148 research outputs found
Cancer exosomes are unique and complex mechanisms that suppress effector T lymphocyte functions
It is still unknown how tumor exosomes influence malignant cell survival and alter cell-to-cell communication to modulate the immune system by, in part, manipulating the activity of cytotoxic T lymphocytes. This study focuses on two critical parts regarding cancer exosomes. The first part is to tailor existing bionanotechnology methods to account for the nanoscale aspects of exosome biology. SEM, TEM, Bioanalyzer and flow cytometry were used to characterize exosome morphologies, identify specific protein biomarkers HER1 and HER2, as well as the quality of RNAs enclosed in exosomes. Competing methods related to exosome isolation, production, preservation, stability and analysis were evaluated. Based on these studies, we recommend improved experimental methods that aim to ensure a consistent framework to identify the roles that exosomes play. With these improved methods, the second part is to characterize the immunosuppressive role that melanoma exosomes play, especially from the perspective of delivering a payload of mRNAs to immune cells. Toward this second aim, melanoma exosomes were purified and cytokine receptor IL12Rbeta2 and specific mRNA enrichment were identified. Microarray and pathway analysis suggested that mRNAs derived from melanoma impact a variety of immune signaling pathways. Induction effects of PTPN11 and DNMT3A from the exosomal mRNAs were characterized in T lymphocytes. Specifically, we showed that PTPN11 upregulation impeded CTLL-2 cytotoxic T cell proliferation in response to IL2 stimulation, and DNMT3A upregulation hindered IFN-gamma production in 2D6 TH1 cells. These findings provide insights regarding the specific immunosuppression effects that tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) may encounter in tumor microenvironment. Understanding those immunosuppression effects is important to engineer anti-tumor immunity for innovative and improved treatments against cancer
Representation Learning for Scale-free Networks
Network embedding aims to learn the low-dimensional representations of
vertexes in a network, while structure and inherent properties of the network
is preserved. Existing network embedding works primarily focus on preserving
the microscopic structure, such as the first- and second-order proximity of
vertexes, while the macroscopic scale-free property is largely ignored.
Scale-free property depicts the fact that vertex degrees follow a heavy-tailed
distribution (i.e., only a few vertexes have high degrees) and is a critical
property of real-world networks, such as social networks. In this paper, we
study the problem of learning representations for scale-free networks. We first
theoretically analyze the difficulty of embedding and reconstructing a
scale-free network in the Euclidean space, by converting our problem to the
sphere packing problem. Then, we propose the "degree penalty" principle for
designing scale-free property preserving network embedding algorithm: punishing
the proximity between high-degree vertexes. We introduce two implementations of
our principle by utilizing the spectral techniques and a skip-gram model
respectively. Extensive experiments on six datasets show that our algorithms
are able to not only reconstruct heavy-tailed distributed degree distribution,
but also outperform state-of-the-art embedding models in various network mining
tasks, such as vertex classification and link prediction.Comment: 8 figures; accepted by AAAI 201
Urban Dreams of Migrants: A Case Study of Migrant Integration in Shanghai
Unprecedented human mobility has driven the rapid urbanization around the
world. In China, the fraction of population dwelling in cities increased from
17.9% to 52.6% between 1978 and 2012. Such large-scale migration poses
challenges for policymakers and important questions for researchers. To
investigate the process of migrant integration, we employ a one-month complete
dataset of telecommunication metadata in Shanghai with 54 million users and 698
million call logs. We find systematic differences between locals and migrants
in their mobile communication networks and geographical locations. For
instance, migrants have more diverse contacts and move around the city with a
larger radius than locals after they settle down. By distinguishing new
migrants (who recently moved to Shanghai) from settled migrants (who have been
in Shanghai for a while), we demonstrate the integration process of new
migrants in their first three weeks. Moreover, we formulate classification
problems to predict whether a person is a migrant. Our classifier is able to
achieve an F1-score of 0.82 when distinguishing settled migrants from locals,
but it remains challenging to identify new migrants because of class imbalance.
This classification setup holds promise for identifying new migrants who will
successfully integrate into locals (new migrants that misclassified as locals).Comment: A modified version. The paper was accepted by AAAI 201
Cross-relation Cross-bag Attention for Distantly-supervised Relation Extraction
Distant supervision leverages knowledge bases to automatically label
instances, thus allowing us to train relation extractor without human
annotations. However, the generated training data typically contain massive
noise, and may result in poor performances with the vanilla supervised
learning. In this paper, we propose to conduct multi-instance learning with a
novel Cross-relation Cross-bag Selective Attention (CSA), which leads to
noise-robust training for distant supervised relation extractor. Specifically,
we employ the sentence-level selective attention to reduce the effect of noisy
or mismatched sentences, while the correlation among relations were captured to
improve the quality of attention weights. Moreover, instead of treating all
entity-pairs equally, we try to pay more attention to entity-pairs with a
higher quality. Similarly, we adopt the selective attention mechanism to
achieve this goal. Experiments with two types of relation extractor demonstrate
the superiority of the proposed approach over the state-of-the-art, while
further ablation studies verify our intuitions and demonstrate the
effectiveness of our proposed two techniques.Comment: AAAI 201
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