Abstract This study investigates the impact of maternal gestation diets with varying fiber contents on gene expression and chromatin accessibility in fetuses and piglets fed a low fiber diet post weaning. High-fiber maternal diets, enriched with sugar beet pulp or pea internal fiber, were compared to a low-fiber maternal diet to evaluate their effects on liver and muscle tissues. The findings demonstrate that maternal high-fiber diets significantly alter the chromatin accessibility, predicted transcription factor activity and transcriptional landscape in both fetuses and piglets. A gene set enrichment analysis revealed over-expression of gene ontology terms related to metabolic processes and under-expression of those linked to immune responses in piglets from sows given the high-fiber diets during gestation. This suggests better metabolic health and immune tolerance of the fetus and offspring, in line with the documented epigenetic effects of short chain fatty acids on immune and metabolic pathways. A deconvolution analysis of the bulk RNA-seq data was performed using cell-type specific markers from a single cell transcriptome atlas of adult pigs. These results confirmed that the transcriptomic and chromatin accessibility data do not reflect different cell type compositions between maternal diet groups but rather phenotypic changes triggered by the critical role of maternal nutrition in shaping the epigenetic and transcriptional environment of fetus and offspring. Our findings have implications for improving animal health and productivity as well as broader implications for human health, suggesting that optimizing maternal diet with high-fiber content could enhance metabolic health and immune function in the formative years after birth and potentially to adulthood.
Objective
To investigate the clinical effects of hyperbaric oxygen (HBO) combined cerebral circular electro-stimulation in the treatment of patients with ischemic stroke.
Methods
One hundred and fifty-two patients with ischemic stroke were divided by different treatment methods into 4 groups: the combined treatment group, the cerebral circular electro-stimulation group, the HBO group and the drug routine group (the control group), each consisting of 38 patients. Blood flow rates of anterior cerebral artery (ACA), middle cerebral artery (MCA), posterior cerebral artery (PCA), vertebral artery (VA) and basilar artery (BA) , and changes in cerebral wave lengths (α, β, δ and θ waves) both before and after stimulation were respectively detected with transcranial Doppler (TCD) and EEG. The National Institute of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) and the Bathel Index were used as standards for comparisons of therapeutic effects between groups.
Results
Cerebral blood flow rates for the patients in the cerebral circular electro-stimulation group and the HBO group were all increased, as compared with that of the control group. For the patients in the combined treatment group, average blood flow rates of MCA(35.13±3.47)cm/s, ACA(34.28±4.25)cm/s, VA(21.45±3.23)cm/s and BA(20.47±3.58)cm/s before treatment were respectively increased to the levels of(60.23±4.32)cm/s, (57.48+ 5.23)cm/s, (36.84±2.75)cm/s and(35.47±3.17)cm/s after treatment, with statistical significance(P<0.05). Statistical significance could be noted, when comparisons were made after treatment between the combined treatment group and the cerebral circular electro-stimulation and the HBO groups(P<0.05). For the patients in the combined treatment group, EEG α wave length was increased from(56.25±3.86)μV2 before treatment to(90.47±4.35)μV2 after treatment, while the wave lengths of θ wave and δ wave lengths were decreased from (22.23±2.63) μV2 and(19.24±3.57)μV2 before treatment to (10.37±2.31)μV2 and 8.19±3.28)μV2 after treatment, with statistical significance(P<0.05). After treatment, the scores of NIHSS for all the groups were decreased dramatically. The NIHSS scores for the combined treatment group were decreased from 22.89±8.15)before treatment to(14.53±6.54)after treatment, with statistical significance(P<0.05). Statistical significance could also be noticed, when they were compared with those of the cerebral circular electro-stimulation and the HBO groups(P<0.05). The therapeutic efficacy achieved following treatment for the cerebral circular electro-stimulation and the HBO groups was respectively 76.3% and 73.4%, and there was statistical significance, when compared with that of the control group(P<0.05), while the therapeutic efficacy for the combined treatment group was 86.8%, and statistical significance could also be noted, when comparisons were made between the groups(P<0.05). The Bathel Index for the combined treatment group was increased from(28.73±6.89)before treatment to(68.28±8.17)after treatment, and statistical significance could be found, when compared with that before treatment and those of other groups after treatment(P<0.05).
Conclusions
HBO and cerebral circular electro-stimulation could all increase cerebral blood flow of the patients with ischemic stroke, improve brain cell function and promote early recovery of the patients with ischemic stroke, and combined treatment of HBO and cerebral circular electro-stimulation could achieve much better effects.
Key words:
Hyperbaric oxygen; Cerebral circular electro-stimulation treatment; Ischemic stroke
The construction of New Zone of Xi'an and Xianyang has already on the stage of rapid development at present.Basing on the theory on financial intermediary and financial restriction,the paper deeply analyzes the problems and obstacles during the process of development of New Zone of Xi'an and Xianyang.Learning from experiences of financial development in Pudong Shanghai,Binhai Tianjin and Liangjiang Chongqing,the paper points out that paying attention to financial deepening and government's leading role in financial development can be acted as the major force to push the development of New Zone of Xi'an and Xianyang,and also puts forward relevant suggestions.
This article proposes a new hand rehabilitation device to help therapists repetitively perform hand group stretching training for poststroke patients. The actuator of the proposed device is made of elastomeric materials, driven by fluid pressure, and put onto the surface of a glove. Compared to the traditional rigid exoskeletons for hand rehabilitation, the proposed device is soft, lightweight, and low cost. Because the exact and explicit model is hard to be built for the proposed device and the unconscious tremors occurred during hand rehabilitation, the active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) algorithm, based on the extended state observer (ESO), is adopted to achieve the control purpose. This article analyzes the transient and steady-state performances of the controller based on some reasonable assumptions, and shows its better disturbance rejection ability compared to the widely used proportional-integral-differential control method. In addition, the ADRC algorithm with the reduced-order extended state observer (RESO) has been studied as well. The parameters of the RESO can be obtained by the parameters of the previously determined ESO instead of the trial and error approach, which can ensure the control performance of the ADRC with the RESO does not degrade. Finally, clinical tests have been conducted to verify the functional correctness of the proposed device, and these theoretical results have also been verified by experiments and comparisons.
In manufacturing, musculoskeletal robots have gained more attention with the potential advantages of flexibility, robustness, and adaptability over conventional serial-link rigid robots. Focusing on the fundamental lifting tasks, a hybrid controller is proposed to overcome control challenges of such robots for widely applications in industry. The metaverse technology offers an available simulated-reality-based platform to verify the proposed method. The hybrid controller contains two main parts. A muscle-synergy-based radial basis function (RBF) network is proposed as the feedforward controller, which is able to characterize the phasic and the tonic muscle synergies simultaneously. The adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) is applied as the feedback controller to address the optimal control problem. The actor–critic structure is applied in the ADP-based controller, where the critic network is trained to approximate the optimal performance index and the actor network is trained to compute the optimal muscle excitations. Furthermore, the convergence and stability of the ADP algorithm are also analyzed. Finally, experiments have been designed to verify the effectiveness of this hybrid controller on an upper limb musculoskeletal system, and the comparisons with other controllers are also illustrated. The results show that the proposed controller can obtain a satisfactory performance for lifting tasks.
Abstract Chicken is a valuable model for understanding fundamental biology and vertebrate evolution, as well as a major source of nutrient-dense and lean-protein-enriched food globally. Although it is the first non-mammalian amniote genome to be sequenced, the chicken genome still lacks a systematic characterization of functional variation. Here, through integrating bulk RNA-Seq of 7,015 samples, single-cell RNA-Seq of 127,598 cells and 2,869 whole-genome sequences, we presented an atlas of regulatory variants across 28 chicken tissues and 43 cell types, including millions of regulatory effects on primary expression (protein-coding genes, lncRNA and exon) and post-transcriptional modifications (alternative splicing and 3’ untranslated region alternative polyadenylation). We highlighted distinct molecular mechanisms underlying these regulatory variants and their context dependence and utility in interpreting genome-wide associations of 108 chicken complex traits. Finally, we illustrated lineage-specific features of gene regulation between chickens and mammals, and demonstrated how this resource can assist with cross-species gene mapping of complex traits.
Our previous studies found that bta-miR-106b and its corresponding target gene, CDKN1A, were differentially expressed between the mammary epithelium of lactating Holstein cows with extremely high and low milk protein and fat percentage, implying the potential role of bta-miR-106b in milk composition synthesis. In this study, with luciferase assay experiment, bta-miR-106b was validated to target the 3′-untranslated region (UTR) of bovine CDKN1A, thereby regulating its expression. Moreover, in bovine mammary epithelial cells (BMECs), over-expression of bta-miR-106b significantly down-regulated the CDKN1A expression at both mRNA and protein levels, and inhibitors of bta-miR-106b increased CDKN1A expression. Of note, we observed that bta-miR-106b accelerated cell proliferation and cell cycle, and changed the expressions of protein synthesis related pathways such as JAK-STAT and PI3K/AKT/mTOR through regulating CDKN1A expression. Our findings highlight the important regulatory role of bta-miR-106b in milk protein synthesis by targeting CDKN1A in dairy cattle.
Surface electromyography (sEMG) driven musculoskeletal models are promising to be applied in the field of human-computer interaction. However, due to the individual-specific physiological characteristics, generic models often fail to provide accurate motion estimation. This study optimized the general model to build a personalized model and improve the accuracy of motion estimation.
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