Endocytic recycling and vesicular transport systems mediate transcytosis of Leptospira interrogans across cell monolayer.

Many bacterial pathogens can cause septicemia and spread from the bloodstream into internal organs. During leptospirosis, individuals are infected by contact with Leptospira-containing animal urine-contaminated water. The spirochetes invade internal organs after septicemia to cause disease aggravation, but the mechanism of leptospiral excretion and spreading remains unknown. Here, we demonstrated that Leptospira interrogans entered human/mouse endothelial and epithelial cells and fibroblasts by caveolae/integrin-β1-PI3K/FAK-mediated microfilament-dependent endocytosis to form Leptospira (Lep)-vesicles that did not fuse with lysosomes. Lep-vesicles recruited Rab5/Rab11 and Sec/Exo-SNARE proteins in endocytic recycling and vesicular transport systems for intracellular transport and release by SNARE-complex/FAK-mediated microfilament/microtubule-dependent exocytosis. Both intracellular leptospires and infected cells maintained their viability. Leptospiral propagation was only observed in mouse fibroblasts. Our study revealed that L. interrogans utilizes endocytic recycling and vesicular transport systems for transcytosis across endothelial or epithelial barrier in blood vessels or renal tubules, which contributes to spreading in vivo and transmission of leptospirosis

Hamiltonian Transformation for Band Structure Calculations

First-principles electronic band structure calculations are essential for understanding periodic systems in condensed matter physics and materials science. We propose an accurate and parameter-free method, called Hamiltonian transformation (HT), to calculate band structures in both density functional theory (DFT) and post-DFT calculations with plane-wave basis sets. The cost of HT is independent of the choice of the density functional and scales as $\mathcal{O}(N_e^3N_k\log N_k)$, where $N_e$ and $N_k$ are the number of electrons and the number of $\mathbf{k}$-points. Compared to the widely used Wannier interpolation (WI), HT adopts an eigenvalue transformation to construct a spatial localized representation of the spectrally truncated Hamiltonian. HT also uses a non-iterative algorithm to change the basis sets to circumvent the construction of the maximally localized Wannier functions. As a result, HT can significantly outperform WI in terms of the accuracy of the band structure calculation. We also find that the eigenvalue transformation can be of independent interest, and can be used to improve the accuracy of the WI for systems with entangled bands.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

MFI2-AS1 enhances the survival of esophageal cancer cell via regulation of miR-331-3p/SOX4

Purpose: To investigate the specific role of melanotransferrin antisense RNA (MFI2-AS1) in esophageal cancer (EC) progression. Methods: The differential expression of MFI2-AS1 in EC tissues and cells was determined using quantitative reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). Silencing MFI2-AS1 was performed by transfection with specific short hairpin RNAs targeting MFI2-AS1. The 3-(4,5- dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide assay (MTT) and flow cytometry (FC) were used to assess cell viability and apoptosis of EC cells, respectively. The sponging microRNA (miRNA) of MFI2-AS1 was validated using luciferase activity and RNA immunoprecipitation assays while the downstream target gene of the sponging miRNA was evaluated by luciferase activity assay. Results: MFI2-AS1 was significantly enhanced in EC tissues (p < 0.01) and indicated a poor prognosis in EC patients. Knockdown of MFI2-AS1 in EC cells decreased cell viability and promoted cell apoptosis of EC cells. Functionally, MFI2-AS1 targeted miR-331-3p, and sex-determining region on Ychromosome-related high-mobility-group box4 (SOX4) was identified as a target gene of miR-331-3p. Ectopic expression of SOX4  counteracted the suppressive effect of MFI2-AS1 knockdown on EC cell viability and stimulative effect on EC cell apoptosis. Conclusion: The pro-oncogenic effect of MFI2-AS1 on EC progression occurs via the regulation of the miR-331-3p/SOX4 axis, providing a new potential therapeutic target for EC

Performance Analysis of Integrated Data and Energy Transfer Assisted by Fluid Antenna Systems

Fluid antenna multiple access (FAMA) is capable of exploiting the high spatial diversity of wireless channels to mitigate multi-user interference via flexible port switching, which achieves a better performance than traditional multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) systems. Moreover, integrated data and energy transfer (IDET) is able to provide both the wireless data transfer (WDT) and wireless energy transfer (WET) services towards low-power devices. In this paper, a FAMA assisted IDET system is studied, where $N$ access points (APs) provide dedicated IDET services towards $N$ user equipments (UEs). Each UE is equipped with a single fluid antenna. The performance of WDT and WET , i.e., the WDT outage probability, the WET outage probability, the reliable throughput and the average energy harvesting amount, are analysed theoretically by using time switching (TS) between WDT and WET. Numerical results validate our theoretical analysis, which reveals that the number of UEs and TS ratio should be optimized to achieve a trade-off between the WDT and WET performance. Moreover, FAMA assisted IDET achieves a better performance in terms of both WDT and WET than traditional MIMO with the same antenna size.Comment: Accepted by IEEE ICC 202