Parkinson's disease (PD) is one of the most common neural degenerative disease, affecting millions of people globally. Great progress has been made in the PD treatment, and one of the most promising one is the stem cell-based therapy. Thus, studies on the differentiation of neural stem cells (NSCs) are important to the advancement in PD therapy. In this study, we used the rat NSCs to elucidate the role of Lithium in the proliferation and differentiation of NSCs by immunostaining against Ki67 and BrdU analysis as well as immunostaining against specific neuronal markers. We concluded that lithium chloride (LiCl) treatment could enhance the proliferation in NSCs and promote the dopaminergic neuronal differentiation of NSCs in vitro. This process was potentially mediated by Wnt signaling pathway. Using the 6-OHDA-induced PD models, we provided evidence to show that LiCl had the capacity to enhance the proliferation in NSCs and differentiation towards dopaminergic neurons in vivo. The beneficial effect of LiCl treatment was further validated by the fact that the motor function as well as learning and memory was improved in the PD models through Rotarod test and Morris water maze analysis. The learning and memory improvement was further supported by the increase in dendrite spine density in PD models receiving LiCl-treated NSCs. Through this study, we concluded that Lithium plays an important role in promoting NSCs' neuronal differentiation in vitro and improving the symptoms of PD models in vivo. It is of great significance that this work showed the potential application of Lithium in the PD therapy in the future.

The supervisory control of probabilistic discrete event systems (PDESs) is investigated under the assumptions that the supervisory controller (supervisor) is probabilistic and has a partial observation. The probabilistic P-supervisor is defined, which specifies a probability distribution on the control patterns for each observation. The notions of the probabilistic controllability and observability are proposed and demonstrated to be a necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of the probabilistic P-supervisors. Moreover, the polynomial verification algorithms for the probabilistic controllability and observability are put forward. In addition, the infimal probabilistic controllable and observable superlanguage is introduced and computed as the solution of the optimal control problem of PDESs. Several examples are presented to illustrate the results obtained. 20] investigated the optimal control problem of PDESs. The optimal control aims to synthesize a supervisor that minimizes the distance between the uncontrollable specification and its controllable approximation. In order to measure the distance, Pantelic et al. [21] proposed the notion of the pseudometric, and its calculating algorithms.Chattopadhyay et. al [22] also considered the optimal control issue of PDESs. However, different from [20], the optimal objective is maximizing the renormalized language measure vector for the controlled plant. Based on the measurement, Chattopadhyay et. al also formulated a theory for the optimal control of PDESs.It should be pointed out that the supervisors defined in [16]-[22] are all supposed to have a full observation to the events, which are not always satisfied in practical engineering systems. In this paper, we focus on the supervisory control problem of PDESs with the assumptions that the supervisor is probabilistic and has a partial observation to the events.Different from the full-observation supervisors defined in [16]-[22], we define a partial-observation probabilistic supervisor, called as the probabilistic P-supervisor, which specifies a probabilistic distribution on the control patterns to each observation. Intuitively, for each observation, the probabilistic Psupervisor makes a special roulette. The roulette issues several outcomes with the pre-specified probabilities. Before making a control decision, the supervisor will "roll" the corresponding roulette, and then adopt the jth control pattern if the jth outcome is issued. In addition, we demonstrate the equivalence between the probabilistic P-supervisor and the scaling-factor function.We then present the notions of the probabilistic controllability and observability, and their polynomial verification algorithms. We also demonstrate that the probabilistic controllability and observability are the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of the probabilistic P-supervisors, and provide the design method of the probabilistic P-supervisor. Moreover, we consider the optimal control problem of PDESs. Different from [20][21][22], the infim...

The supervisory control theory of fuzzy discrete event systems (FDESs) for fuzzy language equivalence has been developed. However, in a way, language equivalence has limited expressiveness. So if the given specification can not be expressed by language equivalence, then the control for language equivalence does not work. In this paper, we further establish the supervisory control theory of FDESs for fuzzy simulation equivalence whose expressiveness is stronger than that of fuzzy language equivalence. First, we formalize the notions of fuzzy simulation and fuzzy simulation equivalence between two FDESs. Then we present a method for deciding whether there is a fuzzy simulation or not. In addition, we also show several basic properties of fuzzy simulation relations. Afterwards, we put forward the notion of fuzzy simulation-based controllability, and particularly show that it serves as a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of the fuzzy supervisors of FDESs. Moreover, we study the "range" control problem of FDESs. Some examples are given to illustrate the main results obtained.Index Terms-fuzzy discrete event systems (FDESs), supervisory control, fuzzy simulation equivalence, simulation-based controllability, fuzzy finite automata. Daowen Qiu received the M.S. degree in mathematics in 1993 from Jiangxi

Superhydrophobic glass fabricated by repeated dewetting methods yields a remarkable improvement in anti-accumulation properties of solar cells against multiphase contaminants.