Circular RNA CDR1as/ciRS-7 functions as an oncogenic regulator in various cancers. However, there has been a lack of systematic and comprehensive analysis to further elucidate its underlying role in cancer. In the current study, we firstly performed a bioinformatics analysis of CDR1as among 868 cancer samples by using RNA-seq datasets of the MiOncoCirc database. Gene ontology (GO), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG), gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA), CIBERSORT, Estimating the Proportion of Immune and Cancer cells (EPIC), and the MAlignant Tumors using Expression data (ESTIMATE) algorithm were applied to investigate the underlying functions and pathways. Functional enrichment analysis suggested that CDR1as has roles associated with angiogenesis, extracellular matrix (ECM) organization, integrin binding, and collagen binding. Moreover, pathway analysis indicated that it may regulate the TGF-β signaling pathway and ECM-receptor interaction. Therefore, we used CIBERSORT, EPIC, and the ESTIMATE algorithm to investigate the association between CDR1as expression and the tumor microenvironment. Our data strongly suggest that CDR1as may play a specific role in immune and stromal cell infiltration in tumor tissue, especially those of CD8+ T cells, activated NK cells, M2 macrophages, cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) and endothelial cells. Generally, systematic and comprehensive analyses of CDR1as were conducted to shed light on its underlying pro-cancerous mechanism. CDR1as regulates the TGF-β signaling pathway and ECM-receptor interaction to serve as a mediator in alteration of the tumor microenvironment.
Remote reprogramming of in situ wireless sensor networks (WSNs) via the wireless link is an important capability. Securing the process of reprogramming allows each sensor node to authenticate each received code image. Due to the resource constraints of WSNs, public key schemes must be used sparingly. This paper introduces a mechanism for secure and efficient code distribution that employs public key cryptography only to sign the root of a combined structure consisting of both hash chains and hash trees. The chain based scheme works best when packets are received in the order they are sent with very few losses. Our hash tree based scheme allows nodes to authenticate packets and verify their integrity quickly, even when the packets may arrive out of order, but can result in too many public key operations. Integrating hash chains and hash trees produces a mechanism that is both resilient to losses and lightweight in terms of reducing memory consumption and the number of public key operations that a node has to perform. Simulation shows that the proposed secure reprogramming schemes add only a modest amount of overhead to a conventional non-secure reprogramming scheme, namely Deluge, and are therefore feasible and practical in a wireless sensor network.
Cryosurgery is a clinical therapy aiming at the destruction of diseased target tissues through a controlled deep freezing and subsequent rewarming. It has recently been realized that freezing immediately followed by a rapid and strong heating of the target tissues would significantly improve the treatment effect. However, most of the currently available cryoprobe systems are only capable of performing a single freezing function. To accommodate to the rapid growth of the combined freezing and heating therapy of tumor treatment, we have developed a new cryoprobe system with a powerful heating feature, which can be conveniently applied to destroy the tumor in deep tissue using a minimally invasive approach. Its operation performance will be characterized through a series of experimental tests in air, water, phantom gel, in vitro tissues and rabbits under anaesthesia. This system is perhaps the first one aiming at performing both cryosurgery and hyperthermia on target tumors. Therefore, it provides the clinicians with more choices and algorithms on treating a specific diseased tissue. Further, strain sensors and thermocouples were applied to simultaneously record the transient temperature and the thermal stress fields over the tissues subjected to freezing and strong heating. It was observed that a sudden change in the transient thermal stress was often induced when phase change occurs, which may imply that an evident thermal stress occurs at the liquid-solid interface. This modifies the commonly accepted viewpoint that no stress should exist at the liquid-like phase change interface. Further, implementations of this new system in clinical cryosurgery or hyperthermia are discussed. In addition to the applications in tumor treatment, the present system can also be very useful in fundamental research such as revealing the thermal stress mechanisms in tissues due to quick freezing and heating, which is hard to do otherwise. One interesting result presented in this paper is the experimental discovery of shock rings induced in the biomaterials around the probe, due to alternant freezing and heating by the present system.
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