Research Progress on the Role of Ubiquitination in Eye Diseases.

The occurrence and development of ophthalmic diseases are related to the dysfunction of eye tissues. Ubiquitin is an important form of protein post-translational modification, which plays an essential role in the occurrence and development of diseases through specific modification of target proteins. Ubiquitination governs a variety of intracellular signal transduction processes, including proteasome degradation, DNA damage repair, and cell cycle progression. Studies have found that ubiquitin can play a role in eye diseases such as cataracts, glaucoma, keratopathy, retinopathy, and eye tumors. In this paper, the role of protein ubiquitination in eye diseases was reviewed.

Crosstalk between heredity and environment in myopia: An overview.

In recent years, the prevalence of myopia has gradually increased, and it has become a significant global public health problem in the 21st century, posing a serious challenge to human eye health. Currently, it is confirmed that the development of myopia is attributed to the combined action of genes and environmental factors. Thus, elucidating the risk factors and pathogenesis of myopia is of great significance for the prevention and control of myopia. To elucidate the impact of gene-environment interaction on myopia, we used the Pubmed database to search for literature related to myopia. Search terms are as follows: myopia, genes, environmental factors, gene-environment interaction, and treatment. This paper reviews the effects of gene and environmental interaction on myopia.

Characterization of lncRNA and mRNA profiles in ciliary body in experimental myopia.

Currently, researchers have mainly focused on the role of the tissues of the posterior segment of the eyes in the development of myopia. However, the ciliary body, an anterior ocular tissue that contracts to initiate the process of accommodation, may also play an important role in the progression of myopia due to the increased demand for near work. In the present study, we established a lens-induced myopia (LIM) animal model in guinea pigs and investigated the molecular changes in the ciliary body associated with the development of myopia based on RNA sequencing. As a result, 871 differentially expressed (DE) mRNAs and 19 DE lncRNAs were identified in the ciliary body between the LIM group and the normal control group. In addition, the lncRNA-mRNA co-expression analysis was performed to explore the target genes of lncRNAs, which were mainly enriched in the Rap1 signaling pathway, cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction, and complement and coagulation cascades pathways based on the functional enrichment analysis. Among the target genes of lncRNAs, three hub genes, including Ctnnb1, Pik3r1, and Itgb1, were found to be involved in the Rap1 signaling pathway. Interestingly, two crucial genes, Grk1 and Pde6a, which are mainly expressed in retinal photoreceptors, were enriched in visual perception in the ciliary body in functional analysis and were verified to be expressed in the ciliary body. These findings indicate the molecular pathogenetic role of the ciliary body in myopia and provide new insights into the underlying mechanism of myopia development. Further studies are needed to explore the specific contributions of these identified lncRNAs and mRNAs to the development of myopia.

The role of oxidative stress in the pathogenesis of ocular diseases: an overview.

Dysregulation of oxidative stress serves as a pivotal predisposing or exacerbating factor in the intricate development of numerous pathological processes and diseases. In recent years, substantial evidence has illuminated the crucial role of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in many fundamental cellular functions, including proliferation, inflammation, apoptosis, and gene expression. Notably, producing free radicals within ROS profoundly impacts a wide range of biomolecules, such as proteins and DNA, instigating cellular damage and impairing vital cellular functions. Consequently, oxidative stress emerges as a closely intertwined factor across diverse disease spectra. Remarkably, the pathogenesis of several eye diseases, including age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, and diabetic retinopathy, manifests an intrinsic association with oxidative stress. In this comprehensive review, we briefly summarize the recent progress in elucidating the intricate role of oxidative stress in the development of ophthalmic diseases, shedding light on potential therapeutic avenues and future research directions.

MitoCur-1 induces ferroptosis to reverse vemurafenib resistance in melanoma through inhibition of USP14.

Melanoma is an aggressive malignant tumor with a poor prognosis. Vemurafenib (PLX4032, vem) is applied to specifically treat BRAF V600E-mutated melanoma patients. However, prolonged usage of vem makes patients resistant to the drug and finally leads to clinical failure. We previously tested the combination regimen of tubulin inhibitor VERU-111 with vem, as well as USP14 selective inhibitor b-AP15 in combination with vem, both of which have showed profound therapeutic effects in overcoming vem resistance in vitro and in vivo. Most importantly, we discovered that vem-resistant melanoma cell lines highly expressed E3 ligase SKP2 and DUB enzyme USP14, and we have demonstrated that USP14 directly interacts and stabilizes SKP2, which contributes to vem resistance. These works give us a clue that USP14 might be a promising target to overcome vem resistance in melanoma. MitoCur-1 is a curcumin derivative, which was originally designed to specifically target tumor mitochondria inducing redox imbalance, thereby promoting tumor cell death. In this study, we have demonstrated that it can work as a novel USP14 inhibitor, and thus bears great potential in providing an anti-tumor effect and sensitizing vem-resistant cells by inducing ferroptosis in melanoma. Application of MitoCur-1 dramatically induces USP14 inhibition and inactivation of GPX4 enzyme, meanwhile, increases the depletion of GSH and decreases SLC7A11 expression level. As a result, ferrous iron-dependent lipid ROS accumulated in the cell, inducing ferroptosis, thus sensitizes the vem-resistant melanoma cell. Interestingly, overexpression of USP14 antagonized all the ferroptosis cascade events induced by MitoCur-1, therefore, we conclude that MitoCur-1 induces ferroptosis through inhibition of USP14. We believe that by inhibition of USP14, vem resistance can be reversed and will finally benefit melanoma patients in future.

Methodological and reporting quality of systematic reviews on health effects of air pollutants were higher than extreme temperatures: a comparative study.

BACKGROUND: An increasing number of systematic reviews (SRs) in the environmental field have been published in recent years as a result of the global concern about the health impacts of air pollution and temperature. However, no study has assessed and compared the methodological and reporting quality of SRs on the health effects of air pollutants and extreme temperatures. This study aims to assess and compare the methodological and reporting quality of SRs on the health effects of ambient air pollutants and extreme temperatures. METHODS: PubMed, Embase, the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), Cochrane Library, Web of Science, and Epistemonikos databases were searched. Two researchers screened the literature and extracted information independently. The methodological quality of the SRs was assessed through A Measurement Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews 2 (AMSTAR 2). The reporting quality was assessed through Preferred Reporting Items of Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA). RESULTS: We identified 405 SRs (286 for air pollution, 108 for temperature, and 11 for the synergistic effects). The methodological and reporting quality of the included SRs were suboptimal, with major deficiencies in protocol registration. The methodological quality of SRs of air pollutants was better than that of temperature, especially in terms of satisfactory explanations for any heterogeneity (69.6% v. 45.4%). The reporting quality of SRs of air pollution was better than temperature, however, adherence to the reporting of the assessment results of risk of bias in all SRs (53.5% v. 34.3%) was inadequate. CONCLUSIONS: Methodological and reporting quality of SRs on the health effect of air pollutants were higher than those of temperatures. However, deficiencies in protocol registration and the assessment of risk of bias remain an issue for both pollutants and temperatures. In addition, developing a risk-of-bias assessment tool applicable to the temperature field may improve the quality of SRs.

Pose ResNet: 3D Human Pose Estimation Based on Self-Supervision.

The accurate estimation of a 3D human pose is of great importance in many fields, such as human-computer interaction, motion recognition and automatic driving. In view of the difficulty of obtaining 3D ground truth labels for a dataset of 3D pose estimation techniques, we take 2D images as the research object in this paper, and propose a self-supervised 3D pose estimation model called Pose ResNet. ResNet50 is used as the basic network for extract features. First, a convolutional block attention module (CBAM) was introduced to refine selection of significant pixels. Then, a waterfall atrous spatial pooling (WASP) module is used to capture multi-scale contextual information from the extracted features to increase the receptive field. Finally, the features are input into a deconvolution network to acquire the volume heat map, which is later processed by a soft argmax function to obtain the coordinates of the joints. In addition to the two learning strategies of transfer learning and synthetic occlusion, a self-supervised training method is also used in this model, in which the 3D labels are constructed by the epipolar geometry transformation to supervise the training of the network. Without the need for 3D ground truths for the dataset, accurate estimation of the 3D human pose can be realized from a single 2D image. The results show that the mean per joint position error (MPJPE) is 74.6 mm without the need for 3D ground truth labels. Compared with other approaches, the proposed method achieves better results.

mm-DSF: A Method for Identifying Dangerous Driving Behaviors Based on the Lateral Fusion of Micro-Doppler Features Combined.

To address the dangerous driving behaviors prevalent among current car drivers, it is necessary to provide real-time, accurate warning and correction of driver's driving behaviors in a small, movable, and enclosed space. In this paper, we propose a method for detecting dangerous behaviors based on frequency-modulated continuous-wave radar (mm-DSF). The highly packaged millimeter-wave radar chip has good in-vehicle emotion recognition capability. The acquired millimeter-wave differential frequency signal is Fourier-transformed to obtain the intermediate frequency signal. The physiological decomposition of the local micro-Doppler feature spectrum of the target action is then used as the eigenvalue. Matrix signal intensity and clutter filtering are performed by analyzing the signal echo model of the input channel. The signal classification is based on the estimation and variety of the feature vectors of the target key actions using a modified and optimized level fusion method of the SlowFast dual-channel network. Nine typical risky driving behaviors were set up by the Dula Hazard Questionnaire and TEIQue-SF, and the accuracy of the classification results of the self-built dataset was analyzed to verify the high robustness of the method. The recognition accuracy of this method increased by 1.97% compared with the traditional method.

Horizontal Data Augmentation Strategy for Industrial Quality Prediction.

In recent years, neural network-based soft sensor technology has been widely used in industrial production processes and has excellent optimization, monitoring, and quality prediction performance. This paper proposes a horizontal data augmentation strategy to provide highly available data for subsequent prediction models, called the combined autoencoder data augmentation (CADA) strategy. This paper has developed a CADA-based convolutional neural network (CADA-CNN) soft sensor model and applied it to the process of industrial debutanizer and industrial steam volume. In terms of method validation, this paper compares the output data of the proposed CADA by the Spearman correlation coefficient to verify the strategy's feasibility. Then, the output data of the CADA strategy is fed into the artificial neural network (NN), support vector regression (SVR), and convolutional neural network (CNN) for comparison experiments. The final experimental results show that our proposed CADA-CNN model has lower prediction error and better prediction error distribution.

Millimeter-Wave Radar Localization Using Indoor Multipath Effect.

The positioning of indoor electronic devices is an essential part of human-computer interaction, and the accuracy of positioning affects the level of user experience. Most existing methods for RF-based device localization choose to ignore or remove the impact of multipath effects. However, exploiting the multipath effect caused by the complex indoor environment helps to improve the model's localization accuracy. In response to this question, this paper proposes a multipath-assisted localization (MAL) model based on millimeter-wave radar to achieve the localization of indoor electronic devices. The model fully considers the help of the multipath effect when describing the characteristics of the reflected signal and precisely locates the target position by using the MAL area formed by the reflected signal. At the same time, for the situation where the radar in the traditional Single-Input Single-Output (SISO) mode cannot obtain the 3D spatial position information of the target, the advantage of the MAL model is that the 3D information of the target can be obtained after the mining process of the multipath effect. Furthermore, based on the original hardware, it can achieve a breakthrough in angular resolution. Experiments show that our proposed MAL model enables the millimeter-wave multipath positioning model to achieve a 3D positioning error within 15 cm.

Microvascular Changes After Conbercept Intravitreal Injection of PDR With or Without Center-Involved Diabetic Macular Edema Analyzed by OCTA.

Purpose: To investigate the intravitreal injection of conbercept as a treatment strategy for proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR) with or without center-involved diabetic macular edema (CI-DME) and evaluate its effect on the microvascular changes in the eyes. Methods: In this prospective study, 43 patients including 29 cases (56 eyes) in CI-DME with PDR patients, and 14 cases (26 eyes) in the non-center involving diabetic macular edema (NCI-DME) with PDR patients were involved in this study. The best corrected visual acuity (BCVA), central retinal thickness (CRT), foveolar avascular zone (FAZ), and macular capillary vessel density (VD) of the superficial retinal capillary plexus (SCP) and deep retinal capillary plexus (DCP) were assessed before and after conbercept treatments for 1, 3, or 6 months. Results: The BCVA was significantly increased after conbercept treatment in the eyes of CI-DME patients. After 6 months of treatment with the conbercept, microvascular density of the inferior area in SCP and the central fovea area in DCP increased significantly, regardless of the central fovea involvement. The effect of the conbercept treatment on the VD of NCI-DME was higher than that of CI-DME. Then, after 6 months of treatment, the CRT of patients with CI-DME and NCI-DME were decreased significantly. Conclusions: In this study, an intravitreal injection of conbercept significantly improved vision, alleviated macular edema in patients with DME. Conbercept treatment also altered the microvascular density in the retina.

Diagnostic value of circulating microRNA-208a in differentiation of preserved from reduced ejection fraction heart failure.

BACKGROUND: There is no satisfactory answer on the specific biomarker that might be used in differentiating heart failure with reduced EF (HFrEF), allowing for inadequacy of N-terminal prohormone brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP). OBJECTIVES: We aim to evaluate the value of microRNA-208a in diagnosing HFrEF patients. METHODS: We included 120 HF patients and 60 healthy volunteers. Diagnostic values of NT-proBNP and miR-208a for HF patients versus controls and HFrEF versus HFpEF were described by area under curve (AUC), sensitivity and specificity. RESULTS: HFrEF patients had significantly higher miR-208a level (p<0.001). As for diagnosing HFrEF patients, additional use of miR-208a and NT-proBNP yielded a significantly higher AUC than NT-proBNP alone (0.83, 95% CI 0.76-0.90 vs. 0.73, 95% CI 0.64-0.82) and the sensitivity and specificity were raised to 68.0% and 90.2%. CONCLUSION: Use of miR-208a in combination with NT-proBNP may allow a more reliable method in diagnosing HFrEF patients.

Spatial-temporal patterns of PM2.5 concentrations for 338 Chinese cities.

Air pollution has become a major concern in cities worldwide. The present study explores the spatial-temporal patterns of PM2.5 (particles with an aerodynamic diameters ≤2.5µm) and the variation in the attainment rate (the number of cities attaining the national PM2.5 standard each day) at different time-scales based on PM2.5 concentrations. One-year of monitoring was conducted in 338 cities at or above the prefectural level in China. Spatial hot spots of PM2.5 were analyzed using exploratory spatial data analysis. Meteorological factors affecting PM2.5 distributions were analyzed. The results indicate the following: (1) Diurnal variations of PM2.5 exhibited a W-shaped trend, with the lowest value observed in the afternoon. The peak concentrations occurred after the ends of the morning and evening rush hours. (2) Out of 338 cities, 235 exceeded the national annual PM2.5 standards (≤35µg/m3), with slightly polluted (75-115µg/m3) cities occupying the greatest proportion. (3) The attainment rate showed an inverted U-shape, while there was a U-shaped pattern observed for daily and monthly mean PM2.5. (4) The spatial distribution of PM2.5 concentrations varied greatly, PM2.5 has significant spatial autocorrelation and clustering characteristics. Hot spots for pollution were mainly concentrated in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area and neighboring regions, in part because of the large amount of smoke and dust emissions in this region. However, weather factors (temperature, humidity, and wind speed) also had an effect. In addition, southwest Xinjiang experienced heavy PM2.5 pollution that was mainly caused by the frequent occurrence of sandstorms, although no significant relationship was observed between PM2.5 and meteorological elements in this region.