The role of retinal glial cells and related factors in macular edema.

Macular edema (ME) has emerged as a leading cause of visual impairment, representing a critical clinical manifestation and complication associated with many eye diseases. In the occurrence and development of ME, retinal glial cells like Müller cells and microglial cells play vital roles. Moreover, growth factor and cytokines associated with them, such as vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), pigment epithelium-derived factor (PEDF), hypoxia-inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α), angiopoietin-like protein 4 (ANGPTL4), interleukin-6(IL-6), interleukin-8 (IL-8), monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1), prostaglandin, etc., also take part in the pathogenesis of ME. Changes in these cytokines can lead to retinal angiogenesis, increased vascular permeability, blood-retinal barrier (BRB) breakdown, and fluid leakage, further causing ME to occur or deteriorate. Research on the role of retinal glial cells and related cytokines in ME will provide new therapeutic directions and effective remedies. This article is a literature review on the role of Müller cells, microglial cells and related factors in ME pathogenesis.

Multiple Bioinformatics Analyses of Integrated Gene Expression Profiling Data and Verification of Hub Genes Associated with Diabetic Retinopathy.

BACKGROUND Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a serious complication of diabetes that can lead to blindness. This study aimed to identify the core genes and molecular functions involved in DR through multiple bioinformatics analyses. MATERIAL AND METHODS The mRNA gene profiles of human DR tissues from the GSE60436 and GSE53257 datasets were assessed with R software and integrated to identify the co-expressed differentially expressed genes (DEGs). Multiple bioinformatics analyses were used: Gene Ontology (GO) analysis, signaling pathway analysis, and hub gene prediction. Quantitative reverse transcription-PCR (qRT-PCR) was used to verify the hub genes. RESULTS The Database for Annotation, Visualization and Integrated Discovery (DAVID) online tool suggested that the biological processes of the DEGs focused on mitochondrial transport, the cellular components focused on mitochondria, and molecular functions focused on catalytic activity. The results provided by DAVID were consistent with those provided by STRING and the GeneMANIA online database. All the DEGs function in metabolic pathways, consistent with the g: Profiler online analysis results. The protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks forecasted by STRING and GeneMANIA were entered into Cytoscape for cytoHubba degree analysis. The hub genes predicted by cytoHubba suggested that fumarate hydratase (FH) might be relevant to DR. qRT-PCR suggested that the expression of FH was higher in DR retinal tissues than in normal control tissues. CONCLUSIONS Multiple bioinformatics analyses verified that FH could be used as a potential diagnostic marker and new therapeutic target of DR.

Application of Amorphous and Nanocrystalline Soft Magnetic Materials in Balanced-Force-Type Electromagnetic Relay.

The magnetic properties of soft magnetic materials, including their saturation magnetic induction strength and permeability, significantly affect the dynamic characteristics of electromagnetic relays. However, the soft materials most commonly used for relays in the magnetic conductive components of electromagnetic systems, such as electrical pure iron, limit further relay design improvement and optimization to a certain extent. Thus, this paper proposes the use of amorphous and nanocrystalline soft magnetic materials with good high-frequency magnetic properties in magnetic circuits. A wavelet analysis was conducted on the high-frequency components of the coil current while the relay operated, and the corresponding magnetic materials were selected. Considering the challenges in processing amorphous and nanocrystalline materials and collecting test data for the accuracy verification of simulation methods, we prepared a scaled-up prototype for use in dynamic characteristic tests. The simulation method was improved, yielding more accurate simulation results regarding the relay's dynamic characteristics. On this basis, six replacement schemes using amorphous and nanocrystalline materials were considered. The test results proved that this application could improve the relay's dynamic characteristics. Finally, a full-size sample with an iron core consisting of nanocrystalline alloy 1K107B was prepared, and the conclusions were verified in tests.

GTransU-CAP: Automatic labeling for cyclic alternating patterns in sleep EEG using gated transformer-based U-Net framework.

Cyclic alternating pattern (CAP) sequences are composed of cycles of alternate activation phases (A-phases) and background phases. CAP A-phases can be further divided into three subtypes, which act as important bio-markers of sleep instability and are also associated with identifiable sleep pathologies. Thus, its accurate detection and identification is of great clinical interest and significance. To release the burden of sleep experts who manually perform this labeling task, several automatic detectors have been proposed, yet the characteristics of CAP have not been fully exploited to achieve a satisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose an automated method to detect A-phases and their subtypes using Transformer-based U-Net framework. In light of the long-span duration of A-phases, our method has intrinsic advantages as U-Net extracts local information while Transformer module provides global dependencies. We also use a curriculum-learning based training strategy to further improve the performance. The method is validated on the publicly available CAP Sleep Database. It obtains average F1 scores of 67.78% and 72.16% on 16 healthy subjects and 30 patients with nocturnal frontal lobe epilepsy respectively for A-phase detection, and the average macro F1-score is 59.5% for multi-class subtype classification. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method achieves superior performance in these two CAP labeling tasks.

SpindleU-Net: An Adaptive U-Net Framework for Sleep Spindle Detection in Single-Channel EEG.

The sleep spindles in EEG have become one type of biomarker used to assess cognitive abilities and related disorders, and thus their detection is crucial for clinical research. This task, traditionally performed by sleep experts, is time-consuming. Many methods have been proposed to automate this process, yet an increase in performance is still expected. Inspired by the application in image segmentation, we propose a point-wise spindle detection method based on the U-Net framework with an attention module (SpindleU-Net). It maps the sequences of arbitrary-length EEG inputs to those of dense labels of spindle or non-spindle on freely chosen intervals. The attention module that focuses on the salient spindle region allows better performance, and a task-specific loss function is defined to alleviate the problem of imbalanced classification. As a deep learning method, SpindleU-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the widely used benchmark dataset of MASS as well as the DREAMS dataset with a small number of samples. On MASS dataset it achieves average F1 scores of 0.854 and 0.803 according to its consistency with the annotations by two sleep experts respectively. On DREAMS dataset, it shows the average F1 score of 0.739. Its cross-dataset performance is also better compared to other methods, showing the good generalization ability for cross-dataset applications.

Production of xylooligosaccharides and monosaccharides from hydrogen peroxide-acetic acid-pretreated poplar by two-step enzymatic hydrolysis.

The severe pretreatment of poplar makes xylan difficult to utilize efficiently. In this work, poplar was pretreated by hydrogen peroxide-acetic acid (HPAC) with H2SO4 as catalyst to remove lignin, and the solid residues were used to produce xylooligosaccharides (XOS) and monosaccharides by two-step xylanase and cellulase hydrolysis. The results indicated that higher H2SO4 concentrations in the HPAC pretreatment of poplar afforded stronger lignin removal ability. An increased XOS yield of 19.8% was obtained from 200 mM H2SO4-catalyzed poplar by xylanase and the XOS purity was high, with a very low xylose/XOS ratio of 0.14. Higher glucose (75.2%) and xylose (61.4%) yields were obtained from the HPAC-pretreated poplar using 50 mM H2SO4 as catalyst. Finally, 16.9 g XOS and 296.4 g glucose were produced from 1 kg poplar by xylanase and cellulase. This study provides a method for producing functional XOS and monosaccharides from poplar using a simple reduced-pollution strategy.

Autophagy, lysosome dysfunction and mTOR inhibition in MNU-induced photoreceptor cell damage.

Progressive photoreceptor death is the main cause of retinal degeneration diseases. Determining the underlying mechanism of this process is essential for therapy improvement. Autophagy has long been considered to be involved in neuronal degeneration diseases, and the regulation of autophagy is thought to have potential implications for neurodegenerative disease therapies. However, whether autophagy is protective or destructive varies among diseases and is controversial. In the present study, we established an N-methyl-N-nitrosourea (MNU)-induced photoreceptor cell damage model in vitro that faithfully replicated photoreceptor cell death in retinal degeneration diseases. Cell viability was tested by 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-5-(3-carboxy-methoxyphenyl)-2-(4-sulfophenyl)-2H-tetrazolium (MTS) assays. Reactive oxygen species (ROS) levels were assessed through 2,7-dichlorodihydrofluorescein diacetate (DCFH-DA) fluorescence. Autophagy was confirmed by observing autophagosomes using transmission electron microscopy (TEM). A lysosome tracker was used to identify acidic lysosomes in cells. We also measured the expression of some proteins related to autophagy, apoptosis and lysosomal degradation by western blot and immunofluorescence assays. We found that MNU could decrease photoreceptor cell viability in a time- and dose-dependent manner, and this change was accompanied by concomitant increases in ROS and the expression of the apoptosis-inducing protein cleaved caspase-3. Moreover, autophagy was activated by MNU treatment during this process. Inhibition of autophagy with 3-methyladenine accelerated cell damage. Lysosome dysfunction was confirmed by autophagosome enlargement and increased cathepsin expression, which was accompanied by mTOR dephosphorylation. In conclusion, autophagy was activated through inhibition of the PI3K/mTOR pathway in the context of MNU-induced photoreceptor cell death. Prolonged mTOR dephosphorylation and autophagy activation resulted in autophagic vacuole accumulation, as indicated by inefficient degradation in lysosomes, and further led to apoptosis.