We developed a high speed PUT system to achieve faster blood vessel destruction, decreasing the treatment time by a factor of 20. Furthermore, we integrated it with optical coherence tomography angiography for real time monitoring. The feasibility of the proposed OCTA-guided PUT was validated through in vivo rabbit experiments.

Methylation has been shown to play an important role in the down-regulation of oestrogen receptors (ER) in breast cancer cells. One critical question that remains unclear is whether methylation can account for the loss of ER expression in cells derived from an ER-positive cell line. This laboratory has established an in vitro cell system using long-term growth of human ER-positive breast cancer cell line T47D in oestrogen-free medium. A clonal cell line, T47D:C4:2 (C4:2), has been characterized. Unlike T47D:A18 (A18), which is a T47D line maintained in oestrogen medium, C4:2 has lost the expression of ER and hormone responsiveness. DNA fingerprinting and restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis results confirmed that C4:2 was of the same lineage as A18. These cell lines provide an invaluable system to study the mechanism of ER expression and regulatory pathways leading to hormone-independent growth. The results here clearly demonstrate that the ER CpG island in C4:2 cells remains unmethylated. The loss of ER in the cell line must be due to mechanisms other than methylation. We also evaluated the ER CpG island in the MDA-MB-231:10A (10A) cell line, which is a clone from the MDA-MB-231 line obtained from ATCC and the DNA from the MDA-MB-231 cell line used in the original report. Unlike the cell line from the report, which showed a full methylation pattern in the island, the 10A line only showed a partial methylation pattern in the CpG island. Possible mechanisms pertaining to the heterogeneous methylation pattern of the ER CpG island in the breast cancer cells are discussed.

SFG has been utilized to monitor the surface species present on platinum and rhodium crystal surfaces during catalytic reactions at atmospheric pressures. Ethylene hydrogenation to ethane, cyclohexene hydrogenation to cyclohexane and its dehydrogenation to benzene, and carbon monoxide oxidation to carbon dioxide have been studied while also measuring the turnover rates and the gas phase product distribution by gas chromatography Strongly bound spectators, weakly bound reaction intermediates, and pressure-dependent changes in the chemical bonding of surface species have all been observed. SFG spectra of polyethylene and polypropylene show monolayer sensitivity and reveal temperature-dependent changes of surface structure. For polymer blends, the hydrophobic component segregates to the solid-air interface, and the hydrophilic component segregates at the solid-water interface. Changes in SFG spectra of polymer blends as a function of bulk concentration correlate with changes of contact angle. SFG is an excellent probe of surface-structure and surface-composition changes as the polymer interface is altered.