Post-transcriptional control during chronic inflammation and cancer: a focus on AU-rich elements

A considerable number of genes that code for AU-rich mRNAs including cytokines, growth factors, transcriptional factors, and certain receptors are involved in both chronic inflammation and cancer. Overexpression of these genes is affected by aberrations or by prolonged activation of several signaling pathways. AU-rich elements (ARE) are important cis-acting short sequences in the 3′UTR that mediate recognition of an array of RNA-binding proteins and affect mRNA stability and translation. This review addresses the cellular and molecular mechanisms that are common between inflammation and cancer and that also govern ARE-mediated post-transcriptional control. The first part examines the role of the ARE-genes in inflammation and cancer and sequence characteristics of AU-rich elements. The second part addresses the common signaling pathways in inflammation and cancer that regulate the ARE-mediated pathways and how their deregulations affect ARE-gene regulation and disease outcome

A Module Language for Typing SIGNAL Programs by Contracts

Chapter 5, on "A Module Language for Typing SIGNAL Programs by Contracts", brings up the polychronous model of computation to present a means to modularly and compositionally support assumption-guarantee reasoning in that framework. Contract-based design has become a popular reasoning concept in which contracts are used to negotiate the correctness of assumptions made on th definition of a component at the point where it is used and provides guarantees to its environment. The chapter first elaborates formal foundations by defining a Boolean algebra of contracts in a trace-theoretical framework. Based on that contracts algebra, a general-purpose module language is then specified. The algebra and module system are instantiated to the framework of the synchronous data-flow language Signal. This presentation is illustrated with the specification of a protocol for Loosely Time-Triggered Architectures (LTTA)