Evaluation of the Mammalian Aquaporin Inhibitors Auphen and Z433927330 in Treating Breast Cancer.

AQPs contribute to breast cancer progression and metastasis. We previously found that genetic inhibition of Aqp7 reduces primary tumor burden and metastasis in breast cancer. In this study, we utilized two AQP inhibitors, Auphen and Z433927330, to evaluate the efficacy of therapeutic inhibition of AQPs in breast cancer treatment.

Marine-derived biopolymers as potential bioplastics, an eco-friendly alternative.

The manufacturing and consumption of plastic products have steadily increased over the past decades due to rising global demand, resulting not only in the depletion of petroleum resources but also increased environmental pollution due to the non-biodegradable nature of conventional plastics. Moreover, despite being introduced into the market as an alternative to conventional petroleum-based plastics, biobased plastics are mainly manufactured from agricultural crop-based sources, which has negative impacts on the environment and the livelihoods of people. Marine-derived bioplastics are becoming a promising and cost-effective solution to the rising demand for plastic products.

Computing a Stable Distance on Merge Trees.

Distances on merge trees facilitate visual comparison of collections of scalar fields. Two desirable properties for these distances to exhibit are 1) the ability to discern between scalar fields which other, less complex topological summaries cannot and 2) to still be robust to perturbations in the dataset. The combination of these two properties, known respectively as stability and discriminativity, has led to theoretical distances which are either thought to be or shown to be computationally complex and thus their implementations have been scarce.

Mother-to-baby transmission of hepatitis G virus.

A mother tested positive for hepatitis G virus (HGV) by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) before and at delivery. Her baby tested HGV negative by RT-PCR at birth but serum samples at four and six weeks of age were HGV positive, suggesting transmission of HGV from mother to baby.