Metabolic Dysfunction-associated Fatty Liver Disease is Associated with Greater Impairment of Lung Function than Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease.

Background and Aims: We compared lung function parameters in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and metabolic dysfunction-associated fatty liver disease (MAFLD), and examined the association between lung function parameters and fibrosis severity in MAFLD. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, we randomly recruited 2,543 middle-aged individuals from 25 communities across four cities in China during 2016 and 2020. All participants received a health check-up including measurement of anthropometric parameters, biochemical variables, liver ultrasonography, and spirometry. The severity of liver disease was assessed by the fibrosis (FIB)-4 score. Results: The prevalence of MAFLD was 20.4% (n=519) and that of NAFLD was 18.4% (n=469). After adjusting for age, sex, adiposity measures, smoking status, and significant alcohol intake, subjects with MAFLD had a significantly lower predicted forced vital capacity (FVC, 88.27±17.60% vs. 90.82±16.85%, p<0.05) and lower 1 s forced expiratory volume (FEV1, 79.89±17.34 vs. 83.02±16.66%, p<0.05) than those with NAFLD. MAFLD with an increased FIB-4 score was significantly associated with decreased lung function. For each 1-point increase in FIB-4, FVC was diminished by 0.507 (95% CI: -0.840, -0.173, p=0.003), and FEV1 was diminished by 0.439 (95% CI: -0.739, -0.140, p=0.004). The results remained unchanged when the statistical analyses was performed separately for men and women. Conclusions: MAFLD was significantly associated with a greater impairment of lung function parameters than NAFLD.

The AMPK-Parkin axis negatively regulates necroptosis and tumorigenesis by inhibiting the necrosome.

The receptor-interacting serine/threonine-protein kinases RIPK1 and RIPK3 play important roles in necroptosis that are closely linked to the inflammatory response. Although the activation of necroptosis is well characterized, the mechanism that tunes down necroptosis is largely unknown. Here we find that Parkin (also known as PARK2), an E3 ubiquitin ligase implicated in Parkinson's disease and as a tumour suppressor, regulates necroptosis and inflammation by regulating necrosome formation. Parkin prevents the formation of the RIPK1-RIPK3 complex by promoting polyubiquitination of RIPK3. Parkin is phosphorylated and activated by the cellular energy sensor AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK). Parkin deficiency potentiates the RIPK1-RIPK3 interaction, RIPK3 phosphorylation and necroptosis. Parkin deficiency enhances inflammation and inflammation-associated tumorigenesis. These findings demonstrate that the AMPK-Parkin axis negatively regulates necroptosis by inhibiting RIPK1-RIPK3 complex formation; this regulation may serve as an important mechanism to fine-tune necroptosis and inflammation.

Quantifying Magnetic Sensitivity of Radical Pair Based Compass by Quantum Fisher Information.

The radical pair (RP) based compass is considered as one of the principal models of avian magnetoreception. Different from the conventional approach where the sensitivity of RP based compass is described by the singlet yield, we introduce the quantum Fisher information (QFI), which represents the maximum information about the magnetic field's direction extracted from the RP state, to quantify the sensitivity of RP based compass. The consistency between our results and experimental observations suggests that the QFI may serve as a measure to describe the sensitivity of RP based compass. Besides, within the framework of quantum metrology, we give two specific possible measurement schemes and find that the conventional singlet yield is corresponding to the measurement of total angular momentum. Moreover, we show that the measurement of fluctuation of the total magnetic moment is much more accurate than the singlet yield measurement, and is close to the optimal measurement scheme. Finally, the effects of entanglement and decoherence are also discussed in the spirit of our approach.

Magnetic field sensing subject to correlated noise with a ring spin chain.

In this paper, we focus on the magnetic field sensing subject to a correlated noise. We use a ring spin chain with only the nearest neighbor interactions as our probe to estimate both the intensity B and the direction θ of the magnetic field when the probe reaches its steady state. We numerically calculate the quantum Fisher information (QFI) to characterize the estimation precision. On the one hand, for estimating B, we find that the coupling between spins in the probe plays an important role in the precision, and the largest value of the QFI can be achieved when θ = π/2 together with an optimal coupling. Moreover, for any direction, the precision scaling can be better than the Heisenberg-limit (HL) with a proper coupling. On the other hand, for estimating θ, we find that our probe can perform a high precision detection for θ ~ π/2, with the QFI much larger than that for any other directions, especially when the coupling is tuned to the optimal value. And we find that the precision scaling for θ ~ π/2 can be better than the HL, but for other directions, the precision scaling is only limited to the standard quantum limit (SQL). Due to the computational complexity we restrict the number of spins in the probe to 60.