• Oncology Letters
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.6852-6868
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• 2019

There is a wide disparity in the incidence, malignancy and mortality of different types of cancer between each sex. The sex-specificity of cancer seems to be dependent on the type of cancer. Cancer incidence and mortality have been demonstrated as sex-specific in a number of different types of cancer, such as liver cancer, whereas sex-specificity is not noticeable in certain other types of cancer, including colon and lung cancer. The present study aimed to elucidate the molecular basis for sex-biased gene expression in cancer. The mRNA expression of the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition-associated genes was investigated, including E-cadherin (also termed CDH1), vimentin (VIM), discoidin domain receptor 1 (DDR1) and zinc finger E-box binding homeobox 1 (ZEB1) in female- and male-derived cancer cell lines by reverse transcription (RT)-PCR and the Broad-Novartis Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia (CCLE) database analysis. A negative correlation was observed between DDR1 and ZEB1 only in the female-derived cancer cell lines via RT-PCR analysis. A negative correlation between DDR1 index (defined by the logarithmic value of DDR1 divided by ZEB1, based on the mRNA data from the RT-PCR analysis) and an invasive phenotype was observed in cancer cell lines in a sex-specific manner. Analysis of the CCLE database demonstrated that DDR1 and ZEB1, which are already known to be sex-biased, were negatively correlated in female-derived liver cancer cell lines, but not in male-derived liver cancer cell lines. In contrast, cell lines of colon and lung cancer did not reveal any sex-dependent difference in the correlation between DDR1 and ZEB1. Kaplan-Meier survival curves using the transcriptomic datasets such as Gene Expression Omnibus, European Genome-phenome Archiva and The Cancer Genome Atlas databases suggested a sex-biased difference in the correlation between DDR1 expression pattern and overall survival in patients with liver cancer. The results of the present study indicate that sex factors may affect the regulation of gene expression, contributing to the sex-biased progression of the different types of cancer, particularly liver cancer. Overall, these findings suggest that analyses of the correlation between DDR1 and ZEB1 may prove useful when investigating sex-biased cancers.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.50 no.7
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• pp.455-465
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• 2017

Understanding of the two-dimensional velocity field is crucial in terms of analyzing various hydrodynamic and fluvial processes in the riverine environments. Until recently, many numerical models have played major roles of providing such velocity field instead of in-situ flow measurements, because there were limitations in instruments and methodologies suitable for efficiently measuring in the broad range of river reaches. In the last decades, however, the advent of modernized instrumentations started to revolutionize the flow measurements. Among others, acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCPs) became very promising especially for accurately assessing streamflow discharge, and they are also able to provide the detailed velocity field very efficiently. Thus it became possible to capture the velocity field only with field observations. Since most of ADCPs measurements have been mostly conducted in the cross-sectional lines despite their capabilities, it is still required to apply appropriate interpolation methods to obtain dense velocity field as likely as results from numerical simulations. However, anisotropic nature of the meandering river channel could have brought in the difficulties for applying simple spatial interpolation methods for handling dynamic flow velocity vector, since the flow direction continuously changes over the curvature of the channel shape. Without considering anisotropic characteristics in terms of the meandering, therefore, conventional interpolation methods such as IDW and Kriging possibly lead to erroneous results, when they dealt with velocity vectors in the meandering channel. Based on the consecutive ADCP cross-sectional measurements in the meandering river channel. For this purpose, the geographic coordinate with the measured ADCP velocity was converted from the conventional Cartesian coordinate (x, y) to a curvilinear coordinate (s, n). The results from application of A-VIM showed significant improvement in accuracy as much as 41.5% in RMSE.