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Summary: Meiotic crossovers are required for the faithful segregation of homologous chromosomes and to promote genetic diversity. However, it is unclear how crossover formation is regulated, especially on the XY chromosomes, which show a homolog only at the tiny pseudoautosomal region. Here, we show that ATF7IP2 is a meiosis-specific ortholog of ATF7IP and a partner of SETDB1. In the absence of ATF7IP2, autosomes show increased axis length and more crossovers; however, many XY chromosomes lose the obligatory crossover, although the overall XY axis length is also increased. Additionally, meiotic DNA double-strand break formation/repair may also be affected by altered histone modifications. Ultimately, spermatogenesis is blocked, and male mice are infertile. These findings suggest that ATF7IP2 constraints autosomal axis length and crossovers on autosomes; meanwhile, it also modulates XY chromosomes to establish meiotic sex chromosome inactivation for cell-cycle progression and to ensure XY crossover formation during spermatogenesis.

The safety of oil and gas pipelines has become an important factor influencing the national economy. With the vigorous development of pipeline engineering, oil and gas pipelines often inevitably intersect with various traffic routes. In the western mountainous area of China, it is very common for the oil and gas pipelines undercrossing the high fill embankment, where the oil and gas pipelines generally have a buried depth of 1 m to 3 m, and they are prone to be affected by the uneven settlement of the overlying soil of the upper embankment, resulting in the risk of extrusion shear fracture. Therefore, studying the interaction between the pipelines and the high fill embankment and accurately evaluating their safety have become the essential consideration for oil and gas pipelines crossing the high fill embankment in complex mountainous area. Herein, the stress, strain and deflection response of the pipeline under the high fill embankment of the logistics outer ring road in Guiyang Shuanglong Airport Economic Zone was analyzed with the in-situ monitoring and finite element method, and the threshold of monitoring and early warning was inversely calculated based on the critical instability state of the pipeline. According to the results, the maximum cumulative settlement of pipeline in the study area is 17.3 mm, the maximum difference of uneven settlement is 4 mm, and the maximum internal offset is 16.1 mm, which indicate that the stress, strain and deflection of the pipeline is much smaller than the allowable value, so the pipeline is safe. In general, the research results could provide guidance for the monitoring, early warning and safety assessment of oil and gas pipelines.

Deep neural network has been successfully applied to image classification, but recent research work shows that deep neural network is vulnerable to adversarial attacks.A moving target defense method was proposed by means of dynamic switching model with a Bayes-Stackelberg game strategy, which could prevent an attacker from continuously obtaining consistent information and thus blocked its construction of adversarial examples.To improve the defense effect of the proposed method, the gradient consistency among the member models was taken as a measure to construct a new loss function in training for improving the difference among the member models.Experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the moving target defense performance of the image classification system and significantly reduce the attack success rate against the adversarial examples.

In recent years, semantic segmentation with pixel-level classification has become one of the types of research focus in the field of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image interpretation. Fully convolutional network (FCN) can achieve end-to-end semantic segmentation, which provides a basic framework for subsequent improved networks. As a classic FCN-based network, U-Net has been applied to semantic segmentation of remote sensing images. Although good segmentation results have been obtained, scalar neurons have made it difficult for the network to obtain multiple properties of entities in the image. The vector neurons used in the capsule network can effectively solve this problem. In this paper, we propose a complex-valued (CV) U-Net with a CV capsule network embedded for semantic segmentation of a PolSAR image. The structure of CV U-Net is lightweight to match the small PolSAR data, and the embedded CV capsule network is designed to extract more abundant features of the PolSAR image than the CV U-Net. Furthermore, CV dynamic routing is proposed to realize the connection between capsules in two adjacent layers. Experiments on two airborne datasets and one Gaofen-3 dataset show that the proposed network is capable of distinguishing different types of land covers with a similar scattering mechanism and extracting complex boundaries between two adjacent land covers. The network achieves better segmentation performance than other state-of-art networks, especially when the training set size is small.

Abstract Background Skin injury is inevitable in daily life. In recent years, with the increasing morbidity of diseases such as diabetes and metabolic disorders, chronic wounds have become a considerable challenge in clinical practice. Royal jelly, reported to have multifarious biological and physiological properties, has been used as a remedy for a variety of wounds since ancient times. However, the active components and mechanisms underlying the wound-healing properties of royal jelly are still largely unknown. Methods Water-soluble proteins of royal jelly were fractionated and investigated for the proliferative and migratory effects on human epidermal keratinocytes (HaCaT) in an in vitro wound healing model. The proteins present in bioactive fractions were characterised and quantified using Label-free protein quantification method. The potential functions of these proteins in biological systems were further analysed using bioinformatic tools. Results A protein fraction, mainly containing major royal jelly proteins 2 (MRJP2), MRJP3 and MRJP7, stimulated proliferative and migratory activities in HaCaT cells without visible cytotoxicity. It exerted the greatest effects on the growth of HaCaT cells in the first 48 h. Furthermore, when treated with this protein fraction, the closure rates of the in vitro scratch wound were significantly increased. Functional analysis indicated that MRJP2, MRJP3 and MRJP7 were associated with carbohydrate transport and metabolism. Conclusions We fractionated the water-soluble proteins of royal jelly and identified one fraction (Fraction 2) that induced both proliferative and migratory effects on a human epidermal keratinocyte cell line. Major royal jelly proteins (MRJP2, MRJP3 and/or MRJP7) were speculated to possess potential wound-healing bioactivity. This is the first report that royal jelly may improve wound closure via MRJP-induced cellular proliferation and migration. These proteins may be valuable lead compounds for the development of novel wound healing medications. Our findings would facilitate better understanding of the wound repair mechanisms of royal jelly.

Royal jelly (RJ) possesses biological effects on varied organisms. The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of RJ on tumour growth with transcriptomic profile. RJ intake for 42 days did inhibit tumour growth in 4T1-bearing mice, and gene expression profile of tumour was determined by high-throughput RNA sequencing system. Out of 281 differently expressed genes (DEGs), 56 were annotated with immune system processes, suggesting that RJ immunomodulation was response to the tumour growth in 4T1-bearing mice. KEGG pathway analysis had shown that only four pathways were notably enriched in tumour of RJ-treated 4T1-bearing mice. DEG ratios related to immunity in these four pathways were very high. Overlapping DEGs of these four pathways were all related to immunity. These findings showed that tumour growth in 4T1-bearing mice was affected by RJ-induced alterations in gene expression and related pathways, especially the immune-related genes.

Due to various pharmacological properties, including antioxidative, anti‑inflammatory and antibiotic properties, royal jelly (RJ) has been widely consumed in daily diets in numerous countries. In the present study, the effect of RJ on 4T1‑bearing mice was investigated. The study was performed by feeding 4T1‑bearing mice with RJ using either the prophylactic‑therapeutic (PTRJ) or therapeutic (TRJ) method. The experimental results for the PTRJ group demonstrated that the weight of tumor was significantly reduced (RJ 0.5 and 1.5 g/kg); and in the serum, the levels of interleukin (IL)‑2 (RJ 0.5 and 1.5 g/kg), interferon (IFN)‑α, superoxide dismutase (SOD) and total antioxidant capacity (T‑AOC) were significantly elevated, but the concentrations of IL‑4 (RJ 0.5 and 1.5 g/kg) and IL‑10 (RJ 1.0 g/kg) were significantly decreased. In addition, the activities of T‑AOC and glutathione reductase (GR) were significantly improved in the liver, whereas in the kidney, the activities of T‑AOC and GR were significantly increased only under the dose of 0.5 g/kg. For the TRJ group, the antitumor effect of RJ was not significant; the change in IL‑2, IFN‑α, SOD and T‑AOC levels in the serum, and the change in T‑AOC and GR in liver were similar to those observed in the PTRJ groups. RJ treatment was demonstrated to reduce the development of breast tumor in mice, and simultaneously improve the antioxidant capacity of the serum, liver and kidney, particularly using the prophylactic‑therapeutic method. These results corroborated the efficacy of RJ supplementation in diets. The results of the present study suggest that the antioxidant and immunomodulatory activities of RJ serve an important role on antitumor growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]