Visualizing Wallerian degeneration in the corticospinal tract after sensorimotor cortex ischemia in mice

Stroke can cause Wallerian degeneration in regions outside of the brain,particularly in the corticospinal tract.To investigate the fate of major glial cells and axons within affected areas of the corticospinal tract following stroke,we induced photochemical infarction of the sensorimotor cortex leading to Wallerian degeneration along the full extent of the corticospinal tract.We first used a routine,sensitive marker of axonal injury,amyloid precursor protein,to examine Wallerian degeneration of the corticospinal tract.An antibody to amyloid precursor protein mapped exclusively to proximal axonal segments within the ischemic cortex,with no positive signal in distal parts of the corticospinal tract,at all time points.To improve visualization of Wallerian degeneration,we next utilized an orthograde virus that expresses green fluorescent protein to label the corticospinal tract and then quantitatively evaluated green fluorescent protein-expressing axons.Using this approach,we found that axonal degeneration began on day 3 post-stroke and was almost complete by 7 days after stroke.In addition,microglia mobilized and activated early,from day 7 after stroke,but did not maintain a phagocytic state over time.Meanwhile,astrocytes showed relatively delayed mobilization and a moderate response to Wallerian degeneration.Moreover,no anterograde degeneration of spinal anterior horn cells was observed in response to Wallerian degeneration of the corticospinal tract.In conclusion,our data provide evidence for dynamic,pathogenic spatiotemporal changes in major cellular components of the corticospinal tract during Wallerian degeneration.

Effects of blade aspect ratio and taper ratio on hovering performance of cycloidal rotor with large blade pitching amplitude

In recent years, a lot of research work has been carried out on the cycloidal rotors. However, it lacks thorough understanding about the effects of the blade platform shape on the hover efficiency of the cycloidal rotor, and the knowledge of how to design the platform shape of the blades. This paper presents a numerical simulation model based on Unsteady ReynoldsAveraged Navier–Stokes equations(URANSs), which is further validated by the experimental results. The effects of blade aspect ratio and taper ratio are analyzed, which shows that the cycloidal rotors with the same chord length have quite similar performance even though the blade aspect ratio varies from a very small value to a large one. By comparing the cycloidal rotors with different taper ratios, it is found that the rotors with large blade taper ratio outperform those with small taper ratio. This is due to the fact that the blade with larger taper ratio has longer chord and hence better efficiency. The analysis results show that the unsteady aerodynamic effects due to blade pitching motion play a more important role in the efficiency than the blade platform shape. Therefore we should pay more attention to the blade airfoil and pitching motion than the blade platform shape.The main contributions of this paper include: the analysis of the effects of aspect ratio and taper ratio on the hover efficiency of cycloidal rotor based on both the experimental and numerical simulation results; the finding of the main influencing factors on the hover efficiency; the qualitative guidance on how to design the blade platform shape for cycloidal rotors.

SOME GENERALIZED GRONWALL-LIKE INEQUALITIES WITH DELAY ON TIME SCALES

In this paper, we establish some new Gronwall-like inequalities which can be used as tools in the theory of integral equations with delay on time scales.