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Aberrant activation of STAT3 signal pathway promotes tumor progression in many solid tumor types, including cervical cancer and endometrial cancer. BBI608, the STAT3 inhibitor had been reported in previous studies for restraining cancer stem cells. However, whether BBI608 is available for inhibiting the proliferation of cervical cancer or endometrial cancer remains poorly understood. This study investigated the anti-tumor effect and molecular mechanism of BBI608 on the patient-specific primary cells (PSPC) generated from cervical and endometrial cancer in vitro.PSPCs were obtained from four patients via biopsy. The cell viability was analyzed by the CCK8 assay. The PSPCs were treated with various concentrations of BBI608 or/and paclitaxel; and then, western blot was applied to investigate the expression of phosphorylated STAT3 (pSTAT3).The PSPCs cell viability was reduced after treated with BBI608 at a lower concentration. Western blot results showed a reduction trend of pSTAT3 after PSPCs treated with BBI608. Our results demonstrated that BBI608 at the certain concentrations worked well in reducing the cell viability of PSPC from the patients who suffered from cervical cancer and endometrial cancer.In this study, the patient-specific primary cell (PSPC) was used as the pre-clinical model for investigating the efficiency of BBI608 in reducing cancer cells viability. BBI608, at a clinical-relevant concentration, had valid efficiency in PSPCs from the patients. The dose of drugs treatment and the measured results were more valuable for further guiding clinical trials.

This paper explores the application of corona plasma technology as a tool in treatment of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The review introduces the principle of corona discharge and describes the characteristics of plasma, especially of various corona plasma reactors. By summarizing the main features of such reactors, this paper provides a brief background to different power sources and reactor configurations and their application to VOC treatment design. Considering chlorinated compounds, benzene series and sulfur compounds, this paper reveals the probable mechanism of corona plasma in VOC degradation. Additionally, the effects of numerous technical parameters - such as reactor structure, shape and materials of electrodes, and humidity - are analyzed comprehensively. Product distribution, energy efficiency and economic benefits are invoked as factors to evaluate the performance of VOC degradation. Finally, the practical application of corona plasma and its advantages are briefly introduced. The review aims to illustrate the enormous potential of corona plasma technology in the treatment of VOCs, and identifies future directions. Implications: This paper comprehensively describes the principle, characteristics, research progress and engineering application examples of the degradation of volatile organics by corona discharge plasma, to provide a theoretical basis for the industrial application of this process.

This work provides a systematic review on the decomposition of volatile organic pollutants in flue gas through the gliding arc (GA) plasma technology. To begin with, the basic mechanisms of GA plasma generation are summarized and three characteristic stages existed during the GA plasma generation process are revealed: gas breakdown stage, equilibrium stage, and non-equilibrium stage. Then, the types of GA reactors are comparatively illustrated. Possible destruction mechanisms of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) by GA plasma are discussed by taking chloroform, benzene, and methanol as examples. Furthermore, the effects of many operating parameters on the VOCs destruction efficiency are comprehensively analyzed. Simultaneously, the product distribution, energy cost, technical and economic during the whole decomposition process are considered. Finally, the advantages and disadvantages of GA plasma and its further development trend are concluded from the academic and industrial application of GA plasma in VOCs decomposition.

Members of Mononegavirales, the order including non-segmented negative sense RNA viruses (NNSV), encode a small number of multifunctional proteins. In members of the Filoviridae family, virus protein 35 (VP35) facilitates immune evasion and functions as an obligatory co-factor for viral RNA-synthesis. VP35 functions in an orthologous manner to phosphoproteins (P proteins) from other NNSVs. Although the critical roles of Ebola viral VP35 (eVP35) in immune evasion and RNA synthesis are well-appreciated, a complete understanding of its organization its role in carrying out its many functions has yet to be fully realized. In particular, we currently lack information on the role of the oligomerization domain within eVP35. To address this limitation, we report here an investigation of the oligomer structure of eVP35 using hybrid methods that include multi-angle light scattering (MALS), small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), and crosslinking coupled with mass spectrometry (XL-MS) to determine the shape and orientation of the eVP35 oligomer. Our integrative results are consistent with a parallel tetramer, in which the N-terminal regions that are required for RNA synthesis are all oriented in the same direction. Furthermore, these results define a framework to target the symmetric tetramer for structure-based antiviral discovery.

Ethanol reformation in a plasma-catalytic hybrid system was studied for H 2 production. Three low-cost catalysts (Ni/γ-Al 2 O 3 , Co/γ-Al 2 O 3 and Cu/γ-Al 2 O 3 ) were prepared and combined with the plasma process independently to enhance the reforming performance. The effects of O/C and S/C ratios on hydrogen production were explored. It was found that the presence of different catalytic beds studied, ethanol conversion and hydrogen selectivity were both obviously improved in a medium temperature range of 120–210 °C. The SER (specific energy requirement) for hydrogen production was lowered to 6.7 kJ/mol with an ethanol conversion rate of 88.2% and the hydrogen selectivity was up to 46.3% by taking Ni/γ-Al 2 O 3 as catalyst, indicating that the non-thermal arc plasma-catalysis hybrid system is a promising method for hydrogen generation. Furthermore, the possible effects of the interaction between plasma process and catalytic bed on the reforming performance were discussed.

In order to verify the integrity of the query results in outsourced database model, we first present a new authenticated data structure by combining skip lists with polynomial functions and accumulators and then construct a data integrity verification scheme for range query. Our scheme can verify the integrity of the query results with constant time verification and constant size proof and support dynamic maintenance with constant computational cost. Compared with that of previous schemes, the communication cost in our scheme is independent of the size of the authenticated dataset and is lower. When dataset size gets larger enough, our scheme outperforms previous schemes in terms of the computational cost and verification cost. In addition, we introduce the designated verifier idea into our scheme, so our scheme achieves the result that none but subscribers can verify the integrity of the query results and then meets the practical demands such as the payment service. The proof of security and analysis of experiment performance show that our scheme is secure and efficient for larger outsourced databases. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this paper, we analyze Liu et al.'s scheme and show that their scheme is not secure. Then we modify their scheme and present an efficient access scheme to outsourced data. Our scheme adopts two-layer encryption model and all users are divided into different groups according to their access privilege. We employ filter functions to construct the key derivation procedure to prevent the revoked users from getting encryption key. Our scheme can realize dynamic access control without shipping outsourced data back to the data owner when group membership is changed. Moreover, our scheme can grant and revoke the users without updating any secret key of other users. Our scheme avoids publishing many public tokens for deriving the encryption key. The analysis of security and performance shows that our scheme is secure and efficient.