Reliability of motor and sensory neural decoding by threshold crossings for intracortical brain-machine interface.

Objective: For intracortical neurophysiological studies, spike sorting is an important procedure to isolate single units for analyzing specific functions. However, whether spike sorting is necessary or not for neural decoding applications is controversial. Several studies showed that using threshold crossings (TC) instead of spike sorting could also achieve a similar satisfactory performance.

Real microgravity condition promoted regeneration capacity of induced pluripotent stem cells during the TZ-1 space mission.

Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are reprogrammed somatic cells that gained self-renewal and differentiation capacity similar to embryonic stem cells. Taking the precious opportunity of the TianZhou-1 spacecraft mission, we studied the effect of space microgravity (µg) on the self-renewal capacity of iPSCs. Murine iPSCs carrying pluripotency reporter Oct4-GFP were used.

Metformin administration prevents memory impairment induced by hypobaric hypoxia in rats.

Metformin, an antidiabetic biguanide, reduces hyperglycemia by improving glucose utilization and reducing gluconeogenesis. Recently, an increasing number of studies have shown that metformin also led to a significant clinical improvement in memory and cognition in different clinical settings. In the present study, we investigated whether metformin administration protects against memory impairment and neuron damage caused by acute exposure to hypobaric hypoxia and screened the possible molecular mechanisms with a focused gene array.

Spaceflight Promoted Myocardial Differentiation of Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells: Results from Tianzhou-1 Space Mission.

During space travel, exposure to microgravity may have profound influence on the physiological function of mammalian cells. In this study, we took opportunity of the Tianzhou-1 (TZ-1) mission to investigate how spaceflight may affect cardiac differentiation of mouse induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). A bioreactor was engineered to perform cell culturing and the time-lapse imaging experiments on-orbit.

Deubiquitinase Mysm1 regulates macrophage survival and polarization.

Macrophages play pivotal roles in innate and adaptive immune response, tissue homeostasis and cancer development. Their development and heterogeneity are tightly controlled by epigenetic program and transcription factors. Deubiquitinase Mysm1 plays crucial roles in regulating stem cell maintenance and immune cell development.

Cortical Inflammation is Increased in a DSS-Induced Colitis Mouse Model.

While inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) might be a risk factor in the development of brain dysfunctions, the underlying mechanisms are largely unknown. Here, mice were treated with 5% dextran sodium sulfate (DSS) in drinking water and sacrificed on day 7. The serum level of IL-6 increased, accompanied by elevation of the IL-6 and TNF-α levels in cortical tissue.

Advance in oral delivery systems for therapeutic protein.

Oral delivery is the most common method of drug administration with high safety and good compliance for patients. However, delivering therapeutic proteins to the target site via oral route involves tremendous challenge due to unfavourable conditions like biochemical barrier, mucus barrier and epithelial barriers. According to the functional differences of various protein drug delivery systems, the recent advances in pH responsive polymer-based drug delivery system, mucoadhesive polymer-based drug delivery system, absorption enhancers-based drug delivery system and composite polymer-based delivery system all were briefly summarised in this review, which not only clarified the clinic potential of these novel drug delivery systems, but also described the way for increasing oral bioavailability of therapeutic protein.

Injectable OPF/graphene oxide hydrogels provide mechanical support and enhance cell electrical signaling after implantation into myocardial infarct.

After myocardial infarction (MI), the scar tissue contributes to ventricular dysfunction by electrically uncoupling viable cardiomyocytes in the infarct region. Injection of a conductive hydrogel could not only provide mechanical support to the infarcted region, but also synchronize contraction and restore ventricular function by electrically connecting isolated cardiomyocytes to intact tissue. We created a conductive hydrogel by introducing graphene oxide (GO) nanoparticles into oligo(poly(ethylene glycol) fumarate) (OPF) hydrogels.

Efficient coding matters in the organization of the early visual system.

Individual areas in the brain are organized into a hierarchical network as a result of evolution. Previous work indicated that the receptive fields (RFs) of individual areas have been evolved to favor metabolically efficient neural codes. In this paper, we propose that not only the RFs of individual areas, but also the organization of adjacent neurons and the hierarchical structure composed of these areas have been evolved to support efficient coding.

Improving Generalization Based on -Norm Regularization for EEG-Based Motor Imagery Classification.

Multichannel electroencephalography (EEG) is widely used in typical brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. In general, a number of parameters are essential for a EEG classification algorithm due to redundant features involved in EEG signals. However, the generalization of the EEG method is often adversely affected by the model complexity, considerably coherent with its number of undetermined parameters, further leading to heavy overfitting.

A Fast, Open EEG Classification Framework Based on Feature Compression and Channel Ranking.

Superior feature extraction, channel selection and classification methods are essential for designing electroencephalography (EEG) classification frameworks. However, the performance of most frameworks is limited by their improper channel selection methods and too specifical design, leading to high computational complexity, non-convergent procedure and narrow expansibility. In this paper, to remedy these drawbacks, we propose a fast, open EEG classification framework centralized by EEG feature compression, low-dimensional representation, and convergent iterative channel ranking.