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Diabetes is one of the most socially challenging health concerns. Even though islet transplantation has shown promise for insulin-dependent diabetes, there is still no effective method for curing diabetes due to the severe shortage of transplantable donors. In recent years, organoid technology has attracted lots of attention as organoid can mirror the human organ

This study aimed to examine the relationship between social support and quality of life in urostomy patients and identify the mediating role of resilience in that relationship.A cross-sectional design.Participants included 232 patients who were recruited from a tertiary hospital in Beijing during March 2020 and August 2020. They completed questionnaires about perceived social support, resilience and ostomy-related quality of life. Structural equation modelling was performed to analyse the data.The mean age of patients was 65.79 (SD = 8.67) years, and the mean length of time after surgery was 42.14 (SD = 15.76) months. Urostomy patients' quality of life, social support and resilience were all above moderate. Social support had a positive direct effect on the quality of life and a positive indirect effect on the quality of life through the mediating role of resilience.

This experiment was to study the effects of newly harvested corn on growth performance, intestine development and metabolism of nutrients in broilers. A total of 380 one-day-old Arbor Acres male broilers were assigned to ageing corn group (AC group), 1/3 newly harvested corn group (1/3 NC group), 2/3 newly harvested corn group (2/3 NC group), and newly harvested corn group (NC group), which according to the proportion of newly harvested corn in the total amount of corn of basal diets. Each group included six replicates with 16 birds. Digestion and metabolism trials were conducted at 39 to 42 days of age. Results showed that feed: gain ratio (F/G) of NC group was higher than that of 1/3 NC group and 2/3 NC group at 22 to 42 and 1 to 42 days of age (p

We present a large scale data set of eye-images captured using a virtual-reality (VR) head mounted display mounted with two synchronized eye-facing cameras at a frame rate of 200 Hz under controlled illumination. This dataset is compiled from video capture of the eye-region collected from 152 individual participants and is divided into four subsets: (i) 12,759 images with pixel-level annotations for key eye-regions: iris, pupil and sclera (ii) 252,690 unlabeled eye-images, (iii) 91,200 frames from randomly selected video sequences of 1.5 seconds in duration, and (iv) 143 pairs of left and right point cloud data compiled from corneal topography of eye regions collected from a subset, 143 out of 152, participants in the study. A baseline experiment has been evaluated on the dataset for the task of semantic segmentation of pupil, iris, sclera and background, with the mean intersection-over-union (mIoU) of 98.3 %. We anticipate that this dataset will create opportunities to researchers in the eye tracking community and the broader machine learning and computer vision community to advance the state of eye-tracking for VR applications, which in its turn will have greater implications in Human-Computer Interaction.

Magnetic Fe 3 O 4 nanoparticles (Fe 3 O 4 -NPs) have been widely investigated for their biomedical applications. The main purpose of this study was to evaluate the cytotoxic effects of different sizes of Fe 3 O 4 -NPs in chicken macrophage cells (HD11). Experimental groups based on three sizes of Fe 3 O 4 -NPs (60, 120 and 250 nm) were created, and the Fe 3 O 4 -NPs were added to the cells at different doses according to the experimental group. The cell activity, oxidative index (malondialdehyde (MDA), superoxide dismutase (SOD) and reactive oxygen species (ROS)), apoptosis and pro-inflammatory cytokine secretion level were detected to analyse the cytotoxic effects of Fe 3 O 4 -NPs of different sizes in HD11 cells. The results revealed that the cell viability of the 60 nm Fe 3 O 4 -NPs group was lower than those of the 120 and 250 nm groups when the same concentration of Fe 3 O 4 -NPs was added. No significant difference in MDA was observed among the three Fe 3 O 4 -NP groups. The SOD level and ROS production of the 60 nm group were significantly greater than those of the 120 and 250 nm groups. Furthermore, the highest levels of apoptosis and pro-inflammatory cytokine secretion were caused by the 60 nm Fe 3 O 4 -NPs. In conclusion, the smaller Fe 3 O 4 -NPs produced stronger cytotoxicity in chicken macrophage cells, and the cytotoxic effects may be related to the oxidative stress and apoptosis induced by increased ROS production as well as the increased expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines.

It is crucial to locate logistics centres for realising optimization of the the entire logistics process. A kind of effective and practical location evaluation method is in an urgent need. This study analyses principles of logistics centre location, constructs a relative evaluation index system and forms evaluation based on weighted entropy which is derived from the information entropy. A true example is lodged in this study is to indicate how this method eliminates subjective influence of traditional evaluation and increases evaluation precision, which introduces a new solution to site selection of logistics centres.

Rational: Salmonella Enteritidis (S. Enteritidis) is a globally significant zoonotic foodborne pathogen which has led to large numbers of deaths in humans and caused economic losses in animal husbandry. S. Enteritidis invades host cells and survives within the cells, causing resistance to antibiotic treatment. Effective methods of elimination and eradication of intracellular S. Enteritidis are still very limited. Here we evaluated whether a new intracellular antibacterial strategy using iron oxide nanozymes (IONzymes) exerted highly antibacterial efficacy via its intrinsic peroxidase-like activity in vitro and in vivo. Methods: The antibacterial activities of IONzymes against planktonic S. Enteritidis, intracellular S. Enteritidis in Leghorn Male Hepatoma-derived cells (LMH), and liver from specific pathogen free (SPF) chicks were investigated by spread-plate colony count method and cell viability assay. Changes in levels of microtubule-associated protein light chain 3 (LC3), a widely used marker for autophagosomes, were analyzed by immunoblotting, immunofluorescence, and electron microscopy. Reactive oxygen species (ROS) production was also assessed in vitro. High-throughput RNA sequencing was used to investigate the effects of IONzymes on liver transcriptome of S. Enteritidis-infected chicks. Results: We demonstrated that IONzymes had high biocompatibility with cultured LMH cells and chickens, which significantly inhibited intracellular S. Enteritidis survival in vitro and in vivo. In addition, co-localization of IONzymes with S. Enteritidis were observed in autophagic vacuoles of LMH cells and liver of chickens infected by S. Enteritidis, indicating that IONzymes mediated antibacterial reaction of S. Enteritidis with autophagic pathway. We found ROS level was significantly increased in infected LMH cells treated with IONzymes, which might enhance the autophagic elimination of intracellular S. Enteritidis. Moreover, orally administered IONzymes decreased S. Enteritidis organ invasion of the liver and prevented pathological lesions in a chicken-infection model. Non-target transcriptomic profiling also discovered IONzymes could change hepatic oxidation-reduction and autophagy related gene expressions in the S. Enteritidis infected chickens. Conclusion: These data suggest that IONzymes can increase ROS levels to promote the antibacterial effects of acid autophagic vacuoles, and thus suppress the establishment and survival of invading intracellular S. Enteritidis. As a result, IONzymes may be a novel alternative to current antibiotics for the control of intractable S. Enteritidis infections.

An experiment was conducted to evaluate the effects of crude protein (CP) levels on growth performance, carcase quality, meat quality, immune indices, litter and faeces quality, as well as welfare quality, in free-range yellow broilers using balanced amino acid technology. In total, 600 one-d-old Suqin yellow broilers were raised for 21 d. On d 22, 540 birds with similar BW (390 ± 7 g SD) were randomly selected and placed into 9 pens (3 groups with 3 replicates per group and 60 birds each replicate) and then reared to 56 d of age. The birds were fed a diet containing CP 19% (control), 18% or 17% (measured value: 18.878%, 17.881%, 17.052%, respectively), in three groups for 35 d. The results revealed that decreasing dietary CP levels from 19% to 17% had no impact on broiler growth performance, carcase quality and meat quality (p > .05). The relative immune organ weights also showed no change to the lowering of dietary CP levels (p > .05), whereas serum albumin was significantly influenced by decreasing dietary CP levels (p = .042). Furthermore, nitrogen content in litter and faeces, as well as the footpad dermatitis score for welfare indices, were decreased with decreased dietary CP levels (p = .009, p = .014, p = .045, respectively). The results of this study suggest that low-protein diets with balanced amino acids reduce nitrogen excretion and footpad dermatitis without effecting the performance, carcase quality, and meat quality of free-range yellow broilers.

To investigate the effects of Clostridium butyricum (C. butyricum) on breast muscle lipid metabolism of broilers, 192 one-day-old male Arbor Acres broilers were randomly allocated into 2 treatments with 6 replicates in a completely randomised design. The broilers were fed corn-soybean meal-based diets and supplemented with 0 or 1 × 109 cfu of C. butyricum/kg of diet for 42 days. The birds in the C. butyricum-supplemented group showed higher (p

This study explored the relationship between self-efficacy, professional identity and competence among nursing students and analyzed the mediating role of self-efficacy in the relationship between professional identity and competence.Increasing attention has been paid to the cultivation of competence among nursing students; however, few studies to date have analyzed its related factors and examined their relationship.A quantitative study with a descriptive design was performed in this study, adopting an online survey with convenience and snowball sampling. A cross-sectional sample of 887 nursing students in the internship period of their education program in mainland China was recruited from November to December 2020.The Nursing Students Competence Instrument, Professional Identity Questionnaire for Nurse Students and General Self-efficacy Scale were distributed online. Descriptive statistics, Pearson's correlation, structural equation modeling (SEM) and the bootstrap method were employed in data analysis.Competence was significantly and positively correlated with professional identity (r = 0.598; P 0.01) and self-efficacy (r = 0.692; P 0.01). SEM analysis revealed that professional identity (β = 0.31; P 0.01) or self-efficacy (β = 0.31; P 0.01) could have a positive impact on competence. Meanwhile, self-efficacy played a mediating role in the relationship between professional identity and competence, with an indirect effect of professional identity creation through self-efficacy accounting for 52% of the total effect.Self-efficacy mediates the relationship between professional identity and competence to some extent. School educators and clinical tutors should pay greater attention to students' professional identity and self-efficacy to improve students' competence.

The present study was conducted to evaluate the effects of lecithin on the performance, meat quality, lipid metabolism, and cecum microbiota of broilers. One hundred and ninety-two one-day-old AA broilers with similar body weights (38 ± 1.0 g) were randomly assigned to two groups with six replicates of sixteen birds each and were supplemented with 0 and 1 g/kg of lecithin for forty-two days. Performance and clinical observations were measured and recorded throughout the study. Relative organ weight, meat quality, lipid-related biochemical parameters and enzyme activities were also measured. Compared with broilers in the control group, broilers in the lecithin treatment group showed a significant increase in L* value and tenderness (p &lt, 0.05). Meanwhile, the abdominal adipose index of broilers was markedly decreased in lecithin treatment after 42 days (p &lt, 0.05). In the lipid metabolism, broilers in the lecithin treatment group showed a significant increase in hepatic lipase and general esterase values at 21 days compared with the control group (p &lt, 0.05). Lower Firmicutes and higher Bacteroidetes levels in phylum levels were observed in the lecithin treatment group after 21 and 42 days. The distribution of lactobacillus, clostridia, and rikenella in genus levels were higher in the lecithin treatment group after 21 and 42 days. No statistically significant changes were observed in performance, relative organ weight, or other serum parameters (p &gt, 0.05). These results indicate that supplementation with lecithin significantly influence the lipid metabolism in broilers at 21 and 42 days, which resulted in the positive effect on the meat color, tenderness, and abdominal adipose in broilers.

AIMS: Epigenetics may mediate the effects of environmental risk factors on disease, including heart disease. Thus, measuring the DNA methylome offers the opportunity to identify novel disease biomarkers and novel insights into disease mechanisms. The DNA methylation landscape of ascending aortic dissection (AD) and bicuspid aortic valve (BAV) with aortic aneurysmal dilatation remain uncharacterized. The present study aimed to explore the genome-wide DNA methylation landscape underpinning these two diseases. METHODS AND RESULTS: We used Illumina 450k DNA methylation beadarrays to analyse 21 ascending aorta samples, including 10 cases with AD, 5 with BAV and 6 healthy controls. We adjusted for intra-sample cellular heterogeneity, providing the first unbiased genome-wide exploration of the DNA methylation landscape underpinning these two diseases. We discover that both diseases are characterized by loss of DNA methylation at non-CpG sites. We validate this non-CpG hypomethylation signature with pyrosequencing. In contrast to non-CpGs, AD and BAV exhibit distinct DNA methylation landscapes at CpG sites, with BAV characterized mainly by hypermethylation of EZH2 targets. In the case of AD, integrative DNA methylation gene expression analysis reveals that AD is characterized by a dedifferentiated smooth muscle cell phenotype. Our integrative analysis further reveals hypomethylation associated overexpression of RARA in AD, a pattern which is also seen in cells exposed to smoke toxins. CONCLUSION: Our data supports a model in which increased cellular proliferation in AD and BAV underpins loss of methylation at non-CpG sites. Our data further supports a model, in which AD is associated with an inflammatory vascular remodeling process, possibly mediated by the epigenome and linked to environmental risk factors such as smoking.

Recently nanomaterials have received substantial attention in biotechnology areas for their innovative properties in physical and chemical function. One of the most arrestive properties of nanomaterials that has been reported is their bacteriostatic activity. Our previous research found that Fe3O4 magnetic nanoparticles (Fe3O4-NPs) could effectively reduce the viability of intracellular Salmonella Enteritidis in chicken cells. There is an essential need to explore whether the bacteriostatic activity of Fe3O4-NPs is available in vivo. As an extension of this research, we conducted the present study to investigate the potential effect of Fe3O4-NPs used for S. Enteritidis control in chickens and to extensively investigate the underlying mechanisms in the process. The overall study included the evaluation of pathological sections, antioxidant status, inflammation, and the autophagy status of chicken liver, including the signaling pathway involved in the process. Results indicated that Fe3O4-NPs pretreatment can effectively inhibit the invasion of S. Enteritidis in chicken liver. Fe3O4-NPs pretreatment significantly increased reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation in chickens, including antioxidant enzyme activities. S. Enteritidis infection significantly increased the protein expression of the autophagy marker LC3. Additionally, the inflammation response and pathological changes caused by S. Enteritidis infection were alleviated by Fe3O4-NPs pretreatment. Phosphorylated mTOR was significantly increased in S. Enteritidis infected chickens, but showed no difference in chickens pretreated with Fe3O4-NPs. In summary, the results demonstrated that ROS and autophagy were involved in the inhibition of S. Enteritidis in chickens by Fe3O4-NPs pretreatment. The redox balance and inflammation response appeared normal in the process, as did the expression of the PI3K/Akt/mTOR signaling pathways. Taken together, our research demonstrate that the bacteriostatic activity of Fe3O4-NPs in chickens is avaliable and safe, which can be an alternative to antibiotics for bacterial inhibition in poultry industry.

Recent deep networks that directly handle points in a point set, e.g., PointNet, have been state-of-the-art for supervised learning tasks on point clouds such as classification and segmentation. In this work, a novel end-to-end deep auto-encoder is proposed to address unsupervised learning challenges on point clouds. On the encoder side, a graph-based enhancement is enforced to promote local structures on top of PointNet. Then, a novel folding-based decoder deforms a canonical 2D grid onto the underlying 3D object surface of a point cloud, achieving low reconstruction errors even for objects with delicate structures. The proposed decoder only uses about 7% parameters of a decoder with fully-connected neural networks, yet leads to a more discriminative representation that achieves higher linear SVM classification accuracy than the benchmark. In addition, the proposed decoder structure is shown, in theory, to be a generic architecture that is able to reconstruct an arbitrary point cloud from a 2D grid. Our code is available at http://www.merl.com/research/license#FoldingNet, Comment: Accepted as a spotlight paper in CVPR'18

This paper describes a study to test the accuracy of a method that tracks wrist motion during eating to detect and count bites. The purpose was to assess its accuracy across demographic (age, gender, and ethnicity) and bite (utensil, container, hand used, and food type) variables. Data were collected in a cafeteria under normal eating conditions. A total of 271 participants ate a single meal while wearing a watch-like device to track their wrist motion. A video was simultaneously recorded of each participant and subsequently reviewed to determine the ground truth times of bites. Bite times were operationally defined as the moment when food or beverage was placed into the mouth. Food and beverage choices were not scripted or restricted. Participants were seated in groups of 2-4 and were encouraged to eat naturally. A total of 24 088 bites of 374 different food and beverage items were consumed. Overall the method for automatically detecting bites had a sensitivity of 75% with a positive predictive value of 89%. A range of 62-86% sensitivity was found across demographic variables with slower eating rates trending toward higher sensitivity. Variations in sensitivity due to food type showed a modest correlation with the total wrist motion during the bite, possibly due to an increase in head-toward-plate motion and decrease in hand-toward-mouth motion for some food types. Overall, the findings provide the largest evidence to date that the method produces a reliable automated measure of intake during unrestricted eating.

Unlike on images, semantic learning on 3D point clouds using a deep network is challenging due to the naturally unordered data structure. Among existing works, PointNet has achieved promising results by directly learning on point sets. However, it does not take full advantage of a point's local neighborhood that contains fine-grained structural information which turns out to be helpful towards better semantic learning. In this regard, we present two new operations to improve PointNet with a more efficient exploitation of local structures. The first one focuses on local 3D geometric structures. In analogy to a convolution kernel for images, we define a point-set kernel as a set of learnable 3D points that jointly respond to a set of neighboring data points according to their geometric affinities measured by kernel correlation, adapted from a similar technique for point cloud registration. The second one exploits local high-dimensional feature structures by recursive feature aggregation on a nearest-neighbor-graph computed from 3D positions. Experiments show that our network can efficiently capture local information and robustly achieve better performances on major datasets. Our code is available at http://www.merl.com/research/license#KCNet, Accepted in CVPR'18. *indicates equal contribution

To select metabolic biomarkers and differentially expressed genes (DEGs) associated with resistant-ascites syndrome (resistant-AS), we used innovative techniques such as metabolomics and transcriptomics to comparatively examine resistant-AS chickens and AS controls. Metabolomic evaluation of chicken serum using ultra-performance liquid chromatography-quadruple time-of-flight high-sensitivity mass spectrometry (UPLC-QTOF/HSMS) showed significantly altered lysoPC(18:1), PE(18:3/16:0), PC(20:1/18:3), DG(24:1/22:6/0:0), PS(18:2/18:0), PI(16:0/16:0), PS(18:0/18:1), PS(14:1/14:0), dihydroxyacetone, ursodeoxycholic acid, tryptophan, L-valine, cycloserine, hypoxanthine, and 4-O-Methylmelleolide concentrations on day 21 and LysoPC(18:0), LysoPE(20:1/0:0), LysoPC(16:0), LysoPE(16:0/0:0), hypoxanthine, dihydroxyacetone, 4-O-Methylmelleolide, LysoPC(18:2), and PC(14:1/22:1) concentrations on day 35, between the susceptible and resistant groups. Compared to the susceptible group, transcriptomic analysis of liver samples using RNA-seq revealed 413 DEGs on day 21 and 214 DEGs on day 35 in the resistant group. Additional evaluations using gene ontology (GO) indicate that significant enrichment occurred in the oxygen transportation, defensive reactions, and protein modifications of the decreased DEGs as well as in the cell morphological formation, neural development, and transforming growth factor (TGF)-beta signalling of the increased DEGs on day 21. Oxygen transportation was also significantly enriched for downregulated DEGs on day 35. The combinatory evaluation of the metabolome and the transcriptome suggests the possible involvement of glycerophospholipid metabolism in the development of resistant-AS in broilers.

Ascites syndrome (AS) still has an unacceptably high incidence rate in both humans and animals although there have been many studies on AS. To continue our previous pathological and biochemical investigation on the underlying mechanisms of AS incidence in broiler chickens, cutting-edge technologies including RNA-seq and metabolimics were used by directly comparing AS chickens and healthy controls. The RNA-seq analysis in the liver identified 390 differentially expressed genes (DEGs), among which 212 genes were up-regulated and 178 genes were down-regulated in the AS group compared to the control. For the down-regulated DEGs, further gene ontology (GO) analysis suggested that lipid metabolism, cell differentiation, enzyme linked receptor protein signaling pathway and steroid biosynthesis pathway were significantly enriched. For up-regulated DEGs, the cholesterol metabolic process has the lowest p value (0.000966) of fold enrichment while the cholesterol biosynthetic process has the highest fold enrichment (46.67). The metabolomic analysis of serum revealed statistically significant changes in the concentrations of LysoPC(20 : 4), LysoPC(16 : 0), LysoPC(18 : 0), LysoPC(18 : 1), LysoPC(18 : 2), PC(14 : 1/20 : 1), PC(20 : 4/18 : 0), PC(14 : 1/22 : 1), dihydroxyacetone, indoleacrylic acid, ursodeoxycholic acid, l-valine, and l-tryptophan. The integrative analysis of transcriptome and metabolome indicated that two biological pathways of tryptophan biosynthesis and metabolism, and glycerophospholipid metabolism may contribute to the induction of AS in broilers. These findings have provided novel insights into our understanding of molecular mechanisms of AS incidence in broilers.

Background: The melanocortin-4 receptor (MC4R) plays a pivotal role in the regulation of appetite and eating behavior. Variants in the MC4R gene have been related to appetite and obesity.