MicroRNA-206: Effective Inhibition of Gastric Cancer Progression through the c-Met Pathway

MicroRNAs are endogenous short chain nucleotide RNAs that regulate gene function by direct binding of target mRNAs. In this study, we investigated the effects of microRNA-206 (miR-206) on the development of gastric cancer. miR-206 was first confirmed to be downregulated in gastric cancer specimens. Conversely, upregulation of c-Met was confirmed in tissue samples of human gastric cancer, with its level inversely correlated with miR-206 expression. Introduction of miR-206 inhibited cellular proliferation by inducing G1 cell cycle arrest, as well as migration and invasion. Moreover, important proliferation and/or migration related molecules such as c-Met, CDK4, p-Rb, p-Akt and p-ERK were confirmed to be downregulated by Western blot analysis. Targeting of c-Met also directly affected AGS cell proliferation, migration and invasion. In vivo, miR-206 expressing tumor cells also displayed growth delay in comparison to unaffected tumor cells. Our results demonstrated that miR-206 suppressed c-Met expression in gastric cancer and could function as a potent tumor suppressor in c-Met overexpressing tumors. Inhibition of miR-206 function could contribute to aberrant cell proliferation and migration, leading to gastric cancer development

Effect of the size of GdBCO-Ag secondary magnet on the static forces performance of linear synchronous motors

Bulk high temperature superconductor magnets (HTSM) have a higher flux-generating capability compared to conventional permanent magnets (PMs). These materials potentially can be used in high temperature superconducting (HTS) linear synchronous motors (LSMs) as superconducting secondary magnets, what will result in a reduced volume and weight as well as in higher force density and efficiency of these devices when compared to conventional PMs. The focus of this paper is on the effect of size of the secondary HTSM on the static performance (thrust force and normal force) of a LSM. In order to obtain high-field HTSM as the secondary, single grain bulk GdBCO-Ag superconductors of diameter 20 mm, 30 mm and 40 mm, which have higher Jc and trapped fields than YBCO superconductors, were used in this device for the first time following application by the same optimized magnetization condition. It was found that both thrust and normal forces increase and saturate with the increasing size of the HTSM secondary at the small size range, and then potentially distort when the physical size of the HTSM secondary approaches the pole pitch of the linear three-phase primary windings of the LSM. Furthermore, more experiments of a larger-sized multi-seeded HTSM secondary, confirmed that the relationship between the HTSM secondary size and the pole pitch of the primary is an important factor for achieving higher thrust and normal forces. It is suggested that the multi-pole HTSM secondary will be more beneficial to future HTS LSM designs since the single-pole HTSM secondary size should be equal to or smaller than the stator pole pitch in the paper.This is the final version. It was first published by IOP at http://iopscience.iop.org/0953-2048/27/11/115016/article?fromSearchPage=tru

Entanglement Structure: Entanglement Partitioning in Multipartite Systems and Its Experimental Detection Using Optimizable Witnesses

Creating large-scale entanglement lies at the heart of many quantum information processing protocols and the investigation of fundamental physics. For multipartite quantum systems, it is crucial to identify not only the presence of entanglement but also its detailed structure. This is because in a generic experimental situation with sufficiently many subsystems involved, the production of so-called genuine multipartite entanglement remains a formidable challenge. Consequently, focusing exclusively on the identification of this strongest type of entanglement may result in an all or nothing situation where some inherently quantum aspects of the resource are overlooked. On the contrary, even if the system is not genuinely multipartite entangled, there may still be many-body entanglement present in the system. An identification of the entanglement structure may thus provide us with a hint about where imperfections in the setup may occur, as well as where we can identify groups of subsystems that can still exhibit strong quantum-information-processing capabilities. However, there is no known efficient methods to identify the underlying entanglement structure. Here, we propose two complementary families of witnesses for the identification of such structures. They are based on the detection of entanglement intactness and entanglement depth, each requires only the implementation of solely two local measurements. Our method is also robust against noises and other imperfections, as reflected by our experimental implementation of these tools to verify the entanglement structure of five different eight-photon entangled states. We demonstrate how their entanglement structure can be precisely and systematically inferred from the experimental data. In achieving this goal, we also illustrate how the same set of data can be classically postprocessed to learn the most about the measured system.Comment: 21 pages, 13 figure

Digital photoprogramming of liquid-crystal superstructures featuring intrinsic chiral photoswitches

Dynamic patterning of soft materials in a fully reversible and programmable manner with light enables applications in anti-counterfeiting, displays and labelling technology. However, this is a formidable challenge due to the lack of suitable chiral molecular photoswitches. Here, we report the development of a unique intrinsic chiral photoswitch with broad chirality modulation to achieve digitally controllable, selectable and extractable multiple stable reflection states. An anti-counterfeiting technique, embedded with diverse microstructures, featuring colour-tunability, erasability, reversibility, multi-stability and viewing-angle dependency of pre-recorded patterns, is established with these photoresponsive superstructures. This strategy allows dynamic helical transformation from the molecular and supramolecular to the macroscopic level using light-activated intrinsic chirality, demonstrating the practicality of photoprogramming photonics

Observation of non-Hermitian antichiral edge currents

Non-Hermitian topological photonics is of great interest in bridging topological matter with gain/dissipation engineering in optics. A key problem in this direction is the interplay between the effective gauge potential and the non-Hermiticity. Here we tackle this problem in a synthetic non-Hermitian Hall ladder and experimentally observe antichiral edge currents (ACECs) of photons, by tuning the locally uniform effective magnetic flux and the on-site gain/loss. Such ACECs provide a topological method to probe the signatures of the non-Hermitian skin effect (NHSE) from steady-state bulk dynamics. The universality of this method is verified by its generalization to three dimensions. This study paves a way to investigate exotic non-Hermitian topological physics and has potential applications in topological photonics engineering