The expression levels of chemotaxis-related molecules CXC chemokine receptor 1, interleukin-8, and pro-platelet basic protein in gingival tissues.

Background/purpose: Excessive host immune response is thought to be an important cause of periodontal tissue damage during periodontitis. The potent chemotaxis produced by locally released chemokines is the key signal to trigger this response. Here, we aimed to investigate the expression of CXC chemokine receptor 1 (CXCR1), and chemokines interleukin-8 (IL-8) and pro-platelet basic protein (PPBP) in human inflammatory gingival tissues compared with healthy tissues.

CNGBdb: China National GeneBank DataBase.

China National GeneBank DataBase (CNGBdb) is a data platform aiming to systematically archiving and sharing of multi-omics data in life science. As the service portal of Bio-informatics Data Center of the core structure, namely, "Three Banks and Two Platforms" of China National GeneBank (CNGB), CNGBdb has the advantages of rich sample resources, data resources, cooperation projects, powerful data computation and analysis capabilities. With the advent of high throughput sequencing technologies, research in life science has entered the big data era, which is in the need of closer international cooperation and data sharing.

[The China National GeneBank─owned by all, completed by all and shared by all].

Genetic resources are important national strategic resources. Their preservation, protection and rational utilization form a solid foundation to guarantee national security and to build national competitiveness for the future. Due to a relatively late starting point, China is actively catching up with global peers in storing genetic samples and data.

TRC4, an improved triptolide derivative, specifically targets to truncated form of retinoid X receptor-alpha in cancer cells.

The nuclear retinoid X receptor-α (RXRα) plays critical roles in cell homeostasis and in many physiological processes mainly through its transcriptional function. However, an N-terminal truncated form of RXRα, tRXRα, was frequently described in various cancer cells and tumor tissues, thus representing a new promising drug target. We recently demonstrated that triptolide (TR01) could target to the oncogenic activity of tRXRα.

Lagrange Programming Neural Network for Nondifferentiable Optimization Problems in Sparse Approximation.

The major limitation of the Lagrange programming neural network (LPNN) approach is that the objective function and the constraints should be twice differentiable. Since sparse approximation involves nondifferentiable functions, the original LPNN approach is not suitable for recovering sparse signals. This paper proposes a new formulation of the LPNN approach based on the concept of the locally competitive algorithm (LCA).

Sparse-representation algorithms for blind estimation of acoustic-multipath channels.

Acoustic channel estimation is an important problem in various applications. Unlike many existing channel estimation techniques that need known probe or training signals, this paper develops a blind multipath channel identification algorithm. The proposed approach is based on the single-input multiple-output model and exploits the sparse multichannel structure.

Time reversal communication over doubly spread channels.

Conventional time reversal can mitigate multipath delay dispersion by temporal focusing. But it is not applicable to time-varying channels with a Doppler spread. Although recently time reversal communication has been adapted to time-variant channels, the modified technique requires frequent channel updates to track channel variations and cannot handle large Doppler spread, which means that it cannot achieve frequency focusing.

Fast estimation of sparse doubly spread acoustic channels.

The estimation of doubly spread underwater acoustic channels is addressed. By exploiting the sparsity in the delay-Doppler domain, this paper proposes a fast projected gradient method (FPGM) that can handle complex-valued data for estimating the delay-Doppler spread function of a time-varying channel. The proposed FPGM formulates the sparse channel estimation as a complex-valued convex optimization using an [script-l](1)-norm constraint.

Time delay and Doppler estimation for wideband acoustic signals in multipath environments.

Estimation of the parameters of a multipath underwater acoustic channel is of great interest for a variety of applications. This paper proposes a high-resolution method for jointly estimating the multipath time delays, Doppler scales, and attenuation amplitudes of a time-varying acoustical channel. The proposed method formulates the estimation of channel parameters into a sparse representation problem.

Deconvolution of sparse underwater acoustic multipath channel with a large time-delay spread.

The deconvolution of multipath underwater acoustic channel with a large time-delay spread is investigated. The channel deconvolution involves estimating the multipath time-delays and attenuation factors from a noisy received signal consisting of multiple overlapped signals. Similar to conventional deconvolution methods, the proposed method estimates channel impulse response based on least-squares criterion.

Immunophenotypes, apoptosis, and expression of Fas and Bcl-2 from peripheral blood lymphocytes in patients with secondary early syphilis.

Objectives: Whether syphilis influences lymphocyte apoptosis has not been reported so far.

Goal: The goals of this study were to determine whether syphilis influences lymphocyte apoptosis and to investigate the molecular mechanism of apoptosis.

Study Design: Peripheral blood lymphocyte (PBL) immunophenotypes, apoptosis, and expression of Fas (CD95) and Bcl-2 were detected by flow cytometry in 33 patients with secondary early syphilis and 30 healthy subjects.