present study, a bio-adsorbent based on cerium immobilized cross-linked chitosan (CTS-Ce) composite was prepared and employed for the removal of fluoride from water. This bio-absorbent was characterized by fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET), energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), elemental mapping images (EMI) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analyses. Adsorption properties for fluoride removal were systematically investigated, including pH (2–11), initial fluoride concentrations (5.0–100 mg/L), contact time, temperature (10–40 °C) and co-existing ions. Besides, kinetics, isotherms, thermodynamics and regeneration were also studied to evaluate the fluoride adsorption performance on this adsorbent. Results showed the experimental data followed Langmuir isotherm and pseudo-second order kinetic model. The adsorption process was controlled by intra-particle diffusion and the maximum adsorption capacity calculated by Langmuir isotherm was 153 mg/g at 20 °C (close to experimental q e value 149 mg/g), which was higher than the raw chitosan (13.2 mg/g) and most of the reported adsorbents. The adsorption mechanisms for fluoride removal were (i) the electrostatic attraction among −NH 3 + and Ce 3+/4+ with F − ions, (ii) the ligand exchange between NO 3 − and F − and (iii) the formation of CTS-Ce-F complexation. This novel composite can be easily regenerated with NaOH solution while maintaining 78% removal efficiency after 3 cycles. It was believed that this composite had great potential to remove fluoride from contaminated water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Face hallucination is to synthesize high-resolution face image from the input low-resolution one. Although many two-step learning-based face hallucination approaches have been developed, they suffer from the expensive computational cost due to the separate calculation of the global and local models. To overcome this problem, we propose a correlative two-step learning-based face hallucination approach which bridges the gap between the global model and the local model. In the global phase, we build a global face hallucination framework by combining the steerable pyramid decomposition and the reconstruction. In the residue compensation phase, based on the combination weights and constituent samples obtained in the global phase, a residue face image is synthesized by the neighbor reconstruction algorithm to compensate the hallucinated global face image with subtle facial features. The ultimate hallucinated result is synthesized by adding the residue face image to the global face image. Compared with existing methods, in the global phase, our global face image is more similar to the original high-resolution face image. Furthermore, in the residue compensation phase, we use the combination weights and constituent samples obtained in the global phase to compute the residue face image, by which the computational efficiency can be greatly improved without compromising the quality of facial details. The experimental results and comparisons demonstrate that our approach can not only generate convincible high-resolution face images efficiently, but also has high computational efficiency. Furthermore, our proposed approach can be used to restore the damaged face images in image inpainting. The efficacy of our approach is validated by recovering the damaged face images with visually good results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Endometriosis is defined as a chronic inflammatory disease. Recent studies have shown that increased coagulation parameters including fibrinogen and platelets are associated with endometriosis. The objective of this study was to determine the levels of inflammatory markers and coagulation parameters and their correlations in women with endometriomas compared to those with benign ovarian cysts or normal pelvic anatomy.Methods: Between June 2015 and June 2017, a total of 548 women who underwent laparoscopic/laparotomic surgery for ovarian endometriomas (OMA group, n = 226), non-endometriosis benign ovarian cysts (Cyst group, n = 210) and tubal reanastomosis (Control group, n = 112) were recruited in this study. Inflammatory markers including c-reactive protein (CRP), neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio (PLR) and coagulation parameters including platelet count, thrombin time (TT), prothrombin time (PT), activated partial thromboplastin time, and plasma fibrinogen as well as CA-125 were determined.Results: Compared with Cyst group and Control group, TT and PT in OMA group were significantly shorter and plasma fibrinogen levels were significantly higher (P < 0.05). Moreover, the levels of plasma fibrinogen were positively correlated with CRP, NLR and PLR (P < 0.05). In addition, the confidence intervals for the area under the curve (AUC) for CA-125 × fibrinogen were significantly higher than those for CA-125 (0.904-0.952 vs. 0.899-0.949) in the diagnosis of endometrioma.Conclusions: These results indicate that women with endometriomas demonstrate a hypercoagulable status due to the inflammatory nature of endometriosis. The combined determination for CA-125 and fibrinogen demonstrate a higher area under the curve than the single detection of CA-125 in those with endometriomas compared to these with benign ovarian cysts.Trial Registration: This study was approved by the Human Ethics Committee of the Women's Hospital, School of Medicine, Zhejiang University (No.20170174) and all women provided written informed consent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purinergic receptor P2X ligand-gated ion channel 3 (P2X3) is crucially involved in peripheral nociceptive processes of somatic and visceral pain. Endometriosis pain is considered as a kind of inflammatory and neuropathic pain. However, whether P2X3 is involved in endometriosis pain has not been reported up to date. Here, we aimed to determine whether P2X3 expression in endometriotic lesions is involved in endometriosis pain, which is regulated by inflammatory mediators through extracellular regulated protein kinases (ERK) signalling pathway. We found that P2X3 expressions in endometriosis endometrium and endometriotic lesions were both significantly higher as compared with control endometrium (P<0.05), and both positively correlated with pain (P<0.05). The expression levels of phosphorylated –ERK (p-ERK), phosphorylated-cAMP-response element binding protein (p-CREB), and P2X3 in endometriotic stromal cells (ESCs) were all significantly increased in comparison to the initial levels after treated with interleukin (IL)-1β (P<0.05) or adenosine triphosphate (ATP) (P<0.05), respectively, and did not increase after the ESCs were pre-treated with ERK1/2 inhibitor. Additionally, P2X3 and calcitonin gene related peptide (CGRP) were co-expressed in endometriotic lesions. These obtained results suggest that P2X3 might be involved in endometriosis pain signal transduction via ERK signal pathway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding forest carbon cycling responses to atmospheric N deposition is critical to evaluating ecosystem N dynamics. The natural abundance of N (δN) has been suggested as an efficient and non-invasive tool to monitor N pools and fluxes. In this study, three successional forests in southern China were treated with four levels of N addition. In each treatment, we measured rates of soil N mineralization, nitrification, NO emission and inorganic N leaching as well as N concentration and δN of leaves, litters and soils. We found that foliar N concentration and δN were higher in the mature broadleaf forest than in the successional pine or mixed forests. Three-year continuous N addition did not change foliar N concentration, but significantly increased foliar δN ( p < 0.05). Also, N addition decreased the δN of top soil in the N-poor pine and mixed forests and significantly increased that of organic and mineral soils in N-rich broadleaf forests ( p < 0.05). In addition, the soil NO emission flux and inorganic N leaching rate increased with increasing N addition and were positively correlated with the N enrichment factor ( ε) of forest ecosystems. Our study indicates that δN of leaf, litter and soil integrates various information on plant species, forest stand age, exogenous N input and soil N transformation and loss, which can be used to monitor N availability and N dynamics in forest ecosystems caused by increasing N deposition in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]