Role of forkhead transcription factors in endocrine sensitive and resistant breast cancer cell lines

Breast cancer is a major concern worldwide as it accounts for one of the highest causes of death. Oestrogen which is widely known for its growth-promoting function in mammary gland has been linked to breast cancer pathogenesis. Oestrogen exerts its effect upon binding to oestrogen receptors mainly ERα. The presence of ERα in breast cancer has become a prognostic and predictive marker in response to endocrine therapy. Transcription factors are proteins that regulate gene expressions by interacting with specific DNA sequences. AP-2γ, which is implicated in the initiation and progression of breast cancer via ErbB2 and ERα, is a member of AP-2 transcription factors. Forkhead box M1 (FOXM1) belongs to the family of Forkhead box transcription factor. High levels of FOXM1 expression are associated with the development and progression of breast cancer. In this study, the relationship between AP-2γ and FOXM1 were explored. The results suggest a direct association of AP-2γ and FOXM1 in MCF-7 cells and in MCF-7 derived anti-oestrogen resistant cell line, MLET2. Taken together, this work does not only identify the role of AP-2γ in endocrine sensitive cell line, it also reveals that AP-2γ might play a role in endocrine resistance. However, it also shows that AP-2γ may not be the key regulator of FOXM1 in breast cancer where other factors may have a greater influence on FOXM1. Endocrine resistance in breast cancer is a hurdle in hormonal therapy. Oestrogen receptor (ERα) which plays a pivotal role in breast cancer progression, contributes to the development of endocrine resistance. Forkhead transcription factors are also known to be involved in the development and progression of breast cancer. This work also identifies the role of FOXA1, FOXM1, FOXC2 and ERα in endocrine sensitive and resistant cell lines. Taken together, the results show that FOXA1 may not be a key regulator of FOXM1 in MCF-7 cells. However, over-expression of FOXA1 in MDA-MB-231 cell line led to slight reduction in FOXM1 and FOXC2 at translational levels suggesting that FOXA1 may play an important role in regulating those transcription factors. When the cell lines were treated with anti-oestrogen, tamoxifen and ICI, high levels of FOXM1 and FOXC2 were detected in most endocrine resistant cells compared to MCF-7 cells suggesting potential mediators for endocrine resistance. However, high levels of FOXA1 were observed in ERα-expressing cell lines which are associated with better prognosis. In addition to ERα, AP-2γ and Forkhead transcription factors may be potential therapeutic targets for breast cancer. However, more studies should be conducted to validate the current findings

Implementation of a Symmetric Chaotic Encryption Scheme

Voice over Internet Protocol technology (VoIP) is progressing commendably, but packet loss, propagation delay, jitter, unreliable IP networks, and vulnerability to attacks by Internet hackers are among critical issues that have been identified. Voice privacy and security needs to focused upon and data encryption techniques are the answers in providing the security needed. However, traditional cryptosystems demand high computational complexity andhigh digital signal processors which in return increases the cost of implementation. There is parallel growth in cryptographic techniques which originated anintense research activity and the search for new directions in cryptography such as chaotic encryption. Due to its deterministic nature and its sensitivity to initial conditions, chaos has a certain potential in creating a newway of securing information to be transmitted or stored. There are two main objectives to this project. First is study the feasibility of the chaotic encryption scheme in providing a solution in to preserve data security while maintaining the voice quality for voice over Internet Protocol. Secondly, a new scheme based on a chaos system will be implemented for voice data. In order to achieve the second objective, a study had been carried out on other proposed schemes mainly the Hierarchical Data Security Protection (HDSP) for VoIP. This scheme performs two main operations which is the data-frame interleaving and intra-frame data encryption using bit swapping. Based onthe HDSP scheme, the author suggests a new scheme using two level encryption techniques, based on chaos. In this scheme, the author uses the bit swapping technique as the second encryption-decryption level and enhances it with a first level encryption-decryption scheme using the two's compliment overflow nonlinearity encoder-decoder pair. The implementation ofthis scheme is specified to do real time processing ofvoice data. It can also be used to read, encrypt and write a wave file. The entire system is implemented, tested and validated using MATLAB and Visual C++. Due to the promising prospect ofchaotic encryption in the field ofcryptography, and the lack ofimplementation ofthis new encryption-decryption algorithm, this project focuses on introducing a new symmetric encryption-decryption scheme based on a chaos system for VoIP

Examining the terminology of race issues in assessments for international exchange students

This study examined assignments by students from a university in Scotland and a university in the USA, and explored the terminology used by student when referring to race issues in assignments linked to practice. The findings suggest the terminology of race issues in assessments may be inappropriate for students because they allow racism to be marginalized from practice or presented in a way that conveys little analysis

Emission characteristics and dynamics of the stagnation layer in colliding laser produced plasmas

The expansion dynamics of ion and neutral species in laterally colliding laser produced aluminum plasmas have been investigated using time and space resolved optical emission spectroscopies and spectrally and angularly resolved fast imaging. The emission results highlight a difference in neutral atom and ion distributions in the stagnation layer where, at a time delay of 80 ns, the neutral atoms are localized in the vicinity of the target surface 1 mm from the target surface while singly and doubly charged ions lie predominantly at larger distances, 1.5 and 2 mm, respectively. The imaging results show that the ions were found to form a well defined, but compressed, stagnation layer at the collision front between the two seed plasmas at early times (Dt ~ 80 ns). On the other hand, the excited neutrals were observed to form a V-shaped emission feature at the outer regions of the collision front with enhanced neutral emission in the less dense, cooler regions of the stagnation layer

CHEMICAL CHARACTERISATION OF ALPINIA GALANGA (L.) WILLD BY GC–MS, XRD, FTIR AND UV-VIS SPECTROSCOPIC METHODS

Objective: Present study was aimed to produce the chemical profile of Alpinia galanga (L.) Willd by various analytical methods.Methods: The sample extracted with methanol were screened for their volatile organic constituents using a Shimadzu QP-2010 PLUS gas chromatograph coupled to a mass spectrometer (GC-MS) instrument (Shimadzu Corporation, Japan). Then the sample was analyzed for the identification of unknown crystalline materials and determination of crystal structure using a PANalytical X'PERT PRO X-ray diffractometer. Finally the extracts were examined under visible and UV light for the proximate analysis. FTIR method performed on IR AFFINITY-1 Spectrophotometer and UV-1700 Spectrophotometer detects characteristic peaks in the visible range.Results: Forty significant compounds were identified in A. galanga by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry method. XRD pattern gave three prominent diffraction peaks at 25 position (15.39 o, 17.42o and 31.32o) results in d-spacing value 5.75, 5.08 and 2.85 Ã…; confirms the presence of Cu, Si and Pb elements. FTIR analysis confirmed the presence of alkanes, amides, carboxylic acids, epoxides, alcohols, aliphatic amines, aromatics and phenol compounds. UV Vis spectrum profile showed the peaks at 358, 268 and 224 nm with the absorption of 0.590, 1.199 and 2.752.Conclusion: The information regarding the characterization and quantification may be useful in assessing the genotoxicity of the plant material and can be recommended for implementation in the official pharmacopeias.Â

Channel Vision Transformers: An Image Is Worth C x 16 x 16 Words

Vision Transformer (ViT) has emerged as a powerful architecture in the realm of modern computer vision. However, its application in certain imaging fields, such as microscopy and satellite imaging, presents unique challenges. In these domains, images often contain multiple channels, each carrying semantically distinct and independent information. Furthermore, the model must demonstrate robustness to sparsity in input channels, as they may not be densely available during training or testing. In this paper, we propose a modification to the ViT architecture that enhances reasoning across the input channels and introduce Hierarchical Channel Sampling (HCS) as an additional regularization technique to ensure robustness when only partial channels are presented during test time. Our proposed model, ChannelViT, constructs patch tokens independently from each input channel and utilizes a learnable channel embedding that is added to the patch tokens, similar to positional embeddings. We evaluate the performance of ChannelViT on ImageNet, JUMP-CP (microscopy cell imaging), and So2Sat (satellite imaging). Our results show that ChannelViT outperforms ViT on classification tasks and generalizes well, even when a subset of input channels is used during testing. Across our experiments, HCS proves to be a powerful regularizer, independent of the architecture employed, suggesting itself as a straightforward technique for robust ViT training. Lastly, we find that ChannelViT generalizes effectively even when there is limited access to all channels during training, highlighting its potential for multi-channel imaging under real-world conditions with sparse sensors. Our code is available at https://github.com/insitro/ChannelViT

Manganese Uptake and Accumulation in the Human Brain

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