Background
Maternal infection during pregnancy is known to adversely affect foetal development, but previous studies have rarely investigated the impact of gynaecological diseases during pregnancy on offspring during adulthood. Vaginitis is one of the most prevalent gynaecological diseases during pregnancy.
Methods
The effect of maternal vaginal inflammation on offspring was simulated by inducing maternal vaginal infection. We performed a transvaginal injection of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) in pregnant mice to induce vaginitis and investigated their offspring by means of behavioural tests and molecular and cellular measurements.
Results
Behavioural tests revealed that the offspring of mothers transvaginally injected with LPS exhibited sex‐dependent differences. Male offspring showed increased anxiety‐related behaviours, including reduced time exploring the open arm in the elevated plus maze test and light chamber in the light‐dark box test. Serum levels of corticosterone were increased in LPS male offspring, indicating activation of the hypothalamic‐pituitary‐adrenal (HPA) axis. Corticotropin‐releasing hormone (CRH) protein expression and c‐Fos positive cells were increased in the hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus (PVN) in LPS male offspring, which presented with an increased number of microglia.
Conclusion
This study suggests that prenatal vaginal infection increases anxiety‐like behaviour in male offspring, possibly via activation of the HPA axis.
A modified continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CVQKD) protocol is proposed by originating the entangled source from a malicious third party Eve in the middle instead of generating it from the trustworthy Alice or Bob. This method is able to enhance the efficiency of the CVQKD scheme attacked by local oscillator (LO) intensity attack in terms of the generated secret key rate in quantum communication. The other indication of the improvement is that the maximum transmission distance and the maximum loss tolerance can be increased significantly, especially for CVQKD schemes based on homodyne detection.
Pool film boiling was studied by visualized quenching experiments on stainless steel spheres in water at the atmospheric pressure. The surfaces of the spheres were coated to be superhydrophobic (SHB), having a static contact angle greater than 160 deg. Subcooled conditions were concerned parametrically with the subcooling degree being varied from 0 °C (saturated) to 70 °C. It was shown that film boiling is the overwhelming mode of heat transfer during the entire course of quenching as a result of the retention of stable vapor film surrounding the SHB spheres, even at very low wall superheat that normally corresponds to nucleate boiling. Pool boiling heat transfer is enhanced with increasing the subcooling degree, in agreement with the thinning trend of the vapor film thickness. The heat flux enhancement was found to be up to fivefold for the subcooling degree of 70 °C in comparison to the saturated case, at the wall superheat of 200 °C. A modified correlation in the ratio form was proposed to predict pool film boiling heat transfer from spheres as a function of the subcooling degree.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.