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Cotton plays a crucial role in the progress of the textile industry and the betterment of human life by providing natural fibers. In our study, we explored the genetic determinants of cotton architecture and fiber yield and quality by crossbreeding Gossypium hirsutum and Gossypium barbadense, creating a recombinant inbred line (RIL) population. Utilizing SNP markers, we constructed an extensive genetic map encompassing 7,730 markers over 2,784.2 cM. We appraised two architectural and seven fiber traits within six environments, identifying 58 QTLs, of which 49 demonstrated stability across these environments. These encompassed QTLs for traits such as lint percentage (LP), boll weight (BW), fiber strength (STRENGTH), seed index (SI), and micronaire (MIC), primarily located on chromosomes chr‐A07, chr‐D06, and chr‐D07. Notably, chr‐D07 houses a QTL region affecting SI, corroborated by multiple studies. Within this region, the genes BZIP043 and SEP2 were identified as pivotal, with SEP2 particularly showing augmented expression in developing ovules. These discoveries contribute significantly to marker‐assisted selection, potentially elevating both the yield and quality of cotton fiber production. These findings provide valuable insights into marker‐assisted breeding strategies, offering crucial information to enhance fiber yield and quality in cotton production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cotton (Gossypium spp.) is an economically important crop, but its productivity is often hindered by the soil‐borne pathogen Verticillium dahliae. This study aimed to investigate the response of cotton roots to V. dahliae infection by analysing the proteome of Gossypium thurberi (resistant) and Gossypium raimondii (susceptible) at 0 h, 24 h, and 48 h post‐infection. Through weighted protein coexpression network analysis, fifteen hub proteins crucial for defense against V. dahliae were identified. Expression analysis revealed the pivotal role of GthGAPC2, encoding GLYCERALDEHYDE‐3‐PHOSPHATE DEHYDROGENASE 2, in conferring resistance to V. dahliae in cotton. Virus‐induced gene Silencing (VIGS) of GthGAPC2 increased susceptibility to V. dahliae, which was supported by oxidant and antioxidant enzyme activities. Furthermore, GthGAPC2 silencing influenced lignin content, indicating its involvement in lignin biosynthesis regulation. Transient overexpression of GthGAPC2 in tobacco supported its role in cell death processes. Subcellular localization studies showed predominant nuclear localization of GthGAPC2. Overexpression of GthGAPC2 in Arabidopsis also confirms its significant role in V. dahliae resistance. These findings shed light on the molecular mechanisms of disease resistance in Gossypium thurberi. Identification of GthGAPC2, as a key protein involved in V. dahliae resistance, and its functional implications can aid breeding strategies for enhancing cotton's disease resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plant Carbonic anhydrases (Cas) have been shown to be stress‐responsive enzymes that may play a role in adapting to adverse conditions. Cotton is a significant economic crop in China, with upland cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) being the most widely cultivated species. We conducted genome‐wide identification of the βCA gene in six cotton species and preliminary analysis of the βCA gene in upland cotton. In total, 73 βCA genes from six cotton species were identified, with phylogenetic analysis dividing them into five subgroups. GHβCA proteins were predominantly localized in the chloroplast and cytoplasm. The genes exhibited conserved motifs, with motifs 1, 2, and 3 being prominent. GHβCA genes were unevenly distributed across chromosomes and were associated with stress‐responsive cis‐regulatory elements, including those responding to light, MeJA, salicylic acid, abscisic acid, cell cycle regulation, and defence/stress. Expression analysis indicated that GHβCA6, GHβCA7, GHβCA10, GHβCA15, and GHβCA16 were highly expressed under various abiotic stress conditions, whereas GHβCA3, GHβCA9, GHβCA10, and GHβCA18 had higher expression patterns under Verticillium dahliae infection at different time intervals. In Gossypium thurberi, GthβCA1, GthβCA2, and GthβCA4 showed elevated expression across stress conditions and tissues. Silencing GHβCA10 through VIGS increased Verticillium wilt severity and reduced lignin deposition compared to non‐silenced plants. GHβCA10 is crucial for cotton's defense against Verticillium dahliae. Further research is needed to understand the underlying mechanisms and develop strategies to enhance resistance against Verticillium wilt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial photosynthesis, which converts carbon dioxide into hydrocarbon fuels, is a promising strategy to overcome both global warming and energy crisis. Herein, the geometric position of Cu and Ga on ultra‐thin CuGaS2/Ga2S3 is oriented via a sulfur defect engineering, and the unprecedented C2H4 yield selectivity is ≈93.87% and yield is ≈335.67 µmol g−1 h−1. A highly delocalized electron distribution intensity induced by S vacancy indicates that Cu and Ga adjacent to S vacancy form Cu–Ga metallic bond, which accelerates the photocatalytic reduction of CO2 to C2H4. The stability of the crucial intermediates (*CHOHCO) is attributed to the upshift of the d‐band center of ultra‐thin CGS/GS. The C–C coupling barrier is intrinsically reduced by the dominant exposed Cu atoms on the 2D ultra‐thin CuGaS2/Ga2S3 in the process of photocatalytic CO2 reduction, which captures *CO molecules effectively. This study proposes a new strategy to design photocatalyst through defect engineering to adjust the selectivity of photocatalytic CO2 reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Whether Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) infection is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains controversial. This study aimed to investigate the association between H. pylori infection and the risk of CVD. Methods: Potentially related studies were searched in the electronic databases, including PubMed, EMBASE and Cochrane Library, from inception to 31 August 2022. Observational cohort studies that reported the multivariable‐adjusted relative risks (RRs) for composite CVD, CHD, stroke, or all‐cause mortality associated with H. pylori infection were included in the meta‐analysis, using random‐effects models. Results: Forty‐one cohort studies with 230,288 participants were included. After a median follow‐up duration of 6.3 years, H. pylori infection was associated with a mildly increased risk of composite CVD (RR 1.10, 95% CI 1.03, 1.18) and coronary heart disease (RR 1.10, 95% CI 1.02, 1.18) compared with those without H. pylori infection. No significant association was observed between H. pylori infection and risk of stroke (RR 1.08, 95% CI 0.94, 1.23) or all‐cause mortality (RR 1.02, 95% CI 0.90, 1.16). Compared with cytotoxin‐associated gene‐A (CagA) negative H. pylori infection, the risk of CVD was significantly increased in patients with CagA positive H. pylori infection (RR 1.58, 95% CI 1.03, 2.41). Conclusions: Helicobacter pylori infection is associated with a mildly increased risk of CVD. It may be of great public health and clinical significance to screen H. pylori infection in patients with a high risk of CVD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effect of crop domestication on photosynthetic productivity has been well‐studied, but at present, none examines its impacts on leaf anatomy and, consequently, light use efficiency in cotton. We investigated leaf and vein anatomy traits, light use efficiency (LUE) and gas exchange in 26 wild and 30 domesticated genotypes of cotton grown under field conditions. The results showed that domestication resulted in a higher photosynthetic rate, higher stomatal conductance, and lower lamina mass per area. Higher LUE was underpinned by the thicker leaves, greater vein volume, elongated palisade and higher chlorophyll content, although there was no difference in the apparent quantum yield. The lower vein mass per area in domesticated genotypes contributed to the reduction of lamina mass per area, but there was no decrease in vein length per area. Our study suggests that domestication has triggered a considerable shift in physiological and anatomical traits to support the increase in LUE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: Patients with heart failure (HF) and with diabetes experienced significantly worse outcomes than those without diabetes. However, data on the prognostic impact of prediabetes in HF are inconclusive. This meta‐analysis aimed to explore the association between prediabetes and the risk of all‐cause mortality and adverse cardiac outcomes in patients with HF. Materials and methods: We searched multiple electronic databases (PubMed, Embase and Google Scholar) for relevant studies up to 31 March 2021. Studies were included for analysis if multivariable adjusted relative risks of adverse outcomes were reported in patients with prediabetes and with HF compared with those with normoglycaemia. Random‐effects models were used to calculate the pooled hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Results: Twelve studies comprising 28 643 patients with HF reported the risk of all‐cause mortality and cardiac outcomes associated with prediabetes. The prevalence of prediabetes ranged from 9.6% to 37.2%. After a median follow‐up duration of 2.3 years, patients with HF and with prediabetes were associated with an increased risk of all‐cause mortality (HR 1.29, 95% CI 1.06‐1.58), cardiovascular mortality (HR 1.59, 95% CI 1.09‐2.32), HF hospitalization (HR 1.33, 95% CI 1.09‐1.61), all‐cause mortality and/or HF hospitalization (HR 1.22, 95% CI 1.01‐1.47), as well as cardiovascular mortality and/or HF hospitalization (HR 1.21, 95% CI 1.07‐1.37). Conclusions: Prediabetes is associated with a worse prognosis in patients with HF. Further risk stratification and effective treatment strategies are needed in patients with prediabetes and with HF to improve the prognosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: To determine the role of prediabetes in the incidence of heart failure (HF). Materials and Methods: We searched electronic databases (PubMed, Embase, Google Scholar and OpenGrey) for studies up to 31 December 2020. Studies were included for meta‐analysis if they reported adjusted relative risks (RRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the risk of HF for prediabetes compared with normoglycaemia. Prediabetes was defined as impaired fasting glucose (IFG) according to the World Health Organization (WHO) criteria (IFG‐WHO), or according to the American Diabetes Association (ADA) definition (IFG‐ADA), impaired glucose tolerance (IGT), raised HbA1c according to the ADA criteria (HbA1c‐ADA), or according to the International Expert Committee (IEC) recommendation (HbA1c‐IEC). Results: A total of 15 studies comprising 9,827,430 individuals provided data for this analysis. The median follow‐up duration of the included studies was 8.0 years. Compared with normoglycaemia, prediabetes was associated with an increased risk for HF: IFG‐ADA (RR: 1.09, 95% CI: 1.05–1.13), IFG‐WHO (RR: 1.18, 95% CI: 1.07–1.30), IGT (RR 1.58, 95% CI 1.04–2.39), HbA1c‐ADA (RR 1.28, 95% CI 1.16–1.41) or HbA1c‐IEC (RR 1.40, 95% CI 1.09–1.79), respectively. Conclusions: Prediabetes is associated with an increased risk of HF. Future studies are needed to evaluate effective treatments for prediabetes to prevent the development and progression of HF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

T‐cell exhaustion is one of the hallmarks in cancer, but the mechanisms underlying T‐cell dysregulation remains unclear. Here, we reported that down‐regulation of transcription factor EOMES contributed to increased levels of inhibitory receptors in T cell among the tumour tissues and resulted in the poor prognosis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). By analysing the correlation between EOMES in tumour‐infiltrating T cells and the clinical features, we demonstrated that the EOMES was related to the advanced stage and poor prognosis of HCC. Further mechanistic studies revealed that the EOMES mainly expressed in the CD8+ T cells and were down‐regulated in tumour samples. Moreover, we demonstrated that the EOMES directly bound at the transcriptional regulatory regions of the key inhibitory factors including PD‐1, CTAL‐4 and CD39, and lower levels of EOMES contributed to overexpression of these factors in T cells. Together, our studies provide new insight into the transcriptional deregulation of the inhibitory receptors on T cells during the tumorigenesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Gut microbiota‐produced trimethylamine N‐oxide (TMAO) is a risk factor for cardiovascular events. However, conflicting findings regarding the link between plasma TMAO level and prognosis for patients with heart failure have been reported. We examined the association of plasma TMAO concentration with risk of major adverse cardiac events (MACEs) and all‐cause mortality in patients with heart failure. Study design: Meta‐analysis of prospective clinical studies. Data sources: We searched electronic databases (PubMed, EMBASE) for published prospective studies examining associations between plasma TMAO level and MACEs and all‐cause mortality in adults with heart failure. Data synthesis: Hazard ratios (HRs) with 95% confidence intervals for associations between TMAO level and outcomes were estimated in random effects models. In seven eligible studies including a total of 6879 patients (median follow‐up, 5.0 years) and adjusted for multiple risk factors, higher plasma TMAO level was associated with greater risks of MACEs (TMAO tertile 3 v tertile 1: HR, 1.68; 95% CI, 1.44–1.96; per SD increment: HR, 1.26; 95% CI, 1.18–1.36) and of all‐cause mortality (TMAO tertile 3 v tertile 1: HR, 1.67; 95% CI, 1.17–2.38; per SD increment: HR, 1.26; 95% CI, 1.07–1.48). Higher TMAO level was also associated with greater risk of MACEs after adjusting for estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR; six studies included); however, the heterogeneity of studies in which risk was adjusted for eGFR was significant (I2 = 76%). Conclusions: Elevated plasma TMAO level in patients with heart failure is associated with poorer prognoses. This association is only partially mediated by renal dysfunction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heterogeneous information network (HIN), which contains various types of nodes and links, has been applied in recommender systems. Although HIN-based recommendation approaches perform better than the traditional recommendation approaches, they still have the following problems: for example, meta-paths are manually selected, not automatically; meta-path representations are rarely explicitly learned; and the global and local information of each node in HIN has not been simultaneously explored. To solve the above deficiencies, we propose a tri-attention neural network (TANN) model for recommendation task. The proposed TANN model applies the stud genetic algorithm to automatically select meta-paths at first. Then, it learns global and local representations of each node, as well as the representations of meta-paths existing in HIN. After that, a tri-attention mechanism is proposed to enhance the mutual influence among users, items, and their related meta-paths. Finally, the encoded interaction information among the user, the item, and their related meta-paths, which contain more semantic information can be used for recommendation task. Extensive experiments on the Douban Movie, MovieLens, and Yelp datasets have demonstrated the outstanding performance of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background & Aims: Whether nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is associated with risk of incident atrial fibrillation (AF) independent of established cardiovascular risk factors remains controversial. We aimed to provide a quantitative estimate of the association between NAFLD and risk of AF after adjustment for cardiometabolic risk factors. Methods: In this study, we searched PubMed and Embase for studies published from database inception until January 31, 2020. Cohort studies reported adjusted relative risks (RRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for AF of NAFLD compared with non‐NAFLD were included for analysis. Results: A total of 6 cohort studies were included, comprising 614 673 individuals for analysis. The median follow‐up duration was 10.0 years with 7271 cases of incident AF. Compared with non‐NAFLD, minimally adjusted models without adjustment for cardiometabolic risk factors showed that NAFLD was associated with increased risk of AF (RR 1.65, 95% CI 1.23‐2.20, I2 = 63.0%). After adjustment for multiple cardiometabolic risk factors, the association between NAFLD and risk of AF was still higher than that in non‐NAFLD (RR 1.19, 95% CI 1.04‐1.31, I2 = 54.0%). There was significant heterogeneity for the risk of AF between minimally and maximally adjusted models (I2 = 77.1%, P for heterogeneity = 0.04). Compared with non‐NAFLD, the absolute risk increase in NAFLD for AF was 1.3 (95% CI 0.5‐2.1) per 1000 person‐years. Conclusions: NAFLD is associated with increased risk of incident AF. The strength of the association between NAFLD and AF is partially attributed to the co‐existing cardiometabolic risk factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The diploid wild cotton species Gossypium australe possesses excellent traits including resistance to disease and delayed gland morphogenesis, and has been successfully used for distant breeding programmes to incorporate disease resistance traits into domesticated cotton. Here, we sequenced the G. australe genome by integrating PacBio, Illumina short read, BioNano (DLS) and Hi‐C technologies, and acquired a high‐quality reference genome with a contig N50 of 1.83 Mb and a scaffold N50 of 143.60 Mb. We found that 73.5% of the G. australe genome is composed of various repeat sequences, differing from those of G. arboreum (85.39%), G. hirsutum (69.86%) and G. barbadense (69.83%). The G. australe genome showed closer collinear relationships with the genome of G. arboreum than G. raimondii and has undergone less extensive genome reorganization than the G. arboreum genome. Selection signature and transcriptomics analyses implicated multiple genes in disease resistance responses, including GauCCD7 and GauCBP1, and experiments revealed induction of both genes by Verticillium dahliae and by the plant hormones strigolactone (GR24), salicylic acid (SA) and methyl jasmonate (MeJA). Experiments using a Verticillium‐resistant domesticated G. barbadense cultivar confirmed that knockdown of the homologues of these genes caused a significant reduction in resistance against Verticillium dahliae. Moreover, knockdown of a newly identified gland‐associated gene GauGRAS1 caused a glandless phenotype in partial tissues using G. australe. The G. australe genome represents a valuable resource for cotton research and distant relative breeding as well as for understanding the evolutionary history of crop genomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: There is evidence that interleukin-6 (IL-6) upregulation plays a critical role in immunopathology of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). MicroRNA- (miRNA-) 98 was predicted to bind with the 3'-untranslated region (3'-UTR) of IL-6 gene. We hypothesized miR-98 through its regulation of IL-6 gene expression to influence cytokine production from peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) in SLE.Methods: The expression of miR-98 and IL-6 mRNA in the PBMCs of 41 SLE patients and 20 healthy controls (HC) was detected by quantitative reverse transcription PCR (qRT-PCR). The correlations between miR-98 expression and clinical features were evaluated. Luciferase reporter assay was performed to identify miR-98 targets. miR-98 mimics, miR-98 inhibitor, and IL-6 overexpression vector were generated. Cell viability of PBMCs was assessed using MTT assay. Gene expression and protein level were determined by qRT-PCR and Western blotting. TNF-α, IL-8, IL-1β, and IL-10 levels in cultured supernatants were quantified using ELISA.Results: The expression of miR-98 was downregulated in PBMCs of SLE patients, and its expression is negatively associated with IL-6 levels. miR-98 expression was correlated with disease activity, lupus nephritis, and anti-dsDNA antibody. IL-6 mRNA was a target gene of miR-98. IL-6 overexpression promoted the proliferation of PBMCs and increased the levels of TNF-α, IL-8, IL-1β, and IL-10. Those effects were further enhanced by miR-98 inhibitor, while were suppressed by miR-98 mimics. miR-98 regulated the levels of STAT3 phosphorylation via its target gene IL-6.Conclusion: The current study revealed that miR-98 could ameliorate STAT3-mediated cell proliferation and inflammatory cytokine production via its target gene IL-6 in patients with SLE. These results suggest that miR-98 might serve as a potential target for SLE treatment and other IL-6-mediated diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We identified 102, 51 and 51 proteins encoded by the trihelix genes in Gossypium hirsutum, Gossypium arboreum and Gossypiumraimondii, respectively. RNA sequence data and real‐time quantitative polymerase chain reaction analysis showed that Gh_A05G2067 (GT‐2) was highly upregulated under drought and salt stress conditions. Transient expression of GT‐2‐green fluorescent protein fusion protein in protoplast showed that GT‐2 was localized in the nucleus. The overexpression of GT‐2 conferred an enhanced drought tolerance to cotton, with lower malondialdehyde, hydrogen peroxide contents and higher reactive oxygen scavenging enzyme activities. Moreover, chlorophyll content, relative leaf water content (RLWC), excised leaf water loss (ELWL) and cell membrane stability (CMS) were relatively stable in the GT‐2‐overexpressed lines compared to wild‐type (WT). Similarly, stress‐responsive genes RD29A, SOS1, ABF4 and CBL1 were highly upregulated in the GT‐2‐overexpressed lines but were significantly downregulated in WT. In addition, the GT‐2‐silenced cotton plants exhibited a high level of oxidation injury, due to high levels of oxidant enzymes, in addition to negative effects on CMS, ELWL, RLWC and chlorophyll content. These results mark the foundation for future exploration of the trihelix genes in cotton, with an aim of developing more resilient, versatile and highly tolerant cotton genotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a tremendous growth in the number of scientific papers, researchers have to spend too much time and struggle to find the appropriate papers they are looking for. Local citation recommendation that provides a list of references based on a text segment could alleviate the problem. Most existing local citation recommendation approaches concentrate on how to narrow the semantic difference between the scientific papers' and citation context's text content, completely neglecting other information. Inspired by the successful use of the encoder-decoder framework in machine translation, we develop an attention-based encoder-decoder (AED) model for local citation recommendation. The proposed AED model integrates venue information and author information in attention mechanism and learns relations between variable-length texts of the two text objects, i.e., citation contexts and scientific papers. Specifically, we first construct an encoder to represent a citation context as a vector in a low-dimensional space; after that, we construct an attention mechanism integrating venue information and author information and use RNN to construct a decoder, then we map the decoder's output into a softmax layer, and score the scientific papers. Finally, we select papers which have high scores and generate a recommended reference paper list. We conduct experiments on the DBLP and ACL Anthology Network (AAN) datasets, and the results illustrate that the performance of the proposed approach is better than the other three state-of-the-art approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To investigate the fetal and maternal outcomes as well as predictors of APOs in women with SLE who conceived when the disease was stable, the so-called "planned pregnancy." Methods. A retrospective multicenter study of 243 patients with SLE who underwent a planned pregnancy was performed. APOs in fetus and mothers were recorded.Results: The average age at conception was 28.9 ± 3.9 years. Duration of SLE prior to pregnancy was 4.4 ± 4.3 years. Fetal APOs occurred in 86 (86/243, 35.4%) patients. Preterm births, intrauterine growth retardation (IUGR), fetal distress, and fetal loss accounted for 22.2%, 14.8%, 11.1%, and 4.9%, respectively. Forty-two preterm infants (42/54, 77.8%) were delivered after the 34th week of gestation. All the preterm infants were viable. Fifty-two patients (52/243, 21.4%) had disease flares, among which 45 cases (45/52, 86.5%) were mild, 6 (6/52, 11.5%) were moderate, and 1 (1/52, 1.9%) was severe. Disease flares were mainly presented as active lupus nephritis (41/52, 78.8%), thrombocytopenia (10/52, 19.2%), and skin/mucosa lesions (9/52, 17.3%). Pregnancy-induced hypertension (PIH) occurred in 29 patients, among which 3 were gestational hypertension and 26 were preeclampsia. Multiple analysis showed that disease flares (OR, 8.1; CI, 3.8-17.2) and anticardiolipin antibody positivity (OR, 7.4; CI, 2.5-21.8) were associated with composite fetal APOs.Conclusion: Planned pregnancy improved fetal and maternal outcomes, presenting as a lower rate of fetal loss, more favorable outcomes for preterm infants, and less severe disease flares during pregnancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efficient utilization of solar energy is a high-priority target and the search for suitable materials as photocatalysts that not only can harvest the broad wavelength of solar light, from UV to near-infrared (NIR) region, but also can achieve high and efficient solar-to-hydrogen conversion is one of the most challenging missions. Herein, using Au/La2Ti2O7 (BP-Au/LTO) sensitized with black phosphorus (BP), a broadband solar response photocatalyst was designed and used as efficient photocatalyst for H2 production. The optimum H2 production rates of BP-Au/LTO were about 0.74 and 0.30 mmol g−1 h−1 at wavelengths longer than 420 nm and 780 nm, respectively. The broad absorption of BP and plasmonic Au contribute to the enhanced photocatalytic activity in the visible and NIR light regions. Time-resolved diffuse reflectance spectroscopy revealed efficient interfacial electron transfer from excited BP and Au to LTO which is in accordance with the observed high photoactivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sentence clustering plays a pivotal role in theme-based summarization, which discovers topic themes defined as the clusters of highly related sentences to avoid redundancy and cover more diverse information. As the length of sentences is short and the content it contains is limited, the bag-of-words cosine similarity traditionally used for document clustering is no longer suitable. Special treatment for measuring sentence similarity is necessary. In this article, we study the sentence-level clustering problem. After exploiting concept- and context-enriched sentence vector representations, we develop two co-clustering frameworks to enhance sentence-level clustering for theme-based summarization-integrated clustering and interactive clustering-both allowing word and document to play an explicit role in sentence clustering as independent text objects rather than using word or concept as features of a sentence in a document set. In each framework, we experiment with two-level co-clustering (i.e., sentence-word co-clustering or sentence-document co-clustering) and three-level co-clustering (i.e., document-sentence-word co-clustering). Compared against concept- and context-oriented sentence-representation reformation, co-clustering shows a clear advantage in both intrinsic clustering quality evaluation and extrinsic summarization evaluation conducted on the Document Understanding Conferences (DUC) datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Helicobacter pylori, non-alcoholic liver disease and atrial fibrillation: Is there a link? In our recently published study, we reported that non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is associated with increased risk of incident atrial fibrillation (AF).1 In minimally adjusted models without adjustment for cardiometabolic risk factors, NAFLD was associated with a 65% increased risk of AF. Impact of Helicobacter pylori -linked metabolic syndrome on non-alcoholic liver disease and its connected atrial fibrillation risk. [Extracted from the article]

Artificial photosynthesis, which converts carbon dioxide into hydrocarbon fuels, is a promising strategy to overcome both global warming and energy crisis. Herein, the geometric position of Cu and Ga on ultra‐thin CuGaS2/Ga2S3 is oriented via a sulfur defect engineering, and the unprecedented C2H4 yield selectivity is ≈93.87% and yield is ≈335.67 µmol g−1 h−1. A highly delocalized electron distribution intensity induced by S vacancy indicates that Cu and Ga adjacent to S vacancy form Cu–Ga metallic bond, which accelerates the photocatalytic reduction of CO2 to C2H4. The stability of the crucial intermediates (*CHOHCO) is attributed to the upshift of the d‐band center of ultra‐thin CGS/GS. The C–C coupling barrier is intrinsically reduced by the dominant exposed Cu atoms on the 2D ultra‐thin CuGaS2/Ga2S3 in the process of photocatalytic CO2 reduction, which captures *CO molecules effectively. This study proposes a new strategy to design photocatalyst through defect engineering to adjust the selectivity of photocatalytic CO2 reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The delivery of adipose-derived stem cells (ADSCs) for promoting tissue repair has become a potential new therapy, while hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) is an important growth factor with angiogenic, anti-fibrotic, and anti-inflammatory benefits. In this paper, hADSCs were separated, cultured and identified based on the expression of cell surface antigens and multiple differentiation potential. We successfully generated a lentiviral vector encoding human HGF, infected hADSCs with this vector and examined the protein expression pattern. Finally we found that the hHGF lentiviral vector was successfully generated, and the lentiviral vector was able to safely infect hADSCs with high infection efficiency, thereby producing cells that overexpressed hHGF, which may provide a new strategy for the treatment of ischemic heart disease (IHD) and other ischemic diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The results of studies on the association between prehypertension (blood pressure 120 to 139/80 to 89 mm Hg) and coronary heart disease (CHD) remain controversial. Furthermore, it is unclear whether prehypertension affects the risk of CHD in Asian and Western populations differently. This meta-analysis evaluated the risk of CHD associated with prehypertension and its different subgroups., Methods and Results: The PubMed and Embase databases were searched for prospective cohort studies with data on prehypertension and the risk of CHD. Studies were included if they reported multivariate-adjusted relative risks (RRs) with 95% CIs of CHD from prehypertension. A total of 591 664 participants from 17 prospective cohort studies were included. Prehypertension increased the risk of CHD (RR 1.43, 95% CI 1.26 to 1.63, P<0.001) compared with optimal blood pressure (<120/80 mm Hg). The risk of CHD was higher in Western than in Asian participants (Western: RR 1.70, 95% CI 1.49 to 1.94; Asian: RR 1.25, 95% CI 1.12 to 1.38; ratio of RRs 1.36, 95% CI 1.15 to 1.61). The population-attributable risk indicated that 8.4% of CHD in Asian participants was attributed to prehypertension, whereas this proportion was 24.1% in Western participants., Conclusions: Prehypertension, even at the low range, is associated with an increased risk of CHD. This risk is more pronounced in Western than in Asian populations. These results supported the heterogeneity of target-organ damage caused by prehypertension and hypertension among different ethnicities and underscore the importance of prevention of CHD in Western patients with prehypertension., (© 2015 The Authors. Published on behalf of the American Heart Association, Inc., by Wiley Blackwell.)