SummaryNOD2 of the NLRs and TLR4 of the TLRs are major pattern-recognition receptors, which sense different microbial pathogens and have important roles in innate immunity. Herein, we investigated the roles of NOD2 in TLR4-mediated signalling and gene regulation in RAW264.7 macrophages. We found that MDP (a NOD2 ligand) increased LPSinduced expressions of TNF-a, IL-1b, IL-6, iNOS and COX-2. MDP did not affect LPS-induced activation of MAPKs or IKK, while it potentiated LPS-induced NF-kB activation. Meanwhile TLR4 activation increased NOD2 mRNA expression, and upregulated NOD2 upon MDP treatment is a positive regulator of TLR4-mediated signalling. Intriguingly we found that NOD2 silencing led to increases in LPSinduced signal transduction and inflammatory responses, and a decrease in LPS-elicited homologous tolerance. We thus propose that NOD2 in the absence of MDP treatment might also play a negative regulatory role in the action of TLR4. Further, we demonstrated that both CARD and LRR domains of the NOD2 protein were responsible for the negative regulatory action on TLR4. In summary, it is the first time to demonstrate that NOD2 have dual effects on TLR4 signalling and exert a novel ligandindependent action. Elucidating molecular mechanisms by which NOD2 exerts its ligand-independent action on TLR4 requires further investigation.
Consecutive strokes of Chinese characters tend to be connected in fast writing, and this causes a problem for most stroke-based recognition approaches. In this correspondence, we propose a recognition .. The authors wish to thank o, M,hirit, Professor at the School of Forestry Of Morocco, for providing the Cedrus data. They are scheme to recognize cursive Chinese-characters under the constraint of correct stroke writing orders. The proposed recognition scheme consists of two phases: candidate character selection and detailed matching. also grateful to B. Ceurstemont for his programming assistance. In the former phase, an input script with .\-strokes is used to split the strokes of each reference character into .Y corresponding parts. In the latter phase, the connected input strokes are broken into multiple strokes under the guidance of candidate characters. In both phases, dynamic programming is employed for stroke or character matching. Good experimental results prove the feasibility of the proposed approach for cursive Chinese character recognition.
The two issues of art image creation and data hiding are integrated into one and solved by a single approach in this study. An automatic method for generating a new type of computer art, called stained glass image, which imitates the stained-glass window picture, is proposed. The method is based on the use of a tree structure for region growing to construct the art image. Also proposed is a data hiding method which utilizes a general feature of the tree structure, namely, number of tree nodes, to encode the data to be embedded. The method can be modified for uses in three information protection applications, namely, covert communication, watermarking, and image authentication. Besides the artistic stego-image content which may distract the hacker's attention to the hidden data, data security is also considered by randomizing both the input data and the seed locations for region growing, yielding a stego-image which is robust against the hacker's attacks. Good experimental results proving the feasibility of the proposed methods are also included.
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