Activating transcription factor 3-activated long noncoding RNA forkhead box P4-antisense RNA 1 aggravates colorectal cancer progression by regulating microRNA-423-5p/nucleus accumbens associated 1 axis.

Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have vital roles in the progression of colorectal cancer (CRC). Forkhead box P4-antisense RNA 1 (FOXP4-AS1) showed a potential unfavorable prognostic factor for CRC, while its underlying mechanism remains elusive. Thus, the goal of this research is to determine mechanism of FOXP4-AS1 in CRC occurrence and development. Herein, a Dual-luciferase reporter assay was performed to assess the regulation of miR-423-5p to nucleus accumbens-associated protein 1 (NACC1) and activating transcription factor 3 (ATF3) to FOXP4-AS1 promoter. Hematoxylin-eosin (H&E) staining was performed to detect the pathological changes of tumor tissues. Flow cytometry, cell counting kit 8, Transwell, and wound healing assays were conducted to assess apoptosis, proliferation, migration, and invasion of CRC cells, respectively. The results showed that FOXP4-AS1 was highly expressed in CRC cell lines and tissues. CRC progression was promoted by the overexpression of FOXP4-AS1 in HTC116 cells and animal models. Furthermore, FOXP4-AS1 served as a molecular sponge for miR-423-5p, and NACC1 is a direct target of miR-423-5p. MiR-423-5p silencing or overexpression of NACC1 increased proliferation, migration, and invasion of HCT116 cells while suppressing apoptosis. We also found that the upregulation of FOXP4-AS1 was activated by ATF3 in CRC cells. Collectively, our results demonstrated that ATF3-activated FOXP4-AS1 aggravates CRC progression by regulating miR-423-5p/NACC1 axis, indicating a new target for CRC treatment.

Multilabel Video Classification Model of Navigation Mark's Lights Based on Deep Learning.

At night, buoys and other navigation marks disappear to be replaced by fixed or flashing lights. Navigation marks are seen as a set of lights in various colors rather than their familiar outline. Deciphering that the meaning of the lights is a burden to navigators, it is also a new challenging research direction of intelligent sensing of navigation environment. The study studied initiatively the intelligent recognition of lights on navigation marks at night based on multilabel video classification methods. To capture effectively the characteristics of navigation mark's lights, including both color and flashing phase, three different multilabel classification models based on binary relevance, label power set, and adapted algorithm were investigated and compared. According to the experiment's results performed on a data set with 8000 minutes video, the model based on binary relevance, named NMLNet, has highest accuracy about 99.23% to classify 9 types of navigation mark's lights. It also has the fastest computation speed with least network parameters. In the NMLNet, there are two branches for the classifications of color and flashing, respectively, and for the flashing classification, an improved MobileNet-v2 was used to capture the brightness characteristic of lights in each video frame, and an LSTM is used to capture the temporal dynamics of lights. Aiming to run on mobile devices on vessel, the MobileNet-v2 was used as backbone, and with the improvement of spatial attention mechanism, it achieved the accuracy near Resnet-50 while keeping its high speed.

Cloning and Expression of aroG Gene of E. coli and Its Co-expression with pheA and tyrB Genes.

3-Deoxy-D-arabino-heptulonate-7-phosphate synthetase (DAHP) is one of the key enzymes in phenylalanine biosynthesis pathway. In E. coli, DAHP is encoded by aroG Gene. In this work, aroG was cloned from an E. coli mutant strain resistant to m-fluro-L-phenylalanine (mPF) and p-fluro-L-phenylalanine (pPF) by PCR. The gene was expressed under the control of lambda phage promoter p(R) in P2392 strain of E. coli. Distinct band was detected as the product of aroG on SDS-PAGE. The specific activity in crude extract of DAHP was raised to 1.7-fold. Based on the cloning and expression of pheA (encoding both chorsmate mutase CM and prephenate dehydratase PD) and tyrB (encoding phenylalanine aminotransferase PAT) genes, aroG, pheA and tyrB genes were constructed and expressed in P2392. The results showed that the specific activities of DAPH, CM/PD and PAT in crude extracts were increased by 1.7, 13.9/7.8 and 2.3-fold, respectively.