Albertsenreed5574

the nucleus. Further investigations showed that CPT treatment increased NAD(P)H quinone oxidoreductase-1 (NQO1) and heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1) expressions together with its upstream mediator, Nrf2. In addition, CPT inhibited LPS-induced toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) and MyD88 expressions in RAW264.7 macrophages. Conclusions Collectively, we suggested that CPT exerted significant anti-inflammatory effects via modulating TLR4-MyD88/PI3K/Nrf2 and TLR4-MyD88/NF-κB/MAPK pathways. © The Author(s) 2020.Background The production and availability of annotated data sets are indispensable for training and evaluation of automatic phenotyping methods. The need for complete 3D models of real plants with organ-level labeling is even more pronounced due to the advances in 3D vision-based phenotyping techniques and the difficulty of full annotation of the intricate 3D plant structure. TRAM34 Results We introduce the ROSE-X data set of 11 annotated 3D models of real rosebush plants acquired through X-ray tomography and presented both in volumetric form and as point clouds. The annotation is performed manually to provide ground truth data in the form of organ labels for the voxels corresponding to the plant shoot. This data set is constructed to serve both as training data for supervised learning methods performing organ-level segmentation and as a benchmark to evaluate their performance. The rosebush models in the data set are of high quality and complex architecture with organs frequently touching each other posing a challenge for the current plant organ segmentation methods. We report leaf/stem segmentation results obtained using four baseline methods. The best performance is achieved by the volumetric approach where local features are trained with a random forest classifier, giving Intersection of Union (IoU) values of 97.93% and 86.23% for leaf and stem classes, respectively. Conclusion We provided an annotated 3D data set of 11 rosebush plants for training and evaluation of organ segmentation methods. We also reported leaf/stem segmentation results of baseline methods, which are open to improvement. The data set, together with the baseline results, has the potential of becoming a significant resource for future studies on automatic plant phenotyping. © The Author(s) 2020.Background Seed size and number are important plant traits from an ecological and horticultural/agronomic perspective. However, in small-seeded species such as Arabidopsis thaliana, research on seed size and number is limited by the absence of suitable high throughput phenotyping methods. Results We report on the development of a high throughput method for counting seeds and measuring individual seed sizes. The method uses a large-particle flow cytometer to count individual seeds and sort them according to size, allowing an average of 12,000 seeds/hour to be processed. To achieve this high throughput, post harvested seeds are first separated from remaining plant material (dust and chaff) using a rapid sedimentation-based method. Then, classification algorithms are used to refine the separation process in silico. Accurate identification of all seeds in the samples was achieved, with relative errors below 2%. Conclusion The tests performed reveal that there is no single classification algorithm that performs best for all samples, so the recommended strategy is to train and use multiple algorithms and use the median predictions of seed size and number across all algorithms. To facilitate the use of this method, an R package (SeedSorter) that implements the methodology has been developed and made freely available. The method was validated with seed samples from several natural accessions of Arabidopsis thaliana, but our analysis pipeline is applicable to any species with seed sizes smaller than 1.5 mm. © The Author(s) 2020.Background Fatty liver is a reversible status, but also an origin stage to develop to other metabolic syndromes, such as diabetes and heart disease that threatens public health worldwide. Ascorbate deficiency is reported to be correlated with increasing risks for metabolic syndromes, but whether ascorbate has a therapeutic effect is unknown. Here, we investigated if ascorbate treatment alone could work on protecting from the development of steatosis and mechanisms beyond. Methods Guinea pigs were fed with a chow diet or a high palm oil diet (HPD) respectively. HPD induced animals were administered different concentrations of ascorbate in different time intervals through water. Besides, hepatocyte-like cells derived from human embryonic stem cells and HepG2 cells were treated with palmitic acid (PA) to induce lipid accumulation for molecular mechanism study. Results We find that ascorbate rescues HPD and PA induced steatosis and insulin tolerance in vivo and in vitro. We demonstrate that ascorbate changes cellular lipid profiles via inhibits lipogenesis, and inhibits the expression of SOCS3 via STAT3, thus enhances insulin signal transduction. Overexpression of SOCS3 abolishes the ascorbate rescue effects on insulin signal and lipid accumulation in hepatic cells. Conclusions Ascorbate ameliorates hepatic steatosis and improves insulin sensitivity through inhibiting lipogenesis and SOCS3. © The Author(s). 2020.Background "Inflammaging" is a coined term that combines the processes of inflammation (within the normal range) and aging, since chronic, low-grade, systemic inflammation emerges with increasing age. Unlike high-level inflammation, with which deleterious effects on bone no longer need to be demonstrated, it is unclear whether inflammaging exerts deleterious effects on bone too. Method We assessed associations between inflammaging - measured via cytokine levels (high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP); interleukin-1β (IL-1β); interleukin-6 (IL-6) and tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α)) - and bone parameters (prevalent and incident fractures, bone mineral density (BMD) and trabecular bone score (TBS)) in 1390 postmenopausal women from the OsteoLaus study. Results Mean (±SD) age was 64.5 ± 7.6 and mean bone mass index (BMI) 25.9 ± 4.5 kg/m2. Median hs-CRP, IL-1β, IL-6 and TNF-α were 1.4 pg/ml, 0.57 pg/ml, 2.36 pg/ml and 4.82 pg/ml, respectively. In total, 10.50% of the participants had a prevalent, low-impact fracture; and, after 5-years of follow up, 5.