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Abstract Background The present study was performed to assess the association between the neutrophil-to-apolipoprotein A1 ratio (NAR) and outcomes in patients with acute decompensated heart failure (ADHF) at different glucose metabolism states. Methods We recruited 1233 patients with ADHF who were admitted to Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital, Affiliated Hospital of Medical School, Nanjing University from December 2014 to October 2019. The endpoints were defined as composites of cardiovascular death, nonfatal myocardial infarction, nonfatal ischemic stroke and exacerbation of chronic heart failure. The restricted cubic spline was used to determine the best cutoff of NAR, and patients were divided into low and high NAR groups. Kaplan-Meier plots and multivariable Cox proportional hazard models were used to investigate the association between NAR and the risk of adverse outcomes. Results During the five-year follow-up period, the composite outcome occurred in 692 participants (56.1%). After adjusting for potential confounding factors, a higher NAR was associated with a higher incidence of composite outcomes in the total cohort (Model 1: HR = 1.42, 95% CI = 1.22–1.65, P0.05). Conclusions The NAR has predictive value for adverse outcomes of ADHF with DM, which implies that the NAR could be a potential indicator for the management of ADHF.

Abstract Background The impact of fibroblasts on the immune system provides insight into the function of fibroblasts. In various tissue microenvironments, multiple fibroblast subtypes interact with immunocytes by secreting growth factors, cytokines, and chemokines, leading to wound healing, fibrosis, and escape of cancer immune surveillance. However, the specific mechanisms involved in the fibroblast‐immunocyte interaction network have not yet been fully elucidated. Main body and conclusion Therefore, we systematically reviewed the molecular mechanisms of fibroblast‐immunocyte interactions in fibrosis, from the history of cellular evolution and cell subtype divisions to the regulatory networks between fibroblasts and immunocytes. We also discuss how these communications function in different tissue and organ statuses, as well as potential therapies targeting the reciprocal fibroblast‐immunocyte interplay in fibrosis. A comprehensive understanding of these functional cells under pathophysiological conditions and the mechanisms by which they communicate may lead to the development of effective and specific therapies targeting fibrosis.

An ecological safety pattern is the basic guarantee for pollution control, ecological environmental protection, economic construction, and sustainable social development, and is an important means of integrated and coordinated development, protection, and governance. This study proposes a research method to identify ecological source sites based on the evaluation of the importance of ecosystem services and ecological sensitivity, and to identify ecological corridors using the minimum cumulative resistance model. The empirical analysis was carried out in Yangxin County, Hubei Province, as an example. The results show that the study area has 16 key corridors and 29 potential corridors, a total of 45 ecological corridors, with a total length of 452 km. In addition, these ecological corridors present a network-like intertwined distribution, connecting various ecological source sites and ensuring the connectivity between ecological source sites, while the well-developed water source sites in the study area provide excellent ecosystem service functions such as water containment for the area.

AbstractBackground A growing number of studies show that people with similar blood glucose levels have different levels of glycosylated haemoglobin (HbA1c), and relying only on HbA1c may lead to clinical decision-making errors. The haemoglobin glycation index (HGI) quantifies the difference in HbA1c among individuals and is strongly linked to the risk of cardiovascular disease. However, the connection between this phenomenon and the poor outcomes of patients with acute decompensated heart failure (ADHF) is currently unknown.Patients and Methods This retrospective, single-centre-based cohort study included 1531 hospitalized patients with ADHF from September 2010 to January 2020. The HGI is calculated from the difference between the observed and predicted HbA1c values [predicted HbA1c = 0.024 × fasting plasma glucose (FPG) (mg/dL)+3.1]. The endpoints examined in the study included all-cause death, cardiovascular (CV) death, and major adverse cardiac events (MACE). We fitted multivariable-adjusted Cox proportional hazard models to investigate the association between the HGI and clinical outcomes.Results During the five-year follow-up, 427 (27.9%) patients died from all causes, 232 (15.6%) from CV death, and 848 (55.4%) from MACE. The restricted cubic spline analysis also showed that the cumulative risk of all-cause and CV deaths decreased linearly with increasing HGI. According to multivariate Cox proportional hazard models, the highest tertile of the HGI was associated with a lower incidence of all-cause and cardiovascular deaths [all-cause death, adjusted hazard ratio (HR): 0.720, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.563–0.921, p = 0.009; CV death, adjusted HR: 0.619, 95% CI: 0.445–0.861, p = 0.004]. A 1% increase in the HGI was associated with a 12.5% reduction in the risk of all-cause death and a 20.8% reduction in the risk of CV death.Conclusions A high HGI was directly associated with a reduction in all-cause and CV deaths but was not associated with MACE. These findings may be helpful in the management of patients with ADHF.

Abstract A Fano resonance originates from the resonant coupling between interacting multipoles inside nanostructures. It breaks the symmetry of spectral line shape and enables Fano‐resonant media to present unusual scattering properties. However, understanding the mechanical effects of such multipolar coupling systems is highly complex compared with the traditional simple dipole. In this work, using single Si nanospheres as the Fano‐resonant media, optical forces arising from different types of Fano resonances including the electric, magnetic, and magnetoelectric Fano resonances are investigated. It is shown that the directions of these types of forces are tunable in three dimensions. The necessary condition to realize a direction change of the Fano‐resonance‐induced forces and elucidate the underlying physics are presented. Furthermore, it is found that the Fano‐resonance‐induced forces exhibit strong polarization‐dependent properties which traditional optical (dipolar) forces cannot possess.

The human spatial perception of urban streets has a high complexity and traditional research methods often focus on access surveys of human perception. Urban streets serve as both a direct conduit for pedestrians’ impressions of a city and a reflection of the spatial quality of that city. Street-view images can provide a large amount of primary data for the image semantic segmentation technique. Deep learning techniques were used in this study to collect the boring, beautiful, depressing, lively, safe, and wealthy perception scores of street spaces based on these images. Then, the spatial pattern of urban street-space quality perception was analyzed by global Moran’s I and GIS hotspot analyses. The findings demonstrate that various urban facilities affect street quality perception in different ways and that the strength of an influencing factor’s influence varies depending on its geographical location. The results of the influencing factors reveal the difference in the degree of influence of positive and negative influencing factors on various perceptions of the visual dimension of pedestrians. The primary contribution of this study is that it reduces the potential bias of a single data source by using multi-dimensional impact analysis to explain the relationship between urban street perception and urban facilities and visual elements. The study’s findings offer direction for high-quality urban development as well as advice for urban planning and enhanced design.

The visual quality and spatial distribution of architectural styles represent a city’s image, influence inhabitants’ living conditions, and may have positive or negative social consequences which are critical to urban sensing and designing. Conventional methods of identifying architectural styles rely on human labor and are frequently time-consuming, inefficient, and subjective in judgment. These issues significantly affect the large-scale management of urban architectural styles. Fortunately, deep learning models have robust feature expression abilities for images and have achieved highly competitive results in object detection in recent years. They provide a new approach to supporting traditional architectural style recognition. Therefore, this paper summarizes 22 architectural styles in a study area which could be used to define and describe urban architectural styles in most Chinese urban areas. Then, this paper introduced a Faster-RCNN general framework of architectural style classification with a VGG-16 backbone network, which is the first machine learning approach to identifying architectural styles in Chinese cities. Finally, this paper introduces an approach to constructing an urban architectural style dataset by mapping the identified architectural style through continuous street view imagery and vector map data from a top-down building contour map. The experimental results show that the architectural style dataset created had a precision of 57.8%, a recall rate of 80.91%, and an F1 score of 0.634. This dataset can, to a certain extent, reflect the geographical distribution characteristics of a wide variety of urban architectural styles. The proposed approach could support urban design to improve a city’s image.

Breast cancer is the most common malignant tumor in adult women. Its common metastatic sites are lymph nodes, bones, lungs, the liver, and the brain. It is so rare for a patient with breast cancer to have metastases of the gastrointestinal tract, peritoneum, and ovary at the same time that the clinical reporting rate is low. We present a case of a 61-year-old woman who underwent right mastectomy and chemoradiotherapy 3 years ago because of mixed invasive ductal-lobular breast cancer. This time, she came to the hospital due to the symptom of stomach discomfort for 2 weeks. The gastroscopy biopsy result showed gastric metastasis from breast cancer. Then, 18F-FDG imaging and 68Ga-FAPI PET/CT imaging were performed for further diagnosis; 68Ga-FAPI PET/CT demonstrated a significantly elevated FAPI activity in the thickened gastric wall, peritoneum, and bilateral adnexal areas, which was superior to that of 18F-FDG. Finally, a biopsy of suspicious lesions was taken for pathological and histochemical examination, which confirmed that, in addition to the gastric metastasis, the peritoneum and bilateral ovaries were all consistent with metastatic breast cancer.

Tumor neoantigens are aberrant polypeptides produced by tumor cells as a result of genomic mutations. They are also tumor-specific antigens (TSA). Neoantigens are more immunogenic than tumor-related antigens and do not induce autoimmunity. Based on the rapid development of bioinformatics and the continuous update of sequencing technology, cancer immunotherapy with tumor neoantigens has made promising breakthroughs and progress. In this review, the generation, prediction, and identification of novel antigens, as well as the individualized treatments of neoantigens, were first introduced. Secondly, the mechanism of Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Cell Immunotherapy (CAR-T) therapy and immune checkpoint blockade therapy in the treatment of tumors were outlined, and the three treatment methods were compared. Thirdly, the application of neoantigens in CAR-T therapy and PD-1/PD-L1 blockade therapy was briefly described. The benefits of the neoantigen vaccines over common vaccines were summarized as well. Finally, the prospect of neoantigen therapy was presented.

Abstract Due to their similarity to some bio‐architectures, for example, extracellular matrix, hydrogels are considered as bio‐inspired networks with bio‐mimetic and bio‐functional properties. With natural cytocompatibility and biocompatibility, hydrogels nowadays are more and more involved in various bio‐applications including shape morphing, artificial muscles, soft robotics, regenerative medicine, and so on. As an important subclass, stimuli‐responsive hydrogels have been attracting interest within decades. In response to single or multi‐triggers in biological microenvironment, stimuli‐responsive hydrogels can undergo phase transition, stiffness change, or biochemical properties activation, which make them intriguing biomaterials with broad applications including sensing, drug delivery, tissue engineering, and wound healing. This review presents typical synthetic and natural gelators comprising small molecules and polymers as building blocks of functional architectures. The fabrication strategies of hydrogels varied from supramolecular assembly to dynamic covalent binding are detailed. Various exogenous or endogenous, physical or chemical, and synthetic or natural stimuli together with response mechanism, design principle are demonstrated. Through recent examples from different perspectives, such as bionic devices, wound dressing, and cargo carrier, the benefits and opportunities of stimuli‐responsive hydrogels for biological applications are highlighted. Finally, the current challenges and future prospects in view of translation from fundamental researches to clinical application are briefly discussed.

Control parameters of classical control system are expected to be online tuned and optimized by intelligent methods, in order to improve performance and help engineers reduce a lot of repetitive work in dangerous and harmful working environments. Main ideas and works of this paper are as follows:Firstly, change ratio based expert PID control method (EA-PID) is proposed to expand range of control parameters. Expert rule table (ERT) of expert PID control method (E-PID) is replaced by change ratio table (CRT) of EA-PID. Adjusted parameters of EA-PID are the results of multiplying change ratios in current adjusting cycle and control parameters in previous adjusting cycle. Secondly, NARX prediction-based NARX-E-PID and NARX-EA-PID are proposed. The NARX neural network is designed as a time series predictor to predict the output of the control system, then control parameters are adjusted according to the predicted output. Thirdly, comparative simulations of all the above methods are implemented to verify the improved effects. Finally, theoretical analysis is provided to ensure the stability of control systems. Effect are as follows: Firstly, comparative simulations verify that the improved methods have faster control speed, smaller steady-state error, less overshoot, and better ability of anti-interference. Secondly, theoretical analysis shows that the unstable control systems with adjusted parameters can be changed into a stable system by stability judgment in each adjusting cycle.

Background: Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma is one of the leading aggressive malignancies with high mortality. Semaphorin 3F has been reported to be involved in lymphangiogenesis by interacting the vascular endothelial growth factor C/neuropilin 2 axis. This study aimed to assess the clinical and functional role of semaphorin 3F and preliminarily evaluate the relationship between semaphorin 3F and lymph node metastasis in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma. Methods: The messenger RNA expression of semaphorin 3F was analyzed using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction. The expression differences of semaphorin 3F between patients having esophageal squamous cell carcinoma with and without lymph node metastasis were assessed, and the correlation of semaphorin 3F with vascular endothelial growth factor C and neuropilin 2 was estimated. The prognostic value of semaphorin 3F was evaluated using Kaplan-Meier survival curves and Cox regression analysis. Gain- and loss-functional cell experiments were performed to explore the biological function of semaphorin 3F, vascular endothelial growth factor C, and neuropilin 2. Results: The messenger RNA expression of semaphorin 3F was reduced in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma tissues compared with normal tissues, and lower semaphorin 3F expression was observed in patients having esophageal squamous cell carcinoma with positive lymph node metastasis. Semaphorin 3F expression was associated with lymph node metastasis and negatively correlated with vascular endothelial growth factor C and neuropilin 2. Lower semaphorin 3F expression was related to a poor overall survival of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma and served as an independent prognostic indicator. In esophageal squamous cell carcinoma cells, semaphorin 3F messenger RNA expression was also decreased compared with normal cells, and the overexpression of semaphorin 3F could significantly inhibit cell proliferation, migration, and invasion. The downregulation of vascular endothelial growth factor C and neuropilin 2 could inhibit cell proliferation, migration, and invasion of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma cells. Conclusion: All data indicate that semaphorin 3F serves as a potential prognostic biomarker and tumor suppressor of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma and may be involved in the lymph node metastasis development through regulating neuropilin 2.

The stability of combustion in the process of fire flooding requires not only a reasonable gas injection rate but also a matching exhaust rate. A reasonable injection-production balance system is very important. Based on the material balance of injection-production, the expression of injection-production ratio suitable for normal fire flooding production is established. The air injection rate of fire flooding combustion and oxygen consumption of formation pressurization is analyzed by this formula to calculate the gas production and liquid production in combustion. The reasonable injection and production parameters for the oilfield are calculated by using the oilfield parameters. It can be seen that the calculated value of injection-production ratio is consistent with the actual value, which shows that the injection-production ratio is reasonable and can guide the adjustment of production parameters in the oilfield.

Abstract Food traceability and authentication systems play an important role in ensuring food quality and safety. Current techniques mainly rely on direct measurement by instrumental analysis, which is usually designed for one or a group of specific foods, not available for various food categories. To develop a general strategy for food identification and discrimination, a novel method based on fluorescence sensor arrays is proposed, composed of supramolecular assemblies regulated by non‐covalent interactions as an information conversion system. The stimuli‐responsiveness and tunability of supramolecular assemblies provided an excellent platform for interacting with various molecules in different foods. In this work, five sensor arrays constructed by supramolecular assemblies composed of pyrene derivatives and perylene derivatives are designed and prepared. Assembly behavior and sensing mechanisms are investigated systematically by spectroscopy techniques. The traceability and authentication effects on several kinds of food from different origins or grades are evaluated and verified by linear discriminant analysis (LDA). It is confirmed that the cross‐reactive signals from different sensor units encompassing all molecular interactions can generate a unique fingerprint pattern for each food and can be used for traceability and authentication toward universal food categories with 100% accuracy.

The energy demand has increased significantly in recent years and it is urgent to develop a renewable energy system that is highly efficient and non-noble metal-based. Hydrogen energy is an environmentally friendly energy source with abundant resources, which can be used to solve the problem of high energy demand without greenhouse gas emissions. However, the development of catalysts for hydrogen production technology by electrolysis of water is slow, mainly due to the complexity of the electrolysis hydrogen generation process, low hydrogen production efficiency, weak electrode material activity and high cost. Among the non-noble metal-based catalysts, carbon-based materials have high conductivity, tunable chemical bonding, and easily modified morphology, making them beneficial to achieving efficient hydrogen production, though pure carbon composites suffer from few surface-active sites and unmoderated hydrogen bonding energy, which need to be further optimized. The principle of electrocatalytic hydrogen production from the perspectives of reaction thermodynamics and kinetics is analyzed and discussed in this paper. Thermodynamics of electrocatalytic hydrogen production is reflected by the Gibbs free energy of hydrogen adsorption (ΔGH*) and electrode potential (E). Reaction kinetics of the electrocatalytic hydrogen production process are reflected by overpotential, Tafel slope and exchange current density. Structural optimization methods of carbon-based composite materials and hydrogen production performance after structural optimization are also summarized. Structural optimization methods of carbon-based composite materials mainly include introducing active sites, improving conductivity, increasing specific surface area and introducing self-supporting materials. Finally, prospects are proposed for the development direction and existing problems of electrocatalytic hydrogen production performance of carbon-based composites.

Abstract Cervical cancer (CC) is the most common gynecologic malignancy, which seriously threatens the health of women. Lipid metabolism is necessary for tumor proliferation and metastasis. However, the molecular mechanism of the relationship between CC and lipid metabolism remains poorly defined. We revealed the expression of IGF2BP3 in CC exceeded adjacent tissues, and was positively associated with tumor stage using human CC tissue microarrays. The Cell Counting Kit-8, colony formation assay, 5-ethynyl-2′-deoxyuridine assay, transwell assays, wound-healing assays, and flow cytometry assessed the role of IGF2BP3 in proliferation and metastasis of CC cells. Besides, exploring the molecular mechanism participating in IGF2BP3-driven lipid metabolism used RNA-seq, which determined SCD as the target of IGF2BP3. Further, lipid droplets, cellular triglyceride (TG) contents, and fatty acids were accessed to discover that IGF2BP3 can enhance lipid metabolism in CC. Moreover, RIP assay and methylated RNA immunoprecipitation experiments seeked the aimed-gene-binding specificity. Lastly, the IGF2BP3 knockdown restrained CC growth and lipid metabolism, after which SCD overexpression rescued the influence in vitro and in vivo using nude mouse tumor-bearing model. Mechanistically, IGF2BP3 regulated SCD mRNA m6A modifications via IGF2BP3-METTL14 complex, thereby enhanced CC proliferation, metastasis, and lipid metabolism. Our study highlights IGF2BP3 plays a crucial role in CC progression and represents a therapeutic latent strategy. It is a potential tactic that blocks the metabolic pathway relevant to IGF2BP3 with the purpose of treating CC.

Breast cancer is the most common malignant tumor in adult women. Its common metastatic sites are lymph nodes, bones, lungs, the liver, and the brain. It is so rare for a patient with breast cancer to have metastases of the gastrointestinal tract, peritoneum, and ovary at the same time that the clinical reporting rate is low. We present a case of a 61-year-old woman who underwent right mastectomy and chemoradiotherapy 3 years ago because of mixed invasive ductal-lobular breast cancer. This time, she came to the hospital due to the symptom of stomach discomfort for 2 weeks. The gastroscopy biopsy result showed gastric metastasis from breast cancer. Then, 18F-FDG imaging and 68Ga-FAPI PET/CT imaging were performed for further diagnosis; 68Ga-FAPI PET/CT demonstrated a significantly elevated FAPI activity in the thickened gastric wall, peritoneum, and bilateral adnexal areas, which was superior to that of 18F-FDG. Finally, a biopsy of suspicious lesions was taken for pathological and histochemical examination, which confirmed that, in addition to the gastric metastasis, the peritoneum and bilateral ovaries were all consistent with metastatic breast cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract As a new type of secondary ion battery, aqueous zinc‐ion battery has a broad application prospect in the field of large‐scale energy storage due to its characteristics of low cost, high safety, environmental friendliness, and high‐power density. In recent years, manganese dioxide (MnO2)‐based materials have been extensively explored as cathodes for Zn‐ion batteries. Based on the research experiences of our group in the field of aqueous zinc ion batteries and combining with the latest literature of system, we systematically summarize the research progress of Zn−MnO2 batteries. This article first reviews the current research progress and reaction mechanism of Zn−MnO2 batteries, and then respectively expounds the optimization of MnO2 cathode, Zn anodes, and diverse electrolytes and their effects on battery performance. Additionally, primary challenges related to different components and their respective strategies for mitigating them are discussed, with the ultimate objective of offering comprehensive guidance for the design and fabrication of high‐performance Zn−MnO2 batteries. Finally, the future research and development direction of aqueous Zn−MnO2 batteries with high energy density, high safety and long life is envisioned.

Abstract Deep learning technology is changing the landscape of cybersecurity research, especially the study of large amounts of data. With the rapid growth in the number of malware, developing of an efficient and reliable method for classifying malware has become one of the research priorities. In this paper, a new method, BIR-CNN, is proposed to classify of Android malware. It combines convolution neural network (CNN) with batch normalization and inception-residual (BIR) network modules by using 347-dim network traffic features. CNN combines inception-residual modules with a convolution layer that can enhance the learning ability of the model. Batch Normalization can speed up the training process and avoid over-fitting of the model. Finally, experiments are conducted on the publicly available network traffic dataset CICAndMal2017 and compared with three traditional machine learning algorithms and CNN. The accuracy of BIR-CNN is 99.73% in binary classification (2-classifier). Moreover, the BIR-CNN can classify malware by its category (4-classifier) and malicious family (35-classifier), with a classification accuracy of 99.53% and 94.38%, respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed model is an effective method for Android malware classification, especially in malware category and family classifier.

In boxing, the wrong training methods can easily cause physical injury, so many sports protective clothing will use new materials to reduce the impact of boxing training. The aim of this paper is to design a boxing suit based on graphene composite fiber seamless knitted fabric, so as to reduce the injury of boxers during training. In this paper, the head yarn, inner yarn and knitting structure of graphene composite fiber seamless knitted fabrics are discussed, and nine kinds of fabrics are determined by orthogonal matrix method; then, a comprehensive evaluation of the wear resistance of fabrics was proposed based on sequence entropy weight technology, and the ideal solution similarity (TOPSIS) method was used to calculate the wear resistance; finally, this paper designed the boxing protective suit according to the best combination of performance. The experimental results in this paper showed that the veil of sample No. 7 is 70D/48F graphene nylon, the inner yarn is 30D graphene spandex/70D graphene nylon covered yarn, and the fabric with the knitted structure of 1 + 3 false rib has the best comprehensive performance and the highest relative proximity, reaching 0.862. The actual wearing test proves that the comfort of anti-impact boxing suit is slightly better than that of ordinary boxing suit. The clothing designed in this paper has good anti-impact effect. Therefore, on the whole, the boxing suit with graphene composite fiber seamless knitted fabric has good protective effect and can be used for boxing training.

Network security has become a growing concern within the popularity and development of the Internet. Malicious code is one of the main threats to network security. Different types of malicious code have different functions and cause different harms. Therefore, improving the detection efficiency and recognition accuracy of malicious code is becoming an urgent problem to be solved. While traditional machine learning methods for malicious code detection largely depend on hand-designed features with experts’ knowledge of the domain or focus on the images which come from malicious code binary files. These methods spend too much time on feature extraction. With the emergence of a large amount of malicious code data, the efficiency of traditional machine learning algorithms is getting worse and worse. In this paper, a workflow based on deep learning is proposed to detect and classify malicious codes. This workflow adopts a convolutional neural network (CNN) and the regularization algorithms to classify malicious code with N_gram semantic feature as input of the model. The convolutional neural network can automatically extract the features of malicious code while avoiding the need for manual feature selection. Regularization algorithms not only speed up the training process of the deep model but also improve the generalization ability in the case of effective prevention of over-fitting of the model. The proposed method is compared with the state-of-the-art methods and other deep learning models. Experimental results show that our workflow can improve the accuracy and efficiency of malicious code classification.

Treatment of irrigation water using plasma involves a series of electrochemical reactions that forms NO- x in water working as a fertilizer in plant cultivation. Here we report the results of an experimental study of the effects of different discharge conditions especially discharge frequency on air phase gliding arc discharge. The results show that, the low-frequency system consumed nearly three times more energy than the high-frequency system when generating the same NO- x production rate in water; gas flow rate has strong influence on the low-frequency system while slight influence on the high-frequency system; high-frequency discharge can generate much larger plasma area to promote electrochemical reactions resulting more NO- x produced in water. Frequency from 5 kHz to 80 kHz does not significantly influence on the nitrogen fixation of gliding arc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients are mostly diagnosed at an advanced stage, resulting in systemic therapy and poor prognosis. Therefore, the identification of a novel treatment target for HCC is important. B-cell receptor-associated protein 31 (BAP31) has been identified as a cancer/testis antigen; however, BAP31 function and mechanism of action in HCC remain unclear. In this study, BAP31 was demonstrated to be upregulated in HCC and correlated with the clinical stage. BAP31 overexpression promoted HCC cell proliferation and colony formation in vitro and tumor growth in vivo. RNA-sequence (RNA-seq) analysis demonstrated that serpin family E member 2 (SERPINE2) was downregulated in BAP31-knockdown HCC cells. Coimmunoprecipitation and immunofluorescence assays demonstrated that BAP31 directly binds to SERPINE2. The inhibition of SERPINE2 significantly decreased the BAP31-induced cell proliferation and colony formation of HCC cells and phosphorylation of Erk1/2 and p38. Moreover, multiplex immunohistochemistry staining of the HCC tissue microarray showed positive associations between the expression levels of BAP31, SERPINE2, its downstream gene LRP1, and a tumor proliferation marker, Ki-67. The administration of anti-BAP31 antibody significantly inhibited HCC cell xenograft tumor growth in vivo. Thus, these findings suggest that BAP31 promotes tumor cell proliferation by stabilizing SERPINE2 and can serve as a promising candidate therapeutic target for HCC.

With the emergence of various types of indoor positioning technologies (e.g., radio-frequency identification, Wi-Fi, and iBeacon), how to rapidly retrieve indoor cells and moving objects has become a key factor that limits those indoor applications. Euclidean distance-based indexing techniques for outdoor moving objects cannot be used in indoor spaces due to the existence of indoor obstructions (e.g., walls). In addition, currently, the indexing of indoor moving objects is mainly based on space-related query and less frequently on semantic query. To address these two issues, the present study proposes a multi-floor adjacency cell and semantic-based index (MACSI). By integrating the indoor cellular space with the semantic space, the MACSI subdivides open cells (e.g., hallways and lobbies) using space syntax and optimizes the adjacency distances between three-dimensionally connected cells (e.g., elevators and stairs) based on the caloric cost that extends single floor indoor space to three dimensional indoor space. Moreover, based on the needs of semantic query, this study also proposes a multi-granularity indoor semantic hierarchy tree and establishes semantic trajectories. Extensive simulation and real-data experiments show that—compared with the indoor trajectories delta tree (ITD-tree) and the semantic-based index (SI)—the MACSI produces more reliable query results with significantly higher semantic query and update efficiencies; has superior semantic expansion capability; and supports multi-granularity complex semantic queries.

Driven by the rapid construction of China's transportation and the integration of urban and rural development, a large network of different transportation modes, such as roads, railways, waterways, and aviation, have formed in urban and rural areas. The multi-mode coordinated planning of transportation has therefore become a new trend in the integration of urban and rural transportation, promoting the common development of urban and rural areas. Based on this, this paper uses multi-source data information to explore the coordinated development and planning of different modes of urban and rural transportation and takes GIS software as a tool to coordinate the development between urban and rural transportation planning and production, life, ecology and cultural elements in urban and rural space for the purpose of evaluating the traffic needs of different modes in urban and rural space. Wuxue City is taken as an example to analyze the shortcomings of the current urban and rural transportation coordination, and accordingly proposes a four-pronged coordinated traffic planning strategy: road network structure, hub layout, information service, and public transport optimization. Spatially, this paper intends to find out a new approach of coordinated planning of urban and rural multi-mode transportation which can promote the integrated development of urban and rural transportation and set a good example for the development of urban and rural transportation in other similar areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]