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IntroductionAsthenozoospermia (AZS) is a leading cause of male infertility, affecting an estimated 18% of infertile patients. Kinesin proteins function as molecular motors capable of moving along microtubules. The highly conserved kinesin family member 9 (KIF9) localizes to the central microtubule pair in the flagella of Chlamydomonas cells. The loss of KIF9 expression in mice has been linked to AZS phenotypes.MethodsVariant screening was performed by whole exome sequencing from 92 Chinese infertile patients with AZS. Western blot was used to was used for analyzing of candidate proteins expression. Patients’ sperm samples were stained with immunofluorescent to visualise proteins localization and were visualised by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to determine axoneme structures. Co-immunoprecipitation assay was used to verify the binding proteins of KIF9. In vitro fertilization (IVF) was used to evaluate the efficiency of clinical treatment.ResultsBi-allelic KIF9 loss-of-function variants were identified in two unrelated Chinese males exhibiting atypical sperm motility phenotypes. Both of these men exhibited typical AZS and suffered from infertility together with the complete absence of KIF9 expression. In contrast to these KIF9-deficient patients, positive KIF9 staining was evident throughout the flagella of sperm from normal control individuals. KIF9 was able to interact with the microtubule central pair (CP) component hydrocephalus-inducing protein homolog (HYDIN) in human samples. And KIF9 was undetectable in spermatozoa harboring CP deletions. The morphologicy of KIF9-deficient spermatozoa appeared normal under gross examination and TEM. Like in mice, in vitro fertilization was sufficient to overcome the fertility issues for these two patientsDiscussionThese findings indicate that KIF9 associates with the central microtubules in human sperm and that it functions to specifically regulate flagellar swinging. Overall, these results offer greater insight into the biological functions of KIF9 in the assembly of the human flagella and its role in male fertility.

Hirsutella sinensis, the anamorph of Ophiocordyceps sinensis (syn. Cordyceps sinensis), is a great substitute for precious and rare wild Cordyceps sinensis to effectively treat a variety of lung and kidney diseases. In this study, an α-glucan (named as HSWP-2a) was obtained by hot water extraction, DEAE-cellulose separation, and Sepharose CL-6B purification from H. sinensis mycelia. Different from known α-glucans, HSWP-2a is an α-(1 → 4)-D-glucan that branched at O-6, O-3, or O-2 with a terminal 1-linked α-D-Glcp as side chain, with an average molecular weight of 870.70 kDa. Immunological tests showed that HSWP-2a could remarkably enhance the phagocytosis of macrophages and increase the production of NO, IL-1β, IL-6, and TNF-α, via activating the p38, JNK, and NF-κB signaling pathways. Moreover, HSWP-2a could significantly promote splenic lymphocyte proliferation. Taken together, HSWP-2a may be potentially utilized as a natural immunomodulatory agent.

Based on 454 articles related to college students' entrepreneurial intention in the Web of Science Core Collection, this study explores the hotspots and trends of international research on college students' entrepreneurial intention by using a combination of coding and bibliometric analysis. The research hotspots are as follows: the theory of planned behavior is the main theoretical basis of these studies; entrepreneurship education is a more important predictor of college students' entrepreneurial intention, and this relationship is regulated by multiple variables; personal traits, several types of capital theories, social entrepreneurial intention, and quantitative research methods are also common. The research fronts include the following: systematic review of the field, continuous attention to the theory of planned behavior, and in-depth exploration of the differentiated influence of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention. Finally, we proposed research thinking and prospects related to research on undergraduates' entrepreneurial intention and entrepreneurship education.

Objective: To explore and analyze the risk factors for postoperative complications in patients with Hirschsprung’s disease (HD). Methods: Patients with HD admitted to the hospital from 2015 to 2020 were reviewed in this retrospective study. Follow-up data collected included constipation, fecal incontinence, anastomotic fistula, Hirschsprung’s-associated enterocolitis (HAEC), and readmission. The putative risk factors for postoperative complications in patients with HD were as follows: clinical classification, gender, operative age, hemoglobin and serum albumin levels and preoperative HAEC. A follow-up survey was conducted for all patients by telephone. Data were analyzed statistically using SPSS version 23.0. Results: A total of 154 patients were included in the study, of whom 119 patients were followed up successfully. 53 patients who had complications postoperatively were compared to 66 patients who had no related complications. Among patients with complications: 8 had constipation, 22 had fecal incontinence and 33 had HAEC. The gender, operative age, hemoglobin levels and preoperative HAEC did not differ significantly between the two groups. However, significant differences were observed between the 2 groups in clinical classification, surgical method, serum albumin level, and whether or not a one-stage operation was performed (P

Ma-Nuo-Xi Decoction (MNXD) is well-known in Tibetan medicine to be in line with the theory of treatment determination based on syndrome differentiation. However, the components responsible for its immunomodulating effect are unknown. In this study, three polysaccharide components-MNXD-P, MNXD-BD-P, and MNXD-AD-P-were isolated from MNXD and its basic and auxiliary prescription decoctions, of which MNXD-BD-P is composed of β-(1,4)-d-glucan and RG-I pectin, MNXD-AD-P contains mainly α-(1,4)-d-glucan and some amount of arabinogalactan and/or arabinorhamnogalactan, and MNXD-P contains components of both MNXD-BD-P and MNXD-AD-P. And treatment with these polysaccharides could significantly improve the host's specific and non-specific immunity, including cellular and humoral immunities, as well as promote recovery from myelosuppression in cyclophosphamide (CTX)-immunosuppressed mice. To our knowledge, this is the first report on chemical and immunoactivity study on polysaccharides from traditional Tibetan medicine compounds, which may provide a new idea for development of carbohydrate drugs from them.

Hollow porous materials with internal spaces or voids and highly porous structures have demonstrated desirable effectiveness in numerous areas. However, the traditional template methods for their synthesis are limited due to their sophisticated operations, expensive templates and low yield. Herein, with the aim to establish an efficient route for the scalable and low-cost production of hollow materials under mild conditions, we report a facile and versatile template-free strategy to prepare hollow porous metal oxide spheres with high specific surface areas, large pore volumes and abundant pores. The as-prepared NiO microspheres demonstrated a noteworthy surface area of 351 m2 g−1 and large pore volume of 0.55 mL g−1. The features of the preparation were based on spray technology and wet chemical methods. Moreover, we demonstrated the construction pathway and the possible formation mechanism of these hollow superstructures. The regulation of the shell thickness of the hollow microspheres was explored. Moreover, a series of hierarchical architectures and multicomponent hollow materials (e.g., MgO/Al2O3) was also designed and investigated.

With diverse presentation attacks emerging continually, generalizable face anti-spoofing (FAS) has drawn growing attention. Most existing methods implement domain generalization (DG) on the complete representations. However, different image statistics may have unique properties for the FAS tasks. In this work, we separate the complete representation into content and style ones. A novel Shuffled Style Assembly Network (SSAN) is proposed to extract and reassemble different content and style features for a stylized feature space. Then, to obtain a generalized representation, a contrastive learning strategy is developed to emphasize liveness-related style information while suppress the domain-specific one. Finally, the representations of the correct assemblies are used to distinguish between living and spoofing during the inferring. On the other hand, despite the decent performance, there still exists a gap between academia and industry, due to the difference in data quantity and distribution. Thus, a new large-scale benchmark for FAS is built up to further evaluate the performance of algorithms in reality. Both qualitative and quantitative results on existing and proposed benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods. The codes will be available at https://github.com/wangzhuo2019/SSAN., Comment: Accepted by CVPR2022

Additional file 8: Table S4. List of differential Gene Expression in mouse lung tissue.

Additional file 6: Table S2. Peak Analysis of IMRC-EVs and MRC5-EVs.

Additional file 5: Table S1. Primers used for PCR amplification.

Additional file 1.

Supplemental Material for The Timing Effect of Childhood Maltreatment in Depression: A Systematic Review and meta-Analysis by Muzi Li, Tingting Gao, Yingying Su, Yingzhe Zhang, Guang Yang, Carl D’Arcy, and Xiangfei Meng in Trauma, Violence, & Abuse

BackgroundTo determine whether the embryo developmental stage affects biochemical or clinical pregnancy loss in young women undergoing frozen-thawed embryo transfer (FET) and to investigate the underlying mechanism.MethodsThis was a retrospective study including a total of 18,34 β-HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin)-positive FET cycles. According to the morphological appearance (MA) of transferred blastocysts, FET cycles with blastocysts were divided into two groups: Group A: morphologically good (MG) blastocysts only, and Group B: at least one morphologically non-good (MNG) blastocyst. FET cycles with day 3 cleavage embryos were assigned as Group C. Biochemical and clinical pregnancy loss were the main outcome measures.Result(s)We predicted 78% in vivo-formed MG and 53.9% in vivo-formed day 5 blastocysts in Group C. (a) Including cases in Group A and Group B for binary logistic regression, we showed that Group B and day 6 blastocysts had significantly higher rates of BPL and CPL than Group A and day 5 blastocysts, respectively. (b) Including cases in Group A, Group B, and Group C for binary logistic regression, we showed that Group C had a significantly higher rate of BPL than Group A and day 5 blastocysts and a similar rate of BPL as Group B and day 6 blastocysts. Group C had a higher rate of CPL than Group A (p=0.071) and day 5 blastocysts (p=0.039), and a lower rate of CPL than Group B (p=0.199) and day 6 blastocysts (p=0.234).Conclusion(s)(1) MA and days of usable blastocysts could serve as independent factors affecting the occurrence of BPL and CPL. (2) Transfer of day 3 cleavage embryos may produce “unusable blastocysts” in vivo, which significantly increased the rate of BPL. (3) The rate of CPL resulting from the transfer of day 3 embryos may depend on the rate of in vivo-formed MG or day 5 blastocysts. Our study indicated that the difference in the BPL or CPL between transfer of blastocysts and day 3 cleavage embryos may largely depend on the quality of embryos transferred.

Yongping copper deposit, associated with S-W-Pb-Zn mineralization, is located at the southern margin of the Jiangshan-Shaoxing suture and between the Yanshanian granite belt and the Hercynian-Indosinian depression in the northern Wuyi Mountains. Late Paleozoic stratigraphy, Yanshanian granite, and copper ore body is controlled by thrust napper structure, as the basement rocks of the Zhoutan Group thrusting on the Late Paleozoic strata, Early Yanshanian biotite granite-granodiorite, quartz porphyry, and granite porphyry intruding along weak planes of thrust, and stratiform ore bodies occurring within the skarnized Carboniferous Yejiawan Formation. The ore body occurred in garnet skarn, phyllitic shale and skarnized marble. This study deciphers the ore-forming episodes and metallogenic process of the deposit based on mineralization-alteration zonation and textures of the ores. Exploration and mining working faces indicate that the mineralization and alteration of the deposit is granite-centered. If taking one side into consideration, i. e., from the granite to the limestone wall rock, following zonation can be delineated : (1) skarn minerals vary from garnet, via diopside, to wollastonite ; (2) the garnet varies in color from red, via brown, to green; (3) economic mineralization mainly occurring as banded and stock veins in the brown garnet skarn zone, leading to the ore grade increasing firstly and then decreasing. Metal mineral association of banded and stock veins in skarns, metasandstone-shales, and large sulfide-quartz veins ( up to 10m wide) is identical, consisting mainly of pyrite, scheelite, galena, sphalerite and chalcopyrite, indicating that different types of ores in the Yongping copper deposit are products of the same hydrothermal mineralization system in diverse wall rocks and ore-controlling structures. According to mineral assemblages and ore textures, six metallogenic stages can be divided for the deposit, which are garnet, mag-hematite, scheelite, iron-copper sulfide, lead-zinc sulfide, and carbonate stages, respectively. Skarn zonation formed during garnet stage, and massive pyrrhotite-grunerite formed at late period of this stage; magnetite, hematite composed mag-hematite stage; scheelite stage dominate tungsten mineralization, occurring as quartz-scheelite stock and disseminated wolframite. Iron-copper sulfide stage is the main period of copper mineralization; lead-zinc and carbonate stage likely marks the late and end of the primary mineralization, respectively.

Background Ma-Nuo-Xi decoction (MNXD), as well as its hundreds of derivative preparations, has been used in Tibetan medicine since the 14th century. MNXD is in accordance with the theory of treatment determination based on syndrome differentiation. This study aimed to compare the effect of the auxiliary MNXD prescription (MNXD-AD) with that of the basic MNXD prescription (MNXD-BD) on the immunostimulating activity of MNXD. Methods The immunopotentiation of MNXD, MNXD-BD, and MNXD-AD was evaluated using a cyclophosphamide (CTX)-immunosuppressed mouse model. Their influences on non-specific and specific immunity were evaluated using immune organ indexes, peripheral white blood cell (WBC) count, red blood cell (RBC) count, platelet count, phagocytosis, macrophage-secreted nitric oxide (NO) and cytokines, natural killer (NK) cytotoxic activity, lymphocyte proliferation, serum cytokines, splenic T-lymphocyte subpopulations, and quantitative hemolysis of sheep red blood cell (QHS SRBC) assays. Results MNXD, MNXD-BD, and MNXD-AD increased the spleen and thymus indexes, as well as the peripheral WBC, RBC, and platelet counts. They also promoted phagocytosis, NO and cytokine secretion from macrophages, NK cytotoxic activity, and lymphocyte proliferation, and also raised the CD4+ /CD8+ T-cell ratio, serum cytokine concentrations, and haemolysin formation in CTX-treated immunosuppressed mice. Compared with MNXD-BD and MNXD-AD, MNXD was superior in restoring the phagocytic index, concanavalin A (ConA)-induced T-lymphocyte proliferation, NO secretion from macrophages, and haemolysin formation, as well as the levels of interleukin 1 beta (IL-1β), and serum interleukin-2 (IL-2) and interferon gamma (INF-γ). Conclusions MNXD, MNXD-BD, and MNXD-AD have excellent immunostimulating and myelosuppression-restoring activities on CTX-immunosuppressed mice. Among them, MNXD-AD might be an immunomodulator, which may happen to be in line with the clinical experience of Tibetan medicine physicians of using it to promote the efficacy of MNXD-BD.

Background Most species of the Russulaceae are ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi, which are widely distributed in different types of forest ecology and drive important ecological and economic functions. Little is known about the composition variation of the Russulaceae fungal community aboveground and in the root and soil during the growing season (June–October) from a Quercus mongolica forest. In this study, we investigated the changes in the composition of the Russulaceae during the growing season of this type of forest in Wudalianchi City, China. Methods To achieve this, the Sanger sequencing method was used to identify the Russulaceae aboveground, and the high-throughput sequencing method was used to analyze the species composition of the Russulaceae in the root and soil. Moreover, we used the Pearson correlation analysis, the redundancy analysis and the multivariate linear regression analysis to analyze which factors significantly affected the composition and distribution of the Russulaceae fungal community. Results A total of 56 species of Russulaceae were detected in the Q. mongolica forest, which included 48 species of Russula, seven species of Lactarius, and one species of Lactifluus. Russula was the dominant group. During the growing season, the sporocarps of Russula appeared earlier than those of Lactarius. The number of species aboveground exhibited a decrease after the increase and were significantly affected by the average monthly air temperature (r = −0.822, p = 0.045), average monthly relative humidity (r = −0.826, p = 0.043), monthly rainfall (r = 0.850, p = 0.032), soil moisture (r = 0.841, p = 0.036) and soil organic matter (r = 0.911, p = 0.012). In the roots and soils under the Q. mongolica forest, the number of species did not show an apparent trend. The number of species from the roots was the largest in September and the lowest in August, while those from the soils were the largest in October and the lowest in June. Both were significantly affected by the average monthly air temperature (r2 = 0.6083, p = 0.040) and monthly rainfall (r2 = 0.6354, p = 0.039). Moreover, the relative abundance of Russula and Lactarius in the roots and soils showed a linear correlation with the relative abundance of the other fungal genera.

This paper takes millet powder as the test object, adopts extrusion modification treatment, optimizes the technological parameters of the modification by single factor and response interview. The results show that the best technological parameters of the modified rice powder are: the water content is 22%, the extrusion temperature is 140 °C, the particle size of millet powder is 142 μm and the screw speed is 20Hz. Under this condition, the gelatinization degree of millet flour was 93.2%. The factors influencing the paste degree of millet powder were: water addition > extrusion temperature > grain size of millet powder > screw speed. This paper aims to provide reference for developing healthy food of cereal powder and provide basis for the deep processing and utilization of millet powder.

As the traditional Chinese herbal formula, Xiaoyaosan and its modified formula have been described in many previous studies with definite anti-depressive effects, but its underlying mechanism remains mystery. Previous work in our lab has demonstrated that depression induced by chronic stress could generate brain blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals disorder, accompanied by the impairment of hippocampal neuronal plasticity, decrease of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, and reduction of the number and complexity of adult neurons in the dentate gyrus. We hypothesized that herbal formula based on Xiaoyaosan could exert anti-depressive effects through restoring these neurobiological dysfunctions and rectifying BOLD-fMRI signals. To test this hypothesis, we examined the effect of modified Xiaoyaosan (MXYS) on depressive-like behaviors, as well as hippocampal neurogenesis and BOLD signals in a mice model of chronic unpredictable mild stress (CUMS)-induced depression. MXYS exerted anti-depressant effects on CUMS-induced depression that were similar to the effects of classical antidepressants drug (fluoxetine hydrochloride), with a significant alleviation of depressive-like behaviors, an improvement of hippocampal neurogenesis, and a reversal of activation of BOLD in the limbic system, particularly in the hippocampus. These results suggested that MXYS attenuated CUMS-induced depressive behaviors by rectifying the BOLD signals in the mice hippocampus. These novel results demonstrated that MXYS had anti-depressive effects accompanied by improving BOLD signals and hippocampal neurogenesis, which suggested that BOLD-fMRI signals in brain regions could be a key component for the evaluation of novel antidepressant drugs.

Rho GTPases have been shown previously to play important roles in several cellular processes by regulating the organization of the actin and microtubule cytoskeletons. However, the mechanisms of Rho GTPases that integrate the cellular responses during regeneration have not been thoroughly elucidated. The planarian flatworm, which contains a large number of adult somatic stem cells (neoblasts), is a unique model to study stem cell lineage development in vivo. Here, we focus on cdc42, which is an extensively characterized member among Rho GTPases. We found that cdc42 is required for the maintenance of epidermal lineage. Cdc42 RNAi induced a sustained increased of cell death and led to a loss of the mature epidermal cells but without affected cell division. Our results indicate that cdc42 function as an inhibitor to block the excessive apoptotic cell death in planarian epidermal regeneration and homeostasis.

WLEDs have lately been the preferred lighting device based on properties such as energy saving, high efficiency, longevity, and environmental protection. However, studies on the safety of white light-emitting diode (WLED) are limited. In our previous study, we found that WLED light (4000 K ± 500 K color temperature, 250 lx, and 20 min exposure) is photocytotoxic to three mammalian cell lines by causing cell lipid peroxidation. To further investigate the potential photocytotoxicity of WLEDs on the human body, we used two human eye cell lines SRA01/04 and D407 as target cells for evaluating its potential phototoxicity on the human eye in the present study based on cell viability, apoptosis, and intracellular oxidative stress assays, as well as the activation levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS)-related apoptosis pathways, including extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK), c-Jun NH2-terminal kinase (JNK) and p38 kinase (p38), using mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling pathway assays. The results showed that WLED light has photocytotoxicities on SRA01/04 and D407 cells, which were both in a time-, irradiance-, and color temperature-dependent manner and strongest at the conditions of 2 h irradiation time, 60 W/m2 irradiance, and 4000 K color temperature. Moreover, the photocytotoxicity of red light-emitting diode (LED) light was the strongest in the three tested monochromatic light compositions of WLED. Mechanism studies show that the potential phototoxicity of WLED on human lens epithelium and retinal pigment epithelium may be caused by its induced oxidative stress damage via the JNK and p38 MAPKs pathways.

Background Mental stress mainly induces depression, and predictable stress, as well as a constant bombardment of chronic unpredictable micro-stressors, always coexist in daily life. However, the combined effect of predictable and unpredictable stress on depression is still not fully understood. Methods The chronic restraint stress (CRS) is to restrain the mice for 6 h per day for 3 weeks, and the chronic unpredictable mild stress (CUMS) is to stimulate the mice with 7 different stressors for 3 weeks. We evaluated the combined effect of CRS and CUMS on depression-like symptoms using behavioral tests and investigated the action mechanism through analysis of neurotransmitters, brain-derived factors, inflammatory factors, antioxidants, and intestinal microorganisms. Results Our data suggested the combined stress of CRS and CUMS caused significant weight loss, food intake reduction, depression-like behaviors-including anhedonia, learned helplessness, and reduction in spontaneous activity-and even atrophy and severe structural damage to the hippocampus in mice. Our pathogenesis study showed that combined stress-induced the reduction of glucocorticoid receptor (GR) levels, loss of oligodendrocytes (NG2 and Olig2 cells), and inhibition of neuron proliferation in the CA1, CA3, and DG regions of the hippocampus, decreased the contents of monoamine neurotransmitters (5-HT and NE) and BDNF in the cerebral cortex, caused hyperactivity of the HPA system, led to immune dysfunction, aggravated oxidative stress, and weakened the capacity of antioxidants in mice. Compared with single stress, combined stress gave rise to a more significant diversity change of the gut microbiota. Conclusions Combined stress caused significant depression-like behaviors, atrophy, and severe structural damage to the hippocampus in mice via monoamine neurotransmitter, BDNF, HPA axis, neurogenesis, and neurodegenerative, immune, oxidative stress and gut-brain axis action pathways.

The flower-like porous MgO was obtained via a interfacial reaction following by further calcination. In the interfacial reaction, flower-like basic magnesium carbonate microspheres (precursor) were prepared by using magnesium chloride hexahydrate, ammonium carbonate, aqueous ammonia and water as starting materials. The formation mechanism of these basic magnesium carbonate microspheres has been proposed. The as-obtained hierarchical porous MgO showed an ultra-high adsorption capacity for Congo red (5051 mg g−1). This study provides a convenient strategy for synthesizing hierarchical porous MgO microspheres with great adsorption ability.

Low-volume road always lied at the area with few inhabitants and few traffic monitoring equipment, thus it's difficult to detect traffic incident and take traffic rescue in a timely manner. However, most research focused on high-volume road traffic sensor location for OD matrix estimation, travel time estimation and traffic volume estimation, not aiming to low-volume road for incident detection. Firstly, a two-stage traffic sensor location method was proposed for low-volume road incident detection, with the optimization objective of maximizing incident detection rate. At the first stage, high-resolution camera Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI) was used to monitor closed road segments, at the second stage, video was used to monitor both the closed road segments and intersection segments. Then, reliability theory was adopted to model the incident detection rate of AVI and video parallel detection system. Next, a real-coded genetic algorithm was proposed to optimize the traffic sensor location problem. Finally, a case study was conducted and the case study result shows that incident detection rate of the first and second stage increase by 36.39% and 7.68% respectively, this demonstrates that the proposed method is effective.

In order to improve the efficiency of new adsorbent, grafting-allylamine bacterial cellulose(al-BC), response surface methodology(RSM) was used for the optimization of preparation process. Three factors affecting the yield of grafting reaction are the amount of allylamine, the concentration of ceric ammonium nitrate(CAN) and the concentration of nitric acid. Based on the regression coefficient analysis in the Box-Behnken design, a relationship between the preparation variable and grafting yield was obtained. Square error analysis on main factors, and multi-variable interactions were employed for studying grafting yield. The results show that at the conditions of CAN of 23.00 mmol/L CAN, 0.17 mol/L nitric acid, adding an amount of grafting-allylamine bacterial cellulose of 26.49 mL/L made grafting rate reach maximum of 24.25% at 40 °C after the reaction for 4 h. The experimental results are in good agreement with the calculation values via proposed regression equation, indicating that the equation could be used to predict and optimizate the preparation of grafting al-BC.

Aiming at the problems of high energy consumption and packet loss rate, long delay and poor fault tolerance of existing information transmission rate control methods, a practical vehicle-based passive vehicle communication information transmission rate control method is proposed. The average relative speed of vehicles and the number of neighbour vehicle nodes are selected as input parameters. The cluster head is selected by using fuzzy logic, and the cluster stability is set to the long duration of the cluster. The effective connection time model of the cluster vehicles' communication link is constructed. Taking the effective connection time model and channel capacity as constraints, the Shannon information concept and the maximum utility function are used to obtain the optimal information transmission rate of the current node. Experimental results show that the proposed method has lower-energy consumption and delay, less packet loss, and better fault-tolerant performance than the current research results.

The reproductive characteristics of four plant species of the genus Nitraria L.in Ulan Buh Desert,Nitraria tangutorum Bobr.,N.sibirica Pall.,N.roborowskii Kom.,N.sphaerocarpa Maxim.,were studied.The reproductive allocation characteristics of reproductive tillers were studied based on measurements of the reproductive modules during blooming.The results showed significant quantitative differences exist in some reproductive modules of the four species,such as ramet height,reproductive tiller length,reproductive tiller diameter,number of flowers per tiller,dry weight of cymes,and dry weight of branches and leaves.Of the four plant species,N.sphaerocarpa was the smallest based on the above measured characters.N.sibirica allocated 44.51% of its mass to reproduction while the other three species allocated less than 20%.Statistical analyses were performed on the reproductive characteristics of four plant species.A significant linear correlation was found between reproductive tiller length and ramet height(P0.05).The correlation coefficients were 0.8207,0.7408,0.8401,and 0.9144 for N.tangutorum,N.sibirica,N.roborowskii,and N.sphaerocarpa,respectively.The statistical significant test level of the curve fitness was 0.0067,0.0224,0.0046 and 0.0006 for N.tangutorum,N.sibirica,N.roborowskii,and N.sphaerocarpa,respectively.Also,the cymous dry weight was significantly correlated to ramet height.Specifically the absolute biomass allocated to the reproductive organs from the total biomass of the reproductive tillers increased as ramet height increased.The correlation coefficients of the two indices for N.tangutorum,N.sibirica,N.roborowskii,N.sphaerocarpa were 0.9283,0.6631,0.8350,and 0.8324,respectively.The fitted curves of the two indices for N.tangutorum and N.roborowskii followed a linear relationship,whereas that of N.sibirica followed a power law,and that of N.sphaerocarpa was quadratic.Third,the reproductive allocation of the four plant species decreased as the biomass of the reproductive tillers increased which represented the size of the plant.The fitted curves of the two indices for N.sibirica and N.roborowskii were linear,and those for N.tangutorum and N.sphaerocarpa were inverse.Plant size had a significantly negative correlation with the reproductive allocation.The characteristics of the reproductive allocation of four plant species of genus Nitraria reflect their strategies for the resource utilization and the trade-off with the clonal propagation and ecological adaptation to the environment.

We evaluated the dietary protein requirements of juvenile turbot (Scophthalmus maximus L.) and their effects on aquatic quality. Five experimental diets were formulated containing 450, 480, 500, 520, and 540 g/kg. Each diet was randomly assigned to triplicate groups of juvenile turbot (mean initial body weight 34.5 +/- 5.5 g) for 88 d. Both the weight gain ratio and feed efficiency increased with increasing dietary protein up to 500 g/kg, but no further improvement was detected when dietary protein levels were > 500 g/kg. Protein intake and digestion increased with protein levels, while fecal nitrogen and nitrogen content in seawater increased only when dietary protein exceeded 500 g/kg. Protein digestibility was highest at intermediate dietary protein levels. Chemical oxygen demand, nitrite-nitrogen (NO (2) (-) -N) and phosphatic-phosphor (PO (4) (3-) -P) levels increased in the rearing water as dietary protein levels increased. The optimum eco-nutrition level of dietary protein for juvenile turbot was 500 g/kg under the current experimental conditions. The diets containing 540 and 500 g/kg protein had similar growth rates and feed conversion ratios, but levels of ammonia (NH (4) (+) ) and nitrogen were considerably higher in the water and feces, respectively, at the higher level of dietary protein. The difference in the pattern of change between body weight gain and ammonia concentration in water with increasing dietary protein is described by rhomb characteristics.

To further understand the generation and development of coinfection of Marek's disease virus (MDV) and reticuloendotheliosis virus (REV) in broiler breeders, and then find the method and optimal time of differential diagnosis for complex clinic multiple infection, the authors studied the pathohistological changes, apoptosis, immunohistochemistry (immunofluorescence), and ultrastructure of tumor tissues of broiler breeders inoculated with MDV and REV. The study showed that proliferation of small lymphocytes was seen in the main organs at the age of 1 week, then immature lymphocytes, all kinds of lymphocytes, primitive reticulum cells, and Marek's disease cells (MDCs) were observed at 2-9 weeks. Apoptosis of lymphocytes could not be seen until the age of 10 weeks in the immune system. Immunohistochemistry detection showed that the positive signs of MDV and REV antigen were observed in the main organs at 2 weeks of age. Multi-morphology lymphocytes, MDV, and REV, mitotic figures and apoptosis of lymphocytes were observed with the help of transmission electron microscopy. MDV cooperating with REV promotes the course of disease of coinfection. Differential diagnosis can be done by immunohistochemistry in the early stage (before 2 weeks), and histopathology in the late stage (post 4 weeks). MDCs, primitive reticulum cells, immature lymphocytes, and two kinds of virions can serve as a basis for histopathology differential diagnosis.

In this paper, the plant model and closed-loop performance of a newly developed slider driven micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) is investigated. The model and hysteresis of this new MEMS thermal actuator (MTA) is presented first. Then, the peak-to-peak gain minimization method, which focuses on minimizing the best upper bound on the control signal peak value, is applied to satisfy the input saturation. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing with the traditional H ∞ method, which uses the weighting function to lower the energy of the control signals.

Proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9), which involves in low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) metabolism by interacting with the LDL receptor, is considered as a potent therapeutic target for treating hypercholesterolemia. Here, a fab antibody phage display library was constructed and employed for bio-panning against recombinant PCSK9. A Fab fragment (designated PA4) bound with high affinity to PCSK9 was isolated after four rounds of panning. The fully human antibody IgG1-PA4 bound specifically to PCSK9 with nanomolar affinity. In vitro, IgG1-PA4 inhibited PCSK9 binding to LDLR and attenuated PCSK9-mediated degradation of LDLR on the HepG2 cell surface. In C57BL/6 mice, administration of IgG1-PA4 at 30 mg/kg increased hepatic LDLR protein levels by as much as 3 fold when compared with control. Taken together, these results suggested that the IgG1-PA4 can be served as a potential candidate for the treatment of hypercholesterolemia by inhibiting PCSK9-mediated degradation of cell surface LDLRs.

An infinite crystal can be constructed by an infinite number of parallel two-dimensional (hkl) crystal planes coupled to each other. For crystals with negligible spin-orbit coupling, we report a rigorous proof of a criterion on the non-existence of surface states in a semi-infinite crystal with the crystal symmetry. The forward transfer to be the same as the backward one, called as F-B dynamical symmetry, is key to realize the criterion. Based on lattice model Hamiltonian with coupling between the nearest neighbor crystal planes only, we prove that a cut crystal will not be able to accommodate any surface states if the original infinite crystal has reflection symmetry about every crystal plane which results in F-B symmetry. The criterion provide a platform to simply conclude whether surface states exist or not in a cut crystal. For any such crystals, the non-existence or existence of surface states depends on the cut direction of the crystal plane. Since the spin-orbit coupling breaks the chiral symmetry, resulting in the F-B asymmetry, surface states can emerge in the (hkl) cut crystal with spin-orbit coupling., 5pages, 2figures

This paper focus on the car sale enterprise customer satisfaction evaluation. With the general acceptance of network technologies as well as the improvement of data collection and management, variety of internet data collection methods have been widely applied. Therefore, enterprises can be provided more directly and handy ways to obtain data by taking the network's advantages, which are promptly, effectively, fast and convenient. The system framework has been set up after the analysis of customer satisfaction evaluation method and criteria. the customer according to the satisfaction evaluation for car sales pre-sales, sale and post-sales, making use of EC platform to evaluate customer satisfaction of different brands of cars, and displaying statistical results on the platform interface, establishing a information sharing platform of the customer satisfaction for customers automobile consumption.

Hard disk drives (HDDs) are a kind of data storage systems that are present in computer systems. With increasing demands for higher storage capacity, the positioning accuracy becomes the most important requirement and challenging problem in HDDs. This thesis presents our research works for HDD systems. The main idea lies with exploiting the plant and controller design for the positioning accuracy improvement. The first part of the thesis focuses on the integrated plant/controller design method. By involving plant modification and controller design to achieve an optimal H2 performance requirement, a linear matrix inequality (LMI) based approach is developed for the plant damping ratio modification using the plant output, the optimal H2 controller is then designed for the modified plant. The results are demonstrated through simulation results, which turn out a better H2 performance level and stability margins than the original plant. Furthermore, the integrated plant/controller design for in-phase property is proposed, involving plant model modification followed by controller design. Such a design method can achieve better stability margins and disturbance rejection capability, and the expected performance is demonstrated through experimental results. The second part of the thesis focuses on investigation of dual-stage actuation systems to improve the positioning accuracy performance. With a newly developed micro thermal actuator (MTA) which is a slider-driven microactuator assembled with suspension, an H_{\infty} loop shaping based controller is developed and experimentally implemented on the MTA based dual-stage actuation systems. Note that one challenging problem for MTA controller design is the plant input constraint, which is more critical than moving suspension type actuator as its movement range is at a nano meter level and much smaller than micro meter level of moving suspension type. A peak-to-peak gain minimization method based controller is proposed to lower the amplitude of the input signal and experimentally compared with the traditional H_{\infty} loop shaping method. Furthermore, an anti-windup compensator is added to the MTA loop of the dual-stage systems, which is beneficial to the long-track seeking performance. Besides, the performance of PZT milliactuator based dual-stage actuation systems is experimentally studied. It shows that the PZT milliactuator driven by a current amplifier has less hysteresis and less primary resonance residues than that driven by a voltage amplifier. Furthermore, the control performances in track-seeking and track-following of the dual-stage actuation systems are thoroughly compared between these two driving methods. Parallel to the control problem, we also consider the impulsive disturbance attenuation problem, which is coupled into the measurement position error signal (PES) in HDDs. Then, an effective nonlinear filtering scheme is developed and modified. Doctor of Philosophy (EEE)

This paper focus on the current GSM-R interleaving redundancy coverage, and proposes a new redundancy network transmission structure. Based on Markov Chains, the factors of transmission errors, handover and connection losses which may lead to wireless connection failure are considered in the models, where the reliability and availability are analyzed for both redundant configurations with respect to the influence of the train velocity. Besides, the simulation of the new redundant structure is implemented to give a visual expression of its improvement in the sojourn time of working states. All these analyzes show that the new redundant structure has got a better reliability as well as a better availability (over 99.99%) than the interleaving redundancy coverage, and it is much less affected when the train velocity is increased.

Along with the developments of the high-speed railway, higher and higher technical requirements for the high-speed railway mobile communication system are raised. Since the “Global System for Mobile Communications Railways” (GSM-R) implemented today is based on GSM, the new technology in GSM evolution can be used in the highspeed railway mobile communication system to adapt to the new requirements. This paper introduces a high-speed railway mobile communication system based on “Long Term Evolution” (LTE), describes its network architecture, and especially analyzes the technical advantages and application value of the system in the high-speed railway wireless communication comparing with the existing GSM-R system. It also discusses feasibility of the GSM-R system's evolution to this high-speed railway mobile communication system and proposes the possible evolution model.