Elevated T-box 2 in infantile hemangioma stem cells maintains an adipogenic differentiation-competent state

Infantile hemangioma is a benign vascular tumor that affects 4 to 10% of neonates. A unique feature of hemangiomas is the natural lifecycle, whereby the tumor rapidly grows and then spontaneously regresses to a fibrofatty residuum. We have shown that hemangiomas are derived from multipotential stem cells (hemSCs), which differentiate into endothelial cells during the early proliferating phase and into adipocytes during the later involutive phase. T-box 2 (TBX2) is a transcription factor involved in controlling cell-fate decisions, and is highly expressed during the proliferating phase of hemangioma development. We hypothesize that TBX2 expression would be high in hemSCs derived from human hemangiomas and inhibiting TBX2 would result in changes in hemSC differentiation potential. To test our hypothesis, we analyzed hemSCs for TBX2 mRNA and protein expression. We then used RNA interference and TBX2 overexpression to determine the effect of altering TBX2 levels on hemSC growth and differentiation. Our studies show that TBX2 is highly expressed in hemSCs compared with a panel of normal stem/progenitor cells and mature vascular cells. TBX2 knockdown completely abolished adipogenic differentiation of hemSCs without significantly altering growth. Furthermore, overexpression of TBX2 led to enhanced adipogenic differentiation ability possibly through induction of C/EBPβ. From these findings, we believe that TBX2 is active in hemSCs and that TBX2 maintains an adipogenic differentiation-competent state of hemSCs. These findings may be important in the development of better treatment options for hemangiomas to accelerate involution. © 2013 Landes Bioscience

Watermarking strategies for IP protection of micro-processor cores

L. Parrilla, E. Castillo, U. Meyer-Bäse, A. García, D. González, E. Todorovich, E. Boemo, A. Lloris, "Watermarking strategies for IP protection of micro-processor cores", Proceedings of SPIE 7703, Independent Component Analyses, Wavelets, Neural Networks, Biosystems, and Nanoengineering VIII, 77030L (2010). Copyright 2010 Society of Photo‑Optical Instrumentation Engineers. One print or electronic copy may be made for personal use only. Systematic reproduction and distribution, duplication of any material in this paper for a fee or for commercial purposes, or modification of the content of the paper are prohibited.Reuse-based design has emerged as one of the most important methodologies for integrated circuit design, with reusable Intellectual Property (IP) cores enabling the optimization of company resources due to reduced development time and costs. This is of special interest in the Field-Programmable Logic (FPL) domain, which mainly relies on automatic synthesis tools. However, this design methodology has brought to light the intellectual property protection (IPP) of those modules, with most forms of protection in the EDA industry being difficult to translate to this domain. However, IP core watermarking has emerged as a tool for IP core protection. Although watermarks may be inserted at different levels of the design flow, watermarking Hardware Description Language (HDL) descriptions has been proved to be a robust and secure option. In this paper, a new framework for the protection of μP cores is presented. The protection scheme is derived from the IPP@HDL procedure and it has been adapted to the singularities of μP cores, overcoming the problems for the digital signature extraction in such systems. Additionally, the feature of hardware activation has been introduced, allowing the distribution of μP cores in a "demo" mode and a later activation that can be easily performed by the customer executing a simple program. Application examples show that the additional hardware introduced for protection and/or activation has no effect over the performance, and showing an assumable area increase.This work was partially funded by project TEC2007-68074-C02-01/MIC (Plan Nacional I+D+I, Spain). CAD tools and supporting material were provided by Altera Corp. trough University Program agreements. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors

Design Time Optimization for Hardware Watermarking Protection of HDL Designs

HDL-level design offers important advantages for the application of watermarking to IP cores, but its complexity also requires tools automating these watermarking algorithms. A new tool for signature distribution through combinational logic is proposed in this work. IPP@HDL, a previously proposed high-level watermarking technique, has been employed for evaluating the tool. IPP@HDL relies on spreading the bits of a digital signature at the HDL design level using combinational logic included within the original system. The development of this new tool for the signature distribution has not only extended and eased the applicability of this IPP technique, but it has also improved the signature hosting process itself. Three algorithms were studied in order to develop this automated tool. The selection of a cost function determines the best hosting solutions in terms of area and performance penalties on the IP core to protect. An 1D-DWT core and MD5 and SHA1 digital signatures were used in order to illustrate the benefits of the new tool and its optimization related to the extraction logic resources. Among the proposed algorithms, the alternative based on simulated annealing reduces the additional resources while maintaining an acceptable computation time and also saving designer effort and time

Speckle signal processing through FPGA

This paper introduces Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology as an alternative platform to implement algorithms for speckle patterns analysis in real time. Functions and algorithmic procedures have been expressed in pseudo languages then in Hardware Description Languages (HDL). For all cases, time performances are presented for the Xilinx Virtex-6 family. Comparisons are also made with PC platform implementations presented in the literature.Sección: Diseño de hardware FPGACentro de Técnicas Analógico-Digitale

Metodologías de Diseño para Sistemas Embebidos

Se presentan los aspectos relevantes de un proyecto de investigación y desarrollo abordado en el grupo Inca del Instituto Intia de la UNCPBA. Este proyecto fue oportunamente aprobado en el marco de los incentivos a la investigación y busca como objetivos generales el trabajo conjunto tendiente a desarrollar tecnologías para el manejo de dispositivos en sistemas embebidos. Conjuntamente se realiza la formación de varios de los integrantes quienes se encuentran realizando sus estudios de posgrado en temas afines al proyecto. El proyecto busca desarrollar tareas de investigación y desarrollo en temas relacionados a los sistemas embebidos, tanto en aspectos de software como de hardware. De este modo se busca desarrollar soluciones a problemas en áreas como visualización, optimización de sistemas operativos de tiempo real, sensores, etc. no solo desde el punto de vista algorítmico sino a partir de su implementación en sistemas de hardware programable como FPGAs.Eje: Procesamiento de Señales y Sistemas de Tiempo RealRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Metodologías de Diseño para Sistemas Embebidos

Se presentan los aspectos relevantes de un proyecto de investigación y desarrollo abordado en el grupo Inca del Instituto Intia de la UNCPBA. Este proyecto fue oportunamente aprobado en el marco de los incentivos a la investigación y busca como objetivos generales el trabajo conjunto tendiente a desarrollar tecnologías para el manejo de dispositivos en sistemas embebidos. Conjuntamente se realiza la formación de varios de los integrantes quienes se encuentran realizando sus estudios de posgrado en temas afines al proyecto. El proyecto busca desarrollar tareas de investigación y desarrollo en temas relacionados a los sistemas embebidos, tanto en aspectos de software como de hardware. De este modo se busca desarrollar soluciones a problemas en áreas como visualización, optimización de sistemas operativos de tiempo real, sensores, etc. no solo desde el punto de vista algorítmico sino a partir de su implementación en sistemas de hardware programable como FPGAs.Eje: Procesamiento de Señales y Sistemas de Tiempo RealRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Metodologías de Diseño para Sistemas Embebidos

Se presentan los aspectos relevantes de un proyecto de investigación y desarrollo abordado en el grupo Inca del Instituto Intia de la UNCPBA. Este proyecto fue oportunamente aprobado en el marco de los incentivos a la investigación y busca como objetivos generales el trabajo conjunto tendiente a desarrollar tecnologías para el manejo de dispositivos en sistemas embebidos. Conjuntamente se realiza la formación de varios de los integrantes quienes se encuentran realizando sus estudios de posgrado en temas afines al proyecto. El proyecto busca desarrollar tareas de investigación y desarrollo en temas relacionados a los sistemas embebidos, tanto en aspectos de software como de hardware. De este modo se busca desarrollar soluciones a problemas en áreas como visualización, optimización de sistemas operativos de tiempo real, sensores, etc. no solo desde el punto de vista algorítmico sino a partir de su implementación en sistemas de hardware programable como FPGAs.Eje: Procesamiento de Señales y Sistemas de Tiempo RealRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Characterization of a murine model of monocrotaline pyrrole-induced acute lung injury

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>New animal models of chronic pulmonary hypertension in mice are needed. The injection of monocrotaline is an established model of pulmonary hypertension in rats. The aim of this study was to establish a murine model of pulmonary hypertension by injection of the active metabolite, monocrotaline pyrrole.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Survival studies, computed tomographic scanning, histology, bronchoalveolar lavage were performed, and arterial blood gases and hemodynamics were measured in animals which received an intravenous injection of different doses of monocrotaline pyrrole.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Monocrotaline pyrrole induced pulmonary hypertension in Sprague Dawley rats. When injected into mice, monocrotaline pyrrole induced dose-dependant mortality in C57Bl6/N and BALB/c mice (dose range 6–15 mg/kg bodyweight). At a dose of 10 mg/kg bodyweight, mice developed a typical early-phase acute lung injury, characterized by lung edema, neutrophil influx, hypoxemia and reduced lung compliance. In the late phase, monocrotaline pyrrole injection resulted in limited lung fibrosis and no obvious pulmonary hypertension.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Monocrotaline and monocrotaline pyrrole pneumotoxicity substantially differs between the animal species.</p