The Complete Loss of p53 Expression Uniquely Predicts Worse Prognosis in Colorectal Cancer

p53 immunohistochemistry is considered an accurate surrogate marker reflecting the underlying TP53 mutation status and has utility in tumor diagnostics. In the present study, 269 primary CRCs were immunohistochemically evaluated for p53 expression to assess its utility in diagnostic pathology and prognostication. p53 expression was wild-type in 59 cases (23%), overexpressed in 143 cases (55%), completely lost in 50 cases (19%), and cytoplasmic in 10 cases (4%). p53 immunoreactivity was associated with tumor size (p = 0.0056), mucus production (p = 0.0015), and mismatch repair (MMR) system status (p < 0.0001). Furthermore, among CRCs with wild-type p53 expression, a significantly higher number of cases had decreased CDX2 than those with p53 overexpression (p = 0.012) or complete p53 loss (p = 0.043). In contrast, among CRCs with p53 overexpression, there were significantly fewer ALCAM-positive cases than p53 wild-type cases (p = 0.0045). However, no significant association was detected between p53 immunoreactivity and the “stem-like” immunophenotype defined by CDX2 downregulation and ALCAM-positivity. Multivariate Cox hazards regression analysis identified tubular-forming histology (hazard ratio [HR] = 0.17, p < 0.0001), younger age (HR = 0.52, p = 0.021), and female sex (HR = 0.55, p = 0.046) as potential favorable factors. The analysis also revealed complete p53 loss (HR = 2.16, p = 0.0087), incomplete resection (HR = 2.65, p = 0.0068), and peritoneal metastasis (HR = 5.32, p < 0.0001) as potential independent risk factors for patients with CRC. The sub-cohort survival analyses classified according to chemotherapy after surgery revealed that CRC patients with wild-type p53 expression tended to have better survival than those with overexpression or complete loss after chemotherapy. Thus, immunohistochemistry for p53 could be used for the prognostication and chemotherapy target selection of patients with CRC.     

Characteristics of a-Si solar cells prepared by the super chamber at a high substrate temperature

A new approach to high-performance a-Si solar cells was studied. a-Si films prepared at a high substrate temperature (> 250°C) have a higher absorption coefficient and a low Si H₂ bond density. the effect of deposition temperature on the open-circuit voltage (V_oc) has been investigated systematically for glass/SnO2 Ipin/metal and glass/metal/nip/indium tin oxide (ITO) structure a-Si solar cells. The V_oc is found to depend strongly on the thermal history of the p/i interface. A short-circuit current of 19.5 mA/cm⁻⁻² was achieved for an a-Si solar cell using an a-Si i-layer with a thickness of 4000 Å, which was prepared at a substrate temperature of 270°C.     

Color and Vanadium Valency in V-Doped ZrO2

The distribution and chemical states of vanadium in V-doped ZrO₂ were studied to clarify the origin of the color of vanadium-zirconium yellow pigment in comparison with vanadium-tin yellow pigment. ESCA data and measurements of lattice constants of V-doped ZrO₂ revealed that vanadium was dissolved mainly as V⁴⁺ substituting for Zr in ZrO₂ lattice, and its solubility limit was 0.5 wt% as V₂O₅. It was found that the yellow color of vanadium-zirconium yellow was produced predominantly by the dissolved vanadium and that the contribution of vanadium oxide on ZrO₂ grains to the yellow color was about 1/30 of that of the dissolved vanadium when compared on the basis of equimolar quantity of vanadium. Most of the undissolved vanadium oxide was in an amorphous or a poorly crystallized state.     

Synthesis of stable and soluble one-handed helical poly(substituted acetylene)s without chiral pendant groups via polymer reaction in membrane state

A soluble and stable one-handed helical conjugated polymer without the coexistence of any other chiral moieties was successfully synthesized by asymmetric-induced polymerization of a chiral monomer having two hydroxyl groups followed by desubstitution of the chiral groups in a solid membrane state. The reason for the success was the polymer reaction was carried out in the membrane state. This is an alternative method to obtain such a unique chiral polymer which was obtained only by the helix-sense-selective polymerization (HSSP) we reported before. In addition the efficiency of the chiral induction was higher than that of the HSSP. It is interesting that the “Membrane state” acted like as if a protecting group.     

Composite of Au nanoparticles and molecularly imprinted polymer as a sensing material

A molecularly imprinted polymer with immobilized Au nanoparticles (Au-MIP) is reported as a novel type of sensing material. The sensing mechanism is based upon the variable proximity of the Au nanoparticles immobilized in the imprinted polymer, which exhibits selective binding of a given analyte accompanied by swelling that causes a blue-shift in the plasmon absorption band of the immobilized Au nanoparticles. Using adrenaline as the model analyte, it was shown that molecular imprinting effectively enhanced the sensitivity and selectivity, and accordingly, Au-MIP selectively detects the analyte at 5 microM. The combination of molecular imprinting and the Au nanoparticle-based sensing system was shown to be a general strategy for constructing sensing materials in a tailor-made fashion due to wide applicability of the imprinting technique and the independence of the sensing mechanism from the analyte recognition system.     

Sentence alignment using P-NNT and GMM

Parallel corpora have become an essential resource for work in multilingual natural language processing. However, sentence aligned parallel corpora are more efficient than non-aligned parallel corpora for cross-language information retrieval and machine translation applications. In this paper, we present two new approaches to align English–Arabic sentences in bilingual parallel corpora based on probabilistic neural network (P-NNT) and Gaussian mixture model (GMM) classifiers. A feature vector is extracted from the text pair under consideration. This vector contains text features such as length, punctuation score, and cognate score values. A set of manually prepared training data was assigned to train the probabilistic neural network and Gaussian mixture model. Another set of data was used for testing. Using the probabilistic neural network and Gaussian mixture model approaches, we could achieve error reduction of 27% and 50%, respectively, over the length based approach when applied on a set of parallel English–Arabic documents. In addition, the results of (P-NNT) and (GMM) outperform the results of the combined model which exploits length, punctuation and cognates in a dynamic framework. The GMM approach outperforms Melamed and Moore’s approaches too. Moreover these new approaches are valid for any languages pair and are quite flexible since the feature vector may contain more, less or different features, such as a lexical matching feature and Hanzi characters in Japanese–Chinese texts, than the ones used in the current research.     

Color displays and flexible displays using quick‐response liquid‐powder technology for electronic paper

Abstract— Color displays and flexible displays that use electronic liquid powder have been developed. Novel types of color displays using either a colored powder or a color filter are discussed. We have also developed a flexible display with low‐cost substrate films with a high‐throughput roll‐to‐roll manufacturing method. These technologies enable a QR‐LPD to be widely used as an electronic‐paper display.     

First-Principles Investigation of the Atomic and Electronic Structures of α-Al2O3(0001)/Ni(111) Interfaces

Atomic and electronic structures of α-Al₂O₃(0001)/Ni(111) interfaces have been investigated using the first-principles pseudopotential method. Models with different rigid-body translations parallel to the interface for both the O-terminated and Al-terminated interfaces are examined in order to clarify the overall features. Results indicate that the interface stoichiometry as well as the interface configuration has significant effects on the adhesive and electronic properties. The bonding nature of the O-terminated interfaces is explained by strong ionic and Ni-3d/O-2p orbital hybridization interactions, and that of the Al-terminated interfaces is explained mainly by image-charge like electrostatic and Ni–Al hybridization interactions, although there is some Ni–O hybridization for the O-site model. Orbital hybridization and adhesive energies are larger than those in the corresponding Al₂O₃/Cu interfaces, because Ni has higher activity for making bonds with ceramics than Cu.