(De-)activating the growth machine for redevelopment: the case of Liede urban village in Guangzhou

This research investigates the mechanism of urban village redevelopment in south China. Through a revised typology of place entrepreneurs based on the growth machine thesis and a case study of Liede village in central Guangzhou, it illustrates how land-based interests embedded in an imbalanced power relationship can (de-)activate urban village redevelopment. The study reveals that while urban villagers, as represented by the village collective, have entrenched interests in the redevelopment process, the city government – as monopolistic land manager and place entrepreneur – plays the deciding role in forging and halting a growth machine geared towards urban village redevelopment. Although developers are also part of the process, the (de-)activation of redevelopment growth machine/coalition in Guangzhou has largely been dominated by the city government. With a comparative view on the original growth machine model, it is hoped that this study would furnish both theoretical and practical thoughts for future research

Point-Voxel Absorbing Graph Representation Learning for Event Stream based Recognition

Considering the balance of performance and efficiency, sampled point and voxel methods are usually employed to down-sample dense events into sparse ones. After that, one popular way is to leverage a graph model which treats the sparse points/voxels as nodes and adopts graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn the representation for event data. Although good performance can be obtained, however, their results are still limited mainly due to two issues. (1) Existing event GNNs generally adopt the additional max (or mean) pooling layer to summarize all node embeddings into a single graph-level representation for the whole event data representation. However, this approach fails to capture the importance of graph nodes and also fails to be fully aware of the node representations. (2) Existing methods generally employ either a sparse point or voxel graph representation model which thus lacks consideration of the complementary between these two types of representation models. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel dual point-voxel absorbing graph representation learning for event stream data representation. To be specific, given the input event stream, we first transform it into the sparse event cloud and voxel grids and build dual absorbing graph models for them respectively. Then, we design a novel absorbing graph convolutional network (AGCN) for our dual absorbing graph representation and learning. The key aspect of the proposed AGCN is its ability to effectively capture the importance of nodes and thus be fully aware of node representations in summarizing all node representations through the introduced absorbing nodes. Finally, the event representations of dual learning branches are concatenated together to extract the complementary information of two cues. The output is then fed into a linear layer for event data classification

Malignant priapism secondary to metastatic colon adenocarcinoma: a case report

Background and objective: Priapism is an uncommon urological emergency, and is even less commonly caused by colon adenocarcinoma metastasis. The aim of this article is to report a case of malignant priapism caused by metastatic colon adenocarcinoma. Methods and materials: Case sharing and clinical experience summary of a 61-year-old man with priapism and hematuria persisting for more than 30 days presented to our hospital in September 2019. Results: The patient did not have a history of perineal trauma, nervous system disease, or hematological system disease. Penile Doppler ultrasound showed no obvious blood flow signal, and penile arterial blood gas parameters were pH of 7.01, partial pressure of oxygen of 26 mmHg, and partial pressure of carbon dioxide of 71 mmHg, suggesting the occurrence of ischemic priapism. Abdominopelvic computed tomography enhancement images showed a localized irregular shape and high-density imaging of the root of the corpus cavernosum. Histopathology after cystoscopy confirmed the metastasis of colon adenocarcinoma. Superselective embolization of the internal pudendal artery was performed, which partially relieve the abnormal penile erection, but drug treatment did not significantly alleviate the patient’s priapism. Conclusion: Priapism secondary to metastatic colon adenocarcinoma suggests systemic dissemination, indicative of a poor prognosis. In such cases, unnecessary surgery should be avoided. Superselective embolization could be an optional treatment for priapism secondary to cancer

The involvement of jasmonates and ethylene in Alternaria alternata f. sp. lycopersici toxin-induced tomato cell death

Previous studies have shown that an ethylene (ET)-dependent pathway is involved in the cell death signalling triggered by Alternaria alternata f. sp. lycopersici (AAL) toxin in detached tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) leaves. In this study, the role of jasmonic acid (JA) signalling in programmed cell death (PCD) induced by AAL toxin was analysed using a 35S::prosystemin transgenic line (35S::prosys), a JA-deficient mutant spr2, and a JA-insensitive mutant jai1. The results indicated that JA biosynthesis and signalling play a positive role in the AAL toxin-induced PCD process. In addition, treatment with the exogenous ET action inhibitor silver thiosulphate (STS) greatly suppressed necrotic lesions in 35S::prosys leaves, although 35S::prosys leaflets co-treated with AAL toxin and STS still have a significant high relative conductivity. Application of 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylic acid (ACC) markedly enhanced the sensitivity of spr2 and jai1 mutants to the toxin. However, compared with AAL toxin treatment alone, exogenous application of JA to the ET-insensitive mutant Never ripe (Nr) did not alter AAL toxin-induced cell death. In addition, the reduced ET-mediated gene expression in jai1 leaves was restored by co-treatment with ACC and AAL toxin. Furthermore, JA treatment restored the decreased expression of ET biosynthetic genes but not ET-responsive genes in the Nr mutant compared with the toxin treatment alone. Based on these results, it is proposed that both JA and ET promote the AAL toxin-induced cell death alone, and the JAI1 receptor-dependent JA pathway also acts upstream of ET biosynthesis in AAL toxin-triggered PCD

Clinicopathological significance of SOX4 expression in primary gallbladder carcinoma

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Aim</p> <p>SOX4, as a member of the SRY-related HMG-box (SOX) transcription factor family, has been demonstrated to be involved in tumorigenesis of many human malignancies; however, its role in primary gallbladder carcinoma (PGC) is still largely unknown. The aim of this study was to investigate SOX4 expression in PGC and its prognostic significance.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>From 1997 to 2006, 136 patients underwent resection for PGC. The median follow-up was 12.8 months. Immunostainings for SOX4 were performed on these archival tissues. The correlation of SOX4 expression with clinicopathological features including survival was analyzed.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>SOX4 was expressed in 75.0% (102/136) of PGC but not in the normal epithelium of the gallbladder. In addition, the over-expression of SOX4 was significantly associated with low histologic grade (<it>P </it>= 0.02), low pathologic T stage (<it>P </it>= 0.02), and early clinical stage (<it>P </it>= 0.03). The levels of SOX4 immunostainings in PGC tissues with positive nodal metastasis were also significantly lower than those without (<it>P </it>= 0.01). Moreover, Kaplan-Meier curves showed that SOX4 over-expression was significantly related to better overall (<it>P </it>= 0.008) and disease-free survival (<it>P </it>= 0.01). Furthermore, multivariate analyses showed that SOX4 expression was an independent risk factor for both overall (<it>P </it>= 0.03, hazard ratio, 3.682) and disease-free survival (<it>P </it>= 0.04, hazard ratio, 2.215).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our data indicate for the first time that the over-expression of SOX4 in PGC was significantly correlated with favorable clinicopathologic features and was an independent prognostic factor for better overall and disease-free survival in patients. Therefore, SOX4 might be an auxiliary parameter for predicting malignant behavior for PGC.</p> <p>Virtual slides</p> <p>The virtual slide(s) for this article can be found here: <url>http://www.diagnosticpathology.diagnomx.eu/vs/1534825818694957</url>.</p

Type One Protein Phosphatase 1 and Its Regulatory Protein Inhibitor 2 Negatively Regulate ABA Signaling

The phytohormone abscisic acid (ABA) regulates plant growth, development and responses to biotic and abiotic stresses. The core ABA signaling pathway consists of three major components: ABA receptor (PYR1/PYLs), type 2C Protein Phosphatase (PP2C) and SNF1-related protein kinase 2 (SnRK2). Nevertheless, the complexity of ABA signaling remains to be explored. To uncover new components of ABA signal transduction pathways, we performed a yeast two-hybrid screen for SnRK2-interacting proteins. We found that Type One Protein Phosphatase 1 (TOPP1) and its regulatory protein, At Inhibitor-2 (AtI-2), physically interact with SnRK2s and also with PYLs. TOPP1 inhibited the kinase activity of SnRK2.6, and this inhibition could be enhanced by AtI-2. Transactivation assays showed that TOPP1 and AtI-2 negatively regulated the SnRK2.2/3/6-mediated activation of the ABA responsive reporter gene RD29B, supporting a negative role of TOPP1 and AtI-2 in ABA signaling. Consistent with these findings, topp1 and ati-2 mutant plants displayed hypersensitivities to ABA and salt treatments, and transcriptome analysis of TOPP1 and AtI-2 knockout plants revealed an increased expression of multiple ABA-responsive genes in the mutants. Taken together, our results uncover TOPP1 and AtI-2 as negative regulators of ABA signaling. © 2016 Hou et al

The THO Complex Regulates Pluripotency Gene mRNA Export and Controls Embryonic Stem Cell Self-Renewal and Somatic Cell Reprogramming

Embryonic stem cell (ESC) self-renewal and differentiation are governed by a broad-ranging regulatory network. Although the transcriptional regulatory mechanisms involved have been investigated extensively, post-transcriptional regulation is still poorly understood. Here we describe a critical role of the THO complex in ESC self-renewal and differentiation. We show that THO preferentially interacts with pluripotency gene transcripts through Thoc5, and is required for self-renewal at least in part by regulating their export and expression. During differentiation, THO loses its interaction with those transcripts due to reduced Thoc5 expression, leading to decreased expression of pluripotency proteins that facilitates exit from self-renewal. THO is also important for the establishment of pluripotency, as its depletion inhibits somatic cell reprogramming and blastocyst development. Together, our data indicate that THO regulates pluripotency gene mRNA export to control ESC self-renewal and differentiation, and therefore uncover a role for this aspect of post-transcriptional regulation in stem cell fate specification

BRD4 Inhibitor Inhibits Colorectal Cancer Growth and Metastasis

Post-translational modifications have been identified to be of great importance in cancers and lysine acetylation, which can attract the multifunctional transcription factor BRD4, has been identified as a potential therapeutic target. In this paper, we identify that BRD4 has an important role in colorectal cancer; and that its inhibition substantially wipes out tumor cells. Treatment with inhibitor MS417 potently affects cancer cells, although such effects were not always outright necrosis or apoptosis. We report that BRD4 inhibition also limits distal metastasis by regulating several key proteins in the progression of epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT). This effect of BRD4 inhibitor is demonstrated via liver metastasis in animal model as well as migration and invasion experiments in vitro. Together, our results demonstrate a new application of BRD4 inhibitor that may be of clinical use by virtue of its ability to limit metastasis while also being tumorcidal