A Semantic-Aware Attention and Visual Shielding Network for Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification.

Cloth-changing person re-identification (ReID) is a newly emerging research topic that aims to retrieve pedestrians whose clothes are changed. Since the human appearance with different clothes exhibits large variations, it is very difficult for existing approaches to extract discriminative and robust feature representations. Current works mainly focus on body shape or contour sketches, but the human semantic information and the potential consistency of pedestrian features before and after changing clothes are not fully explored or are ignored. To solve these issues, in this work, a novel semantic-aware attention and visual shielding network for cloth-changing person ReID (abbreviated as SAVS) is proposed where the key idea is to shield clues related to the appearance of clothes and only focus on visual semantic information that is not sensitive to view/posture changes. Specifically, a visual semantic encoder is first employed to locate the human body and clothing regions based on human semantic segmentation information. Then, a human semantic attention (HSA) module is proposed to highlight the human semantic information and reweight the visual feature map. In addition, a visual clothes shielding (VCS) module is also designed to extract a more robust feature representation for the cloth-changing task by covering the clothing regions and focusing the model on the visual semantic information unrelated to the clothes. Most importantly, these two modules are jointly explored in an end-to-end unified framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods, and more robust features can be extracted for cloth-changing persons. Compared with multibiometric unified network (MBUNet) (published in TIP2023), this method can achieve improvements of 17.5% (30.9%) and 8.5% (10.4%) on the LTCC and Celeb-reID datasets in terms of mean average precision (mAP) (rank-1), respectively. When compared with the Swin Transformer (Swin-T), the improvements can reach 28.6% (17.3%), 22.5% (10.0%), 19.5% (10.2%), and 8.6% (10.1%) on the PRCC, LTCC, Celeb, and NKUP datasets in terms of rank-1 (mAP), respectively.

UGT1A1 variants in Chinese Uighur and Han newborns and its correlation with neonatal hyperbilirubinemia.

To explore the correlation between UGT1A1 variant and neonatal hyperbilirubinemia in Chinese Uighur and Han populations. We conducted this study in Urumqi, China. Umbilical cord blood specimens and clinical information of term infants born in the studied center were collected. Variation status of UGT1A1 was determined by direct sequencing or capillary electrophoresis analysis. 102 Uighur and 99 Han normal term neonates, together with 19 hospitalized term newborns (10 Uighur and 9 Han) due to significant hyperbilirubinemia were enrolled into the final analysis. The incidence of neonates with high-risk transcutaneous bilirubin level (TCB) were much higher in Han newborns than in Uighur newborns(P = 0.01). Also, there was statistically significant difference in (TA) 7 promoter mutation of UGT1A1 between Han and Uighur group(χ2 = 4.675, P = 0.03). Furthermore, exon mutation (c.211 and /or c.1091) in UGT1A1 gene was significantly associated with increased TCB level (ORadj = 1.41, 95%CI: 0.25-2.51, P = 0.002) and higher risk of hyperbilirubinemia in both Han and Uighur infants after adjusted for covariates (ORadj = 2.21, 95%CI: 1.09-4.49, P = 0.03). In conclusion, UGT1A1 promoter polymorphism seem to be an important genetic modulator of plasma bilirubin level and neonatal hyperbilirubinemia risk within ethnic groups. Genetic assessment of UGT1A1 coding variants may be useful for clinical diagnosis of neonatal jaundice.

ASH1L contributes to oocyte apoptosis by regulating DNA damage.

In female mammals, the size of the initially established primordial follicle pool within the ovaries determines the reproductive life span. Interestingly, the establishment of the primordial follicle pool is accompanied by a remarkable programmed oocyte loss for unclear reasons. Here, we identify a new role of ASH1-like histone lysine methyltransferase (ASH1L) in controlling the apoptosis of oocytes during meiotic prophase I in mice. Our results showed that overexpression of Ash1l led to a dramatic loss of fetal oocytes via apoptosis, which subsequently resulted in a reduced capacity of the primordial follicle pool. Overexpression of Ash1l also led to a deficiency in DNA double-strand break repair associated with premature upregulation of p63 and phosphorylated checkpoint kinase 2 (p-CHK2), the major genome guardian of the female germline, following Ash1l overexpression in fetal ovaries. In summary, ASH1L is one of the indispensable epigenetic molecules that acts as a guardian of the genome. It protects oocyte genome integrity and removes oocytes with serious DNA damage by regulating the expression of p63 and p-CHK2 during meiotic prophase I in mice. Our study provides a perspective on the physiological regulatory role of DNA damage checkpoint signaling in fetal oocyte guardianship and female fertility.

A Temporal-Aware Relation and Attention Network for Temporal Action Localization.

Temporal action localization is currently an active research topic in computer vision and machine learning due to its usage in smart surveillance. It is a challenging problem since the categories of the actions must be classified in untrimmed videos and the start and end of the actions need to be accurately found. Although many temporal action localization methods have been proposed, they require substantial amounts of computational resources for the training and inference processes. To solve these issues, in this work, a novel temporal-aware relation and attention network (abbreviated as TRA) is proposed for the temporal action localization task. TRA has an anchor-free and end-to-end architecture that fully uses temporal-aware information. Specifically, a temporal self-attention module is first designed to determine the relationship between different temporal positions, and more weight is given to features within the actions. Then, a multiple temporal aggregation module is constructed to aggregate the temporal domain information. Finally, a graph relation module is designed to obtain the aggregated graph features, which are used to refine the boundaries and classification results. Most importantly, these three modules are jointly explored in a unified framework, and temporal awareness is always fully used. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can outperform all state-of-the-art methods on the THUMOS14 dataset with an average mAP that reaches 67.6% and obtain a comparable result on the ActivityNet1.3 dataset with an average mAP that reaches 34.4%. Compared with A2Net (TIP20), PCG-TAL (TIP21), and AFSD (CVPR21) TRA can achieve improvements of 11.7%, 4.4%, and 1.8%, respectively on the THUMOS14 dataset.

Draft Genome Sequences of Nine "Candidatus Nanosynbacter sp. HMT-352" Strains Cultured from the Human Oral Cavity.

Here, we report draft genome sequences for nine strains of "Candidatus Nanosynbacter sp. HMT-352." These strains and their sequences were used to interrogate strain-level variations in host range, gene content, and growth dynamics among the phylum "Candidatus Saccharibacteria."

Structure and Composition of Candidate Phyla Radiation in Supragingival Plaque of Caries Patients.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the composition and abundance of candidate phyla radiation (CPR) in the oral cavity in caries patients and a healthy population. METHODS: The raw macrogenomic sequencing data for a total of 88 subjects were downloaded from the National Centre for Biotechnology Sequence Read Archive (NCBI SRA) public database according to the public data usage specifications. Trimmomatic (Department for Metabolic Networks, Potsdam, Germany) and Bowtie 2 (University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA) were used to quality control and dehost the host sequences. Species annotation was made using Kraken2 (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA) and Bracken (Johns Hopkins University) based on the reference database. According to the results of the species annotation, the species-significant differences and species correlation of caries and healthy oral microbiota in species composition and microbiota diversity were analysed to study the distribution and abundance differences of CPR in the oral environment. RESULTS: Proteobacteria, Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes, Actinobacteria and Fusobacteria were the main components. The relative abundance of TM7 (Candidatus Saccharibacteria) and GN02 (Candidatus Gracilibacteria) of CPR is second only to the aforementioned five bacteria, indicating that CPR is an important part of the oral microbiota. TM7 and GN02 were common to both the caries patients and healthy patients and were detected in all samples, suggesting that CPR is the 'core microbiome'. There was a correlation between CPR and a variety of oral microbiota, among which the positive correlation with Capnocytophaga was the strongest, suggesting that Capnocytophaga might be the potential host bacteria of CPR. CONCLUSION: CPR is an indispensable part of the oral microbiota. It is the 'core microflora' of the oral cavity and may play an important role in the stability and function of the oral microecological environment. Capnocytophaga may be the potential host bacteria of CPR.

Strain-Level Variation and Diverse Host Bacterial Responses in Episymbiotic Saccharibacteria.

Saccharibacteria (TM7), which are obligate episymbionts growing on the surface of host bacteria, may play an important role in oral disease, such as periodontitis (1, 2). As TM7 is a newly cultured lineage of bacteria, its research is limited by the small number of isolated representatives relative to the number of TM7 genomes assembled from culture-independent studies (3-5). A comprehensive view of both TM7 taxa and TM7 strain-level variations remains opaque. In this study, we expanded our previously developed TM7 baiting method into using many host bacteria in parallel, which allowed us to obtain 37 TM7 strains from the human oral cavity. These strains were further classified into low-enrichment (LE, n = 24) and high-enrichment (HE, n = 13) groups based on their proficiency at propagating on host bacteria. Of the 13 HE strains, 10 belong to "Candidatus Nanosynbacter sp." strain HMT-352 (human microbial taxon) (6), enabling us to explore both the phenotypic and genomic strain variations within a single TM7 species. We show that TM7 HMT-352 strains exhibit a diverse host range and varied growth dynamics during the establishment of their episymbiotic relationship with host bacteria. Furthermore, despite HMT-352 strains sharing a majority of their genes, we identified several gene clusters that may play a pivotal role in host affinity. More importantly, our comparative analyses also provide TM7 gene candidates associated with strain-level phenotypic variation that may be important for episymbiotic interactions with host bacteria. IMPORTANCE Candidate phylum radiation (CPR) bacteria comprise a poorly understood phylum that is estimated to encompass ∼26% of all diversity of domain bacteria. Among CPR bacteria, the Saccharibacteria lineage (TM7) is of particular interest, as it is found in high abundance in the mammal microbiome and has been associated with oral disease. While many CPR genomes, TM7 included, have been acquired through culture-independent methods, only a small number of representatives have been isolated. Such isolated representatives, however, shed light on the physiology, pathogenesis, and episymbiotic interactions of TM7. Combined with genomic analyses, experiments involving isolated representatives can distinguish phylogenetic to phenotypic discrepancies and better identify genes of importance. In this study, we utilized multiple host bacteria in parallel to isolate TM7 bacteria and examined strain-level variation in TM7 to reveal key genes that may drive TM7-host interactions. Our findings accentuate that broad phylogenetic characterization of CPR is the next step in understanding these bacteria.

Dataset for Genome Sequencing and De Novo Assembly of the Candidate Phyla Radiation in Supragingival Plaque.

The Candidate Phyla Radiation (CPR), as a newly discovered and difficult-to-culture bacterium, accounts for the majority of the bacterial domain, which may be related to various oral diseases, including dental caries. Restricted by laboratory culture conditions, there is limited knowledge about oral CPR. Advances in metagenomics provide a new way to study CPR through molecular biology. Here, we used metagenomic assembly and binning to reconstruct more and higher quality metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) of CPR from oral dental plaque. These MAGs represent novel CPR species, which differed from all known CPR organisms. Relative abundance of different CPR MAGs in the caries and caries-free group was estimated by mapping metagenomic reads to newly constructed MAGs. The relative abundance of two CPR MAGs was significantly increased in the caries group, indicating that there might be a relationship with caries activity. The detection of a large number of unclassified CPR MAGs in the dataset implies that the phylogenetic diversity of CPR is enormous. The results provide a reference value for exploring the ecological distribution and function of uncultured or difficult-to-culture microorganisms.

Formation of organic chloramines during chlorination of 18 compounds.

Organic chloramines have attracted considerable attention because of their potential toxicity and reactivity. However, the lack of suitable and effective analytical methods has limited the study of organic chloramines due to their volatile and unstable properties. In this study, membrane introduction mass spectrometry (MIMS) combined with DPD/FAS titration was used to monitor the formation of organic chloramines. N-chlorodimethylamine [(CH3)2NCl] and N-chlorodiethylamine [(C2H5)2NCl] were detected and identified as the dominant volatile DBPs during chlorination of 18 organic compounds with dimethylamine or diethylamine functional groups, with yields ranging from 0.3% to 51.1% at a chlorine to precursor (Cl/P) molar ratio of 8.0. (CH3)2NBr was formed in the presence of bromide, while the formation of (CH3)2NCl was decreased. The reaction of phenol with (CH3)2NCl combined with theoretical calculations confirmed that the reactivity of (CH3)2NCl was similar to that of monochloramine. Moreover, (CH3)2NCl and (C2H5)2NCl were observed at the ppb level during chlorination of actual water samples collected from different areas. The results suggest that (CH3)2NCl and (C2H5)2NCl are important organic chloramines during chlorination, which may lead to the occurrence of further oxidation reactions and promote the formation of other disinfection byproducts simultaneously and should be of concern.

Pyrosequencing of the subgingival microbiome in peri-implantitis after non-surgical mechanical debridement therapy.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Peri-implantitis remains a challenge for dental implant therapy, and the prognosis of non-surgical therapy for peri-implantitis is unsatisfactory. In order to reveal the impact of non-surgical mechanical debridement therapy on microbial communities, we investigated the subgingival microbial communities of healthy implants and implants with peri-implantitis, both before and after the therapy. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Subgingival plaques were collected from patients with healthy dental implants (HC; n = 10) and from patients with peri-implantitis (n = 13) before and after non-surgical mechanical debridement therapy. The treatment was conducted using curettes for submucosal debridement followed by irrigation with 0.2% (w/v) chlorhexidine, with re-examination 1 month later. 16S rRNA pyrosequencing was used to analyze the subgingival microbiome, and co-occurrence networks were adopted to explore the interactions between pathogens in the microbial communities. RESULTS: A total of 506 955 high-quality reads were generated, and 2222 operational taxonomic units were finally detected using a 97% similarity cutoff, with a mean of 249 ± 69 per sample. The peri-implantitis sites harbored similar microbial communities before and after the treatment, as demonstrated by the microbial diversity, relative abundance, and prevalence of bacteria. Most importantly, the microbial community structures were stable before and after non-surgical therapy based on the microbial diversity and bacterial composition, as well as the interactions between key pathogens, including Enterobacteriaceae, Selenomonas sputigena, Parvimonas, Eubacterium infirmum, Campylobacter gracilis, Tannerella forsythia, and Fusobacterium, which were measured using a co-occurrence network analysis. Periodontal pathogens were also detected in subgingival plaque after the treatment. Distinct microbial communities were found between the healthy and peri-implantitis sites. CONCLUSION: Our results demonstrate that non-surgical mechanical debridement therapy did not significantly affect the subgingival microbial communities in peri-implantitis, and the stable microbial networks created via interactions among pathogens may be responsible for the poor prognosis of peri-implantitis treatment.

Experimental Study on Shear Performance of Cast-In-Place Ultra-High Performance Concrete Structures.

In order to study the direct shear properties of ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC) structures, 15 Z-shaped monolithic placement specimens (MPSs) and 12 Z-shaped waterjet treated specimens (WJTSs) were tested to study the shear behavior and failure modes. The effects of steel fiber shape, steel fiber volume fraction and interface treatment on the direct shear properties of UHPC were investigated. The test results demonstrate that the MPSs were reinforced with steel fibers and underwent ductile failure. The ultimate load of the MPS is about 166.9% of the initial cracking load. However, the WJTSs failed in a typical brittle mode. Increasing the fiber volume fraction significantly improves the shear strength, which can reach 24.72 MPa. The steel fiber type has little effect on the shear strength and ductility, while increasing the length of steel fibers improves its ductility and slightly reduces the shear strength. The direct shear strength of the WJTSs made from 16 mm hooked-type steel fibers can reach 9.15 MPa, which is 2.47 times the direct shear strength of the specimens without fibers. Finally, an interaction formula for the shear and compressive strength was proposed on the basis of the experimental results, to predict the shear load-carrying capacity of the cast-in-place UHPC structures.

Downregulation of NGAL is Required for the Inhibition of Proliferation and the Promotion of Apoptosis of Human Gastric Cancer MGC-803 Cells.

BACKGROUND/AIMS: Gastric cancer is considered as a common malignancy with a poor prognosis as well as unsatisfactory treatment. Neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL) has been reported to affect multiple aspects of human tumor, including gastric cancer. This study aims to explore the effects of NGAL gene silencing on the proliferation as well as apoptosis of human gastric cancer MGC-803 cells. METHODS: This study included 87 patients with gastric cancer. MGC-803 cells were collected and mainly treated with siRNA against NGAL and recombinant NGAL plasmid. The expression of NGAL mRNA and the expressions of NGAL protein and apoptosis-related proteins were determined by reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) and western blot analysis, respectively. Cell cycle and apoptosis were tested by flow cytometry, and cell proliferation was detected by water soluble tetrazolium-1 (WST-1) assay. The effect of NGAL gene silencing on tumorigenicity of MGC-803 cells in vivo was detected through establishment of xenograft in nude mice. RESULTS: NGAL was highly expressed in gastric cancer tissues. The protein and mRNA expressions of NGAL gene in MGC-803 cells treated with NGAL-siRNA were obviously reduced, and the amount of cells in G0/G1 phase was increased. Moreover, MGC-803 cells treated with NGAL-siRNA exhibited inhibited proliferation, enhanced apoptosis, decreased expressions of nuclear factor kappa-light-chain-enhancer of activated B cells (NF-κB) as well as B-cell lymphoma-2 (Bcl-2) and increased expressions of cysteine-aspartic acid specific protease-9 (caspase-9) and Bcl2-associated X (Bax), as well as repressed tumorigenicity in vivo. CONCLUSION: NGAL gene silencing inhibits proliferation and promotes apoptosis of MGC-803 cells, which can provide a novel theory for treatment of gastric cancer.

Therapeutic effects of Salvia miltiorrhiza injection combined with telmisartan in patients with diabetic nephropathy by influencing collagen IV and fibronectin: A case-control study.

Involvement of collagen IV (ColIV) and fibronectin (FN) in the occurrence and development of diabetic nephropathy (DN) and the effects of telmisartan and Salvia miltiorrhiza injection in the treatment of the patients were investigated. Two hundred and fifty-eight patients with stage IV DN were selected as the case group, and another 110 normal healthy subjects were incorporated as the control group. Involved patients were subdivided into different groups according to different treatment therapies; patients in the telmisartan group (T group) were given oral telmisartan; patients in the Salvia miltiorrhiza injection + telmisartan (S + T group) were administered with Salvia miltiorrhiza injection combined with telmisartan treatment, and there was a group of patients who received no intervention as the placebo group. After intervention, levels of glycemic indexes and renal damage indexes indicated downwards trends both in the T group and the S + T group when compared to the placebo group; besides, levels in the S + T group were much lower than those in the T group (all P<0.05). Additionally, in comparison among the above three intervention groups, differences in the fasting blood glucose, 2 h post-prandial blood glucose, glycosylated hemoglobin, blood urea nitrogen, serum creatinine and urinary albumin excretion rate were significant after treatment (all P<0.05). Further, before intervention, both Co1IV and FN in the urine were increased in the case group compared to the control group (all P<0.05). After intervention, both levels were apparently decreased. There were remarkable differences of Co1IV and FN levels in the urine when compared among three different intervention groups after treatment (P<0.05). Increased ColIV and FN levels may be partially responsible for the development of DN. Salvia miltiorrhiza injection with telmisartan have beneficial synergistic effects for DN patients through attenuating the increase in ColIV and FN, reversing hyperglycemia state and postponing ultrastructure changes of glomerular basement membrane.

Comparison of efficacy and outcome satisfaction between in-office and home teeth bleaching in Chinese patients.

This in vivo study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of in-office and home teeth bleaching in Asian patients. Moreover, the correlation between tooth color change and patient's outcome satisfaction was investigated. Overall, 40 Chinese patients were randomly divided into two groups and prescribed in-office (OB) or take-home bleaching (HB). The color of the maxillary central incisor and canine were recorded at baseline, immediately after first treatment, 1 week, and 3 months after treatment by using a spectrophotometer. Bleaching sensitivity and outcome satisfaction were assessed using Likert and visual analogue scale (VAS), and the results were analyzed using independent t-test and Pearson correlation (P < 0.05). ΔL*, Δa*, Δb*, and ΔE* values of HB were greater than those of OB. Color changes observed in canines were generally greater than those in incisors. Moreover, HB was generally associated with less tooth sensitivity than OB. Patients were satisfied with both treatments, but VAS scores were greater for HB. Furthermore, the correlation between ΔE* and VAS was significant for canines immediately after the first treatment and 1 week after HB. In conclusion, HB was more effective in lightening teeth and reducing chromacity in Chinese patients. The correlation between tooth color change and outcome satisfaction was generally insignificant and weak.

A Review on Human Activity Recognition Using Vision-Based Method.

Human activity recognition (HAR) aims to recognize activities from a series of observations on the actions of subjects and the environmental conditions. The vision-based HAR research is the basis of many applications including video surveillance, health care, and human-computer interaction (HCI). This review highlights the advances of state-of-the-art activity recognition approaches, especially for the activity representation and classification methods. For the representation methods, we sort out a chronological research trajectory from global representations to local representations, and recent depth-based representations. For the classification methods, we conform to the categorization of template-based methods, discriminative models, and generative models and review several prevalent methods. Next, representative and available datasets are introduced. Aiming to provide an overview of those methods and a convenient way of comparing them, we classify existing literatures with a detailed taxonomy including representation and classification methods, as well as the datasets they used. Finally, we investigate the directions for future research.

Metformin in combination with rosiglitazone contribute to the increased serum adiponectin levels in people with type 2 diabetes mellitus.

To evaluate how metformin plus rosiglitazone affect serum adiponectin levels in people suffering from type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), 240 patients having T2DM were selected in this cohort study. Included subjects were randomly and equally separated into three subsets: i) Group A (rosiglitazone group); ii) group B (metformin group); and iii) group C (rosiglitazone + metformin group). Furthermore, meta-analysis of previous studies was performed by searching the general search engines and bibliographic databases. Compared with before treatment, the serum amount of adiponectin grew considerably in the three groups after treatment, and the levels in the group C was much greater than those of groups A and B (all P<0.05). Corresponding meta-analysis results suggested post-treatment serum adiponectin level to be greater than pretreatment level in T2DM patients (P<0.001). Further subgroup analyses indicated that combination therapy of metformin and rosiglitazone may increase the amount of serum adiponectin in T2DM sufferers among the majority subgroups (all P<0.05). The combination of metformin and rosiglitazone treatment increased serum adiponectin levels, suggesting that metformin plus rosiglitazone therapy is a suitable choice to treat T2DM.

Hierarchical Activity Recognition Using Smart Watches and RGB-Depth Cameras.

Human activity recognition is important for healthcare and lifestyle evaluation. In this paper, a novel method for activity recognition by jointly considering motion sensor data recorded by wearable smart watches and image data captured by RGB-Depth (RGB-D) cameras is presented. A normalized cross correlation based mapping method is implemented to establish association between motion sensor data with corresponding image data from the same person in multi-person situations. Further, to improve the performance and accuracy of recognition, a hierarchical structure embedded with an automatic group selection method is proposed. Through this method, if the number of activities to be classified is changed, the structure will be changed correspondingly without interaction. Our comparative experiments against the single data source and single layer methods have shown that our method is more accurate and robust.

An exploratory study on a chest-worn computer for evaluation of diet, physical activity and lifestyle.

Recently, wearable computers have become new members in the family of mobile electronic devices, adding new functions to those provided by smart-phones and tablets. As "always-on" miniature computers in the personal space, they will play increasing roles in the field of healthcare. In this work, we present our development of eButton, a wearable computer designed as a personalized, attractive, and convenient chest pin in a circular shape. It contains a powerful microprocessor, numerous electronic sensors, and wireless communication links. We describe its design concepts, electronic hardware, data processing algorithms, and its applications to the evaluation of diet, physical activity and lifestyle in the study of obesity and other chronic diseases.

[Effects of different cavosurface margins on color matching of the resin composite].

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate effects of color matching of different cavosurface margins on the resin composites in vitro. METHODS: Twenty extracted human premolars with an A2 shade buccal surface were used in this study. Rectangular shaped cavities (3.0 mm depth, 2.0 mm width, 2.0 mm length) were prepared in the center of the buccal surfaces. The gingival and occlusal cavosurface margins were prepared to be either shoulder or bevel; the other cavosurface margins remained vertical. Ten teeth were filled with Clearfil AP-X (AP), the other ten with Clearfil Majesty (MJ) and light cured. The color difference at the cavosurface margin area was measured using a spectrophotometer (CrystalEye) and evaluated by 3 observers subjectively. The data were statistically analyzed using repeated measures ANOVA and Chi-square test. RESULTS: When measured by CrystalEye, the color difference between the tooth and resin composite was reduced from the center of restoration to the cavosurface margin area. Both objective and subjective evaluations showed that for AP, the color difference at the cavosurface margin area had no statistical difference among 3 types of the margins; for MJ, the color difference at bevel margin area was significantly smaller than that at the vertical margin area. CONCLUSION: The resin composite restorations produced the color matching at marginal area. The color matching of resin composites with higher diffused light transmission property is more susceptible to the type of cavosurface margins. Preparing bevels may reduce the color difference between the restoration and tooth surface.

Pretreatment of rat bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells with a combination of hypergravity and 5-azacytidine enhances therapeutic efficacy for myocardial infarction.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: The in vivo cardiac differentiation and functional effects of unmodified adult bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) after myocardial infarction (MI) is controversial. Our previous results suggested that hypergravity promoted the cardiomyogenic differentiation of BMSCs, and thus we postulated that ex vivo pretreatment of BMSCs using hypergravity and 5-azacytidine (5-Aza) would lead to cardiomyogenic differentiation and result in superior biological and functional effects on cardiac regeneration of infarcted myocardium. METHODS: We used a rat MI model generated by ligation of the coronary artery. Homogeneous rat BMSCs were isolated, culture expanded, and differentiated into a cardiac lineage by adding hypergravity (2G) for 3 days and 5-Aza (50 lmol/L, 24 h). Rats underwent BMSCs (labeled with DAPI) injection after the infarction and were randomized into five groups. Group A rats received the control medium, Group B rats received unmodified BMSCs, Group C rats received BMSCs treated with hypergravity, Group D rats received BMSCs treated with 5-Aza, and Group E rats received BMSCs treated with 5-Aza and hypergravity (n = 6). RESULTS: After hypergravity and 5-Aza treatment, BMSCs showed positive for the early muscle and cardiac markers GATA-4, MEF-2, and Nkx2-5 with RT-PCR. We also found that hypergravity could enhance the activities of MEF-2 via promoting the nuclear export of HDAC5. The frozen section showed that the implanted BMSCs labeled with DAPI survived and angiogenesis was identified at the implantation site. In Groups B, C, D, and E rats, pre-treated BMSCs colocalized with α-actinin, and Group E rats showed a significantly larger increase in left ventricular function. CONCLUSIONS: The biological ex vivo cardiomyogenic differentiation of adult BMSCs with hypergravity and 5-Aza prior to their transplantation is feasible and appears to improve their in vivo cardiac differentiation as well as the functional recovery in a rat model of the infarcted myocardium.