Following stroke, oxidative stress induced by reactive oxygen species (ROS) aggravates neuronal damage and enlarges ischemic penumbra, which is devastating to stroke patients. Nanozyme-based antioxidants are emerging to treat stroke through scavenging excessive ROS. However, most of nanozymes cannot efficiently scavenge ROS in neuronal cytosol and mitochondria, due to low-uptake abilities of neurons and barriers of organelle membranes, significantly limiting nanozymes' neuroprotective effects. To overcome this limitation, a manganese-organic framework modified with polydopamine (pDA-MNOF), capable of not only mimicking catalytic activities of natural SOD2's catalytic domain but also upregulating two endogenous antioxidant enzymes in neurons is fabricated. With such a dual anti-ROS effect, this nanozyme robustly decreases cellular ROS and effectively protects them from ROS-induced injury. STAT-3 signaling is found to play a vital role in pDA-MNOF activating the two antioxidant enzymes, HO1 and SOD2. In vivo pDA-MNOF treatment significantly improves the survival of middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAo) mice by reducing infarct volume and more importantly, promotes animal behavioral recovery. Further, pDA-MNOF activates vascular endothelial growth factor expression, a downstream target of STAT3 signaling, thus enhancing angiogenesis. Taken together, the biochemical, cell-biological, and animal-level behavioral data demonstrate the potentiality of pDA-MNOF as a dual ROS-scavenging agent for stroke treatment.
Acoustic-to-articulatory inversion problem is usually studied in speaker-specific manner because both articulatory data and acoustic features contain speaker-specific components. This paper presents our work on speaker-adaptation training for this problem. We implement speaker adaptation in HMM-based acoustic-to-articulatory inversion mapping, and evaluate different combinatorial structures of the articulatory data and acoustic features. The HMM-based inversion mapping models are built with single-stream and multistream, independent clustering and shared clustering structures. The speaker adaptation is implemented in stream-independent structure and shared adaptation structure. The constrained maximum likelihood linear regression method is used for the speaker-adaptive transformation. The experimental results show that the sharing of the speaker-adaptive transformation of the articulatory feature stream and acoustic feature stream can improve the estimation accuracy in inversion mapping. The multi-stream system with shared clustering and shared adaptive transformation has the best result among all the tested structures.
C 13H10I2,m onoclinic, P121/c1(no.14), a =8.674(2)Å, b =6.155(1) Å, c =23.393(5) Å, b =90.03 Source of materialTo amixture of bis(4-aminophenyl)methane (1.7 g, 8.60 mmol) and concentrated sulfuric acid (30 ml), asolution of sodium nitrite (1.7 g, 24 mmol) in water (5 ml) was added dropwise at 278 K.The slurry was stirred for 30 min at 278 Kand then slowly poured into asolution of potassium iodide (10 g, 60.24 mmol) in 200 ml water.After the mixture was stirred for 1hat328 K, the precipitate was filtered, dried, and extracted with dichloromethane.The organic layer was washed with saturated sodium bicarbonate and water to the pH =7.After the solvent was removed under reduced pressure, the shallow yellow residue was recrystallized from alcohol to give colourless crystals (3.07 g, yield 85 %, m.p. 360 -363 K).
Human neuronal growth inhibitory factor (hGIF) is able to inhibit the outgrowth of neurons. As compared with the amino acid sequences of metallothionein 1/2, hGIF contains two insertions: a Thr at position 5 and an acidic hexapeptide EAAEAE(55-60) close to the C-terminus. Moreover, all mammalian growth inhibitory factor sequences contain a conserved CPCP(6-9) motif. Previous studies have demonstrated that the TCPCP(5-9) motif is pivotal to its bioactivity, but no specific role has been assigned to the unique EAAEAE(55-60) insert. To investigate the potential structural and biological significance of the EAAEAE(55-60) insert, several mutants were constructed and investigated in detail. Notably, deletion of the acidic insert (the Delta55-60 mutant) reduced the inhibitory activity, whereas the bioactivities of other mutants did not change much. Then, spectroscopic characterization and molecular dynamics simulation were performed to investigate the potential causes of the reduced bioactivity of the Delta55-60 mutant. It was found that the domain-domain interaction mechanism of hGIF was different from that of metallothionein 2. It was also shown that the acidic insert could regulate the interdomain interactions in hGIF, leading to the structural change in the beta-domain, which resulted in the alteration of the solvent accessibility and metal release ability, thus playing an important role in the biological activity of hGIF. Our studies provided useful information on the domain-domain interaction at the molecular level for the first time, and shed new light on the mechanism of the bioactivity of hGIF.
5053^ Background: P10-1 (NCT01338012) is a study of sipuleucel-T, an autologous cellular immunotherapy, in men with mCRPC previously treated with sipuleucel-T in PROTECT (NCT00779402). This preliminary analysis of P10-1 evaluates APC activation (a measure of product potency) and immune responses in men retreated with sipuleucelET. Methods: Men who received ≥1 infusion of sipuleucel-T in PROTECT and progressed to mCRPC were retreated with 3 infusions of sipuleucel-T. APC activation was assessed by CD54 upregulation. T cell responses to prostatic acid phosphatase (PAP) and PA2024 (PAP-GM-CSF) antigens were assessed by IFN-γELISPOT assay. Results: As of October 23, 2012, 7 men were enrolled and received ≥1 infusion. Median time between the third PROTECT infusion and first P10-1 infusion was 9.2 (range: 7.8–10.0) years. APC activation was greater at the first P10-1 treatment vs the last PROTECT treatment (Table). PA2024 and PAP ELISPOT responses were present prior to retreatment, indicating long-term memory (Table 1); based on other studies of sipuleucel-T, ELISPOT responses are not generally present prior to the first treatment (Beer. Clin Cancer Res 2011; Sheikh. Cancer Immunol Immunother 2013). Conclusions: This is the first trial to report the feasibility of sipuleucel-T retreatment following treatment in an earlier stage of prostate cancer. These data indicate the presence of existing immunological memory to the immunizing antigen several years after initial treatment. In addition, retreatment with sipuleucel-T appeared to boost product potency compared with prior treatment. Clinical trial information: NCT01338012. [Table: see text]
Corneal neovascularization (CoNV) can cause abnormal blood vessels to grow in the transparent cornea, leading to various sight-threatening eye diseases. MicroRNAs are known to play essential roles in the regulation of numerous biological functions. We try to clarify the role of a specific microRNA, miR‑497, which has been shown to regulate the growth of tumor cells and angiogenesis on the basis of available data. However, the association between miR-497 and vascularized cornea remains unclear. Therefore, it is urgently needed to understand the molecular mechanism of miR497 in the progress of corneal neovascularization. Animal model of CoNV was established in wildtype (WT) C57BL/6 mice, CRISPR/Cas9 mediated miR-497 knockout (KO) and overexpressed (TG) C57BL/6 mice. MiR-497, expressed in corneas, was actively involved in alkali burn-induced corneal neovascularization via targeting STAT3 and negatively regulating its expression, attenuating macrophage infiltration and M2 polarization. Knockdown of miR-497 enhanced the formation of corneal angiogenesis through targeting STAT3 and facilitating its expression, promoting recruitment of macrophages, while overexpression of miR-497 restrained blood vessel sprouting via regulating downstream STAT3 and VEGFA expression, reducing macrophage activation and inhibiting M2 polarization. Moreover, miR-497 knockout-mediated damage effect can be rescued through the inhibition of STAT3 signaling. Mechanically, miR-497 might serve as a potential strategy for pathological corneal neovascularization via macrophage through the IL-6/STAT3/VEGFA signaling pathway.