Connexins and pannexins in the skeleton: gap junctions,hemichannels and more

Regulation of bone homeostasis depends on the concerted actions of bone-forming osteoblasts and bone-resorbing osteoclasts, controlled by osteocytes, cells derived from osteoblasts surrounded by bone matrix. The control of differentiation, viability and function of bone cells relies on the presence of connexins. Connexin43 regulates the expression of genes required for osteoblast and osteoclast differentiation directly or by changing the levels of osteocytic genes, and connexin45 may oppose connexin43 actions in osteoblastic cells. Connexin37 is required for osteoclast differentiation and its deletion results in increased bone mass. Less is known on the role of connexins in cartilage, ligaments and tendons. Connexin43, connexin45, connexin32, connexin46 and connexin29 are expressed in chondrocytes, while connexin43 and connexin32 are expressed in ligaments and tendons. Similarly, although the expression of pannexin1, pannexin2 and pannexin3 has been demonstrated in bone and cartilage cells, their function in these tissues is not fully understood.     

Chaos and Nonlinear Feedback Control of the Arch Micro-Electro-Mechanical System

This paper addresses a nonlinear feedback control problem for the chaotic arch microelectro- mechanical system with unknown parameters, immeasurable states and partial state-constraint subjected to the distributed electrostatic actuation. To reflect inherent properties and design controller, the phase diagrams, bifurcation diagram and Poincare section are presented to investigate the nonlinear dynamics. The authors employ a symmetric barrier Lyapunov function to prevent violation of constraint when the arch micro-electro-mechanical system faces some limits. An RBF neural network system integrating with an update law is adopted to estimate unknown function with arbitrarily small error. To eliminate chaotic oscillation, a neuro-adaptive backstepping control scheme fused with an extended state tracking differentiator and an observer is constructed to lower requirements on measured states and precise system model. Besides, introducing an extended state tracking differentiator avoids repeated derivative for the virtual control signal associated with conventional backstepping. Finally, simulation results are presented to illustrate feasibility of the proposed scheme.     

Intrinsically disordered proteins in crowded milieu: when chaos prevails within the cellular gumbo

Effects of macromolecular crowding on structural and functional properties of ordered proteins, their folding, interactability, and aggregation are well documented. Much less is known about how macromolecular crowding might affect structural and functional behaviour of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) or intrinsically disordered protein regions (IDPRs). To fill this gap, this review represents a systematic analysis of the available literature data on the behaviour of IDPs/IDPRs in crowded environment. Although it was hypothesized that, due to the excluded-volume effects present in crowded environments, IDPs/IDPRs would invariantly fold in the presence of high concentrations of crowding agents or in the crowded cellular environment, accumulated data indicate that, based on their response to the presence of crowders, IDPs/IDPRs can be grouped into three major categories, foldable, non-foldable, and unfoldable. This is because natural cellular environment is not simply characterized by the presence of high concentration of “inert” macromolecules, but represents an active milieu, components of which are engaged in direct physical interactions and soft interactions with target proteins. Some of these interactions with cellular components can cause (local) unfolding of query proteins. In other words, since crowding can cause both folding and unfolding of an IDP or its regions, the outputs of the placing of a query protein to the crowded environment would depend on the balance between these two processes. As a result, and because of the spatio-temporal heterogeneity in structural organization of IDPs, macromolecular crowding can differently affect structures of different IDPs. Recent studies indicate that some IDPs are able to undergo liquid–liquid-phase transitions leading to the formation of various proteinaceous membrane-less organelles (PMLOs). Although interiors of such PMLOs are self-crowded, being characterized by locally increased concentrations of phase-separating IDPs, these IDPs are minimally foldable or even non-foldable at all (at least within the physiologically safe time-frame of normal PMLO existence).     

Platelet-derived growth factor receptor beta identifies mesenchymal stem cells with enhanced engraftment to tissue injury and pro-angiogenic property

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are heterogeneous likely consisting of subpopulations with various therapeutic potentials. Here we attempted to acquire a subset of MSCs with enhanced effect in wound healing. We found that human placental MSCs expressing platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) receptor (PDGFR)-β exhibited greater proliferation rates and generated more colony-forming unit-fibroblast (CFU-F), compared to PDGFR-β^? MSCs. Notably, PDGFR-β⁺ MSCs expressed higher levels of pro-angiogenic factors such as Ang1, Ang2, VEGF, bFGF and PDGF. When 10⁶ GFP-expressing MSCs were topically applied into excisional wounds in mice, PDGFR-β⁺ MSCs actively incorporated into the wound tissue, resulting in enhanced engraftment (3.92 ± 0.31 × 10⁵ remained in wound by 7 days) and accelerated wound closure; meanwhile, PDGFR-β^? MSCs tended to remain on the top of the wound bed with significantly fewer cells (2.46 ± 0.26 × 10⁵) engrafted into the wound, suggesting enhanced chemotactic migration and engraftment of PDGFR-β⁺ MSCs into the wound. Real-Time PCR and immunostain analyses revealed that the expression of PDGF-B was upregulated after wounding; transwell migration assay showed that PDGFR-β⁺ MSCs migrated eightfold more than PDGFR-β^? MSCs toward PDGF-BB. Intriguingly, PDGFR-β⁺ MSC-treated wounds showed significantly enhanced angiogenesis compared to PDGFR-β^? MSC- or vehicle-treated wounds. Thus, our results indicate that PDGFR-β identifies a subset of MSCs with enhanced chemotactic migration to wound injury and effect in promoting angiogenesis and wound healing, implying a greater therapeutic potential for certain diseases.     

Existence and Uniqueness Results for Quaternion-Valued Nonlinear Impulsive Differential Systems

This paper studies the existence and uniqueness conditions for the quaternion-valued nonlinear impulsive system. Firstly, a space of quaternion-valued piecewise functions is constructed and completeness of the space is also proved. Then by taking advantage of the Bielecki norm and fixed point theorem, existence and uniqueness criteria of quaternion-valued nonlinear impulsive system are obtained. At last, an example is given to illustrate our theoretical results.     

ID-Based Public Auditing Protocol for Cloud Storage Data Integrity Checking with Strengthened Authentication and Security

Cloud storage service reduces the burden of data users by storing users’ data files in the cloud. But, the files might be modified in the cloud. So, data users hope to check data files integrity periodically. In a public auditing protocol, there is a trusted auditor who has certain ability to help users to check the integrity of data files. With the advantages of no public key management and verification, researchers focus on public auditing protocol in ID-based cryptography recently. However, some existing protocols are vulnerable to forgery attack. In this paper, based on ID-based signature technology, by strengthening information authentication and the computing power of the auditor, we propose an ID-based public auditing protocol for cloud data integrity checking. We also prove that the proposed protocol is secure in the random oracle model under the assumption that the Diffie-Hellman problem is hard. Furthermore, we compare the proposed protocol with other two ID-based auditing protocols in security features, communication efficiency and computation cost. The comparisons show that the proposed protocol satisfies more security features with lower computation cost.     

Human Development in Saudi Education: a Critical Systemic Approach

This paper is drawn from PhD research funded by the Saudi government on the policy and governance of Saudi schools (Algraini 2017. A critical systemic approach to human development in education: a case study of the Ministry of Education in Saudi Arabia). The aim of this article is to address human development challenges using the Critical Systems Heuristics approach. The results show that the central policy framework limits the opportunity for teachers and learners to contribute to shaping the curriculum and the process for human development. The Saudi Ministry of Education needs to: a) develop policy that takes into account the structure and the processes that shape education outcomes and b) to represent the voices of service users and service providers who have different and overlapping views.     

A Method to Visualize the Skeleton Industrial Structure with Input-Output Analysis and Its Application in China,Japan and USA

The paper established a double filtering method (DFM) to visualize the skeleton industrial structure (SIS) of one economy and find its evolution rule. Different with the previous researches, this method is from a new view of industrial conjunctions combined by leading sectors to depict the industrial structure. It was proved that the leading sector selected by DFM must be key sector selected by Hirschman-Rasmussen method. Applied DFM to input-output tables of China, Japan and USA and MFA to Japan and USA, the results analysis showed that DFM could overtake the two main shortcomings of minimum flow analysis (MFA), scratch SIS of each economy with its own characteristics, visualize the general evolution rules of the industrial structure with crisscrossed conjunctions among leading sectors.