Exosomes promote pre-metastatic niche formation in ovarian cancer.

Ovarian cancer is one of the most common gynecological malignancies. Upon initial diagnosis, the majority of patients present with widespread metastatic growth within the peritoneal cavity. This metastatic growth occurs in stages, with the formation of a pre-metastatic niche occurring prior to macroscopic tumor cell invasion. Exosomes released by the primary ovarian tumor are small extracellular vesicles which prepare the distant tumor microenvironment for accelerated metastatic invasion. They regulate intercellular communication between tumor cells and normal stroma, cancer-associated fibroblasts, and local immune cells within the tumor microenvironment. In this review, we highlight the emerging roles of ovarian cancer exosomes as coordinators of pre-metastatic niche formation, biomarkers amenable to liquid biopsy, and targets of chemotherapy

Automatic Generation of High-Coverage Tests for RTL Designs using Software Techniques and Tools

Register Transfer Level (RTL) design validation is a crucial stage in the hardware design process. We present a new approach to enhancing RTL design validation using available software techniques and tools. Our approach converts the source code of a RTL design into a C++ software program. Then a powerful symbolic execution engine is employed to execute the converted C++ program symbolically to generate test cases. To better generate efficient test cases, we limit the number of cycles to guide symbolic execution. Moreover, we add bit-level symbolic variable support into the symbolic execution engine. Generated test cases are further evaluated by simulating the RTL design to get accurate coverage. We have evaluated the approach on a floating point unit (FPU) design. The preliminary results show that our approach can deliver high-quality tests to achieve high coverage

Systematic Determination of Absolute Absorption Cross-section of Individual Carbon Nanotubes

Determination of optical absorption cross-section is always among the central importance of understanding a material. However its realization on individual nanostructures, such as carbon nanotubes, is experimentally challenging due to the small extinction signal using conventional transmission measurements. Here we develop a technique based on polarization manipulation to enhance the sensitivity of single-nanotube absorption spectroscopy by two-orders of magnitude. We systematically determine absorption cross-section over broad spectral range at single-tube level for more than 50 chirality-defined single-walled nanotubes. Our data reveals chirality-dependent one-dimensional photo-physics through the behaviours of exciton oscillator strength and lifetime. We also establish an empirical formula to predict absorption spectrum of any nanotube, which provides the foundation to determine quantum efficiencies in important photoluminescence and photovoltaic processes

Safety-oriented planning of expressway truck service areas based on driver demand

Funding This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51978522).Peer reviewedPublisher PD