By using a cre-lox conditional knockout strategy, we report here the generation of androgen receptor knockout (ARKO) mice. Phenotype analysis shows that ARKO male mice have a female-like appearance and body weight. Their testes are 80% smaller and serum testosterone concentrations are lower than in wild-type (wt) mice. Spermatogenesis is arrested at pachytene spermatocytes. The number and size of adipocytes are also different between the wt and ARKO mice. Cancellous bone volumes of ARKO male mice are reduced compared with wt littermates. In addition, we found the average number of pups per litter in homologous and heterozygous ARKO female mice is lower than in wt female mice, suggesting potential defects in female fertility and/or ovulation. The cre-lox ARKO mouse provides a much-needed in vivo animal model to study androgen functions in the selective androgen target tissues in female or male mice

In this paper, we propose an end-to-end feature fusion at-tention network (FFA-Net) to directly restore the haze-free image. The FFA-Net architecture consists of three key components:1) A novel Feature Attention (FA) module combines Channel Attention with Pixel Attention mechanism, considering that different channel-wise features contain totally different weighted information and haze distribution is uneven on the different image pixels. FA treats different features and pixels unequally, which provides additional flexibility in dealing with different types of information, expanding the representational ability of CNNs. 2) A basic block structure consists of Local Residual Learning and Feature Attention, Local Residual Learning allowing the less important information such as thin haze region or low-frequency to be bypassed through multiple local residual connections, let main network architecture focus on more effective information. 3) An Attention-based different levels Feature Fusion (FFA) structure, the feature weights are adaptively learned from the Feature Attention (FA) module, giving more weight to important features. This structure can also retain the information of shallow layers and pass it into deep layers.The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed FFA-Net surpasses previous state-of-the-art single image dehazing methods by a very large margin both quantitatively and qualitatively, boosting the best published PSNR metric from 30.23 dB to 36.39 dB on the SOTS indoor test dataset. Code has been made available at GitHub.

Androgens and the androgen receptor (AR) play important roles in male fertility, although the detailed mechanisms, particularly how androgen͞AR influences spermatogenesis in particular cell types, remain unclear. Using a Cre-Lox conditional knockout strategy, we generated a tissue-specific knockout mouse with the AR gene deleted only in Sertoli cells (S-AR ؊/y ). Phenotype analyses show the S-AR ؊/y mice were indistinguishable from WT AR mice (B6 AR ؉/y ) with the exception of testes, which were significantly atrophied. S-AR ؊/y mice were infertile, with spermatogenic arrest predominately at the diplotene premeiotic stage and almost no sperm detected in the epididymides. S-AR ؊/y mice also have lower serum testosterone concentrations and higher serum leuteinizing hormone concentrations than B6 AR ؉/y mice. Further mechanistic studies demonstrated that S-AR ؊/y mice have defects in the expression of anti-Mü llerian hormone, androgen-binding protein, cyclin A1, and sperm-1, which play important roles in the control of spermatogenesis and͞or steroidogenesis. Together, our Sertoli cell-specific AR knockout mice provide in vivo evidence of the need for functional AR in Sertoli cells to maintain normal spermatogenesis and testosterone production, and ensure normal male fertility. knockout mice ͉ anti-Mü llerian hormone ͉ testosterone