Search for: All records

Heterogeneities among tumor cells significantly contribute towards cancer progression and therapeutic inefficiency. Herein, we discuss recent microfluidic platforms for sorting and profiling of tumor cells for prognostics and personalized therapies. 

Deeply embedded systems powered by microcontrollers are becoming popular with the emergence of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology. However, these devices primarily run C/C\({+}{+}\)code and are susceptible to memory bugs, which can potentially lead to both control data attacks and non-control data attacks. Existing defense mechanisms (such as control-flow integrity (CFI), dataflow integrity (DFI) and write integrity testing (WIT), etc.) consume a massive amount of resources, making them less practical in real products. To make it lightweight, we design a bitmap-based allowlist mechanism to unify the storage of the runtime data for protecting both control data and non-control data. The memory requirements are constant and small, regardless of the number of deployed defense mechanisms. We store the allowlist in the TrustZone to ensure its integrity and confidentiality. Meanwhile, we perform an offline analysis to detect potential collisions and make corresponding adjustments when it happens. We have implemented our idea on an ARM Cortex-M-based development board. Our evaluation results show a substantial reduction in memory consumption when deploying the proposed CFI and DFI mechanisms, without compromising runtime performance. Specifically, our prototype enforces CFI and DFI at a cost of just 2.09% performance overhead and 32.56% memory overhead on average. 

Cultivated peanut ( Arachis hypogaea ) is one of the most widely grown food legumes in the world, being valued for its high protein and unsaturated oil contents. Drought stress is one of the major constraints that limit peanut production. This study’s objective was to identify the drought-responsive genes preferentially expressed under drought stress in different peanut genotypes. To accomplish this, four genotypes (drought tolerant: C76-16 and 587; drought susceptible: Tifrunner and 506) subjected to drought stress in a rainout shelter experiment were examined. Transcriptome sequencing analysis identified that all four genotypes shared a total of 2,457 differentially expressed genes (DEGs). A total of 139 enriched gene ontology terms consisting of 86 biological processes and 53 molecular functions, with defense response, reproductive process, and signaling pathways, were significantly enriched in the common DEGs. In addition, 3,576 DEGs were identified only in drought-tolerant lines in which a total of 74 gene ontology terms were identified, including 55 biological processes and 19 molecular functions, mainly related to protein modification process, pollination, and metabolic process. These terms were also found in shared genes in four genotypes, indicating that tolerant lines adjusted more related genes to respond to drought. Forty-three significantly enriched Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathways were also identified, and the most enriched pathways were those processes involved in metabolic pathways, biosynthesis of secondary metabolites, plant circadian rhythm, phenylpropanoid biosynthesis, and starch and sucrose metabolism. This research expands our current understanding of the mechanisms that facilitate peanut drought tolerance and shed light on breeding advanced peanut lines to combat drought stress.