Shenzhen, the first special economic zone of China, has witnessed earth-shaking changes since the late 1980s. In the past 35 years, about 80 km 2 of land has been reclaimed from the sea in Shenzhen. In order to investigate coastal vertical land motions associated with land reclamation, we proposed an elaborated Point Target (PT) based Small Baseline Subset InSAR (SBAS-InSAR) strategy to process an ENVISAT ASAR ascending and descending orbits dataset both acquired from 2007 to 2010. This new strategy can not only select high density PTs but also generate a reliable InSAR measurement with full spatial resolution. The inter-comparison between InSAR-derived deformation velocities from different orbits shows a good self-consistency of the results extracted by the elaborated PT-based SBAS-InSAR strategy. The InSAR measurements show that the reclaimed land is undergoing remarkable coastal subsidence (up to 25 mm/year), especially at the Shenzhen Airport, Bao'an Center, Qianhai Bay and Shenzhen Bay. By analyzing the results together with land reclamation evolution, we conclude that the ground deformation is expected to continue in the near future, which will amplify the regional sea level rise.

H. pylori infection and BE are inversely related when compared with endoscopically normal controls but not blood donor controls. Limited evidence suggests that there is no clear association between H. pylori infection and BE. To determine more accurately the effect size of H. pylori infection in BE, high quality prospective case-control studies with age-matched, endoscopically normal healthy controls are needed.

Accumulating evidence has indicated that lncRNA NEAT1 exerts critical roles in cancers. So far, the detailed biological role and mechanisms of NEAT1 which are responsible for human gastric cancer (GC) is still largely unknown. Here, we observed that NEAT1 and STAT3 expression were significantly upregulated in human gastric cancer cells including BGC823, SGC-7901, AGS, MGC803 and MKN28 cells compared to normal gastric epithelial cells GES-1 while miR-506 was downregulated. We inhibited NEAT1 and observed that NEAT1 inhibition was able to repress the growth, migration and invasion of gastric cancer cells. Reversely, overexpression of NEAT1 exhibited an increase ability of gastric cancer progression in BGC823 and SGC-7901 cells. Bioinformatics analysis, dual luciferase reporter assays, RIP assays and RNA pull-down tests validated the negative binding correlation between NEAT1 and miR-506. In addition, it was found that miR-506 can modulate expression of NEAT1 in vitro. STAT3 was predicted as an mRNA target of miR-506 and miR-506 mimics can suppress STAT3 mRNA expression. Subsequently, it was observed that downregulation of NEAT1 can restrain gastric cancer development by decreasing STAT3 which can be reversed by miR-506 inhibitors. Therefore, it was hypothesized in our study that NEAT1 can be recognized as a ceRNA to modulate STAT3 by sponging miR-506 in gastric cancer. In conclusion, we implied that NEAT1 can serve as an important biomarker in gastric cancer diagnosis and treatment. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Abstract:In this paper, we analyze the robustness of the parameter inversion provided by general polarimetric model-based decomposition methods from the perspective of a quantitative application. The general model and algorithm we have studied is the method proposed recently by Chen et al., which makes use of the complete polarimetric information and outperforms traditional decomposition methods in terms of feature extraction from land covers. Nevertheless, a quantitative analysis on the retrieved parameters from that approach suggests that further investigations are required in order to fully confirm the links between a physically-based model (i.e., approaches derived from the Freeman-Durden concept) and its outputs as intermediate products before any biophysical parameter retrieval is addressed. To this aim, we propose some modifications on the optimization algorithm employed for model inversion, including redefined boundary conditions, transformation of variables, and a different strategy for values initialization. A number of Monte Carlo simulation tests for typical scenarios are carried out and show that the parameter estimation accuracy of the proposed method is significantly increased with respect to the original implementation. Fully polarimetric airborne datasets at L-band acquired by German Aerospace Center's (DLR's) experimental synthetic aperture radar (E-SAR) system were also used for testing purposes. The results show different qualitative descriptions of the same cover from six different model-based methods. According to the Bragg coefficient ratio (i.e., β), they are prone to provide wrong numerical inversion results, which could prevent any subsequent quantitative characterization of specific areas in the scene. Besides the particular improvements proposed over an existing polarimetric inversion method, this paper is aimed at pointing out the necessity of checking quantitatively the accuracy of model-based PolSAR techniques for a reliable physical description of land covers beyond their proven utility for qualitative features extraction.

No abstract

Fluorogenic hydroxylamine reagents were used for detecting 5-fC through a labeling pathway. Chemical synthesis, HPLC, denaturing PAGE, and DNA MS were applied to testify that the probe reacted with 5-fC with oligodeoxynucleotide selectivity to achieve 5-fC detection conveniently and quantificationally with the method of fluorescence. The feasibility of fluorescently detecting 5-fC in a genome was also investigated.

This paper describes an improved Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) ship detection algorithm in spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image based on Alpha-stable distribution model. Typically, the CFAR algorithm uses the Gaussian distribution model to describe statistical characteristics of a SAR image background clutter. However, the Gaussian distribution is only valid for multilook SAR images when several radar looks are averaged. As sea clutter in SAR images shows spiky or heavy-tailed characteristics, the Gaussian distribution often fails to describe background sea clutter. In this study, we replace the Gaussian distribution with the Alpha-stable distribution, which is widely used in impulsive or spiky signal processing, to describe the background sea clutter in SAR images. In our proposed algorithm, an initial step for detecting possible ship targets is employed. Then, similar to the typical two-parameter CFAR algorithm, a local process is applied to the pixel identified as possible target. A RADARSAT-1 image is used to validate this Alpha-stable distribution based algorithm. Meanwhile, known ship location data during the time of RADARSAT-1 SAR image acquisition is used to validate ship detection results. Validation results show improvements of the new CFAR algorithm based on the Alpha-stable distribution over the CFAR algorithm based on the Gaussian distribution.

AAN effective sensor: The two-photon turn-on fluorescent probe NHU was synthesized to optically detect tyrosinase activity in vitro and in melanoma cells. NHU is composed of a 4-aminophenol moiety and a naphthylamine unit, both of which are connected through a urea linkage. Upon exposure to tyrosinase, the 4-aminophenol site is gradually oxidized to the corresponding orthoquinone, ultimately releasing the highly fluorescent product 6-acyl-N-methyl-2-naphthylamine (AAN).