BACKGROUND Alternative splicing is an important mechanism that regulates gene expression and function in human cells. OCT4, a crucial pluripotency marker in embryonic stem/carcinoma cells generates several spliced variants in different cell types and cancers. The expression of OCT4 in cancers has been challenged in many studies. The existence of several OCT4 spliced variants and absence of spec...

BACKGROUND Mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR), involved in PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway, is known to play a central role in regulating the growth of cancer cells. The PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway enhances tumor survival and proliferation through suppressing autophagy, which sustains energy homeostasis by collecting and recycling cellular components under stress conditions. Conversely, inhibitors of the mTO...

Naringin, an active flavonoid found in citrus fruit extracts, has pharmacological utility. The present study identified a novel mechanism of the anticancer effects of naringin in urinary bladder cancer cells. Naringin treatment resulted in significant dose-dependent growth inhibition together with G(1)-phase cell-cycle arrest at a dose of 100 microM (the half maximal inhibitory concentration) i...

Hematopoietin-1 (H-1) was purified from the human cell line 5637 and two amino acid sequences were observed in the preparation. One sequence was identical to that of interleukin 1 alpha (IL 1 alpha) and the other to that of IL 1 beta. The action of recombinant IL 1 alpha and other hematopoietic growth factors was studied using (a) a high proliferative potential colony-forming cell assay that us...

Optogenetic gene expression systems enable spatial-temporal modulation of gene transcription and cell behavior. Although applications in biomedicine are emerging, the utility of optogenetic gene switches remains elusive in cancer research due to the relative low gene activation efficiency. Here, we present an optimized CRISPR-Cas9-based light-inducible gene expression device that controls gene ...

Region-of-interest (ROI) image coding is an interesting feature in JPEG2000, which allows for encoding the ROIs in an image with better quality than the background (BG). Considering the limitations of two standard ROI coding methods, a new ROI coding method called generalized partial bitplanes shift (GPBShift) is presented in this paper. To control the relative importance between ROI and BG, th...