The up-regulation of glycolysis to enhance the production of energy under reduced pO 2 is a hallmark of the hypoxic response. A key regulator of glycolytic flux is fructose-2,6-bisphosphate, and its steady state concentration is regulated by the action of different isozymes product of four genes (pfkfb1-4). pfkfb3 has been found in proliferating cells and tumors, being induced by hypoxia. To understand the organization of cis-acting sequences that are responsible for the oxygen-regulated pfkfb3 gene, we have studied its 5 -flanking region. Extensive analysis of the 5 pfkfb3 promoter sequence revealed the presence of putative consensus binding sites for various transcription factors that could play an important role in pfkfb3 gene regulation. These DNA consensus sequences included estrogen receptor, hypoxia response element (HRE), early growth response, and specific protein 1 putative binding sites. Promoter deletion analysis as well as putative HREs sequences (wild type and mutated) fused to a c-fos minimal promoter unit constructs demonstrate that the sequence located from ؊1269 to ؊1297 relative to the start site is required for hypoxia-inducible factor 1 (HIF-1) induction. The effective binding of HIF-1 transcription factor to the HREs at ؊1279 and ؊1288 was corroborated by electrophoretic mobility shift assay and biotinylated oligonucleotide pull-down. In addition, HIF-1␣ null mouse embryo fibroblasts transfected with a full-length pfkfb3 promoter-luciferase reporter construct further demonstrated that HIF-1 protein was critically involved for hypoxia transactivation of this gene. Altogether, these results demonstrate that pfkfb3 is a hypoxiainducible gene that is stimulated through HIF interaction with the consensus HRE site in its promoter region.

Even after over two decades, the total variation (TV) remains one of the most popular regularizations for image processing problems and has sparked a tremendous amount of research, particularly to move from scalar to vector-valued functions. In this paper, we consider the gradient of a color image as a three dimensional matrix or tensor with dimensions corresponding to the spatial extend, the differences to other pixels, and the spectral channels. The smoothness of this tensor is then measured by taking different norms along the different dimensions. Depending on the type of these norms one obtains very different properties of the regularization, leading to novel models for color images. We call this class of regularizations collaborative total variation (CTV). On the theoretical side, we characterize the dual norm, the subdifferential and the proximal mapping of the proposed regularizers. We further prove, with the help of the generalized concept of singular vectors, that an ∞ channel coupling makes the most prior assumptions and has the greatest potential to reduce color artifacts. Our practical contributions consist of an extensive experimental section where we compare the performance of a large number of collaborative TV methods for inverse problems like denoising, deblurring and inpainting.

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Most common cameras use a CCD sensor device measuring a single color per pixel. The other two color values of each pixel must be interpolated from the neighboring pixels in the so-called demosaicking process. State-of-the-art demosaicking algorithms take advantage of inter-channel correlation locally selecting the best interpolation direction. These methods give impressive results except when local geometry cannot be inferred from neighboring pixels or channel correlation is low. In these cases, they create interpolation artifacts. We introduce a new algorithm involving non-local image self-similarity in order to reduce interpolation artifacts when local geometry is ambiguous. The proposed algorithm introduces a clear and intuitive manner of balancing how much channel-correlation must be taken advantage of. Comparison shows that the proposed algorithm gives state-of-the-art methods in several image bases.

Pansharpening refers to the fusion process of inferring a high-resolution multispectral image from a high-resolution panchromatic image and a low-resolution multispectral one. In this paper we propose a new variational method for pansharpening which incorporates a nonlocal regularization term and two fidelity terms, one describing the relation between the panchromatic image and the highresolution spectral channels and the other one preserving the colors from the low-resolution modality. The nonlocal term is based on the image self-similarity principle applied to the panchromatic image. The existence and uniqueness of minimizer for the described functional is proved in a suitable space of weighted integrable functions. Although quite successful in terms of relative error, state-of-theart pansharpening methods introduce relevant color artifacts. These spectral distortions can be significantly reduced by involving the image self-similarity. Extensive comparisons with state-ofthe-art algorithms are performed. 1. Introduction. Many earth resource satellites, such as IKONOS, Landsat, QuickBird, and SPOT, provide continuously growing quantities of remote sensing images useful for a wide range of both scientific and everyday tasks. For example, satellite images are used to improve visual photointerpretation [54], digital-surface model extraction [45], and texture analysis [48]. Further applications are feature detection [24], land cover classification [33], estimating water depth [38], soil moisture content [43], vegetation mapping [21], and many military tasks such as mission planning, navigation, and targeting.Digital color images are usually represented by three color values at each pixel. Nevertheless, most common cameras use a CCD sensor device measuring a single color per pixel. The other two color values of each pixel must be interpolated from the neighboring pixels in the so-called demosaicking process. The selected configuration of the CCD sensor usually follows the CFA Bayer, where, out of a group of four pixels, two are green, one is red, and one is blue. Most satellites use a different acquisition system that decouples the acquisition of a panchromatic image at high spatial resolution from the acquisition of a multispectral

Most satellites decouple the acquisition of a panchromatic image at high spatial resolution from the acquisition of a multispectral image at lower spatial resolution. Pansharpening is a fusion technique used to increase the spatial resolution of the multispectral data while simultaneously preserving its spectral information. In this paper, we consider pansharpening as an optimization problem minimizing a cost function with a nonlocal regularization term. The energy functional which is to be minimized decouples for each band, thus permitting the application to misregistered spectral components. This requirement is achieved by dropping the, commonly used, assumption that relates the spectral and panchromatic modalities by a linear transformation. Instead, a new constraint that preserves the radiometric ratio between the panchromatic and each spectral component is introduced. An exhaustive performance comparison of the proposed fusion method with several classical and state-of-the-art pansharpening techniques illustrates its superiority in preserving spatial details, reducing color distortions, and avoiding the creation of aliasing artifacts.

The ubiquitous isoform of 6‐phosphofructo‐2‐kinase/fructose‐2,6‐bisphosphatase (uPFK‐2), a product of the Pfkfb3 gene, plays a crucial role in the control of glycolytic flux. In this study, we demonstrate that Pfkfb3 gene expression is increased in streptozotocin‐induced diabetic mouse liver. The Pfkfb3/‐3566 promoter construct linked to the luciferase reporter gene was delivered to the liver via hydrodynamic gene transfer. This promoter was upregulated in streptozotocin‐induced diabetic mouse liver compared with transfected healthy cohorts. In addition, increases were observed in Pfkfb3 mRNA and uPFK‐2 protein levels, and intrahepatic fructose‐2,6‐bisphosphate concentration. During streptozotocin‐induced diabetes, phosphorylation of both p38 mitogen‐activated protein kinase and Akt was detected, together with the overexpression of the proliferative markers cyclin D and E2F. These findings indicate that uPFK‐2 induction is coupled to enhanced hepatocyte proliferation in streptozotocin‐induced diabetic mouse liver. Expression decreased when hepatocytes were treated with either rapamycin or LY 294002. This shows that uPFK‐2 regulation is phosphoinositide 3‐kinase–Akt–mammalian target of rapamycin dependent. These results indicate that fructose‐2,6‐bisphosphate is essential to the maintenance of the glycolytic flux necessary for providing energy and biosynthetic precursors to dividing cells.