Jiangzhi Ligan Decoction Inhibits GSDMD-Mediated Canonical/Noncanonical Pyroptosis Pathways and Alleviates High-Fat Diet-Induced Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease.

Increasing evidence suggests that gasdermin D (GSDMD) mediated pyroptosis signaling pathways play a vital role in the pathogenesis of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Jiangzhi Ligan Decoction (JZLGD) has been verified to prevent NAFLD, but its specific mechanism has not been determined. In this study, an NAFLD model was established in Sprague-Dawley rats by a high-fat diet (HFD). After 12 weeks, JZLGD was orally administered once a day for 6 additional weeks. We investigated the effects of JZLGD on NAFLD rats and determined the GSDMD pathway-associated proteins to explore whether such effects were associated with pyroptosis. Our data show that JZLGD significantly reduced the liver index; improved serum lipid levels, liver function parameters, and lipid droplet content; and relieved NAFLD. We further found that the serum levels of the proinflammatory factors interleukin-1ß (IL-1ß), IL-18, tumor necrosis factor-α, and IL-6 were obviously decreased in the JZLGD group. HFD rats treated with GSDMD exhibited NLRP3, caspase-1, lipopolysaccharide (LPS), and caspase-11 activation; however, these effects were blunted by JZLGD treatment. Taken together, JZLGD may exert hepatoprotective effects against NAFLD in a rat HFD model by regulating GSDMD-mediated canonical/noncanonical pyroptosis pathways.

Control of Rotational Dynamics for Ground and Aerial Behavior.

This paper proposes a physics-based framework to control rolling, flipping and other behaviors with significant rotational components. The proposed technique is a general approach for guiding coordinated action that can be layered over existing control architectures through the purposeful regulation of specific whole-body features. Namely, we apply control for rotation through the specification and execution of specific desired `rotation indices' for whole-body orientation, angular velocity and angular momentum control and highlight the use of the angular excursion as a means for whole-body rotation control. We account for the stylistic components of behaviors through reference posture control. The novelty of the described work includes control over behaviors with considerable rotational components, both on the ground and in the air as well as a number of characteristics useful for general control, such as flight planning with inertia modeling, compliant posture tracking, and contact control planning.

Detail-preserving controllable deformation from sparse examples.

Recent advances in laser scanning technology have made it possible to faithfully scan a real object with tiny geometric details, such as pores and wrinkles. However, a faithful digital model should not only capture static details of the real counterpart but also be able to reproduce the deformed versions of such details. In this paper, we develop a data-driven model that has two components; the first accommodates smooth large-scale deformations and the second captures high-resolution details. Large-scale deformations are based on a nonlinear mapping between sparse control points and bone transformations. A global mapping, however, would fail to synthesize realistic geometries from sparse examples, for highly deformable models with a large range of motion. The key is to train a collection of mappings defined over regions locally in both the geometry and the pose space. Deformable fine-scale details are generated from a second nonlinear mapping between the control points and per-vertex displacements. We apply our modeling scheme to scanned human hand models, scanned face models, face models reconstructed from multiview video sequences, and manually constructed dinosaur models. Experiments show that our deformation models, learned from extremely sparse training data, are effective and robust in synthesizing highly deformable models with rich fine features, for keyframe animation as well as performance-driven animation. We also compare our results with those obtained by alternative techniques.

[Identification and expression analysis of a novel splice variant of human tumor necrosis factor receptor associated factor 2].

AIM: Identification of a novel splice variant of tumor necrosis factor receptor associated factor 2 and its expression analysis. METHODS: By PCR analysis, we identified the existence of a new splice variant of TRAF2 using human brain cDNA library as template. RNA isolated from various cell lines and tissues was subjected to RT-PCR and differential expression analysis of TRAF2 splice variants was carried out. RESULTS: An amplification of about 1 500 bp was found using P1 and P2 as the primers. we performed PCR using exon 6 flanking primers P3 and P4, yielding a full-length transcript of 268 bp (including exon 6) and a novel splice variant of 193 bp lacking the 75 bp of exon 6. The full-length transcript of TRAF2 was found to be dominant in T47D, glioma of grade II and grade III. However the novel splice lacking exon 6 was dominant in Hep3B, GC-1, MCF7, fetus brain and glioma of grade I, the two splices of TRAF2 were similar in PANCI, Hek293 and SW480.We couldn't find any expression of TRAF2 in HepG2, HBL100, A549 and HeLa . CONCLUSION: TRAF2 has a novel splice lacking 6 exon in human beside the full-length splice. The two splices are differential expression in tissues and cell lines.