Intermittent hypoxia accelerates adipogenic differentiation in human subcutaneous preadipocytes in vitro

Poster Discussion Session - B30. Beast is Inside: What Causes the Adverse Outcomes of Sleep Disordered Breathing: no. A2704RATIONALE: Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), characterized by intermittent hypoxia (IH), is highly associated with obesity. Depot-specific adipogenic differentiation, an important physiological mechanism in maintaining adipose tissue homeostasis, could be regulated by intracellular transcriptional factors, extracellular signaling pathways and inflammation in obesity. However, the impact of IH on adipogeneisis is unclear. This study aims at investigating the pathologic role of IH during the adipogenic differentiation process in human subcutaneous preadipocytes in …published_or_final_versio

Emerging biogenesis technologies of extracellular vesicles for tissue regenerative therapeutics

Extracellular vesicles (EVs), including exosomes, carry the genetic packages of RNA, DNA, and proteins and are heavily involved in cell-cell communications and intracellular signalings. Therefore, EVs are spotlighted as therapeutic mediators for the treatment of injured and dysfunctional tissues as well as biomarkers for the detection of disease status and progress. Several key issues in EVs, including payload content and bioactivity, targeting and bio-imaging ability, and mass-production, need to be improved to enable effective therapeutics and clinical translation. For this, significant efforts have been made recently, including genetic modification, biomolecular and chemical treatment, application of physical/mechanical cues, and 3D cultures. Here we communicate those recent technological advances made mainly in the biogenesis process of EVs or at post-collection stages, which ultimately aimed to improve the therapeutic efficacy in tissue healing and disease curing and the possibility of clinical translation. This communication will help tissue engineers and biomaterial scientists design and produce EVs optimally for tissue regenerative therapeutics

Biological potential of polyethylene glycol (Peg)-functionalized graphene quantum dots in in vitro neural stem/progenitor cells

Stem cell therapy is one of the novel and prospective fields. The ability of stem cells to differentiate into different lineages makes them attractive candidates for several therapies. It is essential to understand the cell fate, distribution, and function of transplanted cells in the local microenvironment before their applications. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an accurate and reliable labeling method of stem cells for imaging techniques to track their translocation after transplantation. The graphitic quantum dots (GQDs) are selected among various stem cell labeling and tracking strategies which have high photoluminescence ability, photostability, relatively low cytotoxicity, tunable surface functional groups, and delivering capacity. Since GQDs interact easily with the cell and interfere with cell behavior through surface functional groups, an appropriate surface modification needs to be considered to get close to the ideal labeling nanoprobes. In this study, polyethylene glycol (PEG) is used to improve biocompatibility while simultaneously maintaining the photoluminescent potentials of GQDs. The biochemically inert PEG successfully covered the surface of GQDs. The PEG-GQDs composites show adequate bioimaging capabilities when internalized into neural stem/progenitor cells (NSPCs). Furthermore, the bio-inertness of the PEG-GQDs is confirmed. Herein, we introduce the PEG-GQDs as a valuable tool for stem cell labeling and tracking for biomedical therapies in the field of neural regeneration

Traffic agents for improving QoS in mixed infrastructure and ad hoc modes wireless LAN

As an important complement to infrastructured wireless networks, mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) are more flexible in providing wireless access services, but more difficult in meeting different quality of service (QoS) requirements for mobile customers. Both infrastructure and ad hoc network structures are supported in wireless local area networks (WLAN), which can offer high data-rate wireless multimedia services to the mobile stations (MSs) in a limited geographical area. For those out-of-coverage MSs, how to effectively connect them to the access point (AP) and provide QoS support is a challenging issue. By mixing the infrastructure and the ad hoc modes in WLAN, we propose in this paper a new coverage improvement scheme that can identify suitable idle MSs in good service zones as traffic agents (TAs) to relay traffic from those out-of-coverage MSs to the AP. The service coverage area of WLAN is then expanded. The QoS requirements (e.g., bandwidth) of those MSs are considered in the selection process of corresponding TAs. Mathematical analysis, verified by computer simulations, shows that the proposed TA scheme can effectively reduce blocking probability when traffic load is light

Internal transport barriers in the National Spherical Torus Experiment

In the National Spherical Torus Experiment [M. Ono , Nucl. Fusion 41, 1435 (2001)], internal transport barriers (ITBs) are observed in reversed (negative) shear discharges where diffusivities for electron and ion thermal channels and momentum are reduced. While neutral beam heating can produce ITBs in both electron and ion channels, high harmonic fast wave heating can also produce electron ITBs (e-ITBs) under reversed magnetic shear conditions without momentum input. Interestingly, the location of the e-ITB does not necessarily match that of the ion ITB (i-ITB). The e-ITB location correlates best with the magnetic shear minima location determined by motional Stark effect constrained equilibria, whereas the i-ITB location better correlates with the location of maximum ExB shearing rate. Measured electron temperature gradients in the e-ITB can exceed critical gradients for the onset of electron thermal gradient microinstabilities calculated by linear gyrokinetic codes. A high-k microwave scattering diagnostic shows locally reduced density fluctuations at wave numbers characteristic of electron turbulence for discharges with strongly negative magnetic shear versus weakly negative or positive magnetic shear. Reductions in fluctuation amplitude are found to be correlated with the local value of magnetic shear. These results are consistent with nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations predicting a reduction in electron turbulence under negative magnetic shear conditions despite exceeding critical gradients.X1128sciescopu

On Glauber modes in Soft-Collinear Effective Theory

Gluon interactions involving spectator partons in collisions at hadronic machines are investigated. We find a class of examples in which a mode, called Glauber gluons, must be introduced to the effective theory for consistency.Comment: 19 pages, three figures. Uses JHEP3.cl

Palm vein recognition using scale invariant feature transform with RANSAC mismatching removal

Palm vein recognition has been gaining increasing interest as a biometric method, although there still remains an issue regarding difficulties in obtaining robust signals. In this paper, the effects of random sample consensus point mismatching removal and the use of different wavelengths of illumination on the recognition rate are investigated. The CASIA multi-spectral palm print image database was used to provide input signals and the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) and random sample consensus (RANSAC) mismatching removal approaches were adopted for vein extraction and point feature matching. The results show that the RANSAC mismatching point removal was able to eliminate outliers while preserving the appropriate SIFT key points and that this led to an improvement in the equal error rate metric, signifying better recognition performance. The palm vein recognition system was found to achieve a better verification rate when infrared illumination in a specific spectral band was used to obtain the palm vein image

Discovery of the Acoustic Faraday Effect in Superfluid 3He-B

We report the discovery of the acoustic Faraday effect in superfluid 3He-B. The observation of this effect provides the first direct evidence for propagating transverse acoustic waves in liquid 3He, a mode first predicted by Landau in 1957. The Faraday rotation is large and observable because of spontaneously broken spin-orbit symmetry in 3He-B. We compare the experimental observations with a simulation of the transverse acoustic impedance that includes the field-induced circular birefringence of transverse waves.Comment: 4 pages in RevTex plus 3 postscript figures; new version includes: minor corrections to the text and an updated of list of reference

Osimertinib in Untreated EGFR-Mutated Advanced Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer

FLAURA ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT02296125BACKGROUND: Osimertinib is an oral, third-generation, irreversible epidermal growth factor receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitor (EGFR-TKI) that selectively inhibits both EGFR-TKI-sensitizing and EGFR T790M resistance mutations. We compared osimertinib with standard EGFR-TKIs in patients with previously untreated, EGFR mutation-positive advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). METHODS: In this double-blind, phase 3 trial, we randomly assigned 556 patients with previously untreated, EGFR mutation-positive (exon 19 deletion or L858R) advanced NSCLC in a 1:1 ratio to receive either osimertinib (at a dose of 80 mg once daily) or a standard EGFR-TKI (gefitinib at a dose of 250 mg once daily or erlotinib at a dose of 150 mg once daily). The primary end point was investigator-assessed progression-free survival. RESULTS: The median progression-free survival was significantly longer with osimertinib than with standard EGFR-TKIs (18.9 months vs. 10.2 months; hazard ratio for disease progression or death, 0.46; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.37 to 0.57; P<0.001). The objective response rate was similar in the two groups: 80% with osimertinib and 76% with standard EGFR-TKIs (odds ratio, 1.27; 95% CI, 0.85 to 1.90; P=0.24). The median duration of response was 17.2 months (95% CI, 13.8 to 22.0) with osimertinib versus 8.5 months (95% CI, 7.3 to 9.8) with standard EGFR-TKIs. Data on overall survival were immature at the interim analysis (25% maturity). The survival rate at 18 months was 83% (95% CI, 78 to 87) with osimertinib and 71% (95% CI, 65 to 76) with standard EGFR-TKIs (hazard ratio for death, 0.63; 95% CI, 0.45 to 0.88; P=0.007 [nonsignificant in the interim analysis]). Adverse events of grade 3 or higher were less frequent with osimertinib than with standard EGFR-TKIs (34% vs. 45%). CONCLUSIONS: Osimertinib showed efficacy superior to that of standard EGFR-TKIs in the first-line treatment of EGFR mutation-positive advanced NSCLC, with a similar safety profile and lower rates of serious adverse events. (Funded by AstraZeneca; FLAURA ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT02296125 .).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (MEMS) and Fluid Flows

The micromachining technology that emerged in the late 1980s can provide micron-sized sensors and actuators. These micro transducers are able to be integrated with signal conditioning and processing circuitry to form micro-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS) that can perform real-time distributed control. This capability opens up a new territory for flow control research. On the other hand, surface effects dominate the fluid flowing through these miniature mechanical devices because of the large surface-to-volume ratio in micron-scale configurations. We need to reexamine the surface forces in the momentum equation. Owing to their smallness, gas flows experience large Knudsen numbers, and therefore boundary conditions need to be modified. Besides being an enabling technology, MEMS also provide many challenges for fundamental flow-science research