Background: Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a serious microangiopathy resulting from diabetes. Salviae Miltiorrhizae Radix et Rhizoma (Danshen) is commonly used to treat cardiovascular diseases in clinics in China. However, whether it can also be used for DR treatment, along with its primary active compounds and underlying mechanisms of action, remains unclear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs a prominent complication of diabetes mellitus (DM) affecting microvasculature, diabetic retinopathy (DR) originates from blood-retinal barrier (BRB) damage. Natural polyphenolic compound chlorogenic acid (CGA) has already been reported to alleviate DR. This study delves into the concrete mechanism of the CGA-supplied protection against DR and elucidates its key target in retinal endothelial cells.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The renoprotective benefits of adding immunosuppressant therapy to corticosteroid (CS) treatment for immunoglobulin A nephropathy (IgAN) patients with less than 25% crescent formation (C1) remain uncertain, warranting further research.
Methods: A retrospective study was conducted on IgAN patients with crescent C1 lesions confirmed by renal biopsy at Xinqiao Hospital between May 1, 2017, and May 1, 2020. Patients were stratified into either the CS treatment group or the CS combined with an additional immunosuppressant therapy group.
Heparosan as the precursor for heparin biosynthesis has attracted intensive attention while Escherichia coli Nissle 1917 (EcN) has been applied as a chassis for heparosan biosynthesis. Here, after uncovering the pivotal role of KfiB in heparosan biosynthesis, we further demonstrate KfiB is involved in facilitating KpsT to translocate the nascent heparosan polysaccharide chain. As a result, an artificial expression cassette KfiACB was constructed with optimized RBS elements, resulting in 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe probiotic bacterium Nissle 1917 (EcN) holds significant promise for use in clinical and biological industries. However, the reliance on antibiotics to maintain plasmid-borne genes has overshadowed its benefits. In this study, we addressed this issue by engineering the endogenous cryptic plasmids pMUT1 and pMUT2.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBased on China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) data from 2019, this paper explores the impact of the residential pattern of coresidence with parents on the labor market performance of women in married families with minor children. The study finds that coresidence with parents significantly increases the possibility of female labor market participation and positively impacts women's employment income. To overcome the potential endogeneity problem of residential patterns, this paper uses the Heckman two-step method and the conditional mixed process estimation method (CMP method) for regression, and the conclusions remain robust.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe reported a case of a 7-year-old boy with pulmonary alveolar microlithiasis (PAM) and detected two novel compound heterozygous mutations of solute carrier family 34 member 2 (SLC34A2), EXON:2-6 duplication and c.1218 (EXON:11) C > A (p. Phe406Leu).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFertilization is a crucial agrological measure for agricultural production that can significantly impact the removal of Cd from irrigation water by paddy crusts (PC). In this study, laboratory and field experiments were conducted to investigate the impact of fertilization at low, medium, and high concentrations on the accumulation of Cadmium (Cd) in PC and the underlying mechanisms involved. The results showed that only low fertilizer concentration could promote the removal of Cd by PC, which reduced the Cd concentration in irrigation water from 19.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNucleic acid testing technology has made considerable progress in the last few years. However, there are still many challenges in the clinical application of multiple nucleic acid assays, such as how to ensure accurate results, increase speed and decrease cost. Herein, a three-way junction structure has been introduced to specifically translate analytes of loop-mediated isothermal amplification to a catalytic hairpin assembly.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe solutions neural networks find to solve a task are often inscrutable. We have had little insight into why particular structure emerges in a network. By reverse-engineering neural networks from dynamical principles, Dubreuil & Valente et.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFor large-scale vision tasks in biomedical images, the labeled data is often limited to train effective deep models. Active learning is a common solution, where a query suggestion method selects representative unlabeled samples for annotation, and the new labels are used to improve the base model. However, most query suggestion models optimize their learnable parameters only on the limited labeled data and consequently become less effective for the more challenging unlabeled data.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAn amino-functionalized water-retaining agent (PPM40-NH₂) and a water-retaining agent lacking functionalization (PPM40) were prepared to investigate their selective Cd(II) removal properties. The affinity for Cd(II) was increased after introducing the amino functional group. The of PPM40-NH₂ was 3-7 fold higher than that of PPM40 although the was 100-1000 times higher than that of .
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper presents the gradient-guided image super-resolution reconstruction for terahertz imaging to improve the image quality, taking advantage of super-resolution reconstruction based on adaptive super-pixel gradient field transform. Moreover, spatial entropy-based enhancement and a bilateral filter are introduced to ensure better performance of the reconstruction. Furthermore, we compare the performance of reconstruction operated on terahertz images with frequencies of 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTomographic SAR (TomoSAR) is a remote sensing technique that extends the conventional two-dimensional (2-D) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging principle to three-dimensional (3-D) imaging. It produces 3-D point clouds with unavoidable noise that seriously deteriorates the quality of 3-D imaging and the reconstruction of buildings over urban areas. However, existing methods for TomoSAR point cloud processing notably rely on data segmentation, which influences the processing efficiency and denoising performance to a large extent.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOpt Express
February 2019
An active multifunctional terahertz modulator based on plasmon-induced transparency (PIT) metasurface under the effect of external infrared light was investigated theoretically and experimentally. A distinct transparency window, which resulted from the near-field coupling between two resonators, could be observed in the transmission spectra. Experimental results showed a phenomenon infrared light induced blue shift on the both resonator with increasing optical powers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe characteristics of the electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) analog exposed under different illumination powers have been investigated theoretically and experimentally. The EIT analog is composed of a fixed aluminum structure fabricated on the silicon substrate. It was found that the resonance degree of the transparent window displayed a decreasing trend, and a blueshift phenomenon emerged by increasing the powers of the laser.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEmerging evidence suggests that neuro-inflammation begins early and drives the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD), and anti-inflammatory therapies are under clinical development. However, several anti-inflammatory compounds failed to improve memory in clinical trials, indicating that reducing inflammation alone might not be enough. On the other hand, neuro-inflammation is implicated in a number of mental disorders which share the same therapeutic targets.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe transmission and dielectric spectra of ferroelectric STO/PT superlattice on Si substrate under simultaneous external optical and electric field were investigated and compared at room temperature. Results found that when with an optical field, the electric field realized an effective modulation on the transmission, which displayed a diode property. In addition, a comprehensive model combined with Debye relaxation and Lorentz model was used to analyze the dielectric spectra, variation of the soft mode with external field was put emphasis on exploring.
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