Novel Cell type-specific aptamer-siRNA delivery system for HIV-1 therapy

The successful use of small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) for therapeutic purposes requires safe and efficient delivery to specific cells and tissues. Here we demonstrate cell type-specific delivery of anti-HIV siRNAs via fusion to an anti-gp120 aptamer. The envelope glycoprotein is expressed on the surface of HIV-1 infected cells, allowing binding and interalization of the aptamer-siRNA chimeric molecules. We demonstrate that the anti-gp120 aptamer-siRNA chimera is specifically taken up by cells expressing HIV-1 gp120, and the appended siRNA is processed by Dicer, releasing an anti-tat/rev siRNA which in turn inhibits HIV replication. We show for the first time a dual functioning aptamer-siRNA chimera in which both the aptamer and the siRNA portions have potent anti-HIV activities and that gp120 expressed on the surface of HIV infected cells can be used for aptamer mediated delivery of anti-HIV siRNAs

Affect and Metaphor Sensing in Virtual Drama

We report our developments on metaphor and affect sensing for several metaphorical language phenomena including affects as external entities metaphor, food metaphor, animal metaphor, size metaphor, and anger metaphor. The metaphor and affect sensing component has been embedded in a conversational intelligent agent interacting with human users under loose scenarios. Evaluation for the detection of several metaphorical language phenomena and affect is provided. Our paper contributes to the journal themes on believable virtual characters in real-time narrative environment, narrative in digital games and storytelling and educational gaming with social software

Rising regional income inequality in China: Fact or artefact?

China’s local populations can be counted in two ways; by how many people have hukou household registration from each place and by how many people actually reside in each place. The counts differ by the non-hukou migrants – people that move from their place of registration – who have grown from fewer than five million when reform began in 1978 to over 200 million by 2010. For most of the first three decades of the reform era, the hukou count was used to produce per capita GDP figures. In coastal provinces the resident count is many millions more than the hukou count, while for migrant-sending provinces it is the reverse, creating a systematic and time-varying distortion in provincial GDP per capita. Moreover, a sharp discontinuity occurred when provinces recently switched from the hukou count to the resident count when reporting GDP per capita. A double-count also resulted because some provinces switched before others and initial resident counts were incomplete. This paper describes the changing definition of provincial populations in China and their impact on inequality in provincial GDP per capita. We show that much of the apparent increase in inter-provincial inequality disappears once a consistent series of GDP per resident is used

Spatial price differences and inequality in China: Housing market evidence

The large literature on regional inequality in China is hampered by incomplete evidence on price dispersion across space, making it hard to distinguish real and nominal inequality. The two main methods used to calculate spatial deflators have been to price a national basket of goods and services across China’s different regions or else to estimate a food Engel curve and define the deflator as that needed for nominally similar households to have the same food budget shares in all regions. Neither approach is convincing with the data available in China. Moreover, a focus on tradable goods like food may be misplaced because of the emerging literature on the rapid convergence of traded goods prices within China that contrasts with earlier claims of fragmented internal markets. In a setting where traded goods prices converge rapidly, the main source of price dispersion across space should come from non-traded items, and especially from housing given the fixity of land. In this paper we use newly available data on dwelling sales in urban China to develop spatially-disaggregated indices of house prices, which are then used as spatial deflators for both provinces and core urban districts. These new deflators complement existing approaches that have relied more on traded goods prices, and are used to re-examine the evidence on the level of regional inequality. Around one-quarter of the apparent spatial inequality disappears once account is taken of cost-of-living differences