We aimed to investigate the effect of melatonin on bovine frozen-thawed semen and its impact on fertilization outcome. Plasma membrane integrity, mitochondrial activity, acrosome integrity, and levels of intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) were measured in spermatozoa treated with different concentrations of melatonin. Melatonin-treated spermatozoa were then used for in vitro fertilization, followed by analysis of subsequent embryo development and the expression of apoptosis- and antioxidant-related genes. The results revealed that 10 and 10 M melatonin led to higher plasma membrane integrity, mitochondrial activity, and acrosome integrity, and significantly decreased intracellular ROS levels (P < 0.05). The blastocyst development rate of in vitro-produced bovine embryos originating from 10 M melatonin-treated spermatozoa was significantly higher, while the incidence of apoptotic nuclei in blastocysts was markedly lower than for embryos from any other group (P < 0.05). CASP3 and BAX mRNA abundance were significantly reduced whereas BCL2, XIAP, and CAT transcript abundance were significantly increased in embryos produced from spermatozoa treated with 10 M melatonin; GPX4 expression, however, was comparable in all treatment groups. Thus, 10 M melatonin can improve the quality of bovine frozen-thawed semen. These beneficial effects appear to influence preimplantation embryos, given the correlation with its anti-apoptotic and anti-oxidative properties. Mol. Reprod. Dev. 83: 993-1002, 2016 © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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In cancer patients, appetite and immune status are significantly weakened. Two experimental fermented formulations without (group A, named as FSWW08) and with (group B, FSWW08) an extract from yam root were investigated against a placebo formulation with casein (group C) in a clinical study conducted in six cancer hospitals where cancer patients underwent radio or chemotherapy (patients undergoing radiation therapy n=78, patients undergoing chemotherapy n=184, total 262). IgG and IgA were increased by formulation A in patients despite receiving radio- or chemotherapy. Group A experienced statistically significant increases in lymphocyte transformation rates, whereas group B and group C did not. Formulations A and B either inhibited or lessened statistically significant decreases in white blood counts, whereas the placebo group experienced substantial decreases. Hemoglobin and platelet decreases were inhibited in group A, although not statistically significantly. Patients in group A received no blood transfusions, whereas many patients from the placebo group received blood transfusions. Appetite loss was reduced in group A from 57.9% to 13.3% and in group B from 70% to 35.8%. In the placebo group, an increase in appetite loss was detected under chemo and radiation therapy from 41.8% to 70.9%.

In recent years, remote sensing images has become one of the most popular directions in image processing. A small feature gap exists between satellite and natural images. Therefore, deep learning algorithms could be applied to recognize remote sensing images. We propose an improved Mask R-CNN model, called SCMask R-CNN, to enhance the detection effect in the high-resolution remote sensing images which contain the dense targets and complex background. Our model can perform object recognition and segmentation in parallel. This model uses a modified SC-conv based on the ResNet101 backbone network to obtain more discriminative feature information and adds a set of dilated convolutions with a specific size to improve the instance segmentation effect. We construct WFA-1400 based on the DOTA dataset because of the shortage of remote sensing mask datasets. We compare the improved algorithm with other state-of-the-art algorithms. The object detection AP50 and AP increased by 1–2% and 1%, respectively, objectively proving the effectiveness and the feasibility of the improved model.