Suppression of tumorigenesis by human mesenchymal stem cells in a hepatoma model

Human mesenchymal stem cells （hMSCs） can home to tumor sites and inhibit the growth of tumor cells. Little is known about the underlying molecular mechanisms that link hMSCs to the targeted inhibition of tumor cells. In this study, we investigated the effects of hMSCs on two human hepatoma cell lines （H7402 and HepG2） using an animal transplantation model, a co-culture system and conditioned media from hMSCs. Animal transplantation studies showed that the latent time for tumor formation was prolonged and that the tumor size was smaller when SCID mice were injected with H7402 cells and an equal number of Z3 hMSCs. When co-cultured with Z3 cells, H7402 cell proliferation decreased, apoptosis increased, and the expression of Bcl-2, c-Myc, proliferating cell nuclear antigen （PCNA） and survivin was downregulated. After treatment with conditioned media derived from Z3 hMSC cultures, H4702 cells showed decreased colony-forming ability and decreased proliferation. Immunoblot analysis showed that β-catenin, Bcl-2, c-Myc, PCNA and survivin expression was downregulated in H7402 and HepG2 cells. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that hMSCs inhibit the malignant phenotypes of the H7402 and HepG2 human liver cancer cell lines, which include proliferation, colony-forming ability and oncogene expression both in vitro and in vivo. Furthermore, our studies provide evidence that the Wnt signaling pathway may have a role in hMSC-mediated targeting and tumor cell inhibition.

Convolutional Multi-Head Self-Attention on Memory for Aspect Sentiment Classification

This paper presents a method for aspect based sentiment classification tasks, named convolutional multi-head self-attention memory network(CMA-Mem Net). This is an improved model based on memory networks, and makes it possible to extract more rich and complex semantic information from sequences and aspects. In order to fix the memory network’s inability to capture context-related information on a word-level,we propose utilizing convolution to capture n-gram grammatical information. We use multi-head self-attention to make up for the problem where the memory network ignores the semantic information of the sequence itself. Meanwhile, unlike most recurrent neural network(RNN) long short term memory(LSTM), gated recurrent unit(GRU) models, we retain the parallelism of the network. We experiment on the open datasets Sem Eval-2014 Task 4 and Sem Eval-2016 Task 6. Compared with some popular baseline methods, our model performs excellently.

Tensile Behavior of Strain Hardening Cementitious Composites (SHCC) Containing Reactive Recycled Powder from Various C&D Waste

This work investigates the feasibility of utilizing reactive recycled powder(RP)from construction and demolition(C&D)waste as supplementary cementitious material(SCM)to achieve a ductile strain hardening cementitious composites(SHCC).The recycled mortar powder(RMP)from mortar waste,recycled concrete powder(RCP)from concrete waste and recycled brick powder(RBP)from clay brick waste were first prepared,and the micro-properties and tensile behavior of SHCC containing various types and replacement ratios of RPs were determined.The incorporated RP promotes pozzolanic and filler effects,while the hydration products in cementitious materials decrease with RP incorporation;therefore,the incorporated RP decreases the compressive strength of SHCC.Attributed to the reduction in the matrix strength,the incorporated RP increases the crack-bridging extent and ductility of SHCC;the irregular micro-structure and high reactivity of RP also help the strain-hardening performance of the prepared SHCC.In addition,the strainhardening performance of SHCC containing RMP and RBP is surperior to that of SHCC with RCP and is slightly lower than that of SHCC with fly ash(FA);for instance,the ultimate strain of SHCC containing 54%FA,RMP,RCP and RBP is 3.67%,3.61%,2.52%and 3.53%,respectively.In addition,the strain-hardening behavior of an SHCC doubled mix with FA and RMP or RBP has a similar ultimate strain and a higher ultimate stress than SHCC containing only FA.

Sentence-Level Paraphrasing for Machine Translation System Combination

In this paper, we propose to enhance machine translation system combination (MTSC) with a sentence-level paraphrasing model trained by a neural network. This work extends the number of candidates in MTSC by paraphrasing the whole original MT translation sentences. First we train a neural paraphrasing model of Encoder-Decoder, and leverage the model to paraphrase the MT system outputs to generate synonymous candidates in the semantic space. Then we merge all of them into a single improved translation by a state-of-the-art system combination approach (MEMT) adding some new paraphrasing features. Our experimental results show a significant improvement of 0.28 BLEU points on the WMT2011 test data and 0.41 BLEU points without considering the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words for the sentence-level paraphrasing model.

Preparation of nanocrystalline Na_2ZrO_3 for high-temperature CO_2 acceptors:chemistry and mechanism

Nanocrystalline Na2ZrO3 was demonstrated as a promising acceptor for CO2 capture at elevated temperatures. The mechanism of nanocrystalline Na2ZrO3 formation from the soft-chemistry route is elucidated by varying precursors, preparation methods, and calciantion temperatures, combining detailed characterizations by X-ray diffraction （XRD） and scanning electron microscope （SEM） at different steps in the process. The results revealed that the drying method such as spraying drying and simple evaporation-drying did not influence the final product prop- erties. However both Na and Zr precursors had remarkable influences on the Na2ZrO3 formation. The solid reaction of Na intermediate and nanocrystalline ZrO2 in the calcination was identified as the key step for the Na2ZrO3 formation, where the formation of molten phase Na intermediate was found to be crucial to facilitate the solid reaction. We provided principles for rational design of the chemistry for the Na2ZrO3 formation where the formation of Na intermediate with low melting points is essential. Pure nanocrystalline Na2ZrO3 can be synthesized from a mixture containing sodium nitrate and zirconoxy citrate via the formation of NaNO3 with low melting point. However, it is not possible to form pure nanocrystalline Na2ZrO3 at relatively low temperatures from the mixtures of NaAc/ZrO（NO3）2 or NaCA/ZrOC12 due to the formation of Na2CO3 and NaC1 with high melting points.

Identification of differential mRNA and lncRNA expression in AcMNPV-infected Sf9 cells

Sf9Sf9 are the ovarian cells of Spodoptera frugiperda that is the host of Autographa californica multiple nucleopolyhedrovirus(AcMNPV),and hence can serve as an effective test vehicle to understand the AcMNPV infection mechanism.In this study,through high-throughput sequencing technology using samples collected from Sf9 cells at different time points after AcMNPV infection,3463 pieces of time-series differentially expressed RNA(1,200 mRNA and 2,263 lncRNA)are identified and justified by experimental verification of randomly selected samples from them,proving the validity of the bioinformatical analysis on this topic.Functional enrichment analysis and target prediction are performed on those differentially expressed RNA,from which the major functional enrichment distribution of those differentially expressed mRNA is derived.It has been found that the differential genes are mainly in the cellular anatomical entity and intracellular in terms of the cellular component,and in the binding and catalytic activity in terms of the molecular function.Also,the differential mRNA are mainly concentrated in global and overview maps,signal transduction,infectious diseases,and viral,etc.Moreover,those mRNA targeted by lncRNA are predicted.The correlation between those differentially expressed lncRNA and mRNA indicates that lncRNA is very likely playing an important role in the interaction between virus and host.Aided by an advanced co-expression analysis approach,the“hub”RNA is also identified.The study in this work pave the way for further analyzing and understanding how AcMNPV escapes from the host’s immunity,manipulates the host to realize the selfmultiplication,and realizes the timely conversion between its two particle forms,laying the foundation for uncovering the host’s immune response process.

microR-1294-5p inhibits glycolytic metabolism of non-small cell lung cancer cells via targeting TMPRSS11B

Non-smallcell lung cancer(NSCLC)cells intake and consume glucose at high efficiency by aerobic glycolysis to maintain robust cell growth and resist cell death.MicroRNAs(miRNAs)have been known to play pivotal roles in NSCLC development partly through mediating glycolysis.However,only a few miRNAs have been experimentally confirmed as critical regulators of glycolysis in NSCLC.TCGA datasets were analyzed to screen for differentially expressed miRNAs between NSCLC and normal tissues.The function of miR-1294-5p was determined in NSCLC cells by cell proliferation,glucose uptake,lactate release,and Extracellular Acidification Rate(ECAR)assays.The target of miR-1294-5p was predicted by TargetScan and miRDB,which was further validated by flow cytometry analysis,RT-qPCR,western blotting,a dual-luciferase reporter assay,and RNA immunoprecipitation(RIP)assay.In the present study,it was found that miR-1294-5p was a significantly downregulated miRNA in lung adenocarcinoma(LUAD)and lung squamous cell carcinoma(LUSC).The overexpression of miR-1294-5p inhibited glycolysis,lactate export,ECAR,and cell proliferation in NSCLC cells.Analysis with bioinformatic tools,Western Blotting,RT-qPCR,flow cytometry analysis,dual-luciferase reporter assay,and RIP assay showed that miR-1294-5p directly bound to complementary sites in the 3’-Untranslated Region(UTR)of TMPRSS11B resulted in downregulation of TMPRSS11B expression.In addition,transfection of recombinant TMPRSS11B rescued the functions of miR-1294-5p on glycolysis and proliferation of NSCLC cells.The findings provided novel insights for understanding the regulation of glycolytic metabolism in NSCLC.

A Context-Aware Model Using Distributed Representations for Chinese Zero Pronoun Resolution

Previous approaches to Chinese zero pronoun resolution mainly use syntactic information and probabilistic methods, but the context information is ignored. To make full use of the context and semantic information, we build a context-aware model. We propose a key words extraction strategy and design a classification model by using distributed representations as context feature. To our best knowledge, this is the first work using distributed representations in Chinese zero pronoun resolution. Experimental results show that our approach achieves a better performance than previous supervised methods.

SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein phase separates with G3BPs to disassemble stress granules and facilitate viral production

A key to tackling the coronavirus disease 2019(COVID-19)pandemic is to understand how severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2(SARS-Co V-2)manages to outsmart host antiviral defense mechanisms.Stress granules(SGs),which are assembled during viral infection and function to sequester host and viral m RNAs and proteins,are part of the antiviral responses.Here,we show that the SARS-Co V-2 nucleocapsid(N)protein,an RNA binding protein essential for viral production,interacted with RasGTPase-activating protein SH3-domain-binding protein(G3 BP)and disrupted SG assembly,both of which require intrinsically disordered region1(IDR1)in N protein.The N protein partitioned into SGs through liquid-liquid phase separation with G3 BP,and blocked the interaction of G3 BP1 with other SG-related proteins.Moreover,the N protein domains important for phase separation with G3 BP and SG disassembly were required for SARS-Co V-2 viral production.We propose that N protein-mediated SG disassembly is crucial for SARS-Co V-2 production.

Super broadband absorbing hierarchical CoFe alloy/porous carbon@carbon nanotubes nanocomposites derived from metal-organic frameworks

The exploitation of electromagnetic wave absorption(EMA) materials has attracted ever-increasing attention,not only because electromagnetic wave(EMW) originated from overuse of electronic products has threatened human' health seriously,but also because EMA materials can effectively protect radar stealth from being detected.However,it is still a challenge to obtain broadband and efficient EMA materials to satisfy practical applications.In this work,we developed a series of hierarchical CoFe alloy/porous carbon@carbon nanotubes(CoFe/PC@CNTs) nanocomposites through revising the proportion of Fe^(2+) in the metal-organic frameworks(MOFs)(CoFe-ZIF) precursor and one-step simple pyrolysis process.The cross deposition between CoFe alloy,carbon nanotubes(CNTs),and porous carbon(PC) formed a double conductive network,favoring for achieving excellent EMA property.Surprisingly,when the filler mass ratio is only 10 wt%,the optimized CoFe/PC@CNTs nanocomposites display the best EMA capability,whose minimum reflection loss(RL_(min)) value is-68.94 dB at 13.69 GHz and the effective absorption band(EAB,<-10 dB) reaches up 9.14 GHz with a matching thickness of 2.63 mm.In addition,the largest EAB can achieve up to 11 GHz(3.35-14.35 GHz) during all matching thicknesses.The splendid EMA performance benefits the favorable dielectric loss provided by the double conductive network,the good magnetic loss benefited from the evenly distributed CoFe alloy,the excellent impedance matching,rich transmission paths,and multiple polarization.Therefore,such EMA materials with super broadband absorbing provide desirable candidates for lightweight and high-efficient microwave absorbers.

Recent advances in the catalytic conversion of CO_2 to value added compunds

CO2 is a major greenhouse gas,and it can also be used as a chemical feedstock for synthesis of chemicals and fuels by passing the petrochemical source.Herein,we present the recent progress of our research work in the catalytic conversion of CO2 to chemicals,with particular attention paid to catalytic reactivity and reaction mechanism.We also give the recommendations regarding the challenges and potential directions of the future research in this field.

Differentiated super-enhancers in lung cancer cells

Super-enhancers(SEs) are regulatory elements with enriched accumulation of key transcription factors.Few studies were done investigating SEs in lung cancers.Here we analyzed epigenetic profiling data to identify SEs in lung cancer cell lines.Enhancers were classified as SEs and typical enhancers(TEs).Most of the TEs were overlapped between normal cell and cancer cells.A great portion of SEs were differentiated comparing these cells.Analysis of GO terms associated with SEs revealed SE remodeling(lost on some sites while gain on others) between normal and lung cancer cells.By comparing the average number of SEs in each GO term in cancer cells with the number in control cells,surprisingly,no GO terms with significantly increased SE number in cancer condition were observed.On the contrary,in aspects such as "cell-cell adhesion","receptor activity" and"negative regulation of canonical Wnt signaling pathway",the related SEs were significantly reduced in cancer cells.These findings suggest that in lung cancer,cells may not gain decisive gene expression in the related aspect,instead,they may have lost control of the fateful genes.Taken together,our work with the usability of omics data identified SEs in lung cancer cells and further showed cancer-specific features of SE-related terms.

Effect of Ermiao Fang with Xixin(Herba Asari Mandshurici) on bone marrow stem cell directional homing to a focal zone in an osteoarthritis rat model

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the effects of Ermiao Fang(EM) with medical guide Xixin(Herba Asari Mandshurici)(HAM) on bone marrow stem cell migration to a focal zone in osteoarthritis(OA) rats.METHODS: OA rats were induced by arthrectomy and assigned to sham-operated, model, EM, or EM plus HAM groups.All rats were injected with recombinant human granulocyte colony-stimulating factor 30μg·kg-1·d-1for7 days and treated with EMor EM plus HAM at 1.6 or 1.9 g·kg-1·d-1 for 3 or 6 weeks, respectively. Chondrocyte apoptosis and cartilage matrix components were tested by transferase-mediated deoxyuridine triphosphate-biotin nick end labeling assay and special staining. Levels of interleukin-1 beta(IL-1β) tumor necrosis factor alpha(TNF-α) nitric oxide(NO), and inducible nitric oxide synthase(iNOS) in serum were detected by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay or radioimmunoassay. Matrix metalloproteinases(MMPs)-13,tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases(TIMPs)-1,Bromodeoxyuridine(BrdU), cluster of differentiation 34(CD34), and stromal cell-derived factor 1(SDF-1) were measured by immunohistochemical assay.RESULTS:The EM and EM plus HAM groups had significantly less cartilage damage and synovium inflammation the model group. Moreover, the EM and EM plus HAM groups had less chondrocyte apoptosis and more proteoglycan and collagen content than the model group.The EM and EMplus HAM groups had obviously higher MMPs-13 and TIMPs-1 expression in the cartilage than the model group. Moreover, the two formula groups had less release of IL-1β, TNF-α, NO, and iNOS than model group. Importantly, the expressions of BrdU, CD34,and SDF-1 in cartilage were significantly higher in the EM and EM plus HAM-Medtreated rats than model group. Notably, the EM plus HAM treatment seemed to have the greatest effects.CONCLUSION: HAM improves the therapeutic effects of EM on OA rats by enhancing BMSC directional homing to the focal zone.