The Emerging Role of Sperm-Associated Antigen 6 Gene in the Microtubule Function of Cells and Cancer.

Accumulated evidence shows that sperm-associated antigen 6 (SPAG6) gene has multiple biological functions. It maintains the normal function of a variety of cells including ciliary/flagellar biogenesis and polarization, neurogenesis, and neuronal migration. Moreover, SPAG6 is found to be critically involved in auditory transduction and the fibroblast life cycle. Furthermore, SPAG6 plays an essential role in immuno-regulation. Notably, SPAG6 has been demonstrated to participate in the occurrence and progression of a variety of human cancers. New evidence shows that SPAG6 gene regulates tumor cell proliferation, apoptosis, invasion, and metastasis. Therefore, in this review, we describe the physiological function and mechanism of SPAG6 in human normal cells and cancer cells. We also highlight that SPAG6 gene may be an effective biomarker for the diagnosis of human cancer. Taken together, targeting SPAG6 could be a novel strategy for the treatment of human diseases including cancer.

Dynamics of opinion formation in a small-world network.

The dynamical process of opinion formation within a model using a local majority opinion updating rule is studied numerically in networks with the small-world geometrical property. The network is one in which shortcuts are added to randomly chosen pairs of nodes in an underlying regular lattice. The presence of a small number of shortcuts is found to shorten the time to reach a consensus significantly. The effects of having shortcuts in a lattice of fixed spatial dimension are shown to be analogous to that of increasing the spatial dimension in regular lattices. The shortening of the consensus time is shown to be related to the shortening of the mean shortest path as shortcuts are added. Results can also be translated into that of the dynamics of a spin system in a small-world network.

Effects of contrarians in the minority game.

We study the effects of the presence of contrarians in an agent-based model of competing populations. Contrarians are common in societies. These contrarians are agents who deliberately prefer to hold an opinion that is contrary to the prevailing idea of the commons or normal agents. Contrarians are introduced within the context of the minority game (MG), which is a binary model for an evolving and adaptive population of agents competing for a limited resource. The average success rate among the agents is found to have a nonmonotonic dependence on the fraction a(c) of contrarians. For small a(c), the contrarians systematically outperform the normal agents by avoiding the crowd effect and enhance the overall success rate. For high a(c), the anti-persistent nature of the MG is disturbed and the few normal agents outperform the contrarians. Qualitative discussion and analytic results for the small a(c) and high a(c) regimes are presented, and the crossover behavior between the two regimes is discussed.