NOMA security scheme based on constellation camouflage and selective mapping: publisher's note.

This publisher's note contains corrections to Opt. Lett.48, 4101 (2023)10.1364/OL.493540.

NOMA security scheme based on constellation camouflage and selective mapping.

This study aims to present a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) security scheme based on constellation camouflage and selective mapping. To improve the security of the system, we use a four-dimensional chaos model to camouflage high-power signals at the transmitter. The constellation diagram of high power is disguised from binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) form to quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) form, and after power multiplexing, further camouflaged from 8 points to 16 points. To improve the transmission performance of the designed system as much as possible and not increase the computational complexity, we use the selective mapping method in the process of power multiplexing and use the region decision method for demodulation at the receiving end. The proposed scheme is verified by experiments on a 2-km 7-core optical fiber, and achieves the safety transmission of a power division multiplexing-orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (PDM-OFDM) signal with a net rate of 97.38 Gb/s without signal damage. The maximum achievable key space of the proposed scheme is 10135. Hence, it is a feasible and secure non-orthogonal multiple access-passive optical network scheme.

Secure semantic optical communication scheme based on the multi-head attention mechanism.

In this paper, an artificial-intelligence-based secure semantic optical communication scheme is proposed. The semantic features of the original text information are extracted using Transformer. Compared with other networks, Transformer reduces the complexity of the structure and the associated training cost by using the multi-head attention mechanism. To solve the security problem, the encryption scheme is applied to an orthogonal frequency division multiplexed passive optical network (OFDM-PON). The proposed scheme applies chaotic sequences to produce masking vectors. We encrypt the constellation and frequency, achieving a large key space of 1 × 10270. To prove that Transformer can effectively extract the semantic features of text, we have computed the values of ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, and ROUGE-L, which are 40.9, 18.02, and 37.17, respectively. An encrypted 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (16QAM) OFDM signal transmission over a 2 km seven-core fiber with a data rate of 78.5 Gbits/s was experimentally demonstrated. During the experiments, the bit error rate (BER) was analyzed and the results show that the proposed system improves efficiency and security in an OFDM-PON system.

The galloyl moiety enhances the inhibitory activity of catechins and theaflavins against α-glucosidase by increasing the polyphenol-enzyme binding interactions.

The inhibition properties of 10 tea polyphenols against α-glucosidase were studied through inhibition assay, inhibition kinetics, fluorescence quenching and molecular docking. It was found that the inhibitory activity of polyphenols with a 3 and/or 3' galloyl moiety (GM) was much higher than that without a GM. The GM could enter into the active site of α-glucosidase and bind with the catalytic amino acid residues through hydrogen bonding and π-conjugation, thus playing an important role in the competitive inhibition of catechins and theaflavins. The positive linear correlations among the constants characterizing the inhibitory activity and binding affinity of tea polyphenols to α-glucosidase indicate that enzyme inhibition by polyphenols is caused by the binding interactions between them, and that the combination of the characterization methods for polyphenol-glucosidase binding is reasonable. In addition, the in vivo hypoglycemic effects of galloylated polyphenols suggest that the GM may be considered as a pharmaceutical fragment for the alleviation of type II diabetes symptoms through α-glucosidase inhibition.

Homeobox proteins are potential biomarkers and therapeutic targets in gastric cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND: An increasing number of studies have described the aberrant expression of homeobox (HOX) proteins in gastric cancer (GC), which is critically associated with the prognosis and clinicopathological characteristics of GC. This study was conducted to investigate the clinical value and action mechanisms of HOX proteins in GC. METHODS: A comprehensive search of PubMed, Embase, Web of Science and Cochrane Library was performed in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) statement. The pooled hazard ratio (HR) with its 95% confidence interval (95% CI) and the pooled odds ratio (OR) with its 95% CI were used to assess the effect of HOX protein expression on the prognosis and clinicopathological features of GC, respectively. RESULTS: Nineteen studies containing 3775 patients were selected for this study. Heterogeneity among HRs of overall survival (OS) was markedly high (I2 = 90.5%, p = 0.000). According to the subgroup analysis, increased expression of HOX protein in the downregulated subgroup was associated with a good prognosis for patients with GC (pooled HR: 0.46, 95% CI: 0.36-0.59, I2 = 3.1%, p = 0.377), while overexpression of HOX protein in the upregulated subgroup was correlated with a reduced OS (pooled HR: 2.59, 95% CI: 1.79-3.74, I2 = 73.5%, p = 0.000). The aberrant expression of HOX protein was crucially related to the TNM stage, depth of tumour invasion, tumour size, lymph node metastasis, distant metastasis, vascular invasion, histological differentiation and Lauren classification in patients with GC. In addition, the molecular mechanisms by which HOX proteins regulate tumorigenesis and development of GC were also explored. CONCLUSIONS: HOX proteins play vital roles in GC progression, which might serve as prognostic markers and therapeutic targets for GC.

Pollutant emission reduction of energy efficiency enhancement and energy cascade utilization in an energy-intensive industrial park in China.

Industrial parks play an extremely important role in the rapid development of China's economy. However, as the backbone of China's economic development, industrial parks also consume huge energy resources and cause serious pollution to the environment, making China face greater pressure on environmental issues. This article takes the Yongcheng Economic and Technological Development Area, a typical energy-intensive industrial park in Henan Province, as the research object to analyze its energy saving and emission reduction potential. Three scenarios (baseline scenario, energy cascade utilization scenario, and energy efficiency technology enhancement scenario) are set to quantify the energy-saving potential and air pollutant emission reduction of the park under different scenarios. The results show that in the energy cascade utilization scenario, by realizing the recycling of waste heat resources from heat source enterprises, it can bring energy saving of 6385 TJ, and reduce 0.35 kt SO2, 0.79 kt NOx, 0.067 kt PM10, and 0.035 kt PM2.5. And CO2 emission reductions have reached 604 kt. In the energy efficiency technology enhancement scenario, by eliminating relatively backward technologies and adding advanced energy-saving technologies, 7306 TJ energy saving could be achieved. SO2, NOx, PM10, PM2.5, and CO2 emission reductions are 0.37, 0.82, 0.038, 0.071, and 719 kt, respectively. The results of the CALPUFF model indicate that the pollutant concentrations of SO2, NOx, PM10, and PM2.5 in the spring and autumn are relatively high, while those in the summer and winter seasons are relatively low. In four seasons, the highest 1-h average concentration and dispersion range of four pollutants have been reduced both in the energy cascade utilization scenario and in the efficiency technology enhancement scenario.

Implications of HIF-1α in the tumorigenesis and progression of pancreatic cancer.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths worldwide and is characterized by highly hypoxic tumor microenvironment. Hypoxia-inducible factor-1 alpha (HIF-1α) is a major regulator of cellular response to changes in oxygen concentration, supporting the adaptation of tumor cells to hypoxia in an oxygen-deficient tumor microenvironment. Numerous studies revealed the central role of HIF-1α in the carcinogenesis and progression of pancreatic cancer. This article reviewed the molecular mechanisms of how HIF-1α regulated tumorigenesis and progression of pancreatic cancer and suggested that targeting HIF-1α and its signaling pathways could be promising therapeutics for pancreatic cancer.

CXCL5/CXCR2 axis in tumor microenvironment as potential diagnostic biomarker and therapeutic target.

The components of the tumor microenvironment (TME) in solid tumors, especially chemokines, are currently attracting much attention from scientists. C-X-C motif chemokine ligand 5 (CXCL5) is one of the important chemokines in TME. Overexpression of CXCL5 is closely related to the survival time, recurrence and metastasis of cancer patients. In TME, CXCL5 binds to its receptors, such as C-X-C motif chemokine receptor 2 (CXCR2), to participate in the recruitment of immune cells and promote angiogenesis, tumor growth, and metastasis. The CXCL5/CXCR2 axis can act as a bridge between tumor cells and host cells in TME. Blocking the transmission of CXCL5/CXCR2 signals can increase the sensitivity and effectiveness of immunotherapy and slow down tumor progression. CXCL5 and CXCR2 are also regarded as biomarkers for predicting prognosis and molecular targets for customizing the treatment. In this review, we summarized the current literature regarding the biological functions and clinical significance of CXCL5/CXCR2 axis in TME. The possibility to use CXCL5 and CXCR2 as potential prognostic biomarkers and therapeutic targets in cancer is also discussed.

Fast discrete cross-modal hashing with semantic consistency.

Supervised cross-modal hashing has attracted widespread concentrations for large-scale retrieval task due to its promising retrieval performance. However, most existing works suffer from some of following issues. Firstly, most of them only leverage the pair-wise similarity matrix to learn hash codes, which may result in class information loss. Secondly, the pair-wise similarity matrix generally lead to high computing complexity and memory cost. Thirdly, most of them relax the discrete constraints during optimization, which generally results in large cumulative quantization error and consequent inferior hash codes. To address above problems, we present a Fast Discrete Cross-modal Hashing method in this paper, FDCH for short. Specifically, it firstly leverages both class labels and the pair-wise similarity matrix to learn a sharing Hamming space where the semantic consistency can be better preserved. Then we propose an asymmetric hash codes learning model to avoid the challenging issue of symmetric matrix factorization. Finally, an effective and efficient discrete optimal scheme is designed to generate discrete hash codes directly, and the computing complexity and memory cost caused by the pair-wise similarity matrix are reduced from O(n2) to O(n), where n denotes the size of training set. Extensive experiments conducted on three real world datasets highlight the superiority of FDCH compared with several cross-modal hashing methods and demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency.

Exosomal miR-1246 in serum as a potential biomarker for early diagnosis of gastric cancer.

BACKGROUND: Gastric cancer (GC) patients are usually diagnosed in advanced stages which results in high mortality. This study aimed to identify novel circulating miRNAs as biomarkers for the early detection of GC. METHODS: Candidate miRNA was identified after integrated analysis of two Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) datasets and clinical serum samples. Exosomes extracted were verified using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and western blot. The expressions of miRNAs were tested through qRT-PCR. Receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) analysis was used to explore the diagnostic utility of miRNAs. RNA pull-down assay was used to find RNA binding proteins (RBPs) which transport candidate miRNA into exosomes. Bioinformatics analysis of candidate miRNA was conducted using DAVID and Cytoscape. RESULTS: After integrated analysis of two GEO datasets, six circulating miRNAs were found to be consistently upregulated in GC patients. Then, qRT-PCR demonstrated that serum miR-1246 was the one with the largest fold change. Studies in vitro revealed that elevated serum miR-1246 was tumor-derived by being packaged into exosomes with the help of ELAVL1. Thereafter, we discovered that exosomal miR-1246 expressions in serum could differentiate GC patients with TNM stage I from healthy controls (HCs) and patients with benign diseases (BDs) with area under the curve (AUC) of 0.843 and 0.811, respectively. Bioinformatics analysis revealed miR-1246, as a tumor suppressor in GC, could regulate several signaling pathways. CONCLUSION: Circulating exosomal miR-1246 was a potential biomarker for the early diagnosis of GC.

High-Affinity Human Anti-c-Met IgG Conjugated to Oxaliplatin as Targeted Chemotherapy for Hepatocellular Carcinoma.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most mortality-causing solid cancers globally and the second largest cause of death among malignancies. Oxaliplatin, a platinum-based drug, has been widely utilized in the treatment of malignancies such as colorectal cancer and hepatocellular carcinoma, yet its usage is limited because of severe side effects of cytotoxicity to normal tissues. c-Met, a receptor tyrosine kinase, is expressed aberrantly on the surface of HCC. The purpose of this study was to synthesise a humanized antibody against c-Met (anti-c-Met IgG) and conjugate it to oxaliplatin to develop a novel antibody-drug conjugate (ADC). Anti-c-Met IgG was detected to be loaded with ~4.35 moles oxaliplatin per mole of antibody. ELISA and FCM confirmed that ADC retained a high and selective binding affinity for c-Met protein and c-Met-positive HepG2 cells. In vitro, the cytotoxicity tests and biological function assay indicated that ADC showed much higher cytotoxicity and functioning in c-Met-positive HepG2 cells, compared with shMet-HepG2 cells expressing lower levels of c-Met. Furthermore, compared with free oxaliplatin, ADC significantly improved cytotoxicity to c-Met-positive tumours and avoided off-target cell toxicity in vivo. In conclusion, by targeting c-Met-expressing hepatoma cells, ADC can provide a platform to reduce drug toxicity and improve drug efficacy in vitro and in vivo.

Co-benefits analysis of energy cascade utilization in an industrial park in China.

As an important role in economic development in China, industrial parks have consumed plenty of energy, while emitting enormous air pollutants and discharging large quantities of waste heat. Energy cascade utilization is an effective way to improve the energy efficiency of industrial parks. The objective of this study was to assess the co-benefits of energy cascade utilization, including the energy savings potential, reduction potential of air pollutants, and air quality improvements, in an industrial park in China. Through an energy flow analysis of steam at different pressures and residual gas among various enterprises, this study identified the existing energy cascade utilization network in a baseline scenario and proposed an enhanced scenario. To evaluate the co-benefits of these two scenarios, the CALPUFF model was used to integrate energy savings and air pollutant mitigation for the park in 2017. The results show that energy cascade utilization can result in considerable co-benefits related to energy conservation, air pollutant emission reductions, and air quality improvements. In the enhanced scenario, the total energy savings potential is 11,425 TJ, with emission reductions of 859 tons of SO2 and 910 tons of NOx. Based on the CALPUFF simulations of SO2 and NOx diffusion in the four seasons, the concentrations of SO2 and NOx in the study area considerably decreased in the enhanced scenario compared with those in the baseline scenario. This study demonstrates that the park should focus on the cascade utilization of waste heat and residual gas to improve the energy utilization efficiency and reduce atmospheric pollutant emissions.