Search

Background Coiled-coil domain-containing protein 34 (CCDC34), which belongs to the CCDCs family, has been recently reported to be up-regulated in various kinds of tumors. However, its role in the development of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) still remains unclear. Materials and methods In this study, real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and Western blot analysis were performed to measure the mRNA and protein levels of CCDC34 in clinical samples. Kaplan-Meier method was used to analyze the relationship between CCDC34 and the prognosis in HCC patients. CCK-8 and colony formation assays were conducted to investigate CCDC34's effect on the cell proliferation, and Transwell assays were used to detect CCDC34's effect on the cell metastasis. Moreover, subcutaneous xenograft tumor model and lung metastasis model were applied to confirm the impact of CCDC34 on the HCC development. Lastly, RNA sequencing and Western blot analysis were performed to probe the underlying mechanism of CCDC34's effect on HCC. Results CCDC34 was significantly induced in HCC tissues, and the overexpression of CCDC34 predicted the poor outcomes among HCC patients. It was verified by the in vitro and in vivo experiments that CCDC34-knockdown potently inhibited the proliferation and metastasis of HCC cells. Subsequent results indicated that CCDC34 inhibition can affect the activation of protein kinase B (PKB or AKT) as well as epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) process. Conclusion CCDC34 is significantly associated with HCC. It will become a promising prognostic biomarker and therapeutic target against HCC.

Hybrid utilization of solar and geothermal energy is an attractive option to solve the global energy crisis as well as environmental issues. A solar-assisted ground source absorption heat p...

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel colorless full-duplex passive optical network architecture with Rayleigh backscattering optical beat interference (OBI) noise mitigation by using orthogonal codes. A pair of orthogonal codes are generated and transmitted from optical line terminal (OLT) to optical network unit (ONU) with the same wavelength, in which, one for downstream signal coding, and the other for the upstream seeding signal. In ONU, the upstream signal is remodulated without erasing the downstream signal. Extra centralized CW light sources and gain-saturation RSOAs are not needed. By using orthogonal codes, the spectral overlap between upstream and downstream signal is reduced, which can mitigate OBI noise significantly. The performance of transmission and power margin are investigated through experiments at different data rates, transmission distances compared with normal on-off keying (OOK) signals. The remodulated upstream signals are correlatively received at OLT with coding gain which is useful in long-reach transmissions. Due to coding gain and OBI noise mitigation, total 4~9dB power margin is achieved for 5Gb/s downstream and 1.25Gb/s upstream with 20km to 70km transmission distances.

Background Translationally controlled tumor protein (TCTP), which has been verified to have a proinflammatory activity, plays an important role in allergy. However, it remains unclear whether TCTP has an impact on the acute rejection (AR) after liver transplantation. Methods Three protocols were used to delineate the role of TCTP in AR after liver transplantation. First, in rat orthotopic liver transplantation (OLT), the expression of TCTP was measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), real-time PCR, Western blot and immunofluorescence assays. Second, in mixed lymphocyte reaction (MLR), the role of TCTP in lymphocyte proliferation was measured by carboxyfluorescein succinimidyl ester (CFSE) labeling and the impact of TCTP on inflammatory factor release was detected by cytokine arrays. Third, in human OLT, the level of serum TCTP was detected by ELISA, and the relationship between TCTP and model for early allograft function (MEAF) score was assessed by Spearman's correlation. Results In rat OLT, AR resulted in great harm to allografts, manifesting as deterioration of liver function, increasing inflammatory factors and infiltrating lymphocytes. Meanwhile, TCTP was overexpressed in serum and allografts. Higher level of TCTP was associated with higher rejection activity index (RAI). In an MLR protocol, TCTP knockdown inhibited the proliferation of mixed inflammatory cells and significantly suppressed the release of 15 cytokines and chemokines. In human OLT, the serum TCTP was up-regulated within a week after operation. Additionally, the increasing speed of serum TCTP positively correlated with MEAF scores (r = 0.449; P = 0.0088). Conclusions Up-regulated TCTP positively affects AR after liver transplantation.

The rapid rise of deep learning and AI is inseparable from the support of massive labeled data. Crowdsourcing has become a cheap and efficient paradigm for providing labels for large-scale unlabeled data. But, due to the various uncertainty of crowdsourcing workers (or called labelers), much low-quality and false labeled data is yielded. To address this fundamental challenge, many redundancy-based ground truth inference algorithms have been proposed in the past few years, which assign each labeling task to multiple workers and infer the true label of each instance in task from its multiple label set. In this paper, we devise a novel scheme to improve the quality of labeled data and infer the truth label, which utilizes small proportion golden data that has been labeled correctly to estimate workers’ ability and reliability and uses the incentive mechanism to motivate workers to do their best. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our method is effective and is also robust to low-quality workers as it outperforms Majority Voting (MV) and some commonly used algorithms.

Atomization and spray is now widely used in many industrial fields. On-line measurement of the size distribution, temperature, and component concentration of the spray droplets is very important for the in-depth investigation into the mechanism and optimized control of the atomization and spraying process. Global Rainbow Refractometry (GRR) is an effective light scattering technique for the simultaneous measurement of the size distribution and refractive index of the spray droplets. In the paper, an improved reversion algorithm of GRR is proposed based on Nussenzveig theory, least square method and empirical formulas. Firstly five characteristic points are extracted from the intensity distribution of the pretreated global rainbow, and then the refractive index and diameter range of the droplets can be initially estimated. From the initially estimated values, the refractive index and diameter range of the droplets are determined by optimizing the angular deviation between the reconstructed and captured rainbows. Finally, both numerical simulations and experiments are carried out to evaluate the feasibility of the improved algorithm. The results show that the error of the inversion result of refractive index is of the order of magnitude 10 −4 , and the error of the mean diameter is better than 3 μm.