An acidic fibroblast growth factor protein generated by alternate splicing acts like an antagonist.

Polymerase chain reaction amplification of cDNA for acidic fibroblast growth factor in several lines of cultured human cells revealed two forms of mRNA. The novel smaller mRNA lacks the entire second coding exon of the acidic fibroblast growth factor gene, whereas the previously identified mRNA consists of three coding exons. The truncated variant of acidic fibroblast growth factor (aFGF') is only 60 amino acids long with an apparent molecular mass of 6.7 kD on sodium dodecyl sulfate gels in contrast to 18 kD for the full-length acidic fibroblast growth factor. aFGF' elicits only minimal fibroblast proliferation and antagonizes the effects of acidic fibroblast growth factor when added exogenously to or when coexpressed with aFGF in BALB/c/3T3 fibroblasts. Thus, the truncated variant of acidic fibroblast growth factor may provide fibroblasts with a unique mechanism for endogenous regulation of their responses to acidic fibroblast growth factor

A Model for Investigating Developmental Eye Repair in Xenopus Laevis

Vertebrate eye development is complex and requires early interactions between neuroectoderm and surface ectoderm during embryogenesis. In the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, individual eye tissues such as the retina and lens can undergo regeneration. However, it has been reported that removal of either the specified eye field at the neurula stage or the eye during tadpole stage does not induce replacement. Here we describe a model for investigating Xenopus developmental eye repair. We found that tailbud embryos can readily regrow eyes after surgical removal of over 83% of the specified eye and lens tissues. The regrown eye reached a comparable size to the contralateral control by 5 days and overall animal development was normal. It contained the expected complement of eye cell types (including the pigmented epithelium, retina and lens), and is connected to the brain. Our data also demonstrate that apoptosis, an early mechanism that regulates appendage regeneration, is also required for eye regrowth. Treatment with apoptosis inhibitors (M50054 or NS3694) blocked eye regrowth by inhibiting caspase activation. Together, our findings indicate that frog embryos can undergo successful eye repair after considerable tissue loss and reveals a required role for apoptosis in this process. Furthermore, this Xenopus model allows for rapid comparisons of productive eye repair and developmental pathways. It can also facilitate the molecular dissection of signaling mechanisms necessary for initiating repair

Interference Mitigation and Sum Rate Optimization for MIMO Downlink Small Cells

This paper addresses interference issues in multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) downlink heterogeneous networks in which multiple small cells are deployed in macrocell coverage. With the higher priority to access the frequency bands, the macro base station (MBS) will exploit eigenmode transmission along with water-filling based power allocation to maximize its data rate. To avoid harmful interference to macro users, we propose structures of the precoders at the small cell BSs (SBSs) as cascades of two precoding matrices. In addition, to mitigate intra-tier inference in small cells, the SBSs exploit the user scheduling schemes for their associated users. We investigate two user scheduling schemes using the minimum interference leakage and maximum signal to noise ratio criteria. The sum rate of the selected users can be further improved by power allocation. We develop an iterative algorithm using difference of convex functions (d.c.) programming to tackle the mathematical challenges of the nonconvex power allocation problem, Numerical simulation results show that the proposed strategy outperforms the conventional methods in terms of the achievable sum rate

Min-Max MSE-based Interference Alignment for Transceiver Designs in Cognitive Radio Networks

This paper is concerned with an optimal design of the precoders and receive filters for cognitive radio (CR) networks in which multiple secondary users (SUs) share the same frequency band with multiple primary users (PUs). To cope with interference and to achieve fairness among users, we develop an interference alignment (IA) scheme by minimizing the maximum mean squared error (Min-Max MSE) of the received signals. Since the Min-Max MSE design problems are nonconvex in the design matrix variables of the precoders and receive filters, we develop an alternating optimization algorithm with provable convergence to iteratively find the optimal solutions. In each iteration, the precoder design problems can be recast as second order cone program (SOCP) while the optimal receive filters can be derived in closed-form solutions. Finally, numerical results are provided to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method as compared to previous work in terms of the information rate and bit error rate