Novel Therapeutic Potential of Retinoid-Related Orphan Receptor α in Cardiovascular Diseases.

The retinoid-related orphan receptor α (RORα) is one subfamily of nuclear hormone receptors (NRs). This review summarizes the understanding and potential effects of RORα in the cardiovascular system and then analyzes current advances, limitations and challenges, and further strategy for RORα-related drugs in cardiovascular diseases. Besides regulating circadian rhythm, RORα also influences a wide range of physiological and pathological processes in the cardiovascular system, including atherosclerosis, hypoxia or ischemia, myocardial ischemia/reperfusion injury, diabetic cardiomyopathy, hypertension, and myocardial hypertrophy. In terms of mechanism, RORα was involved in the regulation of inflammation, apoptosis, autophagy, oxidative stress, endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress, and mitochondrial function. Besides natural ligands for RORα, several synthetic RORα agonists or antagonists have been developed. This review mainly summarizes protective roles and possible mechanisms of RORα against cardiovascular diseases. However, there are also several limitations and challenges of current research on RORα, especially the difficulties on the transformability from the bench to the bedside. By the aid of multidisciplinary research, breakthrough progress on RORα-related drugs to combat cardiovascular disorder may appear.

CropDeep: The Crop Vision Dataset for Deep-Learning-Based Classification and Detection in Precision Agriculture.

Intelligence has been considered as the major challenge in promoting economic potential and production efficiency of precision agriculture. In order to apply advanced deep-learning technology to complete various agricultural tasks in online and offline ways, a large number of crop vision datasets with domain-specific annotation are urgently needed. To encourage further progress in challenging realistic agricultural conditions, we present the CropDeep species classification and detection dataset, consisting of 31,147 images with over 49,000 annotated instances from 31 different classes. In contrast to existing vision datasets, images were collected with different cameras and equipment in greenhouses, captured in a wide variety of situations. It features visually similar species and periodic changes with more representative annotations, which have supported a stronger benchmark for deep-learning-based classification and detection. To further verify the application prospect, we provide extensive baseline experiments using state-of-the-art deep-learning classification and detection models. Results show that current deep-learning-based methods achieve well performance in classification accuracy over 99%. While current deep-learning methods achieve only 92% detection accuracy, illustrating the difficulty of the dataset and improvement room of state-of-the-art deep-learning models when applied to crops production and management. Specifically, we suggest that the YOLOv3 network has good potential application in agricultural detection tasks.

The Long Journey of Pollen Tube in the Pistil.

In non-cleistogamous plants, the male gametophyte, the pollen grain is immotile and exploits various agents, such as pollinators, wind, and even water, to arrive to a receptive stigma. The complex process of pollination involves a tubular structure, i.e., the pollen tube, which delivers the two sperm cells to the female gametophyte to enable double fertilization. The pollen tube has to penetrate the stigma, grow in the style tissues, pass through the septum, grow along the funiculus, and navigate to the micropyle of the ovule. It is a long journey for the pollen tube and its two sperm cells before they meet the female gametophyte, and it requires very accurate regulation to perform successful fertilization. In this review, we update the knowledge of molecular dialogues of pollen-pistil interaction, especially the progress of pollen tube activation and guidance, and give perspectives for future research.

[Analysis on 315 cases of clinical adverse drug reaction/event induced by gastrodin].

With patients' general situation, medication use, occurrence time of adverse drug reaction/event (ADR/ADE), clinical manifestations and prognosis as reference items, a retrospective study was made for 315 cases with ADR/ADE induced by Gastrodin in Chongqing from January 2008 to June 2014, in order to analyze the characteristics of ADR/ADE and provide reference for rational clinical medication. The results showed that among the 315 cases with ADR/ADE, 143 cases (45.4%) were males and 172 cases (54.6%) were females, most of them (74.9%) were aged above 45; 60 cases (19.0%) with ADE were caused by off-label indications and 66 cases (21.0%) with ADE were caused by over dosage; ADR/ADE cases induced by intravenous drip mainly happened within 30 min (85.5%), ADR/ADE cases induced by oral administration mainly happened within 2 h (74.4%), and all of ADR/ ADE cases induced by intramuscular injection happened within 10 min. Totally 593 ADR/ADE cases were reported, which were mainly damages in gastrointestinal system, skin and its adnexa; And 61.9% of ADR/ADE cases were newly reported. It is suggested that medical workers shall learn about the regularity and characteristics of ADR/ADE induced by gastrodin, apply it in clinic with standards, pay close attention to changes of patients' situations and attach importance to the monitoring of ADR/ADE, so as to enhance the safety of medication.