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In this work, Flammulina velutipes was used as a novel protein and fibrous structure source to prepare animal-free patties, and transglutaminase (TGase) was added to improve their functional properties. The results showed that the addition of mushroom increased the gel strength, texture profile, and sensory property of animal-free patties. However, the presence of mushroom made the microstructure of patty become loose, with large holes. Interestingly, TGase (6–8 U/g) significantly decreased the size of holes in microstructure and induced to form a uniform and compact microstructure. Because TGase decreased the content of free amino acid group and soluble protein, and induced the formation of new protein polymers with high molecular weight in SDS-PAGE results. The covalent cross-linking catalyzed by TGase helped to form a stronger gel matrix in patty, leading to the formation of patty with higher hardness, adhesiveness, chewiness, water holding capacity, and sensory scores.

BACKGROUND: Diaphragmatic electromyographic (EMGdi) is a helpful method to reflect the respiratory center’s activity visually. However, the electrocardiogram (ECG) severely affected its weakness, limiting its use. OBJECTIVE: To remove the ECG artifact from the EMGdi, we designed a Morphological ECG subtraction method (MES) based on three steps: 1) ECG localization, 2) morphological tracking, and 3) ECG subtractor. METHODS: We evaluated the MES method against the wavelet-based dual-threshold and stationary wavelet filters using visual and frequency-domain characteristics (median frequency and power ratio). RESULTS: The results show that the MES method can preserve the features of the original diaphragm signal for both surface diaphragm signal (SEMGdi) and clinical collection of diaphragm signal (EMGdi_clinic), and it is more effective than the wavelet-based dual-threshold and stationary wavelet filtering methods. CONCLUSION: The MES method is more effective than other methods. This technique may improve respiratory monitoring and assisted ventilation in patients with respiratory diseases.

Let $p$ be an odd prime, and let $a$ be an integer not divisible by $p$. When $m$ is a positive integer with $p\equiv1\pmod{2m}$ and $2$ is an $m$th power residue modulo $p$, we determine the value of the product $\prod_{k\in R_m(p)}\tan\pi\frac{ak}p$, where $$R_m(p)=\{0, Comment: 6 pages. Make the main results more general

Su Yuan,1,2 Biao Zuo,2,3 Si-Cong Zhou,1,2 Meng Wang,2,3 Kai-Yue Tan,2,3 Zhi-Wei Chen,2,3 Wen-Fu Cao1– 3 1Department of Combination of Chinese and Western Medicine, the First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, People’s Republic of China; 2Chongqing Key Laboratory of Traditional Chinese Medicine for Prevention and Cure of Metabolic Diseases, Chongqing, People’s Republic of China; 3College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Wen-Fu Cao, The First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, No. 1, Youyi Road, Yuanjiagang, Yuzhong District, Chongqing, 400016, People’s Republic of China, Email caowenfu20220401@163.comPurpose: Our study aims to reveal the pharmacological mechanism of Astragaloside IV in the treatment of pulmonary fibrosis(PF) through network pharmacology and experimental validation.Methods: We first determined the in vivo anti-pulmonary fibrosis effect of Astragaloside IV by HE, MASSON staining, and lung coefficients, then used network pharmacology to predict the signaling pathways and molecularly docked key pathway proteins, and finally validated the results by in vivo and in vitro experiments.Results: In in vivo experiments, we found that Astragaloside IV improved body weight (P < 0.05), increased lung coefficients (P < 0.05), and reduced lung inflammation and collagen deposition in mice with pulmonary fibrosis. The network pharmacology results showed that Astragaloside IV had 104 cross-targets with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, and the results of KEGG enrichment analysis indicated that cellular senescence could be an important pathway for Astragaloside IV in the treatment of pulmonary fibrosis. Astragaloside IV also bound well to senescence-associated proteins, according to molecular docking results. The results of both in vivo and in vitro experiments showed that Astragaloside IV significantly inhibited senescence protein markers such as P53, P21, and P16 and delayed cellular senescence (P < 0.05). In in vivo experiments, we also found that Astragaloside IV reduced the production of SASPs (P < 0.05), and in in vitro experiments, Astragaloside IV also reduced the production of ROS. In addition, by detecting epithelial-mesenchymal transition(EMT)-related marker protein expression, we also found that Astragaloside IV significantly inhibited the development of EMT in both in vivo and in vitro experiments (P < 0.05).Conclusion: Our research found that Astragaloside IV could alleviate bleomycin-induced PF by preventing cellular senescence and EMT.Keywords: astragaloside IV, pulmonary fibrosis, network pharmacology, cellular senescence, epithelial-mesenchymal transition

Purpose Based on the aerodynamic loads and dynamic performances of trains, this study aims to investigate the effect of crosswinds and raindrops on intercity trains operating on viaducts to ensure the safe operation of intercity railways in metropolitan areas. Design/methodology/approach An approach coupled with the Euler multiphase model as well as the standard k-ɛ turbulence model is used to investigate the coupled flow feature surrounding trains and viaducts, including airflow and raindrops, and the numerical results are validated with those of the wind tunnel test. Additionally, the train’s dynamic response and the operating safety region in different crosswind speeds and rainfall is investigated based on train’s aerodynamic loads and the train wheel–rail dynamics simulation. Findings The aerodynamic loads of trains at varying running speeds exhibit an increasing trend as the increase of wind speed and rainfall intensity. The motion of raindrop particles demonstrates a significant similarity with the airflow in wind and rain environments, as a result of the dominance of airflow and the supplementary impacts of droplets. As the train’s operating speed ranged between 120 and 200 km/h and within a rainfall range of 20–100 mm/h, the safe operating region of trains decreased by 0.56%–7.03%, compared with the no-rain condition (0 mm/h). Originality/value The impact of crosswind speeds and rainfall on the train’s aerodynamic safety is studied, including the flow feature of crosswind and different particle-sized raindrops around the train and viaduct, aerodynamic loads coefficients suffered by the intercity train as well as the operating safety region of intercity trains on the viaduct.

BACKGROUND: The persistence of symptoms in patients with chronic neck pain is considered to be associated with variation in the neck muscle structure and associated neuromuscular control. Sling exercise therapy (SET) has been demonstrated to relieve the symptoms of chronic neck pain, whereas it is controversial whether this benefit is correlated to altered neck muscle structure and associated neuromuscular control in the patients. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the effect of SET on cervical muscle structure (thickness) and associated neuromuscular control in patients with chronic neck pain. METHODS: Twenty-five patients with chronic neck pain were randomly assigned to the SET group (n= 12) or the control group (n= 13). The SET group received the SET intervention for 4 weeks, while the control group maintained normal activities of daily living. At baseline and after 4 weeks of intervention, Visual analogue scale and neck disability index were measured in both groups, and changes in the thickness of the superficial cervical muscles were assessed using musculoskeletal ultrasound. Surface electromyography (EMG) was adapted to assess the neuromuscular control of the neck while the participant was performing the cranio-cervical flexion test. RESULTS: At 4 weeks, the SET group had a significant reduction of RMS in both UT and SCM of EMG compared to the control group (p< 0.05). Regarding ultrasound, the SET group had significantly lower muscle thickness compared to the control group in both the rest position and the MVIC position (p< 0.05). There were no within-group differences in the control group (p> 0.05), while the SET group showed significant reductions in both RMS and muscle thickness (p< 0.05). CONCLUSION: 4-week SET was effective in reducing pain and dysfunction in patients with chronic neck pain, which may be related to improved neck muscle thickness and neuromuscular control of the neck.

Evidence suggests that exposure to coal dust increases immunoglobulin concentration. However, there is a paucity of data reporting immunoglobulin G (IgG) subclass in coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (CWP). Therefore, this study intended to evaluate potential diagnostic biomarkers for the disease. CWP patients, dust-exposed workers without pneumoconiosis (DEW), and matched healthy controls (HCs) presented to the General Hospital of Datong Coal Mining Group and Occupational Disease Prevention and Treatment Hospital of Datong Coal Mining Group between May 2019 and September 2019 were recruited. The serum immunoglobulin concentration was determined by the multiplex immunoassay technique. Totally, 104 CWP patients, 109 DEWs, and 74 HCs were enrolled. Serum levels of IgG1, IgG2, IgM, and IgA were elevated in CWPs compared with those in DEWs and HCs ( P < 0.05 ). The order of diagnostic accuracy between CWPs and DEWs depicted by the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was IgG2, IgM, IgG1, IgG3, and IgA. Significantly higher IgG1/IgG3 and IgG2/IgG3 ratios were observed in the CWP group than in DEW and HC groups. Based on the IgG2/IgG3 ratio, the area under the ROC curve between CWP and DEW was 0.785 (95% CI 0.723-0.838), with a sensitivity of 73.1% and a specificity of 73.4%. Our findings suggest that IgG1, IgG2, IgM, and IgA are higher in the CWPs than DEWs and HCs. The IgG2/IgG3 ratio provides a viable alternative for the diagnosis of CWP.

This paper studies the state-of-charge (SoC) balancing and the total charging/discharging power tracking issues for battery energy storage systems (BESSs) with multiple distributed heterogeneous battery units. Different from the traditional cooperative control strategies based on the asymptotical or finite-time distributed observers, two distributed prespecified-time observers are proposed to estimate average battery units state and average desired power, respectively, which can be determined in advance and independent of initial states or control parameters. Finally, two simulation examples are given to verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed control strategy.

Over the course of the recent decade, the composition of Alsineae has been drastically changed by means of molecular phylogeny. However, the genus Brachystemma has not been sampled in any of the previous studies, and its phylogenetic position is still pending. In addition, the related species Stellaria ovatifolia, which has at times been placed in Brachystemma, Schizotechium, or Stellaria, has also not been sampled. Here, nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) and four plastid regions (trnL-F, matK, rbcL, rps16) were used to conduct phylogenetic analyses within Caryophyllaceae and the tribe Alsineae. Ancestral characters (petal margin and number of seeds) were reconstructed in the tribe Alsineae based on the phylogenetic results. Our results indicate that Brachystemma is nested in the tribe Alsineae and forms a monophylum with S. ovatifolia, and apically lobed petals and numerous seeds may be the ancestral characters in the tribe Alsineae. Based on our study, Stellaria ovatifolia should be considered within Brachystemma, and Brachystemma is clearly a separate genus and now includes two species.

For any $m,n\in\mathbb{N}=\{0,1,2\ldots\}$, the truncated hypergeometric series ${}_{m+1}F_m$ is defined by $$ {}_{m+1}F_m\bigg[\begin{matrix}x_0&x_1&\ldots&x_m\\ &y_1&\ldots&y_m\end{matrix}\bigg|z\bigg]_n=\sum_{k=0}^n\frac{(x_0)_k(x_1)_k\cdots(x_m)_k}{(y_1)_k\cdots(y_m)_k}\cdot\frac{z^k}{k!}, $$ where $(x)_k=x(x+1)\cdots(x+k-1)$ is the Pochhammer symbol. Let $p$ be an odd prime. For $α,z\in\mathbb{Z}_p$ with $\langle -α\rangle_p\equiv0\pmod{2}$, where $\langle x\rangle_p$ denotes the least nonnegative residue of $x$ modulo $p$ for any $x\in\mathbb{Z}_p$, we mainly prove the following congruence motivated by Orr's identity: $$ {}_2F_1\bigg[\begin{matrix}\frac12α&\frac32-\frac12α\\ &1\end{matrix}\bigg|z\bigg]_{p-1}{}_2F_1\bigg[\begin{matrix}\frac12α&\frac12-\frac12α\\ &1\end{matrix}\bigg|z\bigg]_{p-1}\equiv{}_3F_2\bigg[\begin{matrix}α&2-α&\frac12\\ &1&1\end{matrix}\bigg|z\bigg]_{p-1}\pmod{p^2}. $$ As a corollary, for any positive integer $b$ with $p\equiv\pm1\pmod{b}$ and $\langle -1/b\rangle_p\equiv0\pmod{2}$, we deduce that $$ \sum_{k=0}^{p-1}(b^2k+b-1)\frac{\binom{2k}{k}}{4^k}\binom{-1/b}{k}\binom{1/b-1}{k}\equiv0\pmod{p^2}. $$ This confirms a conjectural congruence of the second author., 8 pages, accepted by Journal of Difference Equations and Applications

With the advances in single-cell sequencing techniques, numerous analytical methods have been developed for delineating cell development. However, most are based on Euclidean space, which would distort the complex hierarchical structure of cell differentiation. Recently, methods acting on hyperbolic space have been proposed to visualize hierarchical structures in single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) data and have been proven to be superior to methods acting on Euclidean space. However, these methods have fundamental limitations and are not optimized for the highly sparse single-cell count data. To address these limitations, we propose scDHMap, a model-based deep learning approach to visualize the complex hierarchical structures of scRNA-seq data in low-dimensional hyperbolic space. The evaluations on extensive simulation and real experiments show that scDHMap outperforms existing dimensionality-reduction methods in various common analytical tasks as needed for scRNA-seq data, including revealing trajectory branches, batch correction, and denoising the count matrix with high dropout rates. In addition, we extend scDHMap to visualize single-cell ATAC-seq data.

The rhizosphere, directly influenced by root systems of plant, plays a significant role in plant-microbe interactions, which in turn directly affect the plants. In this work, the dynamic characteristics of rhizosphere bacterial communities during the growth period of cultivated strawberry (Fragaria×ananassa ‘Hongyan’) were investigated, and the dominant bacterial species in different growth stages were identified. High-throughput sequencing (HTS) was employed to obtain operational taxonomic unit (OTU) abundance, bacterial community diversity, and abundance of rhizosphere bacteria at five growth stages of strawberry: growth period (A1.1), budding period (A2.2), flowering period (AB3.2), fruiting period (AB4.1) and mature fruit period (AB5.2). The composition and abundance of bacterial communities structure were analyzed using the unweighted pair group method with arithmetic means (UPGMA) cluster analysis. The result indicated that, in the flowering stage the bacterial community exhibited the highest diversity and richness, while the bud stage had the least. The flowering stage showed a greater specific bacteria species in the strawberry rhizosphere, followed by growth, mature and harvest stages, and the lowest in the bud stage. The main dominant phyla were Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria and Acidobacteria, accounting for over 70% of the total bacterial abundance. The main dominant genera were Alcanivorax, Kaistobacter, Marinobacter and Candidatus Nitrososphaera. The bacterial abundance similarity was relatively high in the growth and harvest stages, as well as in flowering and mature stages, while it differed greatly from that of the bud stage. In conclusion, the difference in bacterial diversity between bud stage and flowering stage was the greatest, with the Chao1 index and Shannon index increased by 79.35 and 6.74%, respectively. The rhizosphere bacterial community richness and diversity were highest at the flowering stage (AB3.2), with 198 specific OTUs accounting for 7.48% of the total OTUs. At the phylum level, the bacterial abundance of Proteobacteria, Acidobacteria and Actinobacteria were greatly affected by the developmental stage. These findings suggest that the bacterial diversity of strawberry rhizosphere will change with the growth stage.

N 6-methyladenosine (m6A) modification on messenger RNAs (mRNAs) is deposited by evolutionarily conserved methyltransferases (writers). How individual m6A writers sculpt the overall landscape of the m6A methylome and the resulting biological impact in multicellular organisms remains unknown. Here, we systematically surveyed the quantitative m6A methylomes at single-nucleotide resolution and their corresponding transcriptomes in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) bearing respective impaired m6A writers. The m6A sites associated with the five Arabidopsis writers were located mostly within 3′ untranslated regions with peaks at around 100 bp downstream of stop codons. m6A predominantly promoted the usage of distal poly(A) sites but had little effect on RNA splicing. Notably, impaired m6A writers resulted in hypomethylation and downregulation of transcripts encoding ribosomal proteins, indicating a possible correlation between m6A and protein translation. Besides the common effects on mRNA metabolism and biological functions uniquely exerted by different Arabidopsis m6A writers compared with their counterparts in human cell lines, our analyses also revealed the functional specificity of individual Arabidopsis m6A writers in plant development and response to stresses. Our findings thus reveal insights into the biological roles of various Arabidopsis m6A writers and their cognate counterparts in other multicellular m6A methyltransferase complexes.