Liposome-based polymer complex as a novel adjuvant: enhancement of specific antibody production and isotype switch

The aim of vaccination is to induce appropriate immunity against pathogens. Antibody-mediated immunity is critical for protection against many virus diseases, although it is becoming more evident that coordinated, multifunctional immune responses lead to the most effective defense. Specific antibody (Ab) isotypes are more efficient at protecting against pathogen invasion in different locations in the body. For example, compared to other Ab isotypes, immunoglobulin (Ig) A provides more protection at mucosal areas. In this study, we developed a cationic lipopolymer (liposome-polyethylene glycol-polyethyleneimine complex [LPPC]) adjuvant that strongly adsorbs antigens or immunomodulators onto its surface to enhance or switch immune responses. The results demonstrate that LPPC enhances uptake ability, surface marker expression, proinflammatory cytokine release, and antigen presentation in mouse phagocytes. In contrast to Freund’s adjuvant, LPPC preferentially activates Th1- immunity against antigens in vivo. With lipopolysaccharides or CpG oligodeoxynucleotides, LPPC dramatically enhances the IgA or IgG2A proportion of total Ig, even in hosts that have developed Th2 immunities and high IgG1 serum titers. Taken together, the results demonstrate that the LPPC adjuvant not only increases the immunogenicity of antigens but also modulates host immunity to produce an appropriate Ab isotype by combining with immunomodulators

Deep reinforcement learning-based resource allocation strategy for energy harvesting-powered cognitive machine-to-machine networks

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication is a promising technology that may realize the Internet of Things (IoTs) in future networks. However, due to the features of massive devices and concurrent access requirement, it will cause performance degradation and enormous energy consumption. Energy Harvesting-Powered Cognitive M2M Networks (EH-CMNs) as an attractive solution is capable of alleviating the escalating spectrum deficient to guarantee the Quality of Service (QoS) meanwhile decreasing the energy consumption to achieve Green Communication (GC) became an important research topic. In this paper, we investigate the resource allocation problem for EH-CMNs underlaying cellular uplinks. We aim to maximize the energy efficiency of EH-CMNs with consideration of the QoS of Human-to-Human (H2H) networks and the available energy in EH-devices. In view of the characteristic of EH-CMNs, we formulate the problem to be a decentralized Discrete-time and Finite-state Markov Decision Process (DFMDP), in which each device acts as agent and effectively learns from the environment to make allocation decision without the complete and global network information. Owing to the complexity of the problem, we propose a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based algorithm to solve the problem. Numerical results validate that the proposed scheme outperforms other schemes in terms of average energy efficiency with an acceptable convergence speed

Oct-4 Expression Maintained Cancer Stem-Like Properties in Lung Cancer-Derived CD133-Positive Cells

CD133 (prominin-1), a 5-transmembrane glycoprotein, has recently been considered to be an important marker that represents the subset population of cancer stem-like cells. Herein we report the isolation of CD133-positive cells (LC-CD133+) and CD133-negative cells (LC-CD133−) from tissue samples of ten patients with non-small cell lung cancer (LC) and five LC cell lines. LC-CD133+ displayed higher Oct-4 expressions with the ability to self-renew and may represent a reservoir with proliferative potential for generating lung cancer cells. Furthermore, LC-CD133+, unlike LC-CD133−, highly co-expressed the multiple drug-resistant marker ABCG2 and showed significant resistance to chemotherapy agents (i.e., cisplatin, etoposide, doxorubicin, and paclitaxel) and radiotherapy. The treatment of Oct-4 siRNA with lentiviral vector can specifically block the capability of LC-CD133+ to form spheres and can further facilitate LC-CD133+ to differentiate into LC-CD133−. In addition, knock-down of Oct-4 expression in LC-CD133+ can significantly inhibit the abilities of tumor invasion and colony formation, and increase apoptotic activities of caspase 3 and poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP). Finally, in vitro and in vivo studies further confirm that the treatment effect of chemoradiotherapy for LC-CD133+ can be improved by the treatment of Oct-4 siRNA. In conclusion, we demonstrated that Oct-4 expression plays a crucial role in maintaining the self-renewing, cancer stem-like, and chemoradioresistant properties of LC-CD133+. Future research is warranted regarding the up-regulated expression of Oct-4 in LC-CD133+ and malignant lung cancer

Digenean parasites of Chinese marine fishes: a list of species, hosts and geographical distribution

In the literature, 630 species of Digenea (Trematoda) have been reported from Chinese marine fishes. These belong to 209 genera and 35 families. The names of these species, along with their hosts, geographical distribution and records, are listed in this paper

Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes

Cancer is driven by genetic change, and the advent of massively parallel sequencing has enabled systematic documentation of this variation at the whole-genome scale(1-3). Here we report the integrative analysis of 2,658 whole-cancer genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types from the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We describe the generation of the PCAWG resource, facilitated by international data sharing using compute clouds. On average, cancer genomes contained 4-5 driver mutations when combining coding and non-coding genomic elements; however, in around 5% of cases no drivers were identified, suggesting that cancer driver discovery is not yet complete. Chromothripsis, in which many clustered structural variants arise in a single catastrophic event, is frequently an early event in tumour evolution; in acral melanoma, for example, these events precede most somatic point mutations and affect several cancer-associated genes simultaneously. Cancers with abnormal telomere maintenance often originate from tissues with low replicative activity and show several mechanisms of preventing telomere attrition to critical levels. Common and rare germline variants affect patterns of somatic mutation, including point mutations, structural variants and somatic retrotransposition. A collection of papers from the PCAWG Consortium describes non-coding mutations that drive cancer beyond those in the TERT promoter(4); identifies new signatures of mutational processes that cause base substitutions, small insertions and deletions and structural variation(5,6); analyses timings and patterns of tumour evolution(7); describes the diverse transcriptional consequences of somatic mutation on splicing, expression levels, fusion genes and promoter activity(8,9); and evaluates a range of more-specialized features of cancer genomes(8,10-18).Peer reviewe

Strategic Adjustments and Organizational Changes of Japan's Cybersecurity

日本為了因應網路威脅，於2013年公佈第一版《網路安全戰略》，將網路安全拉高到國家層次，朝向構建「世界領先、強大而充滿活力的網路空間」並實現「網路安全立國」的目標努力。同年5月，美日第一次舉行網路安全對話，聯合成立「美日網路防衛政策工作小組」，進一步推動美日在網路安全領域上的合作。2015年根據《網路安全基本法》規定，將「資訊安全政策會議」及「內閣官房資訊安全中心」升格為「網路安全戰略本部」與「內閣網路安全中心」，組織調整的目的在於增強網路安全主責機關的監督權限，提高政策制定與執行單位間的效率。本文將探討日本因應網路威脅所進行的戰略調整，首先探討日本面臨的網路威脅與案例分析，接著探討中央省廳對於網路安全組織積極調整與日本的網路安全國際合作。In responding to cyber threats, Japan published the first Cybersecurity Strategy in 2013 and worked towards the goal of a ＂Cybersecurity Nation＂ with a ＂world-leading, resilient and vigorous cyberspace＂. In May of 2013, the United States and Japan held their first cybersecurity dialogue and established the U.S.-Japan Cyber Defense Policy Working Group for prompting cybersecurity cooperation. According to Basic Act on Cybersecurity, Information Security Policy Conference and National Information Security Center were upgraded to Cybersecurity Strategic HQs and National Center of Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity in 2015. The Japanese organizational adjustments were to strengthen the supervision authority of chief cybersecurity institutions and to raise policy formulation and efficiency between execution units. This study explores Japan's strategic adjustments in response to cyber threats. At first, it discusses the Japanese cyber threats and case studies. Furthermore, the Central Government focusing on organizational adjustments and Japan's international cooperation in cybersecurity are included in this paper

Combining Weighted Contour Templates with HOGs for Human Detection Using Biased Boosting

This paper proposes a method to detect humans in the image that is an important issue for many applications, such as video surveillance in smart home and driving assistance systems. A kind of local feature called the histogram of oriented gradients (HOGs) has been widely used in describing the human appearance and its effectiveness has been proven in the literature. A learning framework called boosting is adopted to select a set of classifiers based on HOGs for human detection. However, in the case of a complex background or noise effect, the use of HOGs results in the problem of false detection. To alleviate this, the proposed method imposes a classifier based on weighted contour templates to the boosting framework. The way to combine the global contour templates with local HOGs is by adjusting the bias of a support vector machine (SVM) for the local classifier. The method proposed for feature combination is referred to as biased boosting. For covering the human appearance in various poses, an expectation maximization algorithm is used which is a kind of iterative algorithm is used to construct a set of representative weighted contour templates instead of manual annotation. The encoding of different weights to the contour points gives the templates more discriminative power in matching. The experiments provided exhibit the superiority of the proposed method in detection accuracy