Emerging evidence have illustrated the vital roles of long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) in glioma. Nevertheless, the majority of their roles and mechanisms in gliomagenesis are still largely unclear. In this study, we investigate the roles of lncRNA CASC9 on glioma tumourigenesis and authenticate its potential mechanisms. Results manifested that CASC9 was highly expressed in glioma specimens and cells, moreover, the ectopic overexpression was correlated with glioma patients’ clinic. Functional studies found that siRNA‐mediated CASC9 silencing inhibited the proliferative ability, invasion in vitro, and impaired the tumour growth in vivo. Mechanical studies revealed that miR‐519d both targeted the 3′‐UTR of CASC9 and STAT3 mRNA, which was identified by luciferase reporter assay and RNA immunoprecipitation (RIP). Moreover, chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) and luciferase reporter assay revealed that STAT3, an oncogenic transcription factor, could bind with the promoter of CASC9 and activate its transcriptional level. In conclusion, our results concluded that CASC9 promotes STAT3 expression via sponging miR‐519d, in return, STAT3 activate CASC9 transcription, forming a positive feedback loop of CASC9/miR‐519d/STAT3. The novel finding provides a potential therapeutic target for glioma.

Topological orders and associated topological protected excitations satisfying non-Abelian statistics have been widely explored in various platforms. The Z3 parafermions are regarded as the most natural generation of the Majorana fermions to realize these topological orders. Here we investigate the topological phase and emergent Z2 spin phases in an extended parafermion chain. This model exhibits rich variety of phases, including not only topological ferromagnetic phase, which supports non-Abelian anyon excitation, but also spin-fluid, dimer and chiral phases from the emergent Z2 spin model. We generalize the measurement tools in Z2 spin models to fully characterize these phases in the extended parafermion model and map out the corresponding phase diagram. Surprisingly, we find that all the phase boundaries finally merge to a single supercritical point. In regarding of the rather generality of emergent phenomena in parafermion models, this approach opens a wide range of intriguing applications in investigating the exotic phases in other parafermion models.Topological orders have been one of the major concerns in modern physics due to their potential realization of non-Abelian anyons for topological quantum computation [1,2]. Along this line, the Majorana zero modes have been realized in experiments in semiconductor/topological insulator and superconductor hybrid structures [3][4][5][6][7][8]. This approach may be directly generalized to Z k parafermion[9-13] (with k = 2 for Majorana fermions) with k-fold ground state degeneracy, following the pioneering work by Fendley [14][15][16]. In these phases, the Z 3 parafermion model is most intriguing due to its potential construction of Fibonacci anyons [17][18][19][20][21][22] for universal quantum computation. Recently, these parafermions are proposed to be constructed in semiconductor and fractional quantum Hall state hybrid structures [17,20,21,23,24].In this work, we explore the emergent phenomena in the parafermion models. We consider an extended parafermion Z 3 model, which is mapped to a Z 3 clock model with next nearest neighboring (NNN) interaction. In the presence of strong Zeeman field, the clock model can be projected to a conventional Z 2 spin model, giving rise to emergent spin-fluid (SF), dimer and chiral phases. This model exhibits rich variety of phases, which are characterized using various tools directly generalized from Z 2 spin models. We map out the whole phase diagram and find that the topological ferromagnetic parafermion (FP) phase is greatly enhanced in the presence of ferromagnetic interaction between NNN sites. Strikingly, all the phase boundaries finally merge to a single supercritical (SC) point. This approach lays foundation for understanding exotic phases in other parafermion models.Model and Hamiltonian. We consider the following extended Z 3 parafermion chains,wherewith ω = e i2π/3 and α j are parafermions satisfying α 3 j = 1, α † j = α 2 j and α i α j = α j α i ω sgn(i−j) , J and h correspond to the pairings -0.5 0.5 Dimer SF Topolog...

N6-methyladenosine (m6A) has been identified to exert critical roles in human cancer; however, the regulation of m6A modification on glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) and long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) CASC9 (cancer susceptibility 9) is still unclear. Firstly, MeRIP-Seq revealed the m6A profile in the GBM. Moreover, the m6A-related lncRNA CASC9 expression was significantly elevated in the GBM tissue and its ectopic high expression was associated with poor survival, acting as an independent prognostic factor for GBM patients. Functionally, the aerobic glycolysis was promoted in the CASC9 overexpression transfection, which was inhibited in CASC9 knockdown in GBM cells. Mechanistically, m6A reader IGF2BP2 (insulin-like growth factor 2 mRNA binding protein 2) could recognize the m6A site of CASC9 and enhance its stability, then CASC9 cooperated with IGF2BP2, forming an IGF2BP2/CASC9 complex, to increase the HK2 (Hexokinase 2) mRNA stability. Our findings reveal that CASC9/IGF2BP2/HK2 axis promotes the aerobic glycolysis of GBM.

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Vision transformers (ViTs) have recently set off a new wave in neural architecture design thanks to their record-breaking performance in various vision tasks. In parallel, to fulfill the goal of deploying ViTs into real-world vision applications, their robustness against potential malicious attacks has gained increasing attention. In particular, recent works show that ViTs are more robust against adversarial attacks as compared with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and conjecture that this is because ViTs focus more on capturing global interactions among different input/feature patches, leading to their improved robustness to local perturbations imposed by adversarial attacks. In this work, we ask an intriguing question: "Under what kinds of perturbations do ViTs become more vulnerable learners compared to CNNs?" Driven by this question, we first conduct a comprehensive experiment regarding the robustness of both ViTs and CNNs under various existing adversarial attacks to understand the underlying reason favoring their robustness. Based on the drawn insights, we then propose a dedicated attack framework, dubbed Patch-Fool, that fools the self-attention mechanism by attacking its basic component (i.e., a single patch) with a series of attention-aware optimization techniques. Interestingly, our Patch-Fool framework shows for the first time that ViTs are not necessarily more robust than CNNs against adversarial perturbations. In particular, we find that ViTs are more vulnerable learners compared with CNNs against our Patch-Fool attack which is consistent across extensive experiments, and the observations from Sparse/Mild Patch-Fool, two variants of Patch-Fool, indicate an intriguing insight that the perturbation density and strength on each patch seem to be the key factors that influence the robustness ranking between ViTs and CNNs. It can be expected that our Patch-Fool framework will shed light on both future architecture designs and training schemes for robustifying ViTs towards their real-world deployment. Our codes are available at https://github.com/RICE-EIC/Patch-Fool.