Profile of biological characterizations and clinical application of corneal stem/progenitor cells.

Corneal stem/progenitor cells are typical adult stem/progenitor cells. The human cornea covers the front of the eyeball, which protects the eye from the outside environment while allowing vision. The location and function demand the cornea to maintain its transparency and to continuously renew its epithelial surface by replacing injured or aged cells through a rapid turnover process in which corneal stem/progenitor cells play an important role.

Histone Modification and Chromatin Remodeling During the Seed Life Cycle.

Seeds are essential for the reproduction and dispersion of spermatophytes. The seed life cycle from seed development to seedling establishment proceeds through a series of defined stages regulated by distinctive physiological and biochemical mechanisms. The role of histone modification and chromatin remodeling in seed behavior has been intensively studied in recent years.

Molecular characterisation and expression analysis of NAC transcription factor genes in wild Medicago falcata under abiotic stresses.

The No apical meristem-Arabidopsis transcription activation factor-Cup-shaped cotyledon (NAC) proteins play vital roles in plant development processes and responses to abiotic stress. In this study, 146 unigenes were identified as NAC genes from wild Medicago falcata L. by RNA sequencing.

The Role of PPARs in Pathological Cardiac Hypertrophy and Heart Failure.

Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs) are ligand-activated transcription factors involved in the regulation of lipid metabolism, energy production, and inflammation. It is well established that all of the three isoforms of PPARs expressed in the cardiomyocytes, and that PPARs are closely involved in the regulation of lipid metabolism and energy homeostasis as well as many other different aspects in the heart. We think that PPARs are very important therapeutic targets for drug development, however, the drugs targeting at PPARs meet some trouble in clinical practice, especially the reported side effects related to heart failure.

Robust face alignment under occlusion via regional predictive power estimation.

Face alignment has been well studied in recent years, however, when a face alignment model is applied on facial images with heavy partial occlusion, the performance deteriorates significantly. In this paper, instead of training an occlusion-aware model with visibility annotation, we address this issue via a model adaptation scheme that uses the result of a local regression forest (RF) voting method. In the proposed scheme, the consistency of the votes of the local RF in each of several oversegmented regions is used to determine the reliability of predicting the location of the facial landmarks.