Icariside II Promotes the Differentiation of Adipose Tissue-Derived Stem Cells to Schwann Cells to Preserve Erectile Function after Cavernous Nerve Injury

Zheng, Tao,Zhang, Tian-biao,Wang, Chao-liang,Zhang, Wei-xing,Jia, Dong-hui,Yang, Fan,Sun, Yang-yang,Ding, Xiao-ju,Wang, Rui Korean Society for Molecular and Cellular Biology 2018 Molecules and cells Vol.41 No.6

Icariside II (ICA II) is used in erectile dysfunction treatment. Adipose tissue-derived stem cells (ADSCs) are efficient at improving erectile function. This study aimed to explore the action mechanism of ADSCs in improving erectile function. ADSCs were isolated from the adipose tissues of rats. Cell proliferation was determined using the Cell Counting Kit-8 (CCK-8) assay. The expressions of mRNA and protein were determined separately through qRT-PCR and western blot. The endogenous expressions of related genes were regulated using recombinant plasmids and cell transfection. A Dual-Luciferase Reporter Assay was performed to determine the interaction between miR-34a and STAT3. Rat models with bilateral cavernous nerve injuries (BCNIs) were used to assess erectile function through the detection of mean arterial pressure (MAP) and intracavernosal pressure (ICP). ICA II promoted ADSCs' proliferation and differentiation to Schwann cells (SCs) through the inhibition of miR-34a. Suppressed miR-34a promoted the differentiation of ADSCs to SCs by upregulating STAT3. ICA II promoted the differentiation of ADSCs to SCs through the miR-34a/STAT3 pathway. The combination of ICA II and ADSCs preserved the erectile function of the BCNI model rats. ADSCs treated with ICA II markedly preserved the erectile function of the BCNI model rats, which was reversed through miR-34a overexpression. ICA II promotes the differentiation of ADSCs to SCs through the miR34a/STAT3 pathway, contributing to erectile function preservation after the occurrence of a cavernous nerve injury.

Switchable Spatial Control of Linearly Polarized Light Based on a Liquid-crystal Optical Waveguide

Zhengtao Zha,Qianshu Zhang 한국광학회 2023 Current Optics and Photonics Vol.7 No.1

Risk evaluation of biochars produced from Cd-contaminated rice straw and optimization of its production for Cd removal

Shen, Zhengtao,Fan, Xiaoliang,Hou, Deyi,Jin, Fei,O'Connor, David,Tsang, Daniel C.W.,Ok, Yong Sik,Alessi, Daniel S. Pergamon Press 2019 Chemosphere Vol. No.

<P><B>Abstract</B></P> <P>Based on the “waste-treat-waste” concept, biochars were produced from cadmium (Cd)-contaminated rice straw (CRSBs) at 300, 500, and 700 °C (CRSB300, CRSB500, and CRSB700). The risks of the Cd remaining in CRSBs were evaluated and the optimal biochar pyrolysis temperature for Cd removal was investigated. It was observed that 41% of the total Cd in the raw rice straw was exchangeable, which may pose significant risks to crops and humans. Pyrolyzing at 300 °C did not significantly alter the Cd fractions, while the exchangeable fraction of Cd greatly dropped to 5.79% at 500 °C and further to 2.12% at 700 °C. Increasing the highest pyrolysis temperature resulted in CRSBs with higher pH values, greater surface area, and smaller pore sizes, thus providing more rapid and efficient removal of Cd from aqueous solutions. For Cd removal tests, increasing pyrolysis temperature (300–700 °C) increased the total (24.8–55.1 mg/g) and non-exchangeable (18.9–52.8 mg/g) Cd concentrations immobilized on the CRSBs and significantly decreased the exchangeable Cd fraction (23.7%–4.85%). It is suggested based on the study from aqueous solutions that CRSB700 was the most suitable for the remediation of Cd contaminated soil on site due to the lowest risks of remained Cd from feedstock, fastest and highest Cd removal, and most stable immobilization of Cd.</P> <P><B>Highlights</B></P> <P> <UL> <LI> 41% of Cd in raw rice straw was exchangeable, posing great environmental risks. </LI> <LI> Pyrolyzing at 300 °C did not significantly alter Cd fractions remained in biochar. </LI> <LI> Exchangeable fraction of Cd dropped to 5.79% at 500 °C and to 2.12% at 700 °C. </LI> <LI> Increasing temperature decreased exchangeable Cd fraction immobilized on biochar. </LI> <LI> CRSB700 has the fastest and highest Cd removal, and most stable Cd immobilization. </LI> </UL> </P>

The Chemokine SDF-1α Suppresses Fibronectin-mediated In Vitro Lymphocytes Adhesion

Wang ZhengTao,Ji LiLi,Sheng YuChen 한국분자세포생물학회 2006 Molecules and cells Vol.22 No.3

Stability of heavy metals in soil washing residue with and without biochar addition under accelerated ageing

Shen, Zhengtao,Hou, Deyi,Zhao, Bin,Xu, Wendi,Ok, Yong Sik,Bolan, Nanthi S.,Alessi, Daniel S. Elsevier 2018 Science of the Total Environment Vol.619 No.-

<P><B>Abstract</B></P> <P>Soil washing residue (SWR), which typically concentrates the washed toxic metals and is comprised of high contents of clay particles, may pose risks to the surrounding environment. This study aims to simulate accelerated ageing to assess the stability of selected metals (Cd<SUP>2+</SUP> (132mg/kg), Cu<SUP>2+</SUP> (248mg/kg) and Pb<SUP>2+</SUP> (3470mg/kg)) in a SWR (89.68% of clay) with and without biochar treatment. The soil was incubated under constant moisture and wet-dry cycles (accelerated ageing), respectively, and the mobility and fractions of heavy metals in the soils with and without biochar treatment were examined. Under the constant moisture condition, biochar addition at 5% w/w reduced the leached Cd<SUP>2+</SUP> (by 1.81%) and Cu<SUP>2+</SUP> (by 8.70%) from SWR at day 1 and the leached Cu<SUP>2+</SUP> (by 51.08%) and Pb<SUP>2+</SUP> (by 25.36%) from SWR at day 14; however, the leached metals in the TCLP solution from the biochar-amended soils still exceed the regulatory limits (1mg/L for Cd<SUP>2+</SUP>, 5mg/L for Pb<SUP>2+</SUP>, no regulatory limits for Cu<SUP>2+</SUP>). Conversely, accelerated ageing (14days) significantly increased the fractions of exchangeable Cd<SUP>2+</SUP> (from 3.63–3.94% to 6.21–6.29%) and Pb<SUP>2+</SUP> (from 0.025–0.027% to 0.034–0.041%) as well as the TCLP leachabilities of Cd<SUP>2+</SUP> (from 2.91–3.28% to 3.46–3.73%), Cu<SUP>2+</SUP> (from 0.08–0.10% to 0.03–0.06%) and Pb<SUP>2+</SUP> (from 0.25–0.35% to 0.52–0.57%) in the soils, as compared with those incubated under constant moisture, regardless of biochar addition. This study reveals challenges associated with stabilising SWR due to the presence of residual fine-grained particles.</P> <P><B>Highlights</B></P> <P> <UL> <LI> Cd<SUP>2+</SUP> and Pb<SUP>2+</SUP> in soil washing residue (SWR) exceeds TCLP regulation limit. </LI> <LI> Heavy metal mobility in SWR was reduced by biochar addition. </LI> <LI> Accelerated ageing mobilised heavy metals in SWR regardless of biochar addition. </LI> <LI> Accelerated ageing show SWR poses long-term risks to the environment. </LI> </UL> </P> <P><B>Graphical abstract</B></P> <P>[DISPLAY OMISSION]</P>

Summarizing the Differences in Chinese-Vietnamese Bilingual News

Jinjuan Wu,Zhengtao Yu,Shulong Liu,Yafei Zhang,Shengxiang Gao 한국정보처리학회 2019 Journal of information processing systems Vol.15 No.6

Summarizing the differences in Chinese-Vietnamese bilingual news plays an important supporting role in thecomparative analysis of news views between China and Vietnam. Aiming at cross-language problems in theanalysis of the differences between Chinese and Vietnamese bilingual news, we propose a new method ofsummarizing the differences based on an undirected graph model. The method extracts elements to representthe sentences, and builds a bridge between different languages based on Wikipedia’s multilingual conceptdescription page. Firstly, we calculate the similarity between Chinese and Vietnamese news sentences, andfilter the bilingual sentences accordingly. Then we use the filtered sentences as nodes and the similarity gradeas the weight of the edge to construct an undirected graph model. Finally, combining the random walkalgorithm, the weight of the node is calculated according to the weight of the edge, and sentences with highestweight can be extracted as the difference summary. The experiment results show that our proposed approachachieved the highest score of 0.1837 on the annotated test set, which outperforms the state-of-the-artsummarization models.

A Fast Surface Defect Detection Method based on Background Reconstruction

Chengkan Lv,Zhengtao Zhang,Fei Shen,Feng Zhang,Hu Su 한국정밀공학회 2020 International Journal of Precision Engineering and Vol.21 No.3

In this paper, we propose an unsupervised background reconstruction method to detect defects on surfaces with unevenly distributed textures. An improved deep convolutional autoencoder is utilized to reconstruct the textured background of the original image as a defect-free reference. Specifically, a weighted loss function based on structural similarity (SSIM) is utilized to adapt to the unevenly distributed texture background and improve the reconstruction accuracy. Furthermore, combined with the reconstructed defect-free reference, a novel difference analysis method based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT) is given to accurately segment the defect regions from the original image. A series of experiments for the defect detection on mobile phone cover glass (MPCG) are conducted. The processing time for an image of 512 × 512 pixels is only 20 ms, which satisfies the requirement of online detection. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Case-Related News Filtering via Topic-Enhanced Positive-Unlabeled Learning

Guanwen Wang,Zhengtao Yu,Yantuan Xian,Yu Zhang 한국정보처리학회 2021 Journal of information processing systems Vol.17 No.6

Case-related news filtering is crucial in legal text mining and divides news into case-related and case-unrelated categories. Because case-related news originates from various fields and has different writing styles, it is difficult to establish complete filtering rules or keywords for data collection. In addition, the labeled corpus for case-related news is sparse; therefore, to train a high-performance classification model, it is necessary to annotate the corpus. To address this challenge, we propose topic-enhanced positive-unlabeled learning, which selects positive and negative samples guided by topics. Specifically, a topic model based on a variational autoencoder (VAE) is trained to extract topics from unlabeled samples. By using these topics in the iterative process of positive-unlabeled (PU) learning, the accuracy of identifying case-related news can be improved. From the experimental results, it can be observed that the F1 value of our method on the test set is 1.8% higher than that of the PU learning baseline model. In addition, our method is more robust with low initial samples and high iterations, and compared with advanced PU learning baselines such as nnPU and I-PU, we obtain a 1.1% higher F1 value, which indicates that our method can effectively identify case-related news.

Burmese Sentiment Analysis Based on Transfer Learning

Cunli Mao,Zhibo Man,Zhengtao Yu,Xia Wu,Haoyuan Liang 한국정보처리학회 2022 Journal of information processing systems Vol.18 No.4

Using a rich resource language to classify sentiments in a language with few resources is a popular subject ofresearch in natural language processing. Burmese is a low-resource language. In light of the scarcity of labeledtraining data for sentiment classification in Burmese, in this study, we propose a method of transfer learningfor sentiment analysis of a language that uses the feature transfer technique on sentiments in English. Thismethod generates a cross-language word-embedding representation of Burmese vocabulary to map Burmesetext to the semantic space of English text. A model to classify sentiments in English is then pre-trained using aconvolutional neural network and an attention mechanism, where the network shares the model for sentimentanalysis of English. The parameters of the network layer are used to learn the cross-language features of thesentiments, which are then transferred to the model to classify sentiments in Burmese. Finally, the model wastuned using the labeled Burmese data. The results of the experiments show that the proposed method cansignificantly improve the classification of sentiments in Burmese compared to a model trained using only aBurmese corpus.

Load Allocation Strategy for Command and Control Networks based on Interdependence Strength

Bo Chen,Guimei Pang,Zhengtao Xiang,Hang Tao,Yufeng Chen 한국인터넷정보학회 2023 KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Syst Vol.17 No.9

Command and control networks(C2N) exhibit evident multi-network interdependencies owing to their complex hierarchical associations, interleaved communication links, and dynamic network changes. However, the existing command and control networks do not consider the effects of dependent nodes on the load distribution. Thus, we proposed a command and control networks load allocation strategy based on interdependence strength. First, a new measure of interdependence strength was proposed based on the edge betweenness, which was followed by proposing the inter-layer load allocation strategy based on the interdependence strength. Eventually, the simulation experiments of the aforementioned strategy were designed to analyze the network invulnerability with different initial load capacity parameters, allocation model parameters, and allocation strategies. The simulation indicates that the strategy proposed in this study improved the node survival rate of the interdependent command and control networks model and successfully prevented cascade failures.