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Researchers have achieved precise control of the size of quantum dots by using the quantum confinement effect. Rb+ and Cs+ with similar ionic radii have become a new mechanism for researchers to regulate the emission wavelength of quantum dots. However, there are few studies on the performance of codoped quantum dots with ion at present. By adding a saturated solution of RbCl into an organic solution of CsPbBr3, quantum dots doped with Rb+ and Cl− were prepared. The prepared quantum dots realized adjustable emission spectrum (457‐510 nm), stable lattice structure, and good stability under ultraviolet light irradiation. Therefore, double ion doping is a new method to prepare short‐wavelength of quantum dots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many retailers and manufacturers issue "free" gift cards to consumers who purchase qualifying products. These gift cards are paid for by the retailer or manufacturer and redeemed on certain products at the retailer. We develop a decentralized two‐product supply chain in which the retailer is a Stackelberg leader. We analyze three models: no gift cards, manufacturer‐sponsored gift cards, and retailer‐sponsored gift cards. By comparing these three models, we show that offering retail‐sponsored gift cards is the optimal strategy in such a supply chain. We analyze the influences of product value and redemption rate on the optimal policy and the expected profits. We show that the retailer, two manufacturers, and consumers are better off in such an optimal strategy. Furthermore, we develop a cost‐sharing mechanism based on the result of retailer‐sponsored gift cards by taking reasonableness and fairness into consideration. Finally, we extend our study by considering changed wholesale prices and retailer prices and a pair of complements with gift cards in the models of manufacturer‐sponsored gift cards and retailer‐sponsored gift cards, and we obtain some useful insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alzheimer's disease (AD), the most common form of dementia, is a progressive neurodegenerative disease. In the past decades, numbers of promising drug candidates showed significant anti‐AD effects in preclinical studies but failed in clinical trials. One of the major reasons might be the limitation of appropriate animal models for evaluating anti‐AD drugs. More than 95% of AD cases are sporadic AD (sAD). However, the anti‐AD drug candidates were mainly tested in the familial AD (fAD) animal models. The diversity between the sAD and fAD might lead to a high failure rate during the development of anti‐AD drugs. Therefore, an ideal sAD animal model is urgently needed for the development of anti‐AD drugs. Here, we summarized the available sAD animal models, including their methodology, pathologic features, and potential underlying mechanisms. The limitations of these sAD animal models and future trends in the field were also discussed. HIGHLIGHTS: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common dementia and no drug for it untill now.Sporadic AD (sAD) animal models can be established by metabolic damage, aging, traumatic brain injury, and acrolein.sAD animal models can also be established by introducing protein phosphatase 2A inhibitor peptide, metals, and combining factors.Nonhuman primates may overcome the gap between rodents and humans for AD animal model.Herpes simplex virus type 1 and other pathogens may be used in establishing sAD animal models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patterns are used as a fundamental means for analyzing data in many data mining applications. Many efficient techniques have been developed to discover patterns. However, the excessive number of discovered patterns and the lack of semantic information have made it difficult for a user to interpret and explore the patterns. A rough idea of the meanings of patterns can benefit the user in the process of exploring them. To address this issue, this paper presents a model for automatically annotating patterns with concepts. In addition, in a given context, the relative importance of each term that defines a concept is not the same. To define a context, there are a number of related information sources, such as documents, patterns, concepts, and an ontology. The question is which information sources are useful for estimating the relative importance of the terms? Should the most accurate one to be focused on or all of them be used to define the context? This research investigated these questions and defined an effective annotation context to estimate the relative importance of the terms, where the aim is to improve the performance of a machine that relies on the subject matter of a pattern set. The model is evaluated by comparing it with different baseline models on 2 standard datasets. The results show that the performance of the proposed model is significantly better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To determine hippocampal subfields volume loss in depression, which was simulated by a rat chronic unpredictable mild stress (CUMS) model. As different cellular and molecular characteristics in hippocampal subfields, these subfields are regarded as differentially vulnerable to processes associated with stress.Materials and Methods: Twenty male Wistar rats were exposed to various stressors until the model was successfully established. The effects of physical exercise on recovery of hippocampal volume in depressed rats were simulated using the wheel running test (WRT). These rats hippocampal volumes were dynamically measured using T2 -weighted images (T2 WIs) at 7T structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).Results: After 4 weeks of CUMS (CUMS-4W), the behavioral tests showed that the rat model of depression was successfully established (P < 0.001). In this process, the bilateral CA1 volume was significantly atrophic after 2 weeks of CUMS (CUMS-2W) compared with controls (left: 21.09 ± 2.31 vs. 26.16 ± 3.83 mm3 , P < 0.001; right: 21.05 ± 2.36 vs. 26.12 ± 3.78 mm3 , P < 0.001), whereas the other subfields did not show a similar change (all P > 0.05). The volume of CA3, dentate gyrus (DG), and subiculum displayed atrophy after CUMS-4W (CA3: left:12.23 ± 1.10 mm3 , right: 12.20 ± 1.14 mm3 ; DG: left:8.16 ± 0.58 mm3 , right: 8.18 ± 0.92 mm3 ; subiculum: left: 4.30 ± 0.52 mm3 , right: 4.29 ± 0.44 mm3 ; all P < 0.05). The rats' (CUMS-4W) hippocampal DG volume was restored (left: 10.67 ± 1.60 mm3 , right: 10.71 ± 1.58 mm3 ), and the depression-like behaviors of these rats improved after WRT-4W (P < 0.05).Conclusion: In general, volume loss was demonstrated in various rat hippocampal subfields during the development and recovery from depression, which were detected by ultrahigh-field MRI.Level Of Evidence: 3 Technical Efficacy: Stage 3 J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2017;46:1456-1463. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Association rule mining is one important technique to characterize the behaviour of network traffic. However, mining association rules from network traffic data still have three obstacles such as efficiency, huge number of results and insufficiency to represent the behaviour of network traffic. Aiming to tackle these issues, this paper presents a granule-based association rule mining approach, called association hierarchy mining. The proposed approach adopts top-down rule mining strategy to directly generate interesting rules according to subjectively specified rule template hierarchies, which improves the efficiency of rule generation and subjectively filters user uninterested rules. The approach also proposes to prune a new type of redundant rules defined by this research to reduce the number of rules. Finally, the approach introduces the concept of diversity, aiming to select the interesting rules for better interpreting the behaviour of network traffic. The experiments performed on the MAWI network traffic traces show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ceiling culture is an inverted and closed cell culture system which represents a novel method for exploring adipocyte characteristics and function. Although the role of ceiling culture in mature adipocyte dedifferentiation has been extensively studied, its potential effects on preadipocyte differentiation remain unclear. In this study, we established a simplified dish ceiling culture method for 3T3-L1 preadipocytes and showed that our novel ceiling culture method could reproduce the function of the traditional flask ceiling culture. Then, we investigated the effects of ceiling culture on 3T3-L1 preadipocyte differentiation by Oil red O staining and RT-qPCR. The results showed that ceiling culture significantly impaired triglyceride accumulation and adipogenic marker genes expression in 3T3-L1 preadipocytes. These findings suggest that ceiling culture inhibited 3T3-L1 preadipocyte differentiation while inducing mature adipocytes dedifferentiation. Taken together, our data facilitate the understanding of the property of ceiling culture and promote the study of revealing the underlying mechanisms of mature adipocytes dedifferenatiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multidrug resistance (MDR) remains a major obstacle to effective chemotherapy treatment in ovarian cancer. In our study, paclitaxel-resistant ovarian cancer patients and cell lines had decreased miR-145 levels and expressed high levels of Sp1 and Cdk6. Introducing miR-145 into SKOV3/PTX and A2780/PTX cells led to a reduction in Cdk6 and Sp1 along with downregulation of P-gp and pRb. These changes resulted in increased accumulation of antineoplastic drugs and G1 cell cycle arrest, which rendered the cells more sensitive to paclitaxel in vitro and in vivo. These effects could be reversed by reintroducing Sp1 or Cdk6 into cells expressing high levels of miR-145, resulting in restoration of P-gp and pRb levels. Furthermore, we confirmed that both Cdk6 and Sp1 are targets of miR-145. Intriguingly, demethylation with 5-aza-dC led to reactivation of miR-145 expression in drug-resistant ovarian cancer cell lines, which also resulted in increased sensitivity to paclitaxel. Collectively, these findings begin to elucidate the role of miR-145 as an important regulator of chemoresistance in ovarian cancer by controlling both Cdk6 and Sp1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Brucellosis is a globally distributed zoonotic disease that causes animal and human diseases. Although effective, the current Brucella vaccines (Rev.1 and M5-90) have several drawbacks. The first involves residual virulence for animals and humans and the second is the inability to differentiate natural infection from that caused by vaccination. Therefore, Brucella melitensis 16M hfq mutant (16MΔ hfq) was constructed to overcome these drawbacks. Similarly to Rev.1 and M5-90, 16MΔ hfq reduces survival in macrophages and mice and induces strong protective immunity in BALB/c mice. Moreover, these vaccines elicit anti- Brucella-specific IgG1 and IgG2a subtype responses and induce secretion of gamma interferon and interleukin-4. The Hfq antigen also allows serological differentiation between infected and vaccinated animals. These results show that 16MΔ hfq is an ideal live attenuated vaccine candidate against virulent Brucella melitensis 16M infection. It will be further evaluated in sheep. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY Understanding network traffic behaviour is crucial for managing and securing computer networks. One important technique is to mine frequent patterns or association rules from analysed traffic data. On the one hand, association rule mining usually generates a huge number of patterns and rules, many of them meaningless or user-unwanted; on the other hand, association rule mining can miss some necessary knowledge if it does not consider the hierarchy relationships in the network traffic data. Aiming to address such issues, this paper proposes a hybrid association rule mining method for characterizing network traffic behaviour. Rather than frequent patterns, the proposed method generates non-similar closed frequent patterns from network traffic data, which can significantly reduce the number of patterns. This method also proposes to derive new attributes from the original data to discover novel knowledge according to hierarchy relationships in network traffic data and user interests. Experiments performed on real network traffic data show that the proposed method is promising and can be used in real applications. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: MicroRNAs (miRNA) have emerged as key players in carcinogenesis. Here, we investigated the role of miR-137 in the pathogenesis of lung cancer. The downregulation of miR-137 in lung cancer cells could be rescued following inhibition of DNA methylation. Ectopic expression of miR-137 in lung cancer cells significantly downregulated Cdc42, Cdk6 and induced G1 cell cycle arrest, leading to a significant decrease in cell growth in vivo and in vitro. Further, both Cdc42 and Cdk6 were confirmed as targets of miR-137. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Researchers have achieved precise control of the size of quantum dots by using the quantum confinement effect. Rb+ and Cs+ with similar ionic radii have become a new mechanism for researchers to regulate the emission wavelength of quantum dots. However, there are few studies on the performance of codoped quantum dots with ion at present. By adding a saturated solution of RbCl into an organic solution of CsPbBr3, quantum dots doped with Rb+ and Cl− were prepared. The prepared quantum dots realized adjustable emission spectrum (457‐510 nm), stable lattice structure, and good stability under ultraviolet light irradiation. Therefore, double ion doping is a new method to prepare short‐wavelength of quantum dots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brucellosis is a globally distributed zoonotic disease that causes animal and human diseases. Although effective, the current Brucella vaccines (Rev.1 and M5-90) have several drawbacks. The first involves residual virulence for animals and humans and the second is the inability to differentiate natural infection from that caused by vaccination. Therefore, Brucella melitensis 16M hfq mutant (16MΔhfq) was constructed to overcome these drawbacks. Similarly to Rev.1 and M5-90, 16MΔhfq reduces survival in macrophages and mice and induces strong protective immunity in BALB/c mice. Moreover, these vaccines elicit anti-Brucella-specific IgG1 and IgG2a subtype responses and induce secretion of gamma interferon and interleukin-4. The Hfq antigen also allows serological differentiation between infected and vaccinated animals. These results show that 16MΔhfq is an ideal live attenuated vaccine candidate against virulent Brucella melitensis 16M infection. It will be further evaluated in sheep., (© 2013 The Societies and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd.)