Involvement of lncRNA-mediated signaling pathway in the development of cervical cancer.

Cervical cancer (CC) develops, after human papillomavirus (HPV), an infection transmitted through sexual contact. Worldwide estimates are around >500,000 CC diagnoses and >300,000 related deaths annually, and CC remains the second most devastating type of cancers in women after breast cancer. Although the vaccine against HPV has reduced the incidence of infection and the treatment efficacy of the early-stage diagnoses has improved, many challenges remain in terms of treatment efficacy, during the late-stage and prevention of chemotherapy resistance development. Thus, new tools for prompt diagnoses and more effective curative treatments (including the development of targeted gene therapies) are needed. The long non-coding RNAs (LncRNAs) (>200 nucleotides) are transcripts that do not encode for any proteins, and they have been linked to the development of cancers (such as leukemia and breast, colorectal, and liver cancers). Some lncRNAs have been identified as the cause of the dysregulation of the oncogenes and progression of CC, but these studies are still very preliminary. In this review, we explore the literature for lncRNAs involved in the development of CC and their signaling pathways to identify those that might serve as early diagnostic biomarkers, or as targets for gene therapy or other curative treatments.

Stereausis: binaural processing without neural delays.

A neural network model is proposed for the binaural processing of interaural-time and level cues. The two-dimensional network measures interaural differences by detecting the spatial disparities between the instantaneous outputs of the two ears. The network requires no neural delay lines to generate such attributes of binaural hearing as the lateralization of all frequencies, and the detection and enhancement of noisy signals. It achieves this by comparing systematically, at various horizontal shifts, the spatiotemporal responses of the tonotopically ordered array of auditory-nerve fibers. An alternative view of the network operation is that it computes approximately the cross correlation between the responses of the two cochleas by combining an ipsilateral input at a given characteristic frequency (CF) with contralateral inputs from locally off-CF locations. Thus the network utilizes the delays already present in the traveling waves of the basilar membrane to extract the correlation function. Simulations of the network operation with various signals are presented as are comparisons to computational schemes suggested for stereopsis in vision. Physiological arguments in support of this scheme are also discussed.