Wnt5a Signaling in Normal and Cancer Stem Cells.

Wnt5a is involved in activating several noncanonical Wnt signaling pathways, which can inhibit or activate canonical Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway in a receptor context-dependent manner. Wnt5a signaling is critical for regulating normal developmental processes, including stem cell self-renewal, proliferation, differentiation, migration, adhesion, and polarity. Moreover, the aberrant activation or inhibition of Wnt5a signaling is emerging as an important event in cancer progression, exerting both oncogenic and tumor suppressive effects. Recent studies show the involvement of Wnt5a signaling in regulating normal and cancer stem cell self-renewal, cancer cell proliferation, migration, and invasion. In this article, we review recent findings regarding the molecular mechanisms and roles of Wnt5a signaling in stem cells in embryogenesis and in the normal or neoplastic breast or ovary, highlighting that Wnt5a may have different effects on target cells depending on the surface receptors expressed by the target cell

Truncation of Unitary Operads

We introduce truncation ideals of a $\Bbbk$-linear unitary symmetric operad and use them to study ideal structure, growth property and to classify operads of low Gelfand-Kirillov dimension

Light scattering detection of quantum phases of ultracold atoms in optical lattices

Ultracold atoms loaded on optical lattices can provide unprecedented experimental systems for the quantum simulations and manipulations of many quantum phases. However, so far, how to detect these quantum phases effectively remains an outstanding challenge. Here, we show that the optical Bragg scattering of cold atoms loaded on optical lattices can be used to detect many quantum phases which include not only the conventional superfluid and Mott insulating phases, but also other important phases such as various kinds of density waves (CDW), valence bond solids (VBS), CDW supersolids and VBS supersolids.Comment: 4 pages, 3 colour figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. A, Rapid Communicatio

Simple ultraviolet-based soft-lithography process for fabrication of low-loss polymer polysiloxanes-based waveguides

A simple ultraviolet (UV)-based soft-lithography process is used for fabrication of polymer polysiloxanes (PSQ-L) waveguides. The imprint process is first done on the cladding PSQ-LL layer and is followed by a spin-coating step to fill the imprinted features with core PSQ-LH layer material. The optical loss of the straight PSQ-L waveguides is characterised by the Fabry-Perot method for the first time. Even with non-polished facet of the waveguide, the Fabry-Perot resonance spectrum is obtained. An upper limit scattering loss of the waveguide is extracted to be less than 0.8 +/- 0.2 dB/cm for TE mode and 1.3 +/- 0.2 dB/cm for TM mode at 1550 nm. The fully transferred pattern and low scattering loss proves it to be an effective way to replicate low-loss polymer PSQ-L-based waveguides

Rotational Symmetry Breaking in Sodium Doped Cuprates

For reasonable parameters a hole bound to a Na^{+} acceptor in Ca_{2-x}Na_{x}CuO_{2}Cl_{2} has a doubly degenerate ground state whose components can be represented as states with even (odd) reflection symmetry around the x(y) -axes. The conductance pattern for one state is anisotropic as the tip of a tunneling microscope scans above the Cu-O-Cu bonds along the x(y)-axes. This anisotropy is pronounced at lower voltages but is reduced at higher voltages. Qualitative agreement with recent experiments leads us to propose this effect as an explanation of the broken local rotational symmetry.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure