ZEB2 drives intra-tumor heterogeneity and skin squamous cell carcinoma formation with distinct EMP transition states.

About 5% of patients with cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC) have a poor prognosis which is associated with a loss of tumor differentiation, invasion and metastasis, all of which are linked to the process of epithelial-to-mesenchymal plasticity (EMP). Here, we showed that the EMP-associated transcription factor ZEB2 drives cSCC heterogeneity which resembles biphasic carcinosarcoma-like tumors. Single cell RNA sequencing revealed distinct subpopulations ranging from fully epithelial (E) to intermediate (EM) to fully mesenchymal (M), associated with the gradual loss of cell surface markers EPCAM, CDH1, ITGB4, and CD200.

A nanoscale view of the origin of boiling and its dynamics.

In this work, we present a dynamical theory of boiling based on fluctuating hydrodynamics and the diffuse interface approach. The model is able to describe boiling from the stochastic nucleation up to the macroscopic bubble dynamics. It covers, with a modest computational cost, the mesoscale area from nano to micrometers, where most of the controversial observations related to the phenomenon originate.

Dynamic wetting of various liquids: Theoretical models, experiments, simulations and applications.

Dynamic wetting is a ubiquitous phenomenon and frequently observed in our daily life, as exemplified by the famous lotus effect. It is also an interfacial process of upmost importance involving many cutting-edge applications and has hence received significantly increasing academic and industrial attention for several decades. However, we are still far away to completely understand and predict wetting dynamics for a given system due to the complexity of this dynamic process.

A novel method to assess heat transfer and impact of relevant physicochemical parameters for the scaling up of solid state fermentation systems.

Heat production during fermentation is undesirable. It can affect the growth of biomass, sporulation, products formation and the scaling-up. Physico-chemical properties of substrates influence heat and mass transfer in Solid State Fermentation.

A possible way to extract the dynamic contact angle at the molecular scale from that measured experimentally.

Hypothesis: The maximum velocity of dewetting encodes sufficient information on the hydrodynamics of the wetting process to enable the local dynamic contact angle at the molecular scale, θ, to be determined from the apparent contact angle measured experimentally at much larger scales, θ.

Methods: Effective models of wetting dynamics need to account for differing channels of dissipation. One such model was recently verified by large-scale molecular dynamics (MD).