Background & Aims-Smooth muscle is essential for maintaining homeostasis for many body functions and provides adaptive responses to stresses imposed by pathological disorders. Identified cell signaling networks have defined many potential mechanisms for initiating smooth muscle contraction with or without myosin regulatory light chain (RLC) phosphorylation by myosin light chain kinase (MLCK). We generate tamoxifen-inducible and smooth muscle-specific MLCK knockout (KO) mice and provide direct loss-of-function evidence that shows the primary importance of MLCK in phasic smooth muscle contractions.

Hollow spheres have the potential for promising applications because of their advantageous properties, such as low effective density and high specific surface area.[1] In particular, they have been attracting increasing interest due to the possibility of their use in drug delivery, catalysis, paper coating, cosmetic foundations, and so forth. [2][3][4][5][6] Although there are many strategies for preparing hollow polymeric spheres, [7][8][9][10] a template is often needed. With the template method, hollow structures can be obtained after removing the template by dissolution, evaporation, or thermolysis. However, the preparation schemes are complicated or require large quantities of surfactants. Herein, we demonstrate a simple one-step method for fabricating hollow polymeric spheres with controllable size in aqueous media, by means of the droplet template formed by the monomer itself without the aid of surfactants or functional acids. Recently, polyaniline has been widely studied because of its special properties and potential applications in many fields. [11][12][13] Various morphologies such as nanotubes, [14][15][16] nanobelts, [17] nanofibers, [18][19][20][21] and hollow microspheres [22] have been reported using different strategies. Poly(o-toluidine) (POT), as one of the derivatives of polyaniline, has also received considerable attention. [23][24][25][26][27][28][29] Substituted derivatives of aniline are typically used to copolymerize with aniline to improve the processability of polyaniline, [30][31][32][33][34] while less attention is paid to controlling the morphology of polyaniline derivatives. [23,29] Here, we report for the first time the synthesis of POT hollow spheres in aqueous solution by the droplet template without surfactant stabilization. We found that hollow spheres could be obtained with sizes ranging from the nanometer to micrometer scales, simply by changing the concentration of o-toluidine. Interestingly, there is a hole in the surface of each synthesized POT hollow sphere and the size of the hole can be controlled by changing the molar ratio of initiator to monomer. Typical scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) images of POT hollow microspheres synthesized in aqueous solution are shown in Figure 1. The products are well-defined hollow structures and range in size from 1 to 8 lm, with an average diameter of 4 lm. It is clear from Figure 1a that there is typically just one hole in the surface of each microsphere; there are seldom two. These observations lead us to conclude that the POT microspheres are hollow. Their hollowness is further supported by using TEM (Fig. 1b). The TEM images of POT hollow spheres synthesized at different concentrations of o-toluidine are given in Figure 2. The sizes of the hollow POT spheres increase with the concentration of o-toluidine. When the concentration of o-toluidine is relatively low (e.g., 0.022 M), only hollow nanospheres ranging in size from 200 to 400 nm (Fig. 2a) are found, while hollow sub-micrometer-sized...

Scene text recognition has inspired great interests from the computer vision community in recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel scene text recognition method using part-based tree-structured character detection. Different from conventional multi-scale sliding window character detection strategy, which does not make use of the character-specific structure information, we use part-based tree-structure to model each type of character so as to detect and recognize the characters at the same time. While for word recognition, we build a Conditional Random Field model on the potential character locations to incorporate the detection scores, spatial constraints and linguistic knowledge into one framework. The final word recognition result is obtained by minimizing the cost function defined on the random field. Experimental results on a range of challenging public datasets (ICDAR 2003, ICDAR 2011 demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms stateof-the-art methods significantly both for character detection and word recognition.

No abstract

No abstract

Nanostructure‐based leaf‐like polyaniline (PANI) (see figure) has been fabricated successfully in the presence of surfactant F127. It is found that the building blocks of leaf‐like PANI can be tuned from nanofibers (ca. 25 nm in diameter) to nanotubes (ca. 100 nm in diameter) with increasing monomer concentration. The proposed synthetic method will provide insight into the synthesis of oriented nanostructures of polymer materials by the soft‐template strategy.

No abstract

The scaffold microstructure has a great impact on cell functions in tissue engineering. Herein, the PLLA scaffolds with hierarchical fiber size and pore size were successfully fabricated by thermal-induced phase separation or combined thermal-induced phase separation and salt leaching methods. The PLLA scaffolds were fabricated as microfibrous scaffolds, microfibrous scaffolds with macropores (50-350 µm), nanofibrous scaffolds with micropores (100 nm to 10 µm), and nanofibrous scaffolds with both macropores and micropores by tailoring selective solvents for forming different fiber size and pre-sieved salts for creating controlled pore size. Among the four kinds of PLLA scaffolds, the nanofibrous scaffolds with both macropores and micropores provided a favorable microenvironment for protein adsorption, cell proliferation, and cell infiltration. The results further confirmed the significance of fiber size and pore size on the biological properties, and a scaffold with both micropores and macropores, and a nanofibrous matrix might have promising applications in bone tissue engineering.