The aim of this study was to investigate the role of circular RNA-9119 (circ9119) in cervical cancer (CC) and the microRNA-126-3p (miR-126)-based molecular mechanism underlying CC. circ9119 and MDM4 ...were initially overexpressed, and miR-126 expression was found to be reduced in CC cells and tissues. A series of mimics, inhibitors, overexpressing plasmids or siRNAs were introduced into CC cells to alter the circ9119, miR-126, and MDM4 expressions. Cell-based experiments showed that silencing of circ9119 or the upregulation of miR-126 resulted in suppressed proliferation, accompanied by the induced apoptosis of CC cells. The dual-luciferase reporter assay highlighted that circ9119 functioned as an miR-126 ceRNA to increase MDM4 expression. In vivo experiments further confirmed the suppressed tumor growth caused by circ9119 silencing. Our findings demonstrated that circ9119 acts as an oncogene in CC. Our study provides evidence for targeting circ9119 for the treatment of CC.
Accurate classification of adenocarcinoma (AC) and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) in lung cancer is critical to physicians' clinical decision-making. Exhaled breath analysis provides a tremendous ...potential approach in non-invasive diagnosis of lung cancer but was rarely reported for lung cancer subtypes classification. In this paper, we firstly proposed a combined method, integrating K-nearest neighbor classifier (KNN), borderline2-synthetic minority over-sampling technique (borderlin2-SMOTE), and feature reduction methods, to investigate the ability of exhaled breath to distinguish AC from SCC patients. The classification performance of the proposed method was compared with the results of four classification algorithms under different combinations of borderline2-SMOTE and feature reduction methods. The result indicated that the KNN classifier combining borderline2-SMOTE and feature reduction methods was the most promising method to discriminate AC from SCC patients and obtained the highest mean area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (0.63) and mean geometric mean (58.50) when compared to others classifiers. The result revealed that the combined algorithm could improve the classification performance of lung cancer subtypes in breathomics and suggested that combining non-invasive exhaled breath analysis with multivariate analysis is a promising screening method for informing treatment options and facilitating individualized treatment of lung cancer subtypes patients.
We experimentally demonstrate a spatially non-blocking five-port optical router, which is based on microring resonators tuned through the thermo-optic effect. The characteristics of the ...microring-resonator-based switching element are investigated to achieve balanced performances in its two output ports. The optical router is fabricated on the SOI platform using standard CMOS processing. The effective footprint of the device is about 440×660 μm2. The microring resonators have 3-dB bandwidths of larger than 0.31 nm (38 GHz), and extinction ratios of better than 21 dB for through ports and 16 dB for drop ports. Finally, 12.5 Gbps high-speed signal transmission experiments verify the routing functionality of the optical router.
Optical directed logic (DL) is a novel logic operation scheme that employs electrical signals as operands to control the working states of optical switches to perform the logic functions. This review ...first provides an overview of the concept and working principle of DL. The developing trends of DL computing are then discussed in detail, including the fundamental optical DL gates, combinational optical DL operations, reconfigurable logic computing, low power optical logic computing, and programmable photonic network. The concluding remarks provide an outlook on the DL future development and its impacts in optical computing.
Graphical Abstract
We experimentally demonstrate a compact temperature sensor using a microfiber-based Mach-Zehnder interferometer with a knot micro-ring resonator. The arm with a knot micro-ring resonator is embedded ...in polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), which acts as the temperature transducer. The scattering matrix method is employed to establish the numerical model of the device. Owing to the high thermo-optic coefficient of PDMS, the response spectrum of the device will blue-shift when the ambient temperature increases. The device is characterized by changing temperature in two different environments (air and liquid), respectively. For temperature sensing operated in air, the device is tested utilizing a heating platform, which shows a sensitivity of -35.12 pm/°C when the temperature of the heating platform varies at a range of 15.5 °C. After that, a sensitivity boosting up to -41.58 pm/°C is measured when the device is immersed in a salt solution (25 0 / 00 in concentration) with the temperature changing from 22.2 °C to 32.9 °C.
Cadmium (Cd) is a toxic heavy metal and worldwide environmental pollutant which seriously threatens human health and ecosystems. It is easy to be adsorbed and deposited in organisms, exerting adverse ...effects on various organs including the brain. In a very recent study, making full use of a zebrafish model in both high-throughput behavioral tracking and live neuroimaging, we explored the potential developmental neurotoxicity of Cd2+ at environmentally relevant levels and identified multiple connections between Cd2+ exposure and neurodevelopmental disorders as well as microglia-mediated neuroinflammation, whereas the underlying neurotoxic mechanisms remained unclear. The canonical Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway plays crucial roles in many biological processes including neurodevelopment, cell survival, and cell cycle regulation, as well as microglial activation, thereby potentially presenting one of the key targets of Cd2+ neurotoxicity. Therefore, in this follow-up study, we investigated the implication of the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway in Cd2+-induced developmental disorders and neuroinflammation and revealed that environmental Cd2+ exposure significantly affected the expression of key factors in the zebrafish Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway. In addition, pharmacological intervention of this pathway via TWS119, which can increase the protein level of β-catenin and act as a classical activator of the Wnt signaling pathway, could significantly repress the Cd2+-induced cell cycle arrest and apoptosis, thereby attenuating the inhibitory effects of Cd2+ on the early development, behavior, and activity, as well as neurodevelopment of zebrafish larvae to a certain degree. Furthermore, activation and proliferation of microglia, as well as the altered expression profiles of genes associated with neuroimmune homeostasis triggered by Cd2+ exposure could also be significantly alleviated by the activation of the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway. Thus, this study provided novel insights into the cellular and molecular mechanisms of Cd2+ toxicity on the vertebrate central nervous system (CNS), which might be helpful in developing pharmacotherapies to mitigate the neurological disorders resulting from exposure to Cd2+ and many other environmental heavy metals.
Whether adiponectin (ADIPOQ) polymorphisms are associated with the risk of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) remain controversial. Therefore, we performed this study to better explore correlations ...between ADIPOQ polymorphisms and PCOS risk.
Literature retrieve was conducted in PubMed, Medline and Embase. Odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated.
Eighteen studies were enrolled for analyses. Pooled overall analyses showed that rs1501299 polymorphism was significantly associated with PCOS risk (recessive model: p = 0.02, OR = 0.77, 95%CI 0.62-0.95; allele model: p = 0.001, OR = 1.15, 95%CI 1.06-1.26). Further subgroup analyses according to ethnicity of participants revealed that rs1501299 and rs2241766 polymorphisms were both significantly correlated with PCOS risk in Caucasians. In addition, rs1501299 polymorphism was also significantly correlated with PCOS risk in East Asians.
Our findings indicated that rs1501299 and rs2241766 polymorphisms might serve as genetic biomarkers of PCOS in certain ethnicities.
Data exchange plays a key role in enhancing network resources utilization and optimizing network performance. In this paper, a data exchange device based on mode-division multiplexing (MDM) ...technology is proposed and demonstrated, which is capable of exchanging data information between a fundamental mode (TE 0 ) signal and an arbitrary high-order mode (TE x ) signal. We experimentally demonstrate the exchange between a TE 0 mode signal and a TE 1 mode signal using single microring resonator. The insertion loss is about 7.5 dB, including terminal coupling loss, the extinction ratio is more than 20 dB within the C -band. The crosstalk for the TE 1 -to-TE 0 and TE 0 -to-TE 1 mode conversions is measured to be less than −22 and −16 dB, respectively. Clear and open-eye diagrams of two different wavelength signals at 10 Gb/s are obtained. The proposed scheme is expected to be used for on-chip MDM networks in the future due to its scalability, compact size, and low power consumption.
We design and fabricate a four-port optical router, which is composed of eight microring-resonator-based switching elements, four optical waveguides and six waveguide crossings. The extinction ratio ...is about 13 dB for the through port and larger than 30 dB for the drop port. The crosstalk of the measured optical links is less than -13 dB. The average tuning power consumption is about 10.37 mW and the tuning efficiency is 5.398 mW/nm. The routing functionality and optical signal integrity are verified by transmitting a 12.5 Gb/s PRBS optical signal.
Data exchange between different data channels can offer more flexible and advanced functions for many optical networks. In this paper, we propose a switchable and reconfigurable data exchange device ...for arbitrary two optical mode channels based on three-waveguide-coupling (TWC) switches in mode-division multiplexing (MDM) networks. The working principle of the TWC switches is numerically analyzed using the coupled supermode theory. As a proof of concept, switchable data exchange between arbitrary two mode channels among the first three-order quasi-transverse electric modes is experimentally demonstrated successfully. The insertion losses of the device are less than 5.6 dB, including the coupling loss of the multiplexer and demultiplexer, while the mode crosstalk is less than -13.0 dB for all functions. The proposed device is expected to offer more flexibility to on-chip MDM networks due to its low loss, low crosstalk and good scalability.
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