Domain wall brane in a reduced Born-Infeld-f(T)f(T) theory

The Born-Infeld $f(T)$ theory is reduced from the Born-Infeld determinantal gravity in Weitzenb\"ock spacetime. We investigate a braneworld scenario in this theory and obtain an analytic domain wall solution by utilizing the first-order formalism. The model is stable against the linear tensor perturbation. It is shown that the massless graviton is localized on the brane, but the continuous massive gravitons are non-localized and will generate a tiny correction with the behavior of ${1}/{(k r)^{3}}$ to the Newtonian potential. The four-dimensional teleparallel gravity is recovered as an effective infrared theory on the brane. As a physical application, we consider the (quasi-)localization property of spin-1/2 Dirac fermion in this model.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, published versio

Incorporation of GM-CSF or CD40L Enhances the Immunogenicity of Hantaan Virus-Like Particles

A safe and effective Hantaan virus (HTNV) vaccine is highly desirable because HTNV causes an acute and often fatal disease (hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, HFRS). Since the immunity of the inactivated vaccine is weak and the safety is poor, HTNV virus-like particles (VLPs) offer an attractive and safe alternative. These particles lack the viral genome but are perceived by the immune system as virus particles. We hypothesized that adding immunostimulatory signals to VLPs would enhance their efficacy. To accomplish this enhancement, we generated chimeric HTNV VLPs containing glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI)-anchored granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) or CD40 ligand (CD40L) and investigated their biological activity in vitro. The immunization of mice with chimeric HTNV VLPs containing GM-CSF or CD40L induced stronger humoral immune responses and cellular immune responses compared to the HTNV VLPs and Chinese commercial inactivated hantavirus vaccine. Chimeric HTNV VLPs containing GM-CSF or CD40L also protected mice from an HTNV challenge. Altogether, our results suggest that anchoring immunostimulatory molecules into HTNV VLPs can be a potential approach for the control and prevention of HFRS

Evaluation of the anti-inflammatory effect of chalcone and chalcone analogues in a zebrafish model

[[abstract]]The aim of this study was to investigate novel chalcones with potent anti-inflammatory activities in vivo. Chalcone and two chalcone analogues (compound 5 and 9) were evaluated using a caudal fin-wounded transgenic zebrafish line “Tg(mpx:gfp)” to visualize the effect of neutrophil recruitment dynamically. Results showed that treatment with compound 9 not only affected wound-induced neutrophil recruitment, but also affected Mpx enzymatic activity. Moreover, protein expression levels of pro-inflammatory factors (Mpx, NFκB, and TNFα) were also regulated by compound 9. Taken together, our results provide in vivo evidence of the anti-inflammatory effects of synthesized chalcone analogues on wound-induced inflammation.[[notice]]補正完畢[[incitationindex]]SCI[[booktype]]紙本[[booktype]]電子

Pluripotency-associated genes in human nasopharyngeal carcinoma CNE-2 cells are reactivated by a unique epigenetic sub-microenvironment.

RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are.BACKGROUND: There is increasing evidence that cancers contain their own stem-like cells, and particular attention has been paid to one subset of cancer-stem cells termed side population (SP). Stem cells under normal physical conditions are tightly controlled by their microenvironment, however, the regulatory role of the microenvironment surrounding cancer stem cells is not well characterized yet. In this study we found that the phenotype of SP can be "generated" by macrophage-like cells under conditioned culture. Furthermore the gene regulation pathway involved in cellular reprogramming process was investigated. METHODS: The selection and identification of SP in 50 CNE-2 single cell clones were performed by flow cytometry. The transwell assay and immunofluorescence staining were used to measure migration and cancer stem cell characters of non-SP single clone cells cultured with conditioned medium respectively. The subtraction suppression hybridization (SSH) technique and northern blotting analysis was applied to explore the pluripotency-associated genes under a unique epigenetic sub-microenvironment. RESULTS: Among 50 clones, only one did not possess SP subpopulation while others did. The non-SP cells induced by macrophage-like cells showed more aggressive characters, which increased cell migration compared with the control cells and showed some fraction of SP phenotype. These cells expressed distinguished level of pluripotency-associated genes such as ADP-ribosylation factor-like 6 interacting protein (ARMER), poly (rC) binding protein 1 (PCBP1) and pyruvate dehydrogenase E1-beta subunit (PDHB) when subjected to the environment. CONCLUSION: To our knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate that non-SP single-clone cells can be induced to generate a SP phenotype when they are cultured with conditioned medium of macrophage-like cells, which is associated with the reactivation of pluripotency-associated genes.Peer Reviewe

Zeroth-Order Alternating Gradient Descent Ascent Algorithms for a Class of Nonconvex-Nonconcave Minimax Problems

In this paper, we consider a class of nonconvex-nonconcave minimax problems, i.e., NC-PL minimax problems, whose objective functions satisfy the Polyak-\Lojasiewicz (PL) condition with respect to the inner variable. We propose a zeroth-order alternating gradient descent ascent (ZO-AGDA) algorithm and a zeroth-order variance reduced alternating gradient descent ascent (ZO-VRAGDA) algorithm for solving NC-PL minimax problem under the deterministic and the stochastic setting, respectively. The number of iterations to obtain an $\epsilon$-stationary point of ZO-AGDA and ZO-VRAGDA algorithm for solving NC-PL minimax problem is upper bounded by $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-2})$ and $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-3})$, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, they are the first two zeroth-order algorithms with the iteration complexity gurantee for solving NC-PL minimax problems