TSPAN8 promotes cancer cell stemness via activation of sonic Hedgehog signaling

Cancer stem cells (CSCs) represent a major source of treatment resistance and tumor progression. However, regulation of CSCs stemness is not entirely understood. Here, we report that TSPAN8 expression is upregulated in breast CSCs, promotes the expression of the stemness gene NANOG, OCT4, and ALDHA1, and correlates with therapeutic resistance. Mechanistically, TSPAN8 interacts with PTCH1 and inhibits the degradation of the SHH/PTCH1 complex through recruitment of deubiquitinating enzyme ATXN3. This results in the translocation of SMO to cilia, downstream gene expression, resistance of CSCs to chemotherapeutic agents, and enhances tumor formation in mice. Accordingly, expression levels of TSPAN8, PTCH1, SHH, and ATXN3 are positively correlated in human breast cancer specimens, and high TSPAN8 and ATXN3 expression levels correlate with poor prognosis. These findings reveal a molecular basis of TSPAN8-enhanced Sonic Hedgehog signaling and highlight a role for TSPAN8 in promoting cancer stemness

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Vision -Based Behavior Learning and Automatic Scene Understanding by an Autonomous Robot

132 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2003.In addition to behavior learning, this dissertation initiates a novel research called automatic scene understanding by a robot, in which the robot is taught to learn scene semantics from multiple concept categories via the interactions with its world. A generic model for general-purpose scene understanding is presented, along with a case development for small-sized scene language understanding by a robot. The experimental result shows the effectiveness of the proposed method in solving the so-called "multilabeling" concept classification problems.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD