Clathrin-mediated Endocytosis with Cell Confinement and during Neutrophil Polarization

Clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME) is one of the major pathway through which cells internalize nutrients and membrane proteins. It occurs on the membrane via clathrin-coated pits (CCPs). In this thesis, we studied CCPs' behavior when cells are under spatial constraints. In the first two projects, the constraint was applied using micro-contact printing. CCPs presented differential phenotypes on different-sized but the same shaped cells. In particular, CCPs were smaller with larger spreading area. We further showed that this might be due to the higher cortical tension associated with large spreading area. Seeding cells on anisotropic fibronectin patterns, we were able to manipulate where and how long CCPs appear on the cell. Together, these results showed that CCPs' distribution and behavior are regulated by mechanical cues in a cell. In the last project, HL-60 differentiated neutrophils were used as the experimental system. They undergo rapid polarization in the presence of N-formylmethionyl-leucyl-phenylalanine (fMLP), during which cells not only present anisotropic morphology but also have asymetric distribution of cellular structures and signaling molecules. We found that CCPs did not have as polarized distribution upon the stimulation of fMLP, but they revealed differential interation with formyl peptitde recepter, actin, and β-arrestin with and without fMLP. Disruption of CME blocked effective neutrophil polarization as well as major signaling pathways. The results suggest a regulatory role of CME in neutrophil polarization.PHDMechanical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144015/1/xinyutan_1.pd

The Atomic Characterization of Weighted Local Hardy Spaces and Its Applications

The purpose of this paper is to obtain atomic decomposition characterization of the weighted local Hardy space $h_{\omega}^{p}(\mathbb {R}^{n})$ with $\omega\in A_{\infty}(\mathbb {R}^{n})$. We apply the discrete version of Calder\'on's identity and the weighted Littlewood--Paley--Stein theory to prove that $h_{\omega}^{p}(\mathbb {R}^{n})$ coincides with the weighted$\text{-}(p,q,s)$ atomic local Hardy space $h_{\omega,atom}^{p,q,s}(\mathbb {R}^{n})$ for $0<p<\infty$. The atomic decomposition theorems in our paper improve the previous atomic decomposition results of local weighted Hardy spaces in the literature. As applications, we derive the boundedness of inhomogeneous Calder\'on--Zygmund singular integrals and local fractional integrals on weighted local Hardy spaces.Comment: 30 page

Small pyramidal textured ultrathin crystalline silicon solar cells with double-layer passivation

Ultrathin crystalline silicon solar cells are a promising technology roadmap to achieve more cost effectiveness. However, experimental reports on ultrathin crystalline silicon cells with thickness less than 20 μm are rare. Here, we experimentally fabricate and investigate ultrathin monocrystalline silicon solar cells consisting of 16 μm-silicon base thickness and low-cost front random pyramidal texture with the feature size of 1-2 μm. The normalized light absorption is calculated to explain the measured external quantum efficiency. The achieved efficiency is 15.1% for the single-layer passivated textured solar cell. In addition, via double-layer passivation of Al2O3/SiNx, the efficiency is further increased to 16.4% for the best textured cell, which significantly improves the absolute efficiency with Δη = 1.3%

The Construction of China’s Environmental Legislation Public Participation System

China’s environmental legislation could be enhanced by the public participation and conversation, consultation mechanism, and the mechanisms could be hearing, the legislative forum and Legislative demonstration.Key words: Environmental legislation; public participate; consultation mechanis

Scalable surface code decoders with parallelization in time

Fast classical processing is essential for most quantum fault-tolerance architectures. We introduce a sliding-window decoding scheme that provides fast classical processing for the surface code through parallelism. Our scheme divides the syndromes in spacetime into overlapping windows along the time direction, which can be decoded in parallel with any inner decoder. With this parallelism, our scheme can solve the decoding throughput problem as the code scales up, even if the inner decoder is slow. When using min-weight perfect matching and union-find as the inner decoders, we observe circuit-level thresholds of $0.68\%$ and $0.55\%$, respectively, which are almost identical to $0.70\%$ and $0.55\%$ for the batch decoding.Comment: Main text: 6 pages, 3 figures. Supplementary material: 18 pages, 14 figures. V2: added data and updated general formalis

LightRW: FPGA Accelerated Graph Dynamic Random Walks

Graph dynamic random walks (GDRWs) have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for graph analytics and learning applications, including graph embedding and graph neural networks. Despite the fact that many existing studies optimize the performance of GDRWs on multi-core CPUs, massive random memory accesses and costly synchronizations cause severe resource underutilization, and the processing of GDRWs is usually the key performance bottleneck in many graph applications. This paper studies an alternative architecture, FPGA, to address these issues in GDRWs, as FPGA has the ability of hardware customization so that we are able to explore fine-grained pipeline execution and specialized memory access optimizations. Specifically, we propose {LightRW}, a novel FPGA-based accelerator for GDRWs. LightRW embraces a series of optimizations to enable fine-grained pipeline execution on the chip and to exploit the massive parallelism of FPGA while significantly reducing memory accesses. As current commonly used sampling methods in GDRWs do not efficiently support fine-grained pipeline execution, we develop a parallelized reservoir sampling method to sample multiple vertices per cycle for efficient pipeline execution. To address the random memory access issues, we propose a degree-aware configurable caching method that buffers hot vertices on-chip to alleviate random memory accesses and a dynamic burst access engine that efficiently retrieves neighbors. Experimental results show that our optimization techniques are able to improve the performance of GDRWs on FPGA significantly. Moreover, LightRW delivers up to 9.55x and 9.10x speedup over the state-of-the-art CPU-based MetaPath and Node2vec random walks, respectively. This work is open-sourced on GitHub at https://github.com/Xtra-Computing/LightRW.Comment: Accepted to SIGMOD 202

NBMOD: Find It and Grasp It in Noisy Background

Grasping objects is a fundamental yet important capability of robots, and many tasks such as sorting and picking rely on this skill. The prerequisite for stable grasping is the ability to correctly identify suitable grasping positions. However, finding appropriate grasping points is challenging due to the diverse shapes, varying density distributions, and significant differences between the barycenter of various objects. In the past few years, researchers have proposed many methods to address the above-mentioned issues and achieved very good results on publicly available datasets such as the Cornell dataset and the Jacquard dataset. The problem is that the backgrounds of Cornell and Jacquard datasets are relatively simple - typically just a whiteboard, while in real-world operational environments, the background could be complex and noisy. Moreover, in real-world scenarios, robots usually only need to grasp fixed types of objects. To address the aforementioned issues, we proposed a large-scale grasp detection dataset called NBMOD: Noisy Background Multi-Object Dataset for grasp detection, which consists of 31,500 RGB-D images of 20 different types of fruits. Accurate prediction of angles has always been a challenging problem in the detection task of oriented bounding boxes. This paper presents a Rotation Anchor Mechanism (RAM) to address this issue. Considering the high real-time requirement of robotic systems, we propose a series of lightweight architectures called RA-GraspNet (GraspNet with Rotation Anchor): RARA (network with Rotation Anchor and Region Attention), RAST (network with Rotation Anchor and Semi Transformer), and RAGT (network with Rotation Anchor and Global Transformer) to tackle this problem. Among them, the RAGT-3/3 model achieves an accuracy of 99% on the NBMOD dataset. The NBMOD and our code are available at https://github.com/kmittle/Grasp-Detection-NBMOD

Cold atmospheric plasma induces apoptosis in human colon and lung cancer cells through modulating mitochondrial pathway

Cold atmospheric plasma (CAP) is an emerging and promising oncotherapy with considerable potential and advantages that traditional treatment modalities lack. The objective of this study was to investigate the effect and mechanism of plasma-inhibited proliferation and plasma-induced apoptosis on human lung cancer and colon cancer cells in vitro and in vivo. Piezobrush® PZ2, a handheld CAP unit based on the piezoelectric direct discharge technology, was used to generate and deliver non-thermal plasma. Firstly, CAPPZ2 treatment inhibited the proliferation of HT29 colorectal cancer cells and A549 lung cancer cells using CCK8 assay, caused morphological changes at the cellular and subcellular levels using transmission electron microscopy, and suppressed both types of tumor cell migration and invasion using the Transwell migration and Matrigel invasion assay. Secondly, we confirmed plasma-induced apoptosis in the HT29 and A549 cells using the AO/EB staining coupled with flow cytometry, and verified the production of apoptosis-related proteins, such as cytochrome c, PARP, cleaved caspase-3 and caspase-9, Bcl-2 and Bax, using western blotting. Finally, the aforementioned in vitro results were tested in vivo using cell-derived xenograft mouse models, and the anticancer effect was confirmed and attributed to CAP-mediated apoptosis. The immunohistochemical analysis revealed that the expression of cleaved caspase-9, caspase-3, PARP and Bax were upregulated whereas that of Bcl-2 downregulated after CAP treatment. These findings collectively suggest that the activation of the mitochondrial pathway is involved during CAPPZ2-induced apoptosis of human colon and lung cancer cells in vitro and in vivo