Stroke is one of the leading causes of death and disability worldwide. However, there is a lack of effective medications to speed up the recovery process. Ischemic stroke, as the result of cerebral infarction or cerebral artery narrowing, is accompanied by hemiplegia or impaired consciousness. There are many transcription factors involved in the development of this condition, whose alterations can influence or signal the prognostic outcomes of ischemic stroke. Among them, the augmented expression of specificity protein 1 (SP1) can participate in the progression of the disease by binding DNA to regulate the transcriptions of many genes. Different studies have provided different answers as to whether SP1 plays a positive or a negative role in ischemic stroke. On the one hand, SP1 can play a cytoprotective role as both an antioxidant and anti-apoptotic agent for neurons and glial cells. On the other hand, it can also damage neuronal cells by promoting inflammation and exacerbating brain edema. In this review, we highlight the roles of SP1 in ischemic stroke and shed light on the underlying mechanism.

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We propose a semicentralized semidistributed network architecture based on active stateful path computation elements (PCEs) to intelligently provide end-to-end inter-domain connections in multi-domain optical transport networks supplied by different equipment vendors. A novel control entity, called an inter-domain communication control and management element (ICCME), is introduced into the architecture to achieve flexible distributed interdomain control and centralized intra-domain management by integrating with "proactive" and "reactive" stateful capabilities. Inter-domain routing and signaling are completed with the collaboration of multiple ICCMEs in a peer-to-peer manner, which decentralizes highly intensive computation and signaling to multiple ICCMEs. In addition, we put forward a unified inter-domain communication protocol to eliminate the differences in private signaling message formats of various vendors' domains. We report a successful field trial of providing inter-domain connections across a commercial three-domain three-vendor optical transport network. Also, experimental results indicate that ICCMEbased architecture performs better than previous schemes in terms of scalability, i.e., low average routing load of control entities and low average delay in establishing interdomain connections, but results in higher message overhead and blocking probability.

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