Purpose Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is associated with a complex inflammatory regulatory network. Resistin-like molecule β (RELMβ) is highly expressed in the lungs of COPD patients. We aimed to investigate the proinflammatory effect of RELMβ on airway epithelial cells in COPD. Methods First, a GEO dataset was used to analyze the expression of the RELMβ gene in the COPD and control groups as well as the protein levels of RELMβ in the sera of outpatients with COPD and normal control subjects in our hospital. We also stimulated 16HBE bronchial epithelial cells with recombinant RELMβ protein and analyzed the expression of IL-8 and IL-1β. We upregulated and downregulated the gene expression of RELMβ in 16HBE cells and analyzed the expression of the inflammatory cytokines IL-8 and IL-1β. In addition, we also examined the mechanism by which the p38 MAPK signaling pathway contributed to the regulation of IL-8 and IL-1β expression by RELMβ. Results RELMβ expression was increased in COPD tissues in different data sets and in the serum of COPD patients in our hospital. IL-8 and IL-1β expression was also increased in COPD tissues with high RELMβ gene expression in different data sets. The RELMβ gene was mainly related to inflammatory factors and inflammatory signaling pathways in the PPI regulatory network. Experiments at the cellular level showed that RELMβ promoted the expression of the inflammatory cytokines IL-8 and IL-1β, and this regulation was mediated by the p38 MAPK signaling pathway. Conclusion RELMβ can promote the expression of the inflammatory cytokines IL-8 and IL-1β in bronchial epithelial cells of patients with COPD and exert inflammatory effects. RELMβ may be a potential target for the treatment of COPD.

Rockburst may cause damage to engineering equipment, disrupt construction progress, and endanger human life. To this day, the occurrence of rockburst remains complex and difficult to predict. This study proposes the D-P-Transformer algorithm to address this issue by improving the embedding structure of the Transformer for specific applications to rockburst data. To reduce the computational requirement, sparse self-attention is adopted to replace self-attention. A distilling operation and multiple layer replicas are simultaneously used to enhance the robustness and speed up the algorithm’s process. Taking all relevant rockburst factors into consideration, multiple experiments are conducted on seven large-scale rockburst datasets with different training ratios to verify the reliability of the proposed D-P-Transformer rockburst prediction algorithm. As compared to the original algorithm, the proposed algorithm shows average reductions of 24.45%, 46.56%, 17.32%, and 48.11% in the mean absolute error (MAE), mean square error (MSE), root mean square error (RMSE), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), respectively. The results indicate that the novel D-P-Transformer rockburst prediction algorithm is superior to the Transformer prediction algorithm, and could be used for coal mine rockburst prediction analysis.

Background: In previous studies, we confirmed that endogenous uric acid (UA) formation increases in the streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetic rats with renal injury. Yet changes of renal UA reabsorption and hepatic UA metabolism remain unclear in this model. Methods: STZ-induced diabetic rats and control rats were treated with benzbromarone (BZ), a glucose transporter 9 (GLUT9) inhibitor for 8 weeks. At baseline, 4 and 8 weeks after BZ treatment, blood samples were collected for fasting blood glucose (FBG), serum uric acid (SUA), serum creatinine (SCr), and blood urea nitrogen (BUN). Simultaneous urinary samples were tested and daily urinary amount of albumin (UAE), uric acid (UUA), creatinine (UCR), urea nitrogen (UUN) were calculated. Gene expressions of GLUT9, xanthine oxidase (XO), urate transporter 1 (URAT1) in the kidney and GLUT9, XO as well as uricase in the liver were detected by RT-PCR. Results: 1) Compared with normal rats, FBG, BUN, UUN, UAE and UUA were significantly increased, while SUA was significantly decreased in diabetic rats, while SCr and UCR levels were compared. Treatment with BZ did not change FBG in both rats. BZ significantly decreased SCr, BUN and UAE levels but increased SUA in diabetic rats. 2) In the kidney, expression of GLUT9 and XO was increased, while URAT1 was not altered in diabetic rats if compared with control rats. BZ treatment exerted no any effects on gene expression of GLUT9 and XO. 3) In the liver, gene expression of XO and uricase was compared between diabetic and normal rats, while GLUT9 was significantly upregulated in diabetic rats. BZ treatment remarkably inhibited GLUT9 expression but left XO and uricase unchanged in diabetic rats. Conclusions: 1) Inhibition of hepatic GLUT9 in STZ-induced diabetic rats increased SUA indicates that GLUT9 pathway for UA metabolism is critical in this model. 2) BZ treatment attenuates urinary albumin excretion in diabetes. Disclosure C. Chen: None. J. Ran: None. R. Zhang: None. G. Chen: None. P. Zhu: None. J. Qiu: None. R. Tan: None. Y. Liu: None.

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