Hinokitiol (1), a tropolone-related natural compound, induces apoptosis and has anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and antitumor activities. In this study, the inhibitory effects of 1 were investigated on human colon cancer cell growth and tumor formation of xenograft mice. HCT-116 and SW-620 cells derived from human colon cancers were found to be similarly susceptible to 1, with IC50 values of 4.5 and 4.4 μM, respectively. Compound 1 induced S-phase arrest in the cell cycle progression and decreased the expression levels of cyclin A, cyclin E, and Cdk2. Conversely, 1 increased the expression of p21, a Cdk inhibitor. Compound 1 decreased Bcl-2 expression and increased the expression of Bax, and cleaved caspase-9 and -3. The effect of 1 on tumor formation when administered orally was evaluated in male BALB/c-nude mice implanted intradermally separately with HCT-116 and SW-620 cells. Tumor volumes and tumor weights in the mice treated with 1 (100 mg/kg) were decreased in both cases. These results suggest that the suppression of tumor formation by compound 1 in human colon cancer may occur through cell cycle arrest and apoptosis.

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Porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV) is a highly contagious enteric pathogen of swine causing high mortality rates in piglets. PEDV outbreaks have occurred continuously in most swine-producing Asian countries and have recently emerged in the United States, leading to large economic losses for both the Asian and US pig industries. The spike (S) protein of PEDV consists of the S1 and S2 domains, responsible for virus binding and fusion, respectively. The involvement of the S1 domain in specific high-affinity interactions with the cellular receptor and induction of neutralizing antibodies in the natural host makes it a logical target for the development of effective vaccines and therapeutics against PEDV. Passive immunization by oral administration of egg yolk antibodies (IgY) obtained from immunized chickens provides an alternative source of specific antibodies for the prevention and treatment of PEDV in newborn piglets. In this study, we produced an IgY against the PEDV S1 protein and investigated its immunoprophylactic effect in neonatal piglets. A codon-optimized PEDV S1 gene consisting of amino acid residues 25-749 was synthesized and used to establish a stable porcine cell line constitutively expressing a recombinant PEDV S1 protein containing the chicken immunoglobulin Fc fragment at its C-terminus. The purified recombinant S1 protein was found to mediate potent immune responses in immunized hens. We next tested the ability of oral passive immunization with anti-PEDV S1 IgY to protect piglets against PEDV. Specific chicken IgY against the S1 protein was orally administered to neonatal piglets, and their responses subsequent to a virulent PEDV challenge were monitored. The results showed that oral administration of anti-PEDV S1 IgY efficiently protects neonatal piglets against PEDV, suggesting its potential as a prophylactic or therapeutic agent against acute PEDV infection.

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This paper presents a resource-shared 8-bit (RS8) architecture for the AES algorithm, which aims at compacting the hardware architecture and allows hardware resources to be shared efficiently between encryption and decryption without using a memory. The RS8 architecture only requires one combined S-box/S-1-box for encryption, decryption and key expansion. The RS8 architecture implements the multiplicative inverse in the composite field GF((24)2) with resource sharing methods. In addition, the number of XOR gates used by the proposed combined MixColumns/InvMixColumns module is less than half that of the conventional 32-bit architecture. When comparing the RS8 architecture with the conventional 32-bit architecture on a Xilinx Spartan2 FPGA, the number of total equivalent slices is reduced by 51%. Additionally, the highest operation frequency of the RS8 architecture is 66 MHz, and the throughput is 24 Mbps. Therefore, the performance of the RS8 architecture is sufficient for low-area applications such as wireless network devices and radio frequency identification (RFID).

This paper presents a fully integrated multi-rate and multi-regional frequency shift keying (MR-FSK) systemon-chip (SoC) in 180-nm CMOS technology compliant with IEEE 802.15.4g standard for smart utility network (SUN). This SoC integrates all blocks including 800/900 MHz RF/Analog transceiver, digital modem, medium access controller (MAC) and security functions. The total SoC die area is 4.8 mm x 3.5 mm. The transceiver power consumption is 57 mW in receiving mode and 41 mW -79 mW in transmitting mode, while the digital part consumes 19.5 mW. The implemented SoC exceeds the sensitivity requirements of IEEE 802.15.4g standard and is suitable for long-range and low-duty cycled SUN applications, such as advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) 1 .