Response properties of cat AMLS neurons to optic flow stimuli

Spiral and translation stimuli were used to investigate the response properties of cat AMLS (anteromedial lateral suprasylvian area) neurons to optic flow. The overwhelming majority of cells could be significantly excited by the two modes of stimuli and most responsive cells displayed obvious direction selectivity. It is the first time to find a visual area in mammalian brain preferring rotation stimuli. Two representative hypotheses are discussed here on the neural mechanism of optic flow analysis in visual cortex, and some new viewpoints are proposed to explain the experimental results.     

Human primary epidermal organoids enable modeling of dermatophyte infections

Technology of generating human epidermal derivatives with physiological relevance to in vivo epidermis is continuously investigated for improving their effects on modeling of human natural dermatological status in basic and clinical studies. Here, we report a method of robust establishment and expansion of human primary epidermal organoids (hPEOs) under a chemically defined condition. hPEOs reconstruct morphological, molecular, and functional features of human epidermis and can expand for 6 weeks. Remarkably, hPEOs are permissive for dermatophyte infections caused by Trichophyton Rubrum (T. rubrum). The T. rubrum infections on hPEOs reflect many aspects of known clinical pathological reactions and reveal that the repression on IL-1 signaling may contribute to chronic and recurrent infections with the slight inflammation caused by T. rubrum in human skin. Thus, our present study provides a new insight into the pathogenesis of T. rubrum infections and indicates that hPEOs are a potential ex vivo model for both basic studies of skin diseases and clinical studies of testing potential antifungal drugs.Subject terms: Skin stem cells, Infection     

Internalization of ferromagnetic nanowires by different living cells

The ability of living cells, either adherent or suspended, to internalize nickel nanowires is demonstrated for MC3T3-E1, UMR106-tumour and Marrow-Stromal cells. Nanowires were produced by electrodeposition, 20 μm long and 200 nm in diameter. Cell separation and manipulation was achieved for the three cell types. Applied magnetic field successfully oriented the internalized nanowires but no clear anisotropy is induced on the adherent cells. Nanowires tend to bind to cytoplasm metalloproteins and trigger lysosome reorganization around the nucleus. This work demonstrates the applications of nanowires in adherent and suspended cells for cell separation and manipulation, and further explore into their role in nanobiotechnology.     

Host sunflower-induced silencing of parasitism-related genes confers resistance to invading Orobanche cumana

Orobanche cumana is a holoparasitic plant that attaches to host–plant roots and seriously reduces the yield of sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.). Effective control methods are lacking with only a few known sources of genetic resistance. In this study, a seed-soak agroinoculation (SSA) method was established, and recombinant tobacco rattle virus vectors were constructed to express RNA interference (RNAi) inducers to cause virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) in sunflower. A host target gene HaTubulin was systemically silenced in both leaf and root tissues by the SSA–VIGS approach. Trans-species silencing of O. cumana genes were confirmed for 10 out of 11 target genes with silencing efficiency of 23.43%–92.67%. Knockdown of target OcQR1, OcCKX5, and OcWRI1 genes reduced the haustoria number, and silencing of OcEXPA6 caused further phenotypic abnormalities such as shorter tubercles and necrosis. Overexpression of OcEXPA6 caused retarded root growth in alfalfa (Medicago sativa). The results demonstrate that these genes play an important role in the processes of O. cumana parasitism. High-throughput small RNA (sRNA) sequencing and bioinformatics analyses unveiled the distinct features of target gene-derived siRNAs in O. cumana such as siRNA transitivity, strand polarity, hotspot region, and 21/22-nt siRNA predominance, the latter of which was confirmed by Northern blot experiments. The possible RNAi mechanism is also discussed by analyzing RNAi machinery genes in O. cumana. Taken together, we established an efficient host-induced gene silencing technology for both functional genetics studies and potential control of O. cumana. The ease and effectiveness of this strategy could potentially be useful for other species provided they are amenable to SSA.

Knockdown of several parasitism-related genes endows sunflower with resistance to invading broomrape.     

Double-flow convolutional neural network for rapid large field of view Fourier ptychographic reconstruction

Fourier ptychographic microscopy is a promising imaging technique which can circumvent the space-bandwidth product of the system and achieve a reconstruction result with wide field-of-view (FOV), high-resolution and quantitative phase information. However, traditional iterative-based methods typically require multiple times to get convergence, and due to the wave vector deviation in different areas, the millimeter-level full-FOV cannot be well reconstructed once and typically required to be separated into several portions with sufficient overlaps and reconstructed separately, which makes traditional methods suffer from long reconstruction time for a large-FOV (of the order of minutes) and limits the application in real-time large-FOV monitoring of live sample in vitro. Here we propose a novel deep-learning based method called DFNN which can be used in place of traditional iterative-based methods to increase the quality of single large-FOV reconstruction and reducing the processing time from 167.5 to 0.1125 second. In addition, we demonstrate that by training based on the simulation dataset with high-entropy property (Opt. Express 28, 24 152 [2020]), DFNN could has fine generalizability and little dependence on the morphological features of samples. The superior robustness of DFNN against noise is also demonstrated in both simulation and experiment. Furthermore, our model shows more robustness against the wave vector deviation. Therefore, we could achieve better results at the edge areas of a single large-FOV reconstruction. Our method demonstrates a promising way to perform real-time single large-FOV reconstructions and provides further possibilities for real-time large-FOV monitoring of live samples with sub-cellular resolution.     

High level serum neutralizing antibody against HIV-1 in Chinese long-term non-progressors

NAb have been considered to be an important component of a protective immune response to HIV-1, yet the relationship between the capacity of HIV-1 NAb, the conserved neutralization epitopes and disease progression has been unclear. To gain a better understanding of the protective roles that NAb and conserved neutralization epitopes could play in LTNP, twenty-eight HIV-1-infected subjects were investigated by evaluation of the concentrations of HIV-1 NAb and conserved neutralization epitopes, using single-round PBMC neutralization assay and sequencing. Our study revealed that the concentration of NAb in LTNP was significantly higher than that in subjects with asymptomatic HIV (P < 0.05) and AIDS (P < 0.01). No amino acids substitutions were found in the conserved epitopes of the HIV-1 gp120 region in LTNP, whereas the viruses circulating both in persons with asymptomatic HIV and those with AIDS had amino acid substitutions in their conserved neutralization epitopes. This study suggests that high levels of NAb and stable epitopes in gp120 could play a crucial role in protection against disease progression.     

膀胱功能代偿系统的研究

本文对截瘫病人膀胱功能障碍的重建机理和方法进行了综合分析,对临床上解决膀胱功能代偿的各种途径加以比较,提出膀胱功能代偿系统-膀胱控制器的新设计,它将会使我国广大的膀胱功能障碍患者受益。     

Subnetwork identification and chemical modulation for neural regeneration: A study combining network guided forest and heat diffusion model

Background: The induction of neural regeneration is vital to the repair of spinal cord injury (SCI). While compared with peripheral nervous system (PNS), the regenerative capacity of the central nervous system (CNS) is extremely limited. This indicates that modulating the molecular pathways underlying PNS repair may lead to the discovery of potential treatment for CNS injury.Methods: Based on the gene expression profiles of dorsal root ganglion (DRG) after a sciatic nerve injury, we utilized network guided forest (NGF) to rank genes in terms of their capacity of distinguishing injured DRG from sham-operated controls. Gene importance scores deriving from NGF were used as initial heat in a heat diffusion model (HotNet2) to infer the subnetworks underlying neural regeneration in the DRG. After potential regulators of the subnetworks were found through Connectivity Map (cMap), candidate compounds were experimentally evaluated for their capacity to regenerate the damaged neurons.Results: Gene ontology analysis of the subnetworks revealed ubiquinone biosynthetic process is crucial for neural regeneration. Moreover, almost half of the genes in these subnetworks are found to be related to neural regeneration via text mining. After screening compounds that are likely to modulate gene expressions of the subnetworks, three compounds were selected for the experiment. Of them, trichostatin A, a histone deacetylase inhibitor, was validated to enhance neurite outgrowth in vivo via an optic nerve crush mouse model.Conclusions: Our study identified subnetworks underlying neural regeneration, and validated a compound can promote neurite outgrowth by modulating these subnetworks. This work also suggests an alternative approach for drug repositioning that can be easily extended to other disease phenotypes.