Defect engineering modified graphite carbon nitride (g-C3N4) has been widely used in various photocatalytic systems due to the enhanced catalytic activity by multiple defect sites (such as vacancies or functional...

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Due to peritoneal metastasis and frequent recurrence, ovarian cancer has the highest mortality among gynecological cancers. Epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) contributes to ovarian tumor metastasis. In this study, we report for the first time that metal regulatory transcription factor 1 (MTF1) was upregulated in ovarian cancer, and its high expression was associated with poor patient survival and disease relapse. Knockout of MTF1 using lentiviral CRISPR/Cas9 nickase vector-mediated gene editing inhibited EMT by upregulating epithelial cell markers E-cadherin and cytokeratin 7, and downregulating mesenchymal markers Snai2 and β-catenin in ovarian cancer SKOV3 and OVCAR3 cells. Loss of MTF1 reduced cell proliferation, migration, and invasion in both SKOV3 and OVCAR3 cells. Knockout of MTF1 upregulated the expression of the KLF4 transcription factor, and attenuated two cellular survival pathways, ERK1/2 and AKT. Our studies demonstrated that MTF1 plays an oncogenic role and contributes to ovarian tumor metastasis by promoting EMT. MTF1 may be a novel biomarker for early diagnosis as well as a drug target for clinical therapy.

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This paper proposes a perceived potential field and an aggregated force field for the navigation of pedestrians in a walking domain with poor visibility or complex geometries. While the former field used in uncrowded cells simply reflects the pedestrians' desire to minimize their travel costs, the latter field used in crowded cells suggests much stronger interaction between pedestrians. Compared with a formulation that does not include the latter field, the proposed model displays an advantage in simulating overcrowded pedestrian flows, e.g. at the front of a bottleneck or at a left/right turn in a corridor; the simulated phenomena, including phase transitions and fundamental diagrams, agree well with the observations and studies in the literature.