Indoloquinolizidine derivatives as novel and potent apoptosis inducers and cell-cycle blockers

A collection of approximately 11 000 natural-product derived and inspired compounds was screened for potential apoptosis inducers in the human tumour cell lines HepG2 (liver), HeLa (cervix) and MCF-7 (breast) by means of MTT and ATP-luminescence assays, automated cell counting, caspase 3/7 assay as well as by fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS) analysis. A group of seven indoloquinolizidine derivatives was identified that exhibited IC(50) values for cell proliferation as low as 2 mumol L(-1), with no major necrosis of cells detectable. At the same time, an increase in the rate of apoptosis of up to 600 % relative to the reference level was observed. FACS analysis indicated that these effects are related to an arrest of cells in the G(2)M phase of the cell cycle.     

Side-information-dependent correlation channel estimation in hash-based distributed video coding

In the context of low-cost video encoding, distributed video coding (DVC) has recently emerged as a potential candidate for uplink-oriented applications. This paper builds on a concept of correlation channel (CC) modeling, which expresses the correlation noise as being statistically dependent on the side information (SI). Compared with classical side-information-independent (SII) noise modeling adopted in current DVC solutions, it is theoretically proven that side-information-dependent (SID) modeling improves the Wyner-Ziv coding performance. Anchored in this finding, this paper proposes a novel algorithm for online estimation of the SID CC parameters based on already decoded information. The proposed algorithm enables bit-plane-by-bit-plane successive refinement of the channel estimation leading to progressively improved accuracy. Additionally, the proposed algorithm is included in a novel DVC architecture that employs a competitive hash-based motion estimation technique to generate high-quality SI at the decoder. Experimental results corroborate our theoretical gains and validate the accuracy of the channel estimation algorithm. The performance assessment of the proposed architecture shows remarkable and consistent coding gains over a germane group of state-of-the-art distributed and standard video codecs, even under strenuous conditions, i.e., large groups of pictures and highly irregular motion content.