1,936 research outputs found

    Grasping nettles: cellular heterogeneity and other confounders in epigenome-wide association studies

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    Platform technologies for measurement of CpG methylation at multiple loci across the genome have made ambitious epigenome-wide association studies affordable and practicable. In contrast to genetic studies, which estimate the effects of structural changes in DNA, and transcriptomic studies, which measure genomic outputs, epigenetic studies can access states of regulation of genome function in particular cells and in response to specific stimuli. Although many factors complicate the interpretation of epigenetic variation in human disease, cell-specific methylation patterns and the cellular heterogeneity present in peripheral blood and tissue biopsies are anticipated to cause the most problems. In this review, we suggest that the difficulties may be exaggerated and we explore how cellular heterogeneity may be embraced with appropriate study designs and analytical tools. We further suggest that systematic mapping of the loci influenced by age, sex and genetic polymorphisms will bring important biological insights as well as improved control of epigenome-wide association studies

    Planar Object Tracking in the Wild: A Benchmark

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    Planar object tracking is an actively studied problem in vision-based robotic applications. While several benchmarks have been constructed for evaluating state-of-the-art algorithms, there is a lack of video sequences captured in the wild rather than in constrained laboratory environment. In this paper, we present a carefully designed planar object tracking benchmark containing 210 videos of 30 planar objects sampled in the natural environment. In particular, for each object, we shoot seven videos involving various challenging factors, namely scale change, rotation, perspective distortion, motion blur, occlusion, out-of-view, and unconstrained. The ground truth is carefully annotated semi-manually to ensure the quality. Moreover, eleven state-of-the-art algorithms are evaluated on the benchmark using two evaluation metrics, with detailed analysis provided for the evaluation results. We expect the proposed benchmark to benefit future studies on planar object tracking.Comment: Accepted by ICRA 201

    Autophagy in photodynamic therapy

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    Macroautophagy (autophagy) is crucial for cell survival during starvation and plays important roles in human diseases. It is a highly conserved intracellular degradation system in eukaryotes for removal and recycling of cytoplasmic components including damaged proteins and organelles to obtain energy. The relationship between cancer and autophagy has been extensively studied in recent years. In cancer and cancer therapy, autophagy acts as a double-edged sword. Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is a kind of tumor therapy applied with a tumor-localizing photosensitizing agent which is followed by activation with the light of a specific wavelength. How much is autophagy involved in photodynamic therapy? The work in this area is still limited.Keywords: Autophagy, Photodynamic therapy, Apoptosis, Cance
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