Effects of dietary nucleotides on growth performance, immune response, intestinal morphology and disease resistance of juvenile largemouth bass, Micropterus salmoides.

An 8 week feeding trial was carried out to investigate the effects of dietary nucleotides on growth performance, intestinal morphology, immune response and disease resistance of juvenile largemouth bass, Micropterus salmoides. Five grades of dietary nucleotide levels were designed as 0, 0.2, 0.4, 0.8 and 1.2 g kg-1 , respectively. Each group had 3 replicates, with 40 fish in each replicate. After the feeding experiment, 15 fish from each tank were infected with Aeromonas hydrophila for 14 days. The results indicated that fish fed the diets containing 0.4, 0.8 and 1.2 g kg-1 nucleotides had higher growth performance and feed utilization than those fed the control diet. Nonetheless, there were no significant differences in survival between all the groups, although fish fed the diets with all-level nucleotides obtained higher survival than those fed the control diet. Dietary nucleotides significantly affected the superoxide dismutase, acid phosphatase and catalase activities in serum but not the malondialdehyde content. Fish fed the 0.4 g kg-1 nucleotide diets had the highest fold height, enterocyte height and muscular layer thickness significantly. The average mortality of largemouth bass infected with A. hydrophila was significantly influenced by dietary nucleotides. The mortality was significantly higher in the control group (91.11%) and 0.02% nucleotide group (73.11%) followed by the other groups and lowest in the 0.8 g kg-1 nucleotide group. In summary, dietary 0.4-0.8 g kg-1 nucleotides promoted growth performance, enhanced immunity and improved intestinal morphology and disease resistance of largemouth bass.

Automatic Detection of Peripheral Retinal Lesions From Ultrawide-Field Fundus Images Using Deep Learning.

PURPOSE: To establish a multilabel-based deep learning (DL) algorithm for automatic detection and categorization of clinically significant peripheral retinal lesions using ultrawide-field fundus images. METHODS: A total of 5958 ultrawide-field fundus images from 3740 patients were randomly split into a training set, validation set, and test set. A multilabel classifier was developed to detect rhegmatogenous retinal detachment, cystic retinal tuft, lattice degeneration, and retinal breaks. Referral decision was automatically generated based on the results of each disease class. t -distributed stochastic neighbor embedding heatmaps were used to visualize the features extracted by the neural networks. Gradient-weighted class activation mapping and guided backpropagation heatmaps were generated to investigate the image locations for decision-making by the DL models. The performance of the classifier(s) was evaluated by sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, F 1 score, area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) with 95% CI, and area under the precision-recall curve. RESULTS: In the test set, all categories achieved a sensitivity of 0.836-0.918, a specificity of 0.858-0.989, an accuracy of 0.854-0.977, an F 1 score of 0.400-0.931, an AUROC of 0.9205-0.9882, and an area under the precision-recall curve of 0.6723-0.9745. The referral decisions achieved an AUROC of 0.9758 (95% CI= 0.9648-0.9869). The multilabel classifier had significantly better performance in cystic retinal tuft detection than the binary classifier (AUROC= 0.9781 vs 0.6112, P < 0.001). The model showed comparable performance with human experts. CONCLUSIONS: This new DL model of a multilabel classifier is capable of automatic, accurate, and early detection of clinically significant peripheral retinal lesions with various sample sizes. It can be applied in peripheral retinal screening in clinics.

Nitrative inactivation of thioredoxin-1 loses its protective effect in bleomycin-induced pulmonary fibrosis.

Pulmonary fibrosis is common in the development of inflammatory lung diseases with no effective clinical drug treatment currently. As an essential redox enzyme, thioredoxin (Trx) has been reported to be involved in pulmonary fibrosis, but the mechanism is to be revealed. Therefore, in bleomycin-indued pulmonary fibrosis model in C57 mice, Trx activity and nitrated Trx were examined.,p38-MAPK apoptosis pathway was determined in lung tissues. Additionally, before BLM administration, C57/BL6 mice were treated with aminoguanidine (AG, a peroxynitrite scavenger), recombinant human Trx-1 (rhTrx-1), or SIN-1 (a peroxynitrite donor) nitrated Trx-1 (N-Trx-1). In bleomycin (BLM)-induced pulmonary fibrosis model in C57/BL6 mice, we observed that nitrated Trx increased, while its activity decreased, with the increase of alveolar epithelial cells (AECs)apoptosis by p38-MAPK pathway. We demonstrated that AG or rhTrx-1, but not N-Trx-1 significantly reduced pulmonary fibrosis. Taken together, the results above revealed that blockade of Trx-1 nitration, or supplementation of exogenous rhTrx-1, might represent novel therapies to attenuate pulmonary fibrosis in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis patients.

Clinical Features of Adult/Adolescent Atopic Dermatitis and Chinese Criteria for Atopic Dermatitis.

BACKGROUND: Atopic dermatitis (AD) is an inflammatory skin disease characterized by chronic recurrent dermatitis with profound itching. Most patients have personal and/or family history of atopic diseases. Several criteria have been proposed for the diagnosis of AD. Although the clinical features of childhood AD have been widely studied, there has been less large-scale study on adult/adolescent AD. The aim of this study was to investigate the clinical features of adult/adolescent patients with chronic symmetrical eczema/AD and to propose Chinese diagnostic criteria for adult/adolescent AD. METHODS: A hospital-based study was performed. Forty-two dermatological centers participated in this study. Adult and adolescent patients (12 years and over) with chronic symmetrical eczema or AD were included in this study. Questionnaires were completed by both patients and investigators. The valid questionnaires were analyzed using EpiData 3.1 and SPSS 17.0 software. RESULTS: A total of 2662 valid questionnaires were collected (1369 male and 1293 female). Of all 2662 patients, 2062 (77.5%) patients had the disease after 12 years old, while only 600 (22.5%) patients had the disease before 12 years old, suggesting late-onset eczema/AD is common. Two thousand one hundred and thirty-nine (80.4%) patients had the disease for more than 6 months. One thousand one hundred and forty-four (43.0%) patients had a personal and/or family history of atopic diseases. One thousand five hundred and forty-eight (58.2%) patients had an elevated total serum IgE and/or eosinophilia and/or positive allergen-specific IgE. Based on these clinical and laboratory features, we proposed Chinese criteria for adult/adolescent AD. Of all 2662 patients, 60.3% were satisfied with our criteria, while only 48.2% satisfied with Hanifin Rajka criteria and 32.7% satisfied with Williams criteria, suggesting a good sensitivity of our criteria in adult/adolescent AD patients. CONCLUSION: Late-onset of eczema or AD is common. The clinical manifestations of AD are heterogeneous. We have proposed Chinese diagnostic criteria for adolescent and adult AD, which are simple and sensitive for diagnosis of adult/adolescent AD.

Identifying enzyme activities within human saliva which are relevant to dental resin composite biodegradation.

Esterase activities similar to those of cholesterol and pseudocholine esterases (CE and PCE, respectively) have been detected within whole human saliva. Since commercial CE has been shown to possess distinct activity relative to PCE for select components in dental composites, it is hypothesized that esterases isolated from human saliva will also show selectivity towards specific monomer elements within the composites. The objective of this work was to carry out the isolation of these activities from whole human saliva and study their individual effects on resin monomers such as Bis-phenyl glycidyl dimethacrylate (aromatic structure) and triethylene glycol dimethacrylate (hydrophilic structure), and on cured composites containing the latter monomers. Human saliva samples were processed, fractionated on a gel filtration column and assayed for CE and PCE-like activity. Selected fractions were incubated at 37 degrees C with the above monomers and select commercial composites. Degradation was monitored using high-performance liquid chromatography. The fraction with the highest cholesterol esterase-like character preferentially degraded the aromatic monomer and significantly degraded more of the composite's material relative to a fraction containing low amounts of the cholesterol esterase activity but elevated pseudocholine esterase-like activity. Hence, it was concluded that select salivary esterases had preferences for distinct composite resin components.