Fluoride induces hepatointestinal damage and vitamin B mitigation by regulating IL-17A and Bifidobacterium in ileum.

Introduction: Fluorosis is a global public health disease affecting more than 50 countries and 500 million people. Excessive fluoride damages the liver and intestines, yet the mechanisms and therapeutic approaches remain unclear.

Objectives: To explore the mechanisms by which fluoride-induced intestinal-hepatic damage and vitamin B alleviation.

Relieved Fluoride-Induced Hepatic and Ileal Toxicity via Inflammatory Response and Bile Acid Transporters in Mice.

Fluoride is a pervasive environmental contaminant. Prolonged excessive fluoride intake can inflict severe damage on the liver and intestines. Previous 16S rDNA sequencing revealed a decrease in ileal abundance during fluoride-induced hepatointestinal injury.

Fluoride induces pyroptosis via IL-17A-mediated caspase-1/11-dependent pathways and Bifidobacterium intervention in testis.

Fluoride, a ubiquitous environmental pollutant, poses a significant public health threat. Our previous study revealed a correlation between fluoride-induced testicular pyroptosis and male reproductive dysfunction. However, the underlying mechanism remains unclear.

Experimental Study on the Interface Characteristics of Reinforced Crushed Rock Cushion Layer Based on Direct Shear Tests.

Through indoor large-scale direct shear tests, the interface characteristics of the crushed rock cushions layer reinforced with ParaLink geogrid were studied. The test results indicate that the shear strength of the crushed rock aggregate and the interface strength parameters have a non-linear relationship with the normal stress. The addition of the geogrid reduces the shear strength of the crushed rock aggregate and the interface strength parameters, which is mainly due to the relatively large size, small thickness, and high smoothness of the geogrid.

Integration of Cobalt Phthalocyanine, Acetylene Black and Cu O Nanocubes for Efficient Electroreduction of CO to C H.

Suppressing side reactions and simultaneously enriching key intermediates during CO reduction reaction (CO RR) has been a challenge. Here, we propose a tandem catalyst (Cu O NCs-C-Copc) consisting of acetylene black, cobalt phthalocyanine (Copc) and cuprous oxide nanocubes (Cu O NCs) for efficient CO -to-ethylene conversion. Density-functional theory (DFT) calculation combined with experimental verification demonstrated that Copc can provide abundant CO to nearby copper sites while acetylene black successfully reduces the formation energies of key intermediates, leading to enhanced C H selectivity.

CuO Nanoparticles Wrapped by N-Doped Carbon Nanotubes for Efficient Electroreduction of CO to C Products.

Electroreduction of carbon dioxide (CO) to C products (ethylene and ethanol) using efficient catalysts is a feasible approach to alleviate the climate crisis. Cuprous oxide nanoparticles (CuO NPs) are a promising catalyst for C production but suffer from inherent selectivity and durability. To address this challenge, a CuO NPs-nitrogen-doped carbon nanotube (CuO NPs-NCNT) composite was prepared with carbon nanotubes (CNTs), CuO NPs, and phthalocyanine (Pc).

Global and Local Feature Reconstruction for Medical Image Segmentation.

Learning how to capture long-range dependencies and restore spatial information of down-sampled feature maps are the basis of the encoder-decoder structure networks in medical image segmentation. U-Net based methods use feature fusion to alleviate these two problems, but the global feature extraction ability and spatial information recovery ability of U-Net are still insufficient. In this paper, we propose a Global Feature Reconstruction (GFR) module to efficiently capture global context features and a Local Feature Reconstruction (LFR) module to dynamically up-sample features, respectively.

GDCSeg-Net: general optic disc and cup segmentation network for multi-device fundus images.

Accurate segmentation of optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC) in fundus images is crucial for the analysis of many retinal diseases, such as the screening and diagnosis of glaucoma and atrophy segmentation. Due to domain shift between different datasets caused by different acquisition devices and modes and inadequate training caused by small sample dataset, the existing deep-learning-based OD and OC segmentation networks have poor generalization ability for different fundus image datasets. In this paper, adopting the mixed training strategy based on different datasets for the first time, we propose an encoder-decoder based general OD and OC segmentation network (named as GDCSeg-Net) with the newly designed multi-scale weight-shared attention (MSA) module and densely connected depthwise separable convolution (DSC) module, to effectively overcome these two problems.

Potential Protective Effect of Riboflavin Against Pathological Changes in the Main Organs of Male Mice Induced by Fluoride Exposure.

Long-term exposure to excessive fluorine could cause damage to various tissues and organs in human and animals. However, there is no effective antidote to prevent and cure fluorosis except for avoiding fluoride intake. As an essential nutrient, riboflavin (VB) has been identified to relieve oxidative stress and inflammation in animal tissues caused by other toxic substances, whether it can alleviate the damage caused by fluoride is unknown.

Synthesis and characterization of a flexible fluorescent magnetic FeO@SiO/CdTe-NH nanoprobe.

In this study, we designed and synthesized two novel fluorescent magnetic nanoparticles. FeO@SiO-NH-GSH-CdTe (FSGC) (GSH = glutathione) nanoparticles were synthesized using amino-functionalized FeO@SiO nanoparticles and GSH-stabilized CdTe quantum dots (CdTe QDs), while flexible FeO@SiO-NH-GSH-CdTe-NH-NH (FSGCN) nanoparticles were synthesized using the FSGC precursor and 1,6-hexamethylenediamine. These two kinds of nanoprobes exhibited excellent magnetic and fluorescent properties.

Equivalent modeling of PMSG-based wind power plants considering LVRT capabilities: electromechanical transients in power systems.

Hardware protection and control action are two kinds of low voltage ride-through technical proposals widely used in a permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG). This paper proposes an innovative clustering concept for the equivalent modeling of a PMSG-based wind power plant (WPP), in which the impacts of both the chopper protection and the coordinated control of active and reactive powers are taken into account. First, the post-fault DC link voltage is selected as a concentrated expression of unit parameters, incoming wind and electrical distance to a fault point to reflect the transient characteristics of PMSGs.

Respiratory muscle pacing with chronically implanted intramuscular Permaloc electrodes: A feasibility study.

We tested the feasibility of stimulating upper-intercostal and abdominal muscles plus the diaphragm by using chronically implanted intramuscular electrodes.During two survival surgeries with six dogs, intramuscular electrodes were implanted bilaterally in the three respiratory muscles. Standard stimulation of the diaphragm was conducted.

Stimulating multiple respiratory muscles with intramuscular Permaloc electrodes.

Objective: To test the feasibility of implanting intramuscular electrodes (Permaloc, Synapse Biomedical Inc, Oberlin OH) with self-securing polypropylene anchors to stimulate upper-intercostal and abdominal muscles plus the diaphragm.

Methods/results: In 6 anesthetized dogs, 12 Permaloc electrodes were implanted in the 3 respiratory muscles (4 in each muscle group). Tidal volume with diaphragmatic stimulation was 310 +/- 38 mL (mean +/- SE); with upper intercostal stimulation, it was 68 +/- 18 mL; and with combined diaphragm intercostal stimulation, it was 438 +/- 78 mL.

Vitamin E prevents ethanol-induced inflammatory, hormonal, and cytotoxic changes in reproductive tissues.

Ethanol causes decreased function of the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axis. Ethanol resulted in inflammatory changes in HPG manifested by increased concentrations of pro-inflammatory cytokines. Since, such cytokines have deleterious effects on functions of HPG, it seemed possible that ethanol's suppressive action could be due, at least in part, to this inflammation.

Ethanol-induced alterations in Rab proteins: possible implications for pituitary dysfunction.

Chronic exposure of pubertal male rats to ethanol results in a decline in serum testosterone, increased gonadotropins, pituitary luteinizing hormone (LH) and follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) content, and decreased or inappropriately normal serum LH and FSH levels, suggesting impaired secretory release of gonadotropins. The molecular mechanisms behind this disorder are undefined, but a disruption of vesicle-mediated secretory processes is possible because intracellular protein trafficking pathways are involved in secretion of glycoproteins such as FSH and LH. Because small GTP-binding proteins of Rab family have been implicated as key regulators of membrane and protein trafficking in mammalian cells, this study was designed to test if ethanol-impaired pituitary FSH and LH secretion is associated with changes in Rab proteins, particularly Rab1B, Rab3B, Rab6, and Rab11.

Exposure to ethanol induces oxidative damage in the pituitary gland.

Chronic exposure of pubertal male rats to ethanol results in a decline in serum testosterone and decreased or inappropriately normal serum luteinizing hormone (LH) and follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) levels suggesting a functional defect in the pituitary. The molecular mechanisms behind this disorder are undefined. A role for ethanol-induced oxidative damage in the pathophysiology is supported by studies in liver, muscle, and heart of experimental animals, but there is limited evidence in the pituitary.

Calponin is expressed by Sertoli cells within rat testes and is associated with actin-enriched cytoskeleton.

Within seminiferous tubules, Sertoli cells form three types of actin-filament-containing cell junctions, viz., tight junctions, ectoplasmic specializations, and tubulobulbar complexes. These Sertoli cell junctions are involved in the formation of the blood-testis barrier, germ cell translocation, and the release of spermatozoa.

Antiphospholipid antibodies before and after liver transplantation.

Objective: The aim of this study was to determine whether liver transplantation of patients with antiphospholipid antibodies (APA) is 1) adversely affected with vascular thrombosis and 2) whether such antibodies persist post transplantation.

Methods: Twelve patients with APA awaiting transplant were identified and characterized biochemically and immunologically. Each had the level of APA determined using commercially available enzyme-linked immunoassay kits before, during, and after liver transplantation.

Effects of soybean extract on morphology and survival of Caco-2, SW620, and HT-29 cells.

Soybean consumption may be beneficial to prevention of certain human cancers. Low incidence of colon cancer in Asian countries is associated with consumption of soybean products. A limited number of human and animal studies suggested that soybean consumption might prevent colon cancer; other studies did not support this conclusion.