Syndecan-1 Depletion Has a Differential Impact on Hyaluronic Acid Metabolism and Tumor Cell Behavior in Luminal and Triple-Negative Breast Cancer Cells

Glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) and proteoglycans (PGs) are major components of the glycocalyx. The secreted GAG and CD44 ligand hyaluronic acid (HA), and the cell surface PG syndecan-1 (Sdc-1) modulate the expression and activity of cytokines, chemokines, growth factors, and adhesion molecules, acting as critical regulators of tumor cell behavior. Here, we studied the effect of Sdc-1 siRNA depletion and HA treatment on hallmark processes of cancer in breast cancer cell lines of different levels of aggressiveness. We analyzed HA synthesis, and parameters relevant to tumor progression, including the stem cell phenotype, Wnt signaling constituents, cell cycle progression and apoptosis, and angiogenic markers in luminal MCF-7 and triple-negative MDA-MB-231 cells. Sdc-1 knockdown enhanced HAS-2 synthesis and HA binding in MCF-7, but not in MDA-MB-231 cells. Sdc-1-depleted MDA-MB-231 cells showed a reduced CD24-/CD44+ population. Furthermore, Sdc-1 depletion was associated with survival signals in both cell lines, affecting cell cycle progression and apoptosis evasion. These changes were linked to the altered expression of KLF4, MSI2, and miR-10b and differential changes in Erk, Akt, and PTEN signaling. We conclude that Sdc-1 knockdown differentially affects HA metabolism in luminal and triple-negative breast cancer model cell lines and impacts the stem phenotype, cell survival, and angiogenic factors.     

Polylactide films formed by immersion precipitation: Effects of additives,nonsolvent, and temperature

The influence of nonsolvent, crystallinity of the polymer film, and addition of dodecane (a poor solvent for the polymer and for the nonsolvent) on the morphology of polylactides films has been investigated and was related to phase separation behavior. Both amorphous poly‐DL ‐lactide (PDLLA) and crystalline poly‐L ‐lactide (PLLA) were dissolved in dichloromethane, and subsequently films were made by immersion in nonsolvent baths. PDLLA gave dense films without any internal structure, since the structure was not solidified by crystallization or glassification. PLLA films show varying structure depending on the nonsolvent. With methanol, asymmetric morphologies were observed as a result from combined liquid‐liquid demixing and crystallization, while with water symmetric spherulitic structures were formed. As a next step, dodecane was added, which is not miscible with the nonsolvent, and we found it to have a strong influence on the morphology of the films. The PDLLA films with dodecane did not collapse: a closed cell structure was obtained. In PLLA films, dodecane speeds up phase separation and induces faster crystallization in the films, and the porosity, size of the pores, and interconnectivity increased. When the PLLA solutions were subjected to a heat pretreatment, crystallization could be postponed, which yielded a cellular structure around dodecane, which did not contain spherulites anymore. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 104: 959–971, 2007     

Stability analysis of bilinear systems under aperiodic sampled-data control

This note considers the problem of local stability of bilinear systems with aperiodic sampled-data linear state feedback control. The sampling intervals are time-varying and upper bounded. It is shown that the feasibility of some linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), implies the local asymptotic stability of the sampled-data system in an ellipsoidal region containing the equilibrium. The method is based on the analysis of contractive invariant sets, and it is inspired by the dissipativity theory. The results are illustrated by means of numerical examples.     

Antimicrobial protection of cotton and cotton/polyester fabrics by radiation and thermal treatments. I. Effect of ZnO formulation on the mechanical and dyeing properties

Cotton and cotton/polyester fabrics were treated against microbial attack by applying a formulation based essentially on ZnO under high‐energy radiation and thermal curing. To achieve the homogeneity and the reactivity of the treating formulation, a binder (Impron MTP) and a dispersing agent (Setamol WS) were used with ZnO. The antimicrobial property of the fabrics was evaluated, in terms of mechanical properties, by a soil burial test. Moreover, the effect of antimicrobial finishing on the dyeing properties in terms of color strength was investigated. It was found that the best composition that affords the best antimicrobial protection to cotton fabrics contains 2% ZnO, 2% binder, and 1% dispersing agents. For the cotton/polyester blend, the best results were achieved at the same conditions except the ZnO was 1%. It was found that the treatment under the effect of electron‐beam irradiation is better than that of gamma irradiation and thermal curing. The results showed that when the finishing process was carried out before dyeing with a reactive dye, it affects the color strength rather than performing the finishing after the dyeing process. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 88: 1129–1137, 2003     

Bathymetry and siltation rate for Dokan Reservoir,Iraq

The Dokan Reservoir dam is a concrete cylindrical arch with gravity abutments, located on the Lesser Zab River about 60 km from the city of Sulaimani in north‐eastern Iraq. A bathymetric survey was conducted in November 2014 for a period of 10 days, using an echo sounder of 200‐kHz single beam. The survey results indicated an annual average sediment deposition of 3.8 million m³. Thirty‐two sediment samples were collected from the reservoir bed. The ratio of gravel, sand, silt and clay was 15:14:48:23, respectively. The reservoir bed is covered mainly with silt. The sediments are composed of silty clay (77.6%), silty sandy clay (10%), sandy gravely silty clay (1.2%) and gravely sandy silty clay (1%).     

Rubber‐toughened polypropylene nanocomposite: Effect of polyethylene octene copolymer on mechanical properties and phase morphology

Rubber‐toughened polypropylene (PP)/org‐Montmorillonite (org‐MMT) nanocomposite with polyethylene octene (POE) copolymer were compounded in a twin‐screw extruder at 230°C and injection‐molded. The POE used had 25 wt % 1‐octene content and the weight fraction of POE in the blend was varied in the range of 0–20 wt %. X‐ray diffraction analysis (XRD) revealed that an intercalation org‐MMT silicate layer structure was formed in rubber‐toughened polypropylene nanocomposites (RTPPNC). Izod impact measurements indicated that the addition of POE led to a significant improvement in the impact strength of the RTPPNC, from 6.2 kJ/m² in untoughened PP nanocomposites to 17.8 kJ/m² in RTPPNC containing 20 wt % POE. This shows that the POE elastomer was very effective in converting brittle PP nanocomposites into tough nanocomposites. However, the Young's modulus, tensile strength, flexural modulus, and flexural strength of the blends decreased with respect to the PP nanocomposites, as the weight fraction of POE was increased to 20 wt %. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was used for the investigation of the phase morphology and rubber particles size. SEM study revealed a two‐phase morphology where POE, as droplets was dispersed finely and uniformly in the PP matrix. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 99: 3441–3450, 2006     

Monitoring web services’ quality of service: a literature review

Monitoring Quality of Service (QoS) compliance is an important procedure in web service environment. It determines whether users’ expectations are met, and becomes the vital factor for them to decide whether to continue paying for the service or not. The monitoring is performed by checking the actual services performance against the QoS stated in Service Level Agreement (SLA). In relation to that, the need for monitoring vague QoS specifications in SLA has become more apparent nowadays. This paper reviews the published literature on web services QoS monitoring. A total of 60 selected articles were systematically analyzed. There were 23 of the articles selected through restrictive search criteria while the other 37 were selected based on unrestrictive search criteria. The review shows that little evidence exists on monitoring vague QoS specifications of web services. Providing ability for monitoring QoS that is specified vaguely in SLA could give new insights and implications to web services field. This paper concludes with some recommended future works to construct the theory and perform the empirical research.     

Robust Fault Diagnosis for Quadrotor UAVs Using Adaptive Thau Observer

A robust Fault Diagnosis (FD) scheme for a real quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a novel Adaptive Thau observer (ATO) is developed to estimate the quadrotor system states and build a set of offset residuals to indicate actuators’ faults. Based on these residuals, some rules of Fault Diagnosis (FD) are designed to detect and isolate the faults as well as estimate the fault offset parameters. Secondly, a synthetic robust optimization scheme is presented to improve Fault Estimation (FE) accuracies, three key issues include modeling uncertainties, and magnitude order unbalances as well as noises are addressed. Finally, a typical fault of rotors is simulated and injected into one of four rotors of the quadrotor, and experiments for the FD scheme have been carried out. Unlike former research works on the FD schemes for quadrotors, our proposed FD scheme based on the ATO can not only detect and isolate the failed actuators, but also estimate the fault severities. Regardless of roughness of the real flying data, the FD results still have sufficient FE accuracies.     

Identification of probe request attacks in WLANs using neural networks

Any sniffer can see the information sent through unprotected ‘probe request messages’ and ‘probe response messages’ in wireless local area networks (WLAN). A station (STA) can send probe requests to trigger probe responses by simply spoofing a genuine media access control (MAC) address to deceive access point (AP) controlled access list. Adversaries exploit these weaknesses to flood APs with probe requests, which can generate a denial of service (DoS) to genuine STAs. The research examines traffic of a WLAN using supervised feed-forward neural network classifier to identify genuine frames from rogue frames. The novel feature of this approach is to capture the genuine user and attacker training data separately and label them prior to training without network administrator’s intervention. The model’s performance is validated using self-consistency and fivefold cross-validation tests. The simulation is comprehensive and takes into account the real-world environment. The results show that this approach detects probe request attacks extremely well. This solution also detects an attack during an early stage of the communication, so that it can prevent any other attacks when an adversary contemplates to start breaking into the network.