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Photosynthetic organisms exhibit remarkable diversity in their light-harvesting complexes (LHCs). LHCs are associated with photosystem I (PSI), forming a PSI-LHCI supercomplex. The number of LHCI subunits, along with their protein sequences and pigment compositions, has been found to differ greatly among the PSI-LHCI structures. However, the mechanisms by which LHCIs recognize their specific binding sites within the PSI core remain unclear. In this study, we determined the cryo-electron microscopy structure of a PSI supercomplex incorporating fucoxanthin chlorophyll a/c-binding proteins (FCPs), designated as PSI-FCPI, isolated from the diatom Thalassiosira pseudonana CCMP1335. Structural analysis of PSI-FCPI revealed five FCPI subunits associated with a PSI monomer; these subunits were identified as RedCAP, Lhcr3, Lhcq10, Lhcf10, and Lhcq8. Through structural and sequence analyses, we identified specific protein–protein interactions at the interfaces between FCPI and PSI subunits, as well as among FCPI subunits themselves. Comparative structural analyses of PSI-FCPI supercomplexes, combined with phylogenetic analysis of FCPs from T. pseudonana and the diatom Chaetoceros gracilis, underscore the evolutionary conservation of protein motifs crucial for the selective binding of individual FCPI subunits. These findings provide significant insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying the assembly and selective binding of FCPIs in diatoms.

Abstract The Retinoic acid-Inducible Gene I (RIG-I) like receptors (RLRs) are the major viral RNA sensors essential for the initiation of antiviral immune responses. RLRs are subjected to stringent transcriptional and posttranslational regulations, of which ubiquitination is one of the most important. However, the role of ubiquitination in RLR transcription is unknown. Here, we screen 375 definite ubiquitin ligase knockout cell lines and identify Ubiquitin Protein Ligase E3 Component N-Recognin 5 (UBR5) as a positive regulator of RLR transcription. UBR5 deficiency reduces antiviral immune responses to RNA viruses, while increases viral replication in primary cells and mice. Ubr5 knockout mice are more susceptible to lethal RNA virus infection than wild type littermates. Mechanistically, UBR5 mediates the Lysine 63-linked ubiquitination of Tripartite Motif Protein 28 (TRIM28), an epigenetic repressor of RLRs. This modification prevents intramolecular SUMOylation of TRIM28, thus disengages the TRIM28-imposed brake on RLR transcription. In sum, UBR5 enables rapid upregulation of RLR expression to boost antiviral immune responses by ubiquitinating and de-SUMOylating TRIM28.

Background: The treatment of patellar tendon injury has always been an unsolved problem, and mechanical characterization is very important for its repair and reconstruction. Elastin is a contributor to mechanics, but it is not clear how it affects the elasticity, viscoelastic properties, and structure of patellar tendon.Methods: The patellar tendons from six fresh adult experimental pigs were used in this study and they were made into 77 samples. The patellar tendon was specifically degraded by elastase, and the regional mechanical response and structural changes were investigated by: (1) Based on the previous study of elastase treatment conditions, the biochemical quantification of collagen, glycosaminoglycan and total protein was carried out; (2) The patellar tendon was divided into the proximal, central, and distal regions, and then the axial tensile test and stress relaxation test were performed before and after phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) or elastase treatment; (3) The dynamic constitutive model was established by the obtained mechanical data; (4) The structural relationship between elastin and collagen fibers was analyzed by two-photon microscopy and histology.Results: There was no statistical difference in mechanics between patellar tendon regions. Compared with those before elastase treatment, the low tensile modulus decreased by 75%–80%, the high tensile modulus decreased by 38%–47%, and the transition strain was prolonged after treatment. For viscoelastic behavior, the stress relaxation increased, the initial slope increased by 55%, the saturation slope increased by 44%, and the transition time increased by 25% after enzyme treatment. Elastin degradation made the collagen fibers of patellar tendon become disordered and looser, and the fiber wavelength increased significantly.Conclusion: The results of this study show that elastin plays an important role in the mechanical properties and fiber structure stability of patellar tendon, which supplements the structure-function relationship information of patellar tendon. The established constitutive model is of great significance to the prediction, repair and replacement of patellar tendon injury. In addition, human patellar tendon has a higher elastin content, so the results of this study can provide supporting information on the natural properties of tendon elastin degradation and guide the development of artificial patellar tendon biomaterials.

Manufactured sand (MS), due to its wide availability and cost-effectiveness, is used as an alternative aggregate for quartz sand (QS) in ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) to prepare ultra-high-performance manufactured sand concrete (UHPMC). This study aims to assess the bond behavior of 600 MPa-grade, high-strength, hot-rolled ribbed bars (HRB 600) in UHPMC. Thirty specimens were designed for the pull-out tests, taking into account several feature parameters, including MS replacement ratio (0%, 50%, 100%), water–binder ratio (0.17, 0.19, 0.21), steel fiber content (0%, 1%, 2%), and anchorage length (2d, 3d, 4d, 5d). The effects of the feature parameters on the failure mode, bond stress–slip curves, bond strength, bond-slip mechanism, and constitutive model were analyzed and illustrated. The results reveal that the pull-out specimen of UHPMC exhibits three distinct failure modes: rebar pull-out failure, UHPMC splitting failure, and splitting-pull-out failure. The bond strength increases from 46.57 MPa to 56.92 MPa when the steel fiber content increases from 0% to 2%. Additionally, a decrease in anchoring length is beneficial for improving the bond strength; as the anchoring length increases from 2d to 5d, the bonding strength decreases by 35.84%. The bond strength increases with an increase in the MS replacement ratio. As for the water–binder ratio, the bond strength presents the highest value when the water–binder ratio is 0.17. In addition, a new bond-slip constitutive model applicable to UHPMC and HRB 600 rebar, considering the MS replacement ratio, the water–binder ratio, etc., is proposed, which presents favorable prediction accuracy.

Most traditional synthetic dyes and functional reagents used in silk fabrics are not biodegradable and lack green environmental protection. Natural dyes have attracted more and more attention because of their coloring, functionalization effects, and environmental benefits. In this study, natural dyes were extracted from lac and used for coloring and functionalization in silk fabrics without any other harmful dyes. The extraction conditions were studied and analyzed by the univariate method. The optimal extraction process was that the volume ratio of ethanol to water was 60:40 with a solid–liquid ratio of 1:10, and reacting under the neutrality condition for 1 h at 70 °C. Silk fabric can be dyed dark owing to the certain lifting property of lac. After being dyed by Al3+ post-medium, the levels of the washing fastness, light fastness, and friction fastness of silk fabric are all above four with excellent fastness. The results show that the dyed silk fabrics have good UV protection, antioxidation, and antibacterial properties. The UV protection coefficient UPF is 42.68, the antioxidant property is 98.57%, and the antibacterial property can reach more than 80%. Therefore, the dyeing and functionalization of silk fabrics by utilizing naturally lac dyes show broad prospects in terms of the application of green sustainable dyeing and functionalization.

Cracks provide the earliest and most immediate visual response to structural deterioration of asphalt pavements. Most of the current methods for crack detection are based on visible light sensors and convolutional neural networks. However, such an approach obviously limits the detection to daytime and good lighting conditions. Therefore, this paper proposes a crack detection technique cross-modal feature alignment of YOLOV5 based on visible and infrared images. The infrared spectrum characteristics of silicate concrete can be an important supplement. The adaptive illumination-aware weight generation module is introduced to compute illumination probability to guide the training of the fusion network. In order to alleviate the problem of weak alignment of the multi-scale feature map, the FA-BIFPN feature pyramid module is proposed. The parallel structure of a dual backbone network takes 40% less time to train than a single backbone network. As determined through validation on FLIR, LLVIP, and VEDAI bimodal datasets, the fused images have more stable performance compared to the visible images. In addition, the detector proposed in this paper surpasses the current advanced YOLOV5 unimodal detector and CFT cross-modal fusion module. In the publicly available bimodal road crack dataset, our method is able to detect cracks of 5 pixels with 98.3% accuracy under weak illumination.

Abstract Quantum systems are under various unwanted interactions due to their coupling with the environment. Efficient control of quantum system is essential for quantum information processing. Weak-coupling interactions are ubiquitous, and it is very difficult to suppress them using optimal control method, because the control operation is at a time scale of the coherent life time of the system. Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center of diamond is a promising platform for quantum information processing. The $$^{13}$$ 13 C nuclear spins in the bath are weakly coupled to the NV, rendering the manipulation extremely difficulty. Here, we report a coupling selective optimal control method that selectively suppresses unwanted weak coupling interactions and at the same time greatly prolongs the life time of the wanted quantum system. We applied our theory to a 3 qubit system consisting of one NV electron spin and two $$^{13}$$ 13 C nuclear spins through weak-coupling with the NV center. In the experiments, the iSWAP $$^{\dagger }$$ † gate with selective optimal quantum control is implemented in a time-span of $$T_{ctrl}$$ T ctrl = 170.25 $$\mu$$ μ s, which is comparable to the phase decoherence time $$T_2$$ T 2 = 203 $$\mu s$$ μ s . The two-qubit controlled rotation gate is also completed in a strikingly 1020(80) $$\mu$$ μ s, which is five times of the phase decoherence time. These results could find important applications in the NISQ era.

Abstract While there are multiple reports on venous thromboembolism (VTE) associated with several orthopedic procedures, the knowledge regarding incidence and risk factors of VTE in tibial plateau fractures is limited. This study aimed to investigate the incidence and risk factors of clinically important venous thromboembolism (CIVTE) in patients with tibial plateau fractures. All adult patients who underwent surgical treatment of tibia plateau fractures between 2003 and 2018 in our level 1 trauma center were included in the study. All patients suspected CIVTE were assessed by the ultrasonography and/or CT scan. Univariate and multivariate analysis were used to evaluate the association between potential risk factors and CIVTE Variables. Thirty-nine of 462 patients (8.4%) developed clinically important venous thromboembolism, in which pulmonary embolism (PE) and deep vein thrombosis (DVT) were observed in 18 (3.9%) and 21 (4.54%) patients, respectively. Male gender (OR 9.75; 95% CI 2.34–40.66), spine injury (OR 9.51; 95% CI 3.39–26.64), other extremity injury (OR 3.7; 95% CI 1.58–8.66), length of stay in ICU (OR 1.14; 95% CI 1.09–1.2) were all risk factors for CIVTE. The incidence of CIVTE in tibial plateau fracture was relatively high (8.4%); The male gender, spine injury, other extremity injury, length of stay in ICU were the independent risk factors.

It is urgent to develop a polyamide (PA) thin-film composite (TFC) membrane with a new method in this study by designing and constructing a new nanomaterial support layer instead of the conventional support layer. Polydopamine-wrapped single-walled carbon nanotubes (PDA@MWCNTs) as the place of the polymerization reaction can optimize the PA film structure and performance. The resulting composite membrane presents a higher water flux of 15.8 L·m−2·h−1·bar−1 and a rejection rate of 97% to Na2SO4, simultaneously maintaining this high separation performance in 300 min. It is a new ideal to construct novel support layer by using inorganic nanoparticles and organic polymer nanofiber membranes.

Multi-point flexible stretch-forming process applies the idea of discretization to the die and clamp of stretch-forming, so that the die and clamp have high flexibility at the same time. Because the surface of the multi-point die is discontinuous, the sheet metal will produce the dimple during the forming process, which will affect the forming effect. To suppress the dimple, this paper takes parabolic spherical parts as the research object, and discusses the influence of swinging unit and discrete elastic cushion on the dimples of forming parts by numerical simulation. The results show that the strain and thickness distribution are more uniform and the dimples on the surface of the forming parts are obviously reduced when the swinging unit is used. The use of discrete elastic cushions on the fixed unit and the swinging unit can further suppress the dimples of the forming part and improve the forming accuracy. To verify the correctness of the numerical simulation, the multi-point die for swinging unit with discrete elastic cushion was used to carry out the flexible stretch-forming test of the parabolic spherical part. The test results are in agreement with the numerical simulation results, which shows that the methods are reliable and feasible.

In order to solve the poor hydrophilicity of low melting point polylactic acid (LMPLA) limiting its application in absorbent sanitary products. LMPLA/butenediol vinyl alcohol copolymer (BVOH) blends with different ratios were manufactured by simple melt blending. The BVOH exhibited good compatibility and dispersity in LMPLA matrix without chemical reaction, and LMPLA/BVOH blends showed sea-island structure. The introduction of BVOH could promote the crystallization of LMPLA and improve the crystallinity, whereas the crystallization of BVOH were limited. Furthermore, the introduction of BVOH could also decrease the thermal stability of LMPLA without affecting its application, but the tensile stress of LMPLA could be significantly increased. The tensile stress of LMPLA/BVOH blends could reach 78.59 MPa (increased by 10.9%) when he BVOH content was 3 wt%. Most importantly, the introduction of BVOH could significantly improve the hydrophilicity of LMPLA. The initial water contact angle decreased from 68.5° to 51.4° with the increase of BVOH content, and the contact angle decreased from 63.7° to 44.6° at 60 s. Moreover, the contact angle change rate of LMPLA/BVOH blends increased with the increase of BVOH content at different contact time, which also indicated adding BVOH could sharply improve the hydrophilicity of LMPLA.

ObjectiveThis study explored the structural imaging changes in patients with subcortical ischemic vascular disease (SIVD)-vascular cognitive impairment no dementia (VCIND) and the correlation between the changes in gray matter volume and the field of cognitive impairment to provide new targets for early diagnosis and treatment.MethodsOur study included 15 patients with SIVD-normal cognitive impairment (SIVD-NCI), 63 with SIVD-VCIND, 26 with SIVD-vascular dementia (SIVD-VD), and 14 normal controls (NC). T1-weighted images of all participants were collected, and DPABI and SPM12 software were used to process the gray matter of the four groups based on voxels. Fisher’s exact test, one-way ANOVA and Kruskal-Wallis H test were used to evaluate all clinical and demographic data and compare the characteristics of diencephalic gray matter atrophy in each group. Finally, the region of interest (ROI) of the SIVD-VCIND was extracted, and Pearson correlation analysis was performed between the ROI and the results of the neuropsychological scale.ResultsCompared to the NC, changes in gray matter atrophy were observed in the bilateral orbitofrontal gyrus, right middle temporal gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, and precuneus in the SIVD-VCIND. Gray matter atrophy was observed in the left cerebellar region 6, cerebellar crural region 1, bilateral thalamus, right precuneus, and calcarine in the SIVD-VD. Compared with the SIVD-VCIND, gray matter atrophy changes were observed in the bilateral thalamus in the SIVD-VD (p

The 3D reconstruction of forests provides a strong basis for scientific regulation of tree growth and fine survey of forest resources. Depth estimation is the key to the 3D reconstruction of inter-forest scene, which directly determines the effect of digital stereo reproduction. In order to solve the problem that the existing stereo matching methods lack the ability to use environmental information to find the consistency of ill-posed regions, resulting in poor matching effect in regions with weak texture, occlusion and other inconspicuous features, LANet, a stereo matching network based on Linear-Attention mechanism is proposed, which improves the stereo matching accuracy by effectively utilizing the global and local information of the environment, thereby optimizing the depth estimation effect. An AM attention module including a spatial attention module (SAM) and a channel attention module (CAM) is designed to model the semantic relevance of inter-forest scenes from the spatial and channel dimensions. The linear-attention mechanism proposed in SAM reduces the overall complexity of Self-Attention from O(n2) to O(n), and selectively aggregates the features of each position by weighted summation of all positions, so as to learn rich contextual relations to capture long-range dependencies. The Self-Attention mechanism used in CAM selectively emphasizes interdependent channel maps by learning the associated features between different channels. A 3D CNN module is optimized to adjust the matching cost volume by combining multiple stacked hourglass networks with intermediate supervision, which further improves the speed of the model while reducing the cost of inferential calculation. The proposed LANet is tested on the SceneFlow dataset with EPE of 0.82 and three-pixel-error of 2.31%, and tested on the Forest dataset with EPE of 0.68 and D1-all of 2.15% both of which outperform some state-of-the-art methods, and the comprehensive performance is very competitive. LANet can obtain high-precision disparity values of the inter-forest scene, which can be converted to obtain depth information, thus providing key data for high-quality 3D reconstruction of the forest.

Due to its poor toughness and hydrophilicity, the application of polylactic acid (PLA) in the field of absorbent sanitary materials is restricted. A butenediol vinyl alcohol copolymer (BVOH) was used to improve PLA via melt blending. The morphology, molecular structure, crystallization, thermal stability, tensile property, and hydrophilicity of PLA/BVOH composites with different mass ratios were investigated. The results show that the PLA/BVOH composites possessed a two-phase structure with good interfacial adhesion. The BVOH could effectively blend into PLA without a chemical reaction. The addition of the BVOH promoted the crystallization of PLA, improved the perfection of the crystalline region, and increased the glass transition temperature and melting temperature of PLA in the heating process. Moreover, the thermal stability of PLA was markedly improved by adding the BVOH. The addition of the BVOH also had a significant effect on the tensile property of the PLA/BVOH composites. When the content of the BVOH was 5 wt.%, the elongation at the break of the PLA/BVOH composites could reach 9.06% (increased by 76.3%). In addition, the hydrophilicity of PLA was also significantly improved, and the water contact angles decreased with the increase in the BVOH content and time. When the content of the BVOH was 10 wt.%, the water contact angle could reach 37.3° at 60 s, suggesting good hydrophilicity.

The human telomere system is highly dynamic. Both short and long leucocyte average telomere lengths (aTL) are associated with an increased risk of cancer and early death, illustrating the complex relationship between TL and human health and the importance of assessing TL distributions with single TL analysis. A DNA microarray and telomere fluorescent in situ hybridization (DNA-array-FISH) approach was developed to measure the base-pair (bp) lengths of single telomeres. On average 32000 telomeres were measured per DNA sample with one microarray chip assaying 96 test DNA samples. Various telomere parameters, i.e. aTL and the frequency of short/long telomeres, were computed to delineate TL distribution. The intra-assay and inter-assay coefficient of variations of aTL ranged from 1.37% to 3.98%. The correlation coefficient (r) of aTL in repeated measurements ranged from 0.91 to 1.00, demonstrating high measurement precision. aTLs measured by DNA-array-FISH predicted aTLs measured by terminal restriction fragment (TRF) analysis with r ranging 0.87-0.99. A new accurate and high-throughput method has been developed to measure the bp lengths of single telomeres. The large number of single TL data provides an opportunity for an in-depth analysis of telomere dynamics and the complex relationship between telomere and age-related diseases.

At present, the Monte Carlo method is the only method to evaluate the area blackbody emissivity, so it needs to be compared and verified with other calculation methods. In particular, the efficiency of Monte Carlo is low when the micro-cavity structure of the area blackbody is more complex for higher emissivity. An efficient algorithm for calculating emissivity of the area blackbody based on the multiple reflection method was put forward in this article. A multiple reflected light path that radiated into the inner micro-cavity structure of the area blackbody was simulated. The ratio of the outgoing light intensity to the incident light intensity was obtained by setting a threshold of the outgoing light intensity, and then the area blackbody emissivity was calculated. The simulation results showed that, compared with the Monte Carlo method, the results of the emissivity calculation were similar, and calculation efficiency was increased more than 100 times under the same micro-cavity structure. A practical area blackbody was made based on the simulation results from the proposed multiple reflection method, and the emissivity measurement experiments were carried out and compared to the cavity blackbody at the same temperature. The results showed that the emissivity was near one and stable for the NIR (Near Infrared) spectrum range when the temperature was higher than 280°C. Thus, the feasibility of the multiple reflection method for calculating the area blackbody emissivity was verified. The multiple reflection method proposed in this article provided one more design path for developing area blackbodies with more complex micro-cavity structures.

The calibration accuracy of the infrared temperature measurement system near room temperature field is easily affected by the calibration environment. In this paper, an equivalent blackbody calibration method is proposed for this problem. In this method, the target radiation and ambient radiation superimposed in calibration data are separated by two calibration functions at different ambient temperatures, and an equivalent blackbody calibration function is constructed. The experimental verification of the proposed method is carried out, and the results show that the proposed method has a better calibration effect for the surface blackbody than the commonly used environmental compensation methods. This method can effectively improve the calibration accuracy of infrared temperature measurement system near room temperature field, and further improve the infrared temperature measurement theory.

In this study, polyamide (PA) thin-film composite (TFC) nanofiltration membranes were fabricated via interfacial polymerization on cellulose acetate (CA)/poly(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) support layers. Several types of CA/PVDF supports were prepared via the phase inversion method. With increasing CA, the PVDF membrane surface pore size decreased and hydrophilicity increased. The effect of the support properties on the performance and formation mechanism of PA films was systematically investigated via an interfacial polymerization (IP) process. The permselectivity of the resulting TFC membranes was evaluated using a MgSO4 solution. The results show that the desired polyamide TFC membrane exhibited excellent water flux (6.56 L/(m2·h·bar)) and bivalent salt ion rejection (>97%). One aim of this study is to explore how the support of CA/PVDF influences the IP process and the performance of PA film.

Micro-scale cracks on the surface of a magnetic rotor are difficult to detect because of the formation of stains. A method that is based on computer vision and a support vector machine (SVM) that can accurately and rapidly locate micro-scale cracks are proposed. To further highlight the cracks and reduce interference, the image is pre-processed using improved adaptive median filtering, image sharpening, extract feature point, and an expansion based on mathematical morphology. Next, the feature curves of cracks and stains are extracted as training samples using the feature curve extract algorithm and the region orientation algorithm (ROA) for continuous and discontinuous crack curves images, respectively. SVM is later used to distinguish between the two types of image sources. An improved region orientation algorithm (IROA) is proposed to increase the efficiency of discontinuous crack curves images through online detection. Experiment results show that the accuracy of crack detection using ROA is 97.9%, and the accuracy is 94.7% using IROA. However, the IROA algorithm execution time is 3% that of ROA, and IROA's average crack detection time is shorter than that of ROA by 51%. The proposed method provides the basis for the automatic online detection of micro-scale cracks on a magnetic rotor surface and paves the way for the identification of cracks on complex morphologies, such as split cracks and circular cracks.

Abstract One unique feature of quantum mechanics is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that the outcomes of two incompatible measurements cannot simultaneously achieve arbitrary precision. In an information-theoretic context of quantum information, the uncertainty principle can be formulated as entropic uncertainty relations with two measurements for a quantum bit (qubit) in two-dimensional system. New entropic uncertainty relations are studied for a higher-dimensional quantum state with multiple measurements, and the uncertainty bounds can be tighter than that expected from two measurements settings and cannot result from qubits system with or without a quantum memory. Here we report the first room-temperature experimental testing of the entropic uncertainty relations with three measurements in a natural three-dimensional solid-state system: the nitrogen-vacancy center in pure diamond. The experimental results confirm the entropic uncertainty relations for multiple measurements. Our result represents a more precise demonstrating of the fundamental uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics.

Biodegradable and efficient filtration membrane is essential to practical oil–water separation. Herein, we fabricated highly porous membrane induced by the humidity. The resulting poly(lactic acid) fiber membrane exhibits superhydrophobicity due to more trapped air by the increased roughness of fiber at the relative humidity of 80%. Meanwhile, the increased humidity favors to the membrane porosity improvement from 81 ± 3.3% to 92 ± 4.1% with the humidity change from 40% to 80%. The superhydrophobicity company with the increased membrane porosity makes the functional poly(lactic acid) membrane with enhanced flux for practical oil–water separation.

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) remain the biggest cause of deaths worldwide. More than 17 million people die from CVDs annually. The HeartRescue Global Program is a five-year international healthcare program, sponsored by Medtronic Philanthropy and its partners, that supports community-based demonstration projects specifically designed to expand access to life saving interventions for acute cardiovascular events. Both global in scope and local in nature, HeartRescue focuses on working with healthcare partners in select communities in China, India, and Russia. The Heart Rescue Global Program will draw upon important lessons learned and expertise from within the on-going Heart Rescue-US Project. HeartRescue China has begun operating in select districts of China. This article focuses on introduces in details of the specific aims of the project, major components and activities, Expected Measurable Outcomes of the HeartRescue Program. This article focuses on and introduces in detail.

Background/Aims: The elucidation of the molecular mechanism of adipocyte differentiation in mesenchymal stem cells is of essential importance for the development of treatments for metabolic diseases, such as obesity and diabetes. Methods: The expression levels of miR-342-3p and carboxy-terminal binding protein 2 (CtBP2) were regulated by oligonucleotide transfection. Adipogenic differentiation was induced by adipogenic medium containing indomethacin, dexamethasone and 3-isobutyl-1-methylxanthine on day 12, as determined by Oil Red O staining and triglyceride concentration assay to assess intracellular lipid accumulation. The induction of adipocyte-specific transcription factors and markers was detected by qRT-PCR and western blot. The regulation of CtBP2 expression by miR-342-3p was determined by western blot, qRT-PCR, luciferase reporter assay, ChIP assay and functional experiments. Results: We revealed that miR-342-3p was enriched in the adipose tissue of obese mice, and its expression was significantly elevated during adipogenic differentiation in both human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) and 3T3L1 cells. Using gain- and loss-of-function assays, we demonstrated that the overexpression of miR-342-3p markedly promoted the differentiation of hMSCs into an adipogenic lineage. Adipogenesis was significantly blocked by miR-342-3p downregulation. We identified and validated that CtBP2 was a direct target of miR-342-3p in this process. The effects of the inhibition of CtBP2 were similar to those of miR-342-5p overexpression on adipogenic differentiation, promoting the release of C/EBPα from CtBP2 binding. Conclusion: miR-342-3p is a powerful enhancer of the adipogenesis of human adipose-derived MSCs that acts by inhibiting CtBP2 and releasing the key adipogenic regulator C/EBPα from CtBP2 binding, subsequently activating the expression of adipogenic transcription factors and markers.

BioSense is a US national system that uses data from health information systems for automated disease surveillance. We studied 4 time-series algorithm modifications designed to improve sensitivity for detecting artificially added data. To test these modified algorithms, we used reports of daily syndrome visits from 308 Department of Defense (DoD) facilities and 340 hospital emergency departments (EDs). At a constant alert rate of 1%, sensitivity was improved for both datasets by using a minimum standard deviation (SD) of 1.0, a 14–28 day baseline duration for calculating mean and SD, and an adjustment for total clinic visits as a surrogate denominator. Stratifying baseline days into weekdays versus weekends to account for day-of-week effects increased sensitivity for the DoD data but not for the ED data. These enhanced methods may increase sensitivity without increasing the alert rate and may improve the ability to detect outbreaks by using automated surveillance system data.