Enhancement of collagen deposition and cross-linking by coupling lysyl oxidase with bone morphogenetic protein-1 and its application in tissue engineering

Cultured cell-derived extracellular matrices (ECM)-based biomaterials exploit the inherent capacity of cells to create highly sophisticated supramolecular assemblies. However, standard cell culture conditions are far from ideal given the fact that the diluted microenvironment does not favor the production of ECM components, a circumstance particularly relevant for collagen. An incomplete conversion of procollagen by C-proteinase/bone morphogenetic protein 1 (BMP1) has been proposed to severely limit in vitro collagen deposition. BMP1 also catalyzes the proteolytic activation of the precursor of the collagen cross-linking enzyme, lysyl oxidase (LOX) to yield the active form, suggesting a deficit in cross-linking activity under standard conditions. We hypothesized that the implementation of fibroblast cultures with LOX and BMP1 may be an effective way to increase collagen deposition. To test it, we have generated stable cell lines overexpressing LOX and BMP1 and studied the effect of supernatants enriched in LOX and BMP1 on collagen synthesis and deposition from fibroblasts. Herein, we demonstrate that the supplementation with LOX and BMP1 strongly increased the deposition of collagen onto the insoluble matrix at the expense of the soluble fraction in the extracellular medium. Using decellularization protocols, we also show that fibroblast-derived matrices regulate adipogenic and osteogenic differentiation of human mesenchymal stem cells (MSC), and this effect was modulated by LOX/BMP1. Collectively, these data demonstrate that we have developed a convenient protocol to enhance the capacity of in vitro cell cultures to deposit collagen in the ECM, representing this approach a promising technology for application in tissue engineeringTis work was supported by grants from Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Plan Nacional de I+D+I: SAF2012-34916, and SAF2015-65679-R to F.R-P

Reduced Switching Connectivity for Large Scale Antenna Selection

In this paper, we explore reduced-connectivity radio frequency (RF) switching networks for reducing the analog hardware complexity and switching power losses in antenna selection (AS) systems. In particular, we analyze different hardware architectures for implementing the RF switching matrices required in AS designs with a reduced number of RF chains. We explicitly show that fully-flexible switching matrices, which facilitate the selection of any possible subset of antennas and attain the maximum theoretical sum rates of AS, present numerous drawbacks such as the introduction of significant insertion losses, particularly pronounced in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Since these disadvantages make fully-flexible switching suboptimal in the energy efficiency sense, we further consider partially-connected switching networks as an alternative switching architecture with reduced hardware complexity, which we characterize in this work. In this context, we also analyze the impact of reduced switching connectivity on the analog hardware and digital signal processing of AS schemes that rely on channel power information. Overall, the analytical and simulation results shown in this paper demonstrate that partially-connected switching maximizes the energy efficiency of massive MIMO systems for a reduced number of RF chains, while fully-flexible switching offers sub-optimal energy efficiency benefits due to its significant switching power losses.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure

Hybrid Analog-Digital Precoding Revisited under Realistic RF Modeling

In this paper we revisit hybrid analog-digital precoding systems with emphasis on their modelling and radio-frequency (RF) losses, to realistically evaluate their benefits in 5G system implementations. For this, we decompose the analog beamforming networks (ABFN) as a bank of commonly used RF components and formulate realistic model constraints based on their S-parameters. Specifically, we concentrate on fully-connected ABFN (FC-ABFN) and Butler networks for implementing the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) in the RF domain. The results presented in this paper reveal that the performance and energy efficiency of hybrid precoding systems are severely affected, once practical factors are considered in the overall design. In this context, we also show that Butler RF networks are capable of providing better performances than FC-ABFN for systems with a large number of RF chains.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure

Lagrangian Flow Network approach to an open flow model

Concepts and tools from network theory, the so-called Lagrangian Flow Network framework, have been successfully used to obtain a coarse-grained description of transport by closed fluid flows. Here we explore the application of this methodology to open chaotic flows, and check it with numerical results for a model open flow, namely a jet with a localized wave perturbation. We find that network nodes with high values of out-degree and of finite-time entropy in the forward-in-time direction identify the location of the chaotic saddle and its stable manifold, whereas nodes with high in-degree and backwards finite-time entropy highlight the location of the saddle and its unstable manifold. The cyclic clustering coefficient, associated to the presence of periodic orbits, takes non-vanishing values at the location of the saddle itself.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures. To appear in European Physical Journal Special Topics, Topical Issue on "Recent Advances in Nonlinear Dynamics and Complex Structures: Fundamentals and Applications