Brinkworkman6614

Ovulation has long been regarded as a process resembling an inflammatory response. Previously, luteinizing hormone (LH) was shown to induce Toll-like receptor 2 (TLR2) and TLR4 in granulosa cells from preovulatory hormone-dependent follicles. However, whether this could already initiate before the hormone-dependent phase is currently unknown. The aim of this study was to investigate TLR genes in human oocytes and granulosa cells from primordial and primary ovarian follicles during the hormone-independent phase. A class-comparison study of existing oocyte and granulosa cell RNA sequencing transcriptomes from primordial (n = 539 follicles) and primary (n = 261) follicles collected from three patients was examined. This revealed a distinct expression pattern of TLR3, TLR4 and TLR5 transcripts. Interestingly, the TLR3 protein was differentially detected in both the oocyte and the granulosa cells in primordial and primary follicles, suggesting that TLR3 is maternally contributed both as mRNA and protein. Intracellularly, the compartmentalized TLR3 dot-like staining in the intersection between the oocyte and the surrounding primordial granulosa cells. The TLR4 protein was detected in both primordial and primary follicles, with a notable staining in the granulosa cells. We functionally challenged ovaries in vitro, by polyinosinicpolycytidylic acid (poly IC) and LPS, known to activate TLR3 and TLR4, respectively, and found a tendency for increased IL-6 production, which was particular evident in the LPS-treated group. Based on the expression of TLRs, it is notably that human primordial and primary follicles express genes that would allow them to respond to innate immune proteins and cytokines during follicle activation.Objectives Exposure to smoking causes inflammatory damage to the airways, and in turn declines lung function. Meanwhile gender difference in the association between smoking and lung function has been reported. This study aimed to assess the extent to which C-reactive protein (CRP) mediates the association of smoking with lung function and explains gender difference in this association. Study design The study design is a cross-sectional study. Methods Data were taken from the English Longitudinal Study of Aging, Wave 6 (2012-2013). Lung function parameters including forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV1) and forced vital capacity (FVC) were measured by using a spirometer. Smoking status was self-reported by questionnaires. CRP was analyzed from peripheral blood. Multiple linear regression models stratified by gender were fitted to assess the gender difference. Karlson/Holm/Bree method was used to test the mediating effect. Results Of all people, 11.8% of men and 11.2% of women reported current smoking. The association between smoking and lung function was greater in men than in women (P-interaction less then 0.001 for FEV1; P-interaction = 0.028 for FVC). Women had a higher CRP (P = 0.006), but a weaker association between CRP and lung function (P-interaction less then 0.001 for FEV1; P-interaction less then 0.001 for FVC). The indirect effects of current smoking on lung function via CRP were significant in both men and women, with 7.76%-19.40% of the total effect being mediated. Conclusions CRP mediates the association between smoking and lung function. The gender difference in the risk effect of smoking on lung function might be partially explained by the different susceptibility to inflammatory process in men and women.Background and objective Ultrasound is the non-radioactive imaging modality used in the diagnosis of various diseases related to the internal organs of the body. The presence of speckle noise in ultrasound image (UI) is inevitable and may affect resolution and contrast of the image. Existence of the speckle noise degrades the visual evaluation of the image. The despeckling of UI is a desirable pre-processing step in computer-aided UI based diagnosis systems. Methods This paper proposes a novel method for despeckling UIs using pre-trained residual learning network (RLN). Initially, RLN is trained with pristine and its corresponding noisy images in order to achieve a better performance. The developed method chooses a pre-trained RLN for despeckling UIs with less computational resources. But the training procedure of RLN from scratch is computationally demanding. The pre-trained RLN is a blind despeckling approach and does not require any fine tuning and noise level estimation. The presented approach shows superiority in the removal of speckle noise as compared to the existing state-of-art methods. Results To highlight the effectiveness of the proposed method the pristine images from the Waterloo dataset has been considered. The proposed pre-trained RLN based UI despeckling method resulted in a better peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM) at different speckle noise levels. The no-reference image quality approach is adopted to ensure robustness of the established method for real time UI. From results it is obvious that, the performance of the proposed method is superior than the existing methods in terms of naturalness image quality evaluator (NIQE). SHIN1 in vivo Conclusions From the experimental results, it is clear that the proposed method outperforms the existing despeckling methods in terms of both artificially added and naturally occurring speckle images.Objectives The aim of the present study was to investigate three licorice-derived polyphenols (glabridin, licochalcone A, licoricidin) as well as cinnamon oil for their antimicrobial activities against major endodontic pathogens Enterococcus faecalis, Streptococcus mutans, Actinomyces israelii, Fusobacterium nucleatum, Prevotella intermedia, Porphyromonas endodontalis, and Candida albicans. The synergistic interactions between the four compounds and chlorhexidine were assessed on E. faecalis. Lastly, the biocompatibility of the tested compounds was assessed using human gingival fibroblasts. Design Minimal inhibitory concentrations (MIC) and minimal microbicidal concentrations (MMC) were determined using a microplate dilution assay. A luminescence assay monitoring adenosine triphosphate was used to assess the antimicrobial activity of the tested compounds against E. faecalis biofilm. The synergistic effects of the tested compounds in association with chlorhexidine were evaluated using the checkerboard technique.