Expression and biological significance of c-FLIP in human hepatocellular carcinomas

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>c-FLIP can be considered as a tumor-progression factor in regard to its anti-apoptotic functions. In the present study, we intended to investigate the expression of c-FLIP in human HCC tissues, and its relation with drug-induced cell apoptosis through the specific inhibition of c-FLIP expression by siRNA in 7721 cells.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>c-FLIP expression was quantified immunohistochemically in HCC tissues(eighty-six cases), and corresponding noncancerous tissues (fifty-seven cases). Patients with HCC were followed up for cancer recurrence. Then, the c-FLIP gene was silenced with specific siRNA in 7721 HCC cells. c-FLIP expression was detected by RT-PCR, Western Blot and immunocytochemical staining. The cellular viability and cell apoptosis were assayed <it>in vitro </it>with cells treated with doxorubicin.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Positive immunostaining was detected for c-FLIP in 83.72% (72/86) human HCC tissues, 14.81% (4/27) hepatic cirrhosis, 11.11% (2/18) hepatic hemangioma tissues, and absent in normal hepatic tissues. The overexpression(more than 50%) of c-FLIP in HCC adversely affected the recurrence-free survival. Through c-FLIP gene silencing with siRNA, the expressions of c-FLIP mRNA and protein were remarkably down-regulated in 7721 HCC cells. And doxorubicin showed apparent inhibition on cell proliferations, and induced more apoptosis.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>These results indicate that c-FLIP is frequently expressed in human HCCs, and its overexpression implied a lesser probability of recurrence-free survival. The specific silencing of c-FLIP gene can apparently up-regulate drug-induced HCC cell apoptosis, and may have therapeutic potential for the treatment of human HCC.</p

Mechanisms of Stress Tolerance in Xerophyte \u3cem\u3eZygophyllum xanthoxylum\u3c/em\u3e and Their Application in Genetic Improvement of Legume Forages

Xerophytes, naturally growing in desert areas, have evolved multiple protective mechanisms to survive and grow well in harsh environments. Zygophyllum xanthoxylum, a succulent xerophyte with excellent adaptability to adverse arid environments and a fodder shrub with high palatability and nutrient value, colonizes arid areas in China and Mongolia. In this study, we found that Z. xanthoxylum grew better responding to salt condition with a typical feature for halophytes and became more tolerant to drought in the presence of moderate salinity (50 mM NaCl); 50 mM NaCl alleviated deleterious impacts of drought on the growth of Z. xanthoxylum by improving the relative water content, inducing a significant drop in leaf water potential and, concomitantly, increasing leaf turgor pressure and chlorophyll concentrations resulting in an enhancement of overall plant photosynthetic activity. Subsequently, co-expression of genes encoding the tonoplast Na+/H+ antiporter (ZxNHX) and H+-PPase (ZxVP1-1) which involve in leaf Na+ accumulation under stress condition by compartmentalizing Na+ into vacuoles in Z. xanthoxylum significantly improved both drought and salt tolerance in legume forages, Lotus corniculatus L. and Medicago sativa L

Geo6D: Geometric Constraints Learning for 6D Pose Estimation

Numerous 6D pose estimation methods have been proposed that employ end-to-end regression to directly estimate the target pose parameters. Since the visible features of objects are implicitly influenced by their poses, the network allows inferring the pose by analyzing the differences in features in the visible region. However, due to the unpredictable and unrestricted range of pose variations, the implicitly learned visible feature-pose constraints are insufficiently covered by the training samples, making the network vulnerable to unseen object poses. To tackle these challenges, we proposed a novel geometric constraints learning approach called Geo6D for direct regression 6D pose estimation methods. It introduces a pose transformation formula expressed in relative offset representation, which is leveraged as geometric constraints to reconstruct the input and output targets of the network. These reconstructed data enable the network to estimate the pose based on explicit geometric constraints and relative offset representation mitigates the issue of the pose distribution gap. Extensive experimental results show that when equipped with Geo6D, the direct 6D methods achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets and demonstrate significant effectiveness, even with only 10% amount of data

A macro-element based practical model for seismic analysis of steel-concrete composite high-rise buildings

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Engineering Structures. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2012 Elsevier B.V.Seismic behaviour of steel–concrete composite high-rise buildings, composed of external steel frames (SFs) and internal concrete tube (CT), with rectangular plan is investigated in this paper. A macro-element based model is established for seismic analysis of composite high-rise buildings aiming at predicting their global responses under earthquakes. By employing this macro-element based model, natural frequencies and vibration modes, storey and inter-storey drifts, overturning moments and storey shear forces of composite structures, induced by earthquakes, are able to be obtained with much less computation time and cost compared with using micro-element based analytical models. To validate its efficiency and reliability, the macro-element based model is employed to analyse a 1/20 scaled-down model of a 25-storey steel–concrete composite high-rise building subjected to simulated earthquakes with various intensities through a shaking table. Natural frequencies and storey drifts of the model structure are obtained from numerical analyses and compared with those from shaking table test results. It has been found that the calculated dynamic responses of the composite model structure subjected to minor, basic, major and super strong earthquakes agree reasonably well with those obtained from experiments, suggesting that the proposed macro-element based model is appropriate for inelastic time-history analyse for global responses of steel–concrete composite high-rise structures subjected to earthquakes with satisfactory precision and reliability. This research thus provides a practical model for elastic and inelastic deformation check of high-rise composite buildings under earthquakes.Ministry of Science and Technology of Chin

Mobile robotics platform for strawberry temporal–spatial yield monitoring within precision indoor farming systems

Plant phenotyping and production management are emerging fields to facilitate Genetics, Environment, &amp; Management (GEM) research and provide production guidance. Precision indoor farming systems (PIFS), vertical farms with artificial light (aka plant factories) in particular, have long been suitable production scenes due to the advantages of efficient land utilization and year-round cultivation. In this study, a mobile robotics platform (MRP) within a commercial plant factory has been developed to dynamically understand plant growth and provide data support for growth model construction and production management by periodical monitoring of individual strawberry plants and fruit. Yield monitoring, where yield = the total number of ripe strawberry fruit detected, is a critical task to provide information on plant phenotyping. The MRP consists of an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) and a multilayer perception robot (MPR), i.e., MRP = the MPR installed on top of the AMR. The AMR is capable of traveling along the aisles between plant growing rows. The MPR consists of a data acquisition module that can be raised to the height of any plant growing tier of each row by a lifting module. Adding AprilTag observations (captured by a monocular camera) into the inertial navigation system to form an ATI navigation system has enhanced the MRP navigation within the repetitive and narrow physical structure of a plant factory to capture and correlate the growth and position information of each individual strawberry plant. The MRP performed robustly at various traveling speeds with a positioning accuracy of 13.0 mm. The temporal–spatial yield monitoring within a whole plant factory can be achieved to guide farmers to harvest strawberries on schedule through the MRP’s periodical inspection. The yield monitoring performance was found to have an error rate of 6.26% when the plants were inspected at a constant MRP traveling speed of 0.2 m/s. The MRP’s functions are expected to be transferable and expandable to other crop production monitoring and cultural tasks

Evolutionary transition between invertebrates and vertebrates via methylation reprogramming in embryogenesis

© The Author(s), 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Xu, X., Li, G., Li, C., Zhang, J., Wang, Q., Simmons, D. K., Chen, X., Wijesena, N., Zhu, W., Wang, Z., Wang, Z., Ju, B., Ci, W., Lu, X., Yu, D., Wang, Q., Aluru, N., Oliveri, P., Zhang, Y. E., Martindale, M. Q., & Liu, J. Evolutionary transition between invertebrates and vertebrates via methylation reprogramming in embryogenesis. National Science Review, 6(5), (2019):993-1003, doi:10.1093/nsr/nwz064.Major evolutionary transitions are enigmas, and the most notable enigma is between invertebrates and vertebrates, with numerous spectacular innovations. To search for the molecular connections involved, we asked whether global epigenetic changes may offer a clue by surveying the inheritance and reprogramming of parental DNA methylation across metazoans. We focused on gametes and early embryos, where the methylomes are known to evolve divergently between fish and mammals. Here, we find that methylome reprogramming during embryogenesis occurs neither in pre-bilaterians such as cnidarians nor in protostomes such as insects, but clearly presents in deuterostomes such as echinoderms and invertebrate chordates, and then becomes more evident in vertebrates. Functional association analysis suggests that DNA methylation reprogramming is associated with development, reproduction and adaptive immunity for vertebrates, but not for invertebrates. Interestingly, the single HOX cluster of invertebrates maintains unmethylated status in all stages examined. In contrast, the multiple HOX clusters show dramatic dynamics of DNA methylation during vertebrate embryogenesis. Notably, the methylation dynamics of HOX clusters are associated with their spatiotemporal expression in mammals. Our study reveals that DNA methylation reprogramming has evolved dramatically during animal evolution, especially after the evolutionary transitions from invertebrates to vertebrates, and then to mammals.This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2018YFC1003303), the Strategic Priority Research Program of the CAS (XDB13040200), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (91519306, 31425015), the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the CAS and the Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences, CAS (QYZDY-SSW-SMC016)