AP-2 is a transcription factor implicated in mammalian development, cell proliferation, apoptosis, and carcinogenesis. To identify potential AP-2alpha-interacting partners, a yeast two-hybrid screen was performed in human brain cDNA library. One of the identified clones encodes potassium channel tetramerization domain-containing 1 (KCTD1). We demonstrated the novel KCTD1-AP-2alpha interaction in vitro by GST pull-down assays and in vivo by co-immunoprecipitation assays and mapped the interaction domains to the N-termini of both proteins. In addition, we observed that the two proteins were completely co-localized in the nuclei of mammalian cells. Transient transfection assays using four promoters containing AP-2-binding sites confirmed that KCTD1 significantly repressed AP-2alpha-mediated transactivation through the BTB domain, whereas KCTD1 siRNA strongly relieved KCTD1-mediated repression of AP-2alpha transcriptional activity, and other BTB domain proteins such as PDIP1, KCTD10, and TNFAIP1 did not markedly inhibit the transcriptional activity of AP-2alpha, suggesting that KCTD1 specifically acts as a negative regulator of AP-2alpha. Finally, we found that KCTD1 interacted with three major members of the AP-2 family and inhibited their transcriptional activities. Taken together, our results indicate the novel function of KCTD1 as the transcriptional repressor for AP-2 family, especially for AP-2alpha.

Spontaneous imbibition of water-based fracturing fluids into the shale matrix is considered to be the main mechanism responsible for the high volume of water loss during the flowback period. Understanding the matrix imbibition capacity and rate helps to determine the fracturing fluid volume, optimize the flowback design, and to analyze the influences on the production of shale gas. Imbibition experiments were conducted on shale samples from the Sichuan Basin, and some tight sandstone samples from the Ordos Basin. Tight volcanic samples from the Songliao Basin were also investigated for comparison. The effects of porosity, clay minerals, surfactants, and KCl solutions on the matrix imbibition capacity and rate were systematically investigated. The results show that the imbibition characteristic of tight rocks can be characterized by the imbibition curve shape, the imbibition capacity, the imbibition rate, and the diffusion rate. The driving forces of water imbibition are the capillary pressure and the clay absorption force. For the tight rocks with low clay contents, the imbibition capacity and rate are positively correlated with the porosity. For tight rocks with high clay content, the type and content of clay minerals are the most important factors affecting the imbibition capacity. The imbibed water volume normalized by the porosity increases with an increasing total clay content. Smectite and illite/smectite tend to greatly enhance the water imbibition capacity. Furthermore, clay-rich tight rocks can imbibe a volume of water greater than their measured pore volume. The average ratio of the imbibed water volume to the pore volume is approximately 1.1 in the Niutitang shale, 1.9 in the Lujiaping shale, 2.8 in the Longmaxi shale, and 4.0 in the Yingcheng volcanic rock, and this ratio can be regarded as a parameter that indicates the influence of clay. In addition, surfactants can change the imbibition capacity due to alteration of the capillary pressure and wettability. A 10 wt% KCl solution can inhibit clay absorption to reduce the imbibition capacity.

Abstract-The growing size of modern storage systems is expected to exceed billions of objects, making metadata scalability critical to overall performance. Many existing distributed file systems only focus on providing highly parallel fast access to file data, and lack a scalable metadata service. In this paper, we introduce a middleware design called IndexFS that adds support to existing file systems such as PVFS, Lustre, and HDFS for scalable high-performance operations on metadata and small files. IndexFS uses a table-based architecture that incrementally partitions the namespace on a per-directory basis, preserving server and disk locality for small directories. An optimized log-structured layout is used to store metadata and small files efficiently. We also propose two client-based stormfree caching techniques: bulk namespace insertion for creation intensive workloads such as N-N checkpointing; and stateless consistent metadata caching for hot spot mitigation. By combining these techniques, we have demonstrated IndexFS scaled to 128 metadata servers. Experiments show our out-of-core metadata throughput out-performing existing solutions such as PVFS, Lustre, and HDFS by 50% to two orders of magnitude.