We report here on the measurement of the diffusion coefficient of fluorescent species using a commercial microscope possessing a resonant scanner. Sequential linescans with a rate of up to 12 kHz yield a temporal resolution of 83 μs, making the setup amenable to measure diffusion rates over a range covering at least three orders of magnitude, from 100 μm2/s down to 0.1 μm2/s. We share representative data sets covering (i) the diffusion of a dye molecule, observed in media of different viscosities and (ii) the diffusion of a prototypical membrane receptor. The data can be valuable for researchers interested in the rapid diffusion properties of nuclear, cytosolic or membrane bound proteins fused to fluorescent tags. © 2020 The Authors.Metal(loid) contamination may pose an increased risk of exposure to children residing near legacy and active resource extraction sites. https://www.selleckchem.com/products/pp2.html Children may be exposed to arsenic, cadmium, and/or lead by ingestion and/or inhalation while engaging in school or home outdoor activities via environmental media including water, soil, dust, and locally grown produce. It is thus critical to collect site-specific data to best assess these risks. This data article provides gastric and lung in-vitro bioaccessibility assay (IVBA) data, as well as environmental monitoring data for water, soil, dust, and garden produce collected from preschools (N = 4) in mining communities throughout Nevada County, California in 2018. Arsenic, cadmium, and lead concentrations in the aforementioned media and synthetic gastric and lung fluids were measured by inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). This dataset provides useful metal(loid) concentrations for future risk assessments for similar settings. © 2019 The Author(s).Introduction Cutting the cost of manufacturing is important for extending the use of tissue-engineered therapeutic products. The present study aimed to develop a simple method for fabrication of cartilaginous tissues for regenerative therapy, utilizing the phenomenon where human articular chondrocytes grow thickness-wise and spontaneously form three-dimensionally thick tissues. Methods Normal human articular chondrocytes (NHACs) were cultured with varying concentrations of transforming growth factor beta 1 (TGF-β1) and/or fibroblast growth factor-2 (FGF-2) to optimize the culture condition for thickness-wise growth of chondrocytes. Next, the tissues grown in the optimal condition were subjected to re-differentiation culture in attached and detached states to assess differentiation capacity by evaluating secreted factors, histological analysis, and a gene expression assay. Results NHACs grew thickness-wise efficiently in the presence of 1 ng/mL TGF-β1 and 10 ng/mL FGF-2. After two weeks of culture, NHACs grew with 11-fold higher thickness and 16-fold higher cell number compared to cells which were neither treated with TGF-β1 nor with FGF-2. These thickness-wise-grown chondrocytes could be re-differentiated by a differentiation medium according to the increase in melanoma inhibitory activity (MIA) and positive safranin-O staining. Interestingly, the cartilaginous gene expression was considerably different between the attached and detached conditions even in the same culture medium, indicating the necessity of detachment and shrinkage to achieve further differentiation. Conclusions Spontaneous thickness-wise growth might provide a simple tissue-engineering method for manufacturing cartilaginous 3D tissues. © 2020 The Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V.Positron emission tomography (PET) suffers from severe resolution limitations which reduce its quantitative accuracy. In this paper, we present a super-resolution (SR) imaging technique for PET based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). To facilitate the resolution recovery process, we incorporate high-resolution (HR) anatomical information based on magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. We introduce the spatial location information of the input image patches as additional CNN inputs to accommodate the spatially-variant nature of the blur kernels in PET. We compared the performance of shallow (3-layer) and very deep (20-layer) CNNs with various combinations of the following inputs low-resolution (LR) PET, radial locations, axial locations, and HR MR. To validate the CNN architectures, we performed both realistic simulation studies using the BrainWeb digital phantom and clinical studies using neuroimaging datasets. For both simulation and clinical studies, the LR PET images were based on the Siemens HR+ scanner. Two different scenarios were examined in simulation one where the target HR image is the ground-truth phantom image and another where the target HR image is based on the Siemens HRRT scanner - a high-resolution dedicated brain PET scanner. The latter scenario was also examined using clinical neuroimaging datasets. A number of factors affected relative performance of the different CNN designs examined, including network depth, target image quality, and the resemblance between the target and anatomical images. In general, however, all deep CNNs outperformed classical penalized deconvolution and partial volume correction techniques by large margins both qualitatively (e.g., edge and contrast recovery) and quantitatively (as indicated by three metrics peak signal-to-noise-ratio, structural similarity index, and contrast-to-noise ratio).In the central nervous system, neurons and the vasculature influence each other. While it is well described that a functional vascular system is trophic to neurons and that vascular damage contributes to neurodegeneration, the opposite scenario in which neural damage might impact the microvasculature is less defined. In this study, using an in vivo excitotoxic approach in adult mice as a tool to cause specific damage to retinal ganglion cells, we detected subsequent damage to endothelial cells in retinal capillaries. Furthermore, we detected decreased expression of vascular endothelial growth factor D (VEGFD) in retinal ganglion cells. In vivo VEGFD supplementation via neuronal-specific viral-mediated expression or acute intravitreal delivery of the mature protein preserved the structural and functional integrity of retinal ganglion cells against excitotoxicity and, additionally, spared endothelial cells from degeneration. Viral-mediated suppression of expression of the VEGFD-binding receptor VEGFR3 in retinal ganglion cells revealed that VEGFD exerts its protective capacity directly on retinal ganglion cells, while protection of endothelial cells is the result of upheld neuronal integrity.