TGF-β1 and IL-10 expression in epithelial ovarian cancer cell line A2780

Purpose: Ovarian cancer is a leading cause of death among gynaecological malignancies. Transforming growth factor-beta 1 (TGF β1) and interleukin-10 (IL-10) are cytokines in the tumour microenvironment and may play critical roles in immune suppression. This study highlights these roles and immunosuppressive functions in epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC).Methods: TGF-β1 and IL-10 expression was compared in malignant, benign, and borderline cancerous tissues and tumour-free tissue by immunohistochemistry. Relationships among the levels of these cytokines, correlation of expression level with EOC prognosis, and cytokine involvement in immunosuppression were investigated.Results: Immunohistochemical analysis of TGF-β1 and IL-10 in epithelial cells showed the presence of epithelial, borderline, and benign ovarian tumour growth, and normal ovarian growth. TGF-β1 (P = 0.121), residual tumour after surgery (P = 0.231) and standard chemotherapy (P = 0.121) were prognostic factors for EOC. There were no significant differences in clinicopathologic factors between specimens expressing TGF-β1 at low and high levels, indicating that TGF-β1 is an independent factor in EOC diagnosis. Higher concentrations of TGF-β1 (1754.690 ± 3416.487 pg/ml) and IL 10 (2731.7101 ± 6.1613 pg/ml) were observed in A2780-conditioned than in control medium.Conclusion: TGF-β1 and IL-10 play pivotal roles in EOC and can lead to immune evasion. Targeting these cytokines for tumour treatment, specifically at early stages, may prevent tumour progression.Keywords: Epithelial ovarian cancer, TGF-β1, IL-10, histopatholog

A Fast and Provable Algorithm for Sparse Phase Retrieval

We study the sparse phase retrieval problem, which aims to recover a sparse signal from a limited number of phaseless measurements. Existing algorithms for sparse phase retrieval primarily rely on first-order methods with linear convergence rate. In this paper, we propose an efficient second-order algorithm based on Newton projection, which maintains the same per-iteration computational complexity as popular first-order methods. The proposed algorithm is theoretically guaranteed to converge to the ground truth (up to a global sign) at a quadratic convergence rate after at most $O\big(\log (\Vert \mathbf{x}^{\natural} \, \Vert /x_{\min}^{\natural})\big)$ iterations, provided a sample complexity of $O(s^2\log n)$, where $\mathbf{x}^{\natural} \in \mathbb{R}^n$ represents an $s$-sparse ground truth signal. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our algorithm not only outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of achieving a significantly faster convergence rate, but also excels in attaining a higher success rate for exact signal recovery from noise-free measurements and providing enhanced signal reconstruction in noisy scenarios

In vitro antioxidant activity and inhibitory hepatic steatosis effect on oleic acid-induced fatty liver model of consecutive extracts from Rosa davurica Pall

The nutrient and phytochemical composition of Rosa davurica Pall. fruit (RDF) from China were determined, including sugar, reducing sugar, ascorbic acid, caroteniods and phenolics. RDF was successively extracted with chloroform, ethyl acetate (EA), water-saturated n-butanol, ethanol and distilled water, respectively. Among the five fractions, EA fraction revealed the highest total phenolic content and the strongest antioxidant ability in cyclic voltammograms (CV) and oxygen radical absorbance capacity (ORAC) assays. Moreover, the strongest inhibitory activity against oleic acidinduced (OA-induced) fatty liver in vitro was also the EA fraction. Further, it was separated by a semipreparative high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) on C18 column. The most active fraction (EA-FII) of EA in all assays above, which mainly included catechin, quercetin-sedoheptulose and quercetin-94, was identified by LC/MS, HPLC and ultraviolet (UV)/V spectrum analysis.Keywords: RDF extracts, composition properties, antioxidant ability, inhibitory activity, oleic acid-induced, HPLC, LC/MS.African Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 12(31), pp. 4944-495

Fast Projected Newton-like Method for Precision Matrix Estimation with Nonnegative Partial Correlations

We study the problem of estimating precision matrices in multivariate Gaussian distributions where all partial correlations are nonnegative, also known as multivariate totally positive of order two ($\mathrm{MTP}_2$). Such models have received significant attention in recent years, primarily due to interesting properties, e.g., the maximum likelihood estimator exists with as few as two observations regardless of the underlying dimension. We formulate this problem as a weighted $\ell_1$-norm regularized Gaussian maximum likelihood estimation under $\mathrm{MTP}_2$ constraints. On this direction, we propose a novel projected Newton-like algorithm that incorporates a well-designed approximate Newton direction, which results in our algorithm having the same orders of computation and memory costs as those of first-order methods. We prove that the proposed projected Newton-like algorithm converges to the minimizer of the problem. We further show, both theoretically and experimentally, that the minimizer of our formulation using the weighted $\ell_1$-norm is able to recover the support of the underlying precision matrix correctly without requiring the incoherence condition present in $\ell_1$-norm based methods. Experiments involving synthetic and real-world data demonstrate that our proposed algorithm is significantly more efficient, from a computational time perspective, than the state-of-the-art methods. Finally, we apply our method in financial time-series data, which are well-known for displaying positive dependencies, where we observe a significant performance in terms of modularity value on the learned financial networks.Comment: 43 pages; notation updated for section

Electromagnetic cloaking by layered structure of homogeneous isotropic materials

Electromagnetic invisibility cloak requires material with anisotropic distribution of the constitutive parameters deduced from a geometrical transformation as first proposed by Pendry et al. [Science 312, 1780 (2006)]. In this paper, we proposed a useful method to realize the required radius-dependent, anisotropic material parameters and to construct an electromagnetic cloak through concentric layered structure of thin, alternating layers of homogeneous isotropic materials. With proper design of the permittivity or the thickness ratio of the alternating layers, we demonstrated the low-reflection and power-flow bending properties of the proposed cloaking structure through rigorous analysis of the scattered electromagnetic fields. The proposed cloaking structure does not require anisotropy or inhomogeneity of the material constitutive parameters usually realized by metamaterials with subwavelength structured inclusions, therefore may lead to a practical path to an experimental demonstration of electromagnetic cloaking, especially in the optical range.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure