Astragaloside IV inhibits cell invasion and metastasis in vulvar squamous cell carcinoma through the TGF-β1/FAK/AKT signaling pathway

Objectives: To investigate the mechanism of astragaloside IV (AS-IV) inhibiting the invasion and metastasis of vulvar squamous cell carcinoma (VSCC). Material and methods: MTT and plate colony-formation assays were used to examine the cell proliferation of VSCC (SW962 cell line). Transwell and scratch wound-healing assays were used to analyse cell migration and invasion. Western blot was used to detect the expression of relevant proteins in terms of cell proliferation, invasion and metastasis, as well as the TGF-β1/FAK/AKT signaling pathway. Results: The results showed that AS-IV inhibited the proliferation of SW962 cells in a concentration-dependent manner, as demonstrated by the upregulation of P53 and P21 expression and the downregulation of cyclin D1 expression. AS-IV decreased the ability of cell invasion and metastasis by the downregulation of MMP-2 and MMP-9 expression. When TGF-β1 was added to SW962 cells, the expression of the N-cadherin and Vimentin were upregulated and that of the E-cadherin was downregulated. Subsequently, fibroblast-like elongated spindle-shaped cells appeared, which suggests that TGF-β1 could induce EMT in SW962 cells. Furthermore, the expression of p-FAK, p-AKT, MMP-2 and MMP-9 were upregulated. The expression of these proteins exhibited the opposite effect after AS-IV intervention. Cell invasion and metastasis were suppressed. Conclusions: AS-IV inhibits cell invasion and metastasis in VSCC through the TGF-β1/FAK/AKT signalling pathway

Synthesis, Characterization and Anion Binding Properties of Boron-based Lewis Acids

The recognition and capture of fluoride, cyanide and azide anions is attracting great deal of attention due to the negative effects of these anions on the environment and on human health. One of common methods used for the recognition and capture of these anions is based on triarylboranes, the Lewis acidity of which can be enhanced via variation the steric and electronic properties of the boron substituents. This dissertation is dedicated to the synthesis of novel boron-based anion receptors that, for the most part, feature an onium group bound to one of the aryl substituents. The presence of this group is shown to increase the anion affinity of the boron center via Coulombic effects. Another interesting effect is observed when the onium group is juxtaposed with the boron atom. This is for example the case of naphthalene-based compounds bearing a dimesitylboryl moiety at one of the peri-position and a sulfonium or telluronium unit at the other peri position. Fluoride anion complexation studies with these sulfonium or telluronium boranes, show that the boron-bound fluoride anion is further stabilized by formation of a B-F->Te/S bridge involving a lp(F)->sigma*(Te/S-C) donor acceptor interaction. Some of the sulfonium boranes investigated have been shown to efficiently capture fluoride anions from wet methanolic solutions. The resulting fluoride/sulfonium borane adducts can be triggered to release a "naked" fluoride equivalent in organic solution and thus show promise as new reagents for nucleophilic fluorination chemistry. Interestingly, the telluronium systems show a greater fluoride anion affinity than their sulfonium analogs. This increase is assigned to the greater spatial and energetic accessibility of the sigma* orbital on the tellurium atom which favors the formation of a strong B-F->Te interaction. This dissertation is concluded by an investigation of the Lewis acidic properties of B(C6Cl5)3. This borane, which has been reported to be non-Lewis acidic by other researchers, is found by us to bind fluoride, azide and cyanide anions in dichloromethane with large binding constants. This borane is also reactive toward neutral Lewis bases, such as p-dimethylaminopyridine, in organic solvents

Automatic Article Commenting: the Task and Dataset

Comments of online articles provide extended views and improve user engagement. Automatically making comments thus become a valuable functionality for online forums, intelligent chatbots, etc. This paper proposes the new task of automatic article commenting, and introduces a large-scale Chinese dataset with millions of real comments and a human-annotated subset characterizing the comments' varying quality. Incorporating the human bias of comment quality, we further develop automatic metrics that generalize a broad set of popular reference-based metrics and exhibit greatly improved correlations with human evaluations.Comment: ACL2018; with supplements; Dataset link available in the pape

Power allocation for cache-aided small-cell networks with limited backhaul

Cache-aided small-cell network is becoming an effective method to improve the transmission rate and reduce the backhaul load. Due to the limited capacity of backhaul, less power should be allocated to users whose requested contents do not exist in the local caches to maximize the performance of caching. In this paper, power allocation is considered to improve the performance of cache-aided small-cell networks with limited backhaul, where interference alignment (IA) is utilized to manage interferences among users. Specifically, three power allocation algorithms are proposed. First, we come up with a power allocation algorithm to maximize the sum transmission rate of the network, considering the limitation of backhaul. Second, in order to have more users meet their rate requirements, a power allocation algorithm to minimizing the average outage probability is also proposed. In addition, in order to further improve the users’ experience, a power allocation algorithm that maximizes the average satisfaction of all the users is also designed. Simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness of the three proposed power allocation algorithms for cache-aided small-cell networks with limited backhaul

ηQ\eta_{Q} meson photoproduction in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions

The transverse momentum distributions for inclusive $\eta_{c,b}$ meson described by gluon-gluon interactions from photoproduction processes in relativistic heavy ion collisions are calculated. We considered the color singlet (CS) and color octet (CO) components with the framework of non-relativistic Quantum Chromodynamics (NRQCD) into the production of heavy quarkonium. The phenomenological values of the matrix elements for the color-singlet and color-octet components give the main contribution to the production of heavy quarkonium from the gluon-gluon interaction caused by the emission of additional gluon in the initial state. The numerical results indicate that the contribution of photoproduction processes cannot be negligible for mid-rapidity in p-p and Pb-Pb collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) energies.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure