Liver cancer, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in particular, is one of the deadliest cancers worldwide. Although the etiologies for liver oncogenesis are relatively well defined, the exact mechanisms ...leading to cancer development remain elusive. The Hippo signaling pathway, an evolutionarily conserved signaling module, plays critical roles in organ size control and tumorigenesis. The aberrant activation of the transcriptional coactivator YAP or TAZ, downstream effectors of the Hippo signaling pathway, has been implicated in several human cancers including HCC. YAP/TAZ therefore have emerged as an attractive target for cancer therapeutics. In this review, we summarize the recent findings regarding the role of YAP/TAZ in HCC development, and discuss the multifarious mechanisms regulating their activities and their potential contribution to human liver tumorigenesis.
Second harmonic generation from the two-layer structure where a transition-metal dichalcogenide monolayer is put on a one-dimensional grating has been studied. This grating supports bound states in ...the continuum which have no leakage lying within the continuum of radiation modes, we can enhance the second harmonic generation from the transition-metal dichalcogenide monolayer by more than four orders of magnitude based on the critical field enhancement near the bound states in the continuum. In order to complete this calculation, the scattering matrix theory has been extended to include the nonlinear effect and the scattering matrix of a two-dimensional material including nonlinear terms; furthermore, two methods to observe the bound states in the continuum are considered, where one is tuning the thickness of the grating and the other is changing the incident angle of the electromagnetic wave. We have also discussed various modulation of the second harmonic generation enhancement by adjusting the azimuthal angle of the transition-metal dichalcogenide monolayer.
Abstract
Cancer-secreted exosomes are critical mediators of cancer-host crosstalk. In the present study, we showed the delivery of miR-21-5p from colorectal cancer (CRC) cells to endothelial cells ...via exosomes increased the amount of miR-21-5p in recipient cells. MiR-21-5p suppressed Krev interaction trapped protein 1 (KRIT1) in recipient HUVECs and subsequently activated β-catenin signaling pathway and increased their downstream targets VEGFa and Ccnd1, which consequently promoted angiogenesis and vascular permeability in CRC. A strong inverse correlation between miR-21-5p and KRIT1 expression levels was observed in CRC-adjacent vessels. Furthermore, miR-21-5p expression in circulating exosomes was markedly higher in CRC patients than in healthy donors. Thus, our data suggest that exosomal miR-21-5p is involved in angiogenesis and vascular permeability in CRC and may be used as a potential new therapeutic target.
Inflammation plays an important role in the pathogenesis of ischemic stroke and other forms of ischemic brain injury. Increasing evidence suggests that inflammatory response is a double-edged sword, ...as it not only exacerbates secondary brain injury in the acute stage of stroke but also beneficially contributes to brain recovery after stroke. In this article, we provide an overview on the role of inflammation and its mediators in acute ischemic stroke. We discuss various pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory responses in different phases after ischemic stroke and the possible reasons for their failures in clinical trials. Undoubtedly, there is still much to be done in order to translate promising pre-clinical findings into clinical practice. A better understanding of the dynamic balance between pro- and anti-inflammatory responses and identifying the discrepancies between pre-clinical studies and clinical trials may serve as a basis for designing effective therapies.
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•Karst ecosystem had low service supply capacity.•Karst ecosystem had high potential to enhance plant carbon sink.•Overpopulation threatened total ES, Bio, SC, and N export in karst ...area.•Farming in the non-karst area deteriorated total ES, HQ, Bio, and N export.•Biodiversity played a positive role in the maintenance capacity of ES.
The South China Karst (SCK), the world's largest contiguous karst region, has undergone severe ecological degradation associated with the interaction of fragile natural attributes and human activities. Understanding the causes of changes in ecosystem services (ES) is essential to prevent and control ecosystem degradation and support sustainable development. However, existing studies have not comprehensively explored the impact of natural systems and human activities on karst ES and have failed to consider their spatiotemporal heterogeneity. Here, we used regression analysis to study the spatiotemporal evolution of ES in diverse landscapes (karst and non-karst) of SCK and the impact of human activity on them. Random forest regression and geographically weighted regression analysis were used to explore the key factors and driving forces in different landscape ES. The results show that from 1982 to 2018, ES, such as soil conservation (+8.12%), net primary productivity (+21.14%), carbon storage (+0.86%), nitrogen export (−5.89%), and phosphorus export (−1.46%), were improved, mainly due to re-greening and rewilding, which optimizes the structure of the ecosystem. However, large-scale afforestation led to a decrease in water yield (−13.23%). Urban development worsened habitat quality (−0.50%) and biodiversity (−1.91%). With the intensification of human activities, ES in the karst region showed lower maintenance capacity than in non-karst regions. The study found that the driving factors of ES varied with the differing landscapes. Population distribution in the karst region was the biggest threat to ES, whereas farming in the non-karst region was the main ES threat in this region. In these regions, the improvement in vegetation coverage was helpful in plant-carbon sequestration, and the increase of precipitation increased water yield. Importantly, we found that biodiversity maintenance plays a crucial role in ES. Nature-based solutions combined with proper management strategies can counter ecosystem degradation and help achieve sustainable development.
Cyperi Rhizoma
(CR) is the dry rhizome of
Cyperus rotundus
L., a Cyperaceae plant. It has a long history of clinical medication and is known as the “holy medicine” of gynecology. CR smells sweet and ...bitter. It has the effect of soothing the liver and relieving depression, regulating qi, regulating meridian and relieving pain. It can be used to treat liver qi stagnation, chest pain, spleen and stomach qi stagnation, hernia pain, irregular menstruation and other diseases. At present, the main chemical constituents isolated from CR are volatile oil, flavonoids and terpenes. Modern pharmacological studies have shown that CR has a wide range of pharmacological activities, including antidepressant, hypoglycemic, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antipyretic and analgesic effects. In this paper, the botany, traditional application, phytochemistry, pharmacological effects, processing and other aspects of CR are reviewed. At the same time, the shortcomings of current research of CR are discussed in depth, and the possible solutions are put forward in order to find a breakthrough point for future research of CR.
We experimentally demonstrate an indoor visible light positioning system based on optical camera communications, in which the transmitted coordinate data are spatially separated and demodulated by a ...camera. The receiver's position is calculated based on the coordinates of light-emitting diodes in the real word and in the image. The experimental results show that the proposed system with under-sampled phase shift keying modulation offers an error free data transmission and mean positioning errors of 5.0 and 6.6 cm for h of 120 and 180 cm, respectively.
We introduce a generic visual descriptor, termed as distribution aware retinal transform (DART), that encodes the structural context using log-polar grids for event cameras. The DART descriptor is ...applied to four different problems, namely object classification, tracking, detection and feature matching: (1) The DART features are directly employed as local descriptors in a bag-of-words classification framework and testing is carried out on four standard event-based object datasets (N-MNIST, MNIST-DVS, CIFAR10-DVS, NCaltech-101); (2) Extending the classification system, tracking is demonstrated using two key novelties: (i) Statistical bootstrapping is leveraged with online learning for overcoming the low-sample problem during the one-shot learning of the tracker, (ii) Cyclical shifts are induced in the log-polar domain of the DART descriptor to achieve robustness to object scale and rotation variations; (3) To solve the long-term object tracking problem, an object detector is designed using the principle of cluster majority voting. The detection scheme is then combined with the tracker to result in a high intersection-over-union score with augmented ground truth annotations on the publicly available event camera dataset; (4) Finally, the event context encoded by DART greatly simplifies the feature correspondence problem, especially for spatio-temporal slices far apart in time, which has not been explicitly tackled in the event-based vision domain.
Telomeres are organized into a heterochromatin structure and maintenance of silent heterochromatin is required for chromosome stability. How telomere heterochromatin is dynamically regulated in ...response to stimuli remains unknown. Pyruvate kinase Pyk1 forms a complex named SESAME (Serine-responsive SAM-containing Metabolic Enzyme complex) to regulate gene expression by phosphorylating histone H3T11 (H3pT11). Here, we identify a function of SESAME in regulating telomere heterochromatin structure. SESAME phosphorylates H3T11 at telomeres, which maintains SIR (silent information regulator) complex occupancy at telomeres and protects Sir2 from degradation by autophagy. Moreover, SESAME-catalyzed H3pT11 directly represses autophagy-related gene expression to further prevent autophagy-mediated Sir2 degradation. By promoting H3pT11, serine increases Sir2 protein levels and enhances telomere silencing. Loss of H3pT11 leads to reduced Sir2 and compromised telomere silencing during chronological aging. Together, our study provides insights into dynamic regulation of silent heterochromatin by histone modifications and autophagy in response to cell metabolism and aging.
Abstract
Recently the alternating twisted trilayer graphene is discovered to exhibit unconventional superconductivity, which motivates us to study the electronic structures and possible correlation ...effects for this class of alternating twisted multilayer graphene (ATMG) systems. In this work we consider generic ATMG systems with
M
-
L
-
N
stacking configurations, in which the
M
(
L
) graphene layers and the
L
(
N
) layers are twisted by an angle
θ
(−
θ
). Based on analysis from a simplified
k
⋅
p
model approach, we derive generic partition rules for the low-energy electronic structures, which exhibit various band dispersions including two pairs of flat bands and flat bands co-existing with various gapless Fermionic excitations. For a mirror-symmetric ATMG system with doubled flat bands, we further find that Coulomb interactions may drive the system into a state with intertwined electric polarization and orbital magnetization orders, which can exhibit an interaction-driven orbital magnetoelectric effect.
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