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The complexities of energy transfer mechanisms in the flagella of mammalian sperm flagella have been intensively investigated and demonstrate significant diversity across species. Enzymatic shuttles, particularly adenylate kinase (AK) and creatine kinase (CK), are pivotal in the efficient transfer of intracellular ATP, showing distinct tissue- and species-specificity. Here, the expression profiles of AK and CK were investigated in mice and found to fall into four subgroups, of which Subgroup III AKs were observed to be unique to the male reproductive system and conserved across chordates. Both AK8and AK9were found to be indispensable to male reproduction after analysis of an infertile male cohort. Knockout mouse models showed that AK8 and AK9 were central to promoting sperm motility. Immunoprecipitation combined with mass spectrometry revealed that AK8 and AK9 interact with the radial spoke (RS) of the axoneme. Examination of various human and mouse sperm samples with substructural damage, including the presence of multiple RS subunits, showed that the head of radial spoke 3 acts as an adapter for AK9 in the flagellar axoneme. Using an ATP probe together with metabolomic analysis, it was found that AK8 and AK9 cooperatively regulated ATP transfer in the axoneme, and were concentrated at sites associated with energy consumption in the flagellum. These findings indicate a novel function for RS beyond its structural role, namely, the regulation of ATP transfer. In conclusion, the results expand the functional spectrum of AK proteins and suggest a fresh model regarding ATP transfer within mammalian flagella.

Unsupervised domain adaption (UDA), which aims to enhance the segmentation performance of deep models on unlabeled data, has recently drawn much attention. In this paper, we propose a novel UDA method (namely DLaST) for medical image segmentation via disentanglement learning and self-training. Disentanglement learning factorizes an image into domain-invariant anatomy and domain-specific modality components. To make the best of disentanglement learning, we propose a novel shape constraint to boost the adaptation performance. The self-training strategy further adaptively improves the segmentation performance of the model for the target domain through adversarial learning and pseudo label, which implicitly facilitates feature alignment in the anatomy space. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art UDA methods for medical image segmentation on three public datasets, i.e., a cardiac dataset, an abdominal dataset and a brain dataset. The code will be released soon.

This paper presents an unobtrusive system for monitoring heart rate (HR) based on ballistocardiogram (BCG). The system contains a piezoelectric sensor, which can be embedded into a chair or bed, to convert small body vibrations caused by heart beating into BCG signal and a novel algorithm to estimate HR from the BCG. The algorithm employs the Hilbert Transform to reveal the frequency content of J-peak in the BCG signal for HR estimation. The Viterbi Decoding is applied to improve the HR accuracy for noisy BCG signal by finding the most likely path through time-frequency state-space plane. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by BCG recordings from 32 subjects. Mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.17 beats per minute (BPM) and standard deviation of absolute error (SDAE) of 2.34 BPM are achieved. Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.956 between estimated HR and true HR is obtained.

The multiple effect evaporator (MEE) system is a typical process for liquor concentration in the energy-intensive industries. Many approaches and commercial software have been widely used for MEE simulation and optimization. However, the existing work usually assumes simplified correlations for material thermodynamic properties and evaporator operations to avoid computational complexity, which may cause a large deviation in results. This Article addresses accurate and detailed unit operations and material properties to model the MEE systems and further heat integration for optimal energy recovery. To deal with the resulting complex mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems of MEE systems, an efficient optimization strategy is developed, where the noncritical variables in the MINLP model are initialized as parameters and updated by solving a series of mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problems using a two-stage iterative procedure. An industrial scale problem for concentrating black liquor in a Chinese paper mill is carried out to demonstrate the validity and efficiency of the new approach. On the basis of the conditions of constant heat-transfer coefficients and stream boiling point rises assumed in the well-known commercial software WinGEMS, our method performs identically to WinGEMS in five distinct scenarios. Moreover, our method is more capable of solving industrial problems in practical situations including varying stream thermal properties and evaporator heat-transfer coefficients, achieving up to 25% of energy conservation in a real-world case.

β-Blocker exposure has been shown to reduce mortality in traumatic brain injury (TBI); however, the efficacy of β-blockers remains inconclusive. Therefore, a meta-analysis was conducted in this paper to evaluate the safety and efficacy of β-blocker therapy on patients with TBI.

Primary brain tumors are a rare occurrence in comparison to other malignancies, the most predominant form being glioma. Commonly, exposure to ionizing radiations and inheritance of associated conditions such a neurofibromatosis and tuberous sclerosis are the most common causes of development of glioma. However, understanding of the molecular mechanisms that drive glioma development is limited. We explore the role of aberration of microRNA namely miR-494-3pthrough long noncoding RNA WT1-ASin the development of gliomas. In this study, we found that, levels of WT1-ASwere significantly reduced in glioma tissues and cell lines. The miR-494-3plevels were negatively correlated with WT1-ASlevels. The cellular proliferation and invasiveness decreased in WT1-AStransfected cell lines. Further the half maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) of chemotherapeutic agent temozolomide was significantly reduced in the presence of WT1-AS. The cotransfection of WT1-ASand miR-494-3preduced activation of phospho-AKT (p-AKT). Expression of miR-494-3pis modulated by binding to long noncoding RNA WT1-AS. Deregulation of WT1-AS leads to aberrant expression of miR-494-3pleading to hyperactivation of AKT. This malformation may result in altering protective immune responses in malignancies. Targeting of WT1-AS, miR-494-3p, and AKT may be novel therapeutic options in treatment of glioma.