This thesis deals with the topic of network slicing technology in 5G networks, mainly on the RAN part. In the theoretical part, basic principles of 5G network slicing in core network part and RAN part are presented. Practical part contains a simulation scenario created in NS3 simulator with LENA 5G module. Results of this simulation are presented and discussed with the emphasis on RAN slicing.

The aim of this thesis was to observe how polyunsaturated fatty acids affect the wound healing process. This effect was observed by expression of selected genes and collagen type I and III in the model organism. The Wistar Albino laboratory rat strain was chosen as a model organism. 50 rats were used for the experiment. Rats were divi-ded into five groups of ten. One control group was selected which was fed only with compound feed without the addition of oil. The rats in the remaining groups were fed a feed mixture with the addition of oil (Schizochytrium extract oil, fish oil, palm oil and safflower oil). After 52 days of fattening, rats under anesthesia were excised on the dor-sal side of the back. Fattening was continued for 12 days and then rats were sacrificed with isoflurane to remove liver and healing skin wounds. EPA / DHA deposition was determined from collected liver. RNA was obtained from healing skin wounds for quan-titative PCR with specific primers for TGF-β1, PTGS2, ACTA2, VEGF, COL1A1, COL3A1. Further, immunohistochemical sections with type I and III collagen monoclo-nal antibodies were generated from the healing skin wound. The assumption of achie-ving better results with high DHA oil was not lost. Best results in the wound healing process were achieved in rats fed with safflower and fish oil (p <0.05). These results are inconsistent with the literature, since it was assumed that only n-3 PUFAs contribute to a better wound healing process and n-6 PUFAs, on the other hand, prolong wound hea-ling. Ambiguous results regarding the use of n-3 PUFAs in the wound healing process require further research.

How should nature be written? Writing has long been a way for people to understand nature. Still, we have come to an age that we need to reconceptualize our relation with nature. Nature can no longer be regarded as a passive stage upon which human beings act. How should we understand nature so that nature is made inanimate? I propose that the solution, known as “Schizo-Natural Writing,” can be found in Dung Kai-cheung’s Natural Histories Trilogy. Hong Kong is commonly seen as a city. Correspondingly, when it comes to Hong Kong literature, the term appears frequently will be “city writing”. It is not surprising, given that Hong Kong has always been recognised as a highly-developed city, one of the most densely populated cities in the world. Famous literary works in Hong Kong like Xi Xi’s My City (西西，我城), A Dictionary of Two Cities co-written by Hon Lai Chu and Dorothy Tse Hiu Hong (韓麗珠、謝曉虹，雙城辭典), Wong Bik Wan’s The City of Lost (黃碧雲，失城), just to name some. This phenomenon is closely related to the historical background of Hong Kong. According to Chan (2009), the connection between Hong Kong literature and its cityscape can be dated back to 1950s. Though it does not mean that there are no non-urban writings, those were not in the mainstream. However, in 2000s one of the most influential local writers, Dung Kai Cheung (1967 -), has begun his Natural Histories Trilogy. He is the director in The House of Hong Kong Literature, a folk organisation of local literature. His publication includes, Androgyny: Evolution of a Non-existent Species (1996), a story about a female scientist who went into the wild and sought a nonexistent species, named as androgyny and Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City (1997), an imaginary archaeology in the future Hong Kong, which has been translated into English. During 2005 to 2010, he published the Natural Histories Trilogy, including firstly, the History of the Adventures of Vivi and Vera (2018, which titled in Chinese, 天工開物．栩栩如真), secondly, the Histories of Time: The Light of Nga Chi (2007, 時間繁史．啞瓷之光) and thirdly, on the Origin of Species: The Rebirth of Bui Bui - The Age of Apprenticeship (2010, 物種源始．貝貝重生 之 學習年代). In the trilogy, Dung Kai-cheung, echoing Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “nature=industry”, highlighted the productivity of nature, or the naturing of nature. As such, he no longer writes nature. He writes schizo-naturally. I further adopted the term “ecology”, which on the one hand pointed out the close relation between the item produced during the schizo-natural writing; on the other hand, echoed Guattari’s the Three Ecology. In this thesis, there are four parts investigating four types of ecology: mental ecology, social ecology, environmental ecology and spatiotemporal ecology. Through examining the trilogy, love, being standing outside oneself, is advocated to be the way out of the fragmented world. Keywords: Dung Kai-cheung, the Natural Histories Trilogy, nature writing, Gilles Deleuze, Ecology

Yes / Next-generation cellular networks such as fifth-generation (5G) will experience tremendous growth in traffic. To accommodate such traffic demand, there is a necessity to increase the network capacity that eventually requires the deployment of more base stations (BSs). Nevertheless, BSs are very expensive and consume a significant amount of energy. Meanwhile, cloud radio access networks (C-RAN) has been proposed as an energy-efficient architecture that leverages cloud computing technology where baseband processing is performed in the cloud, i.e., the computing servers or baseband processing units (BBUs) are located in the cloud. With such an arrangement, more energy saving gains can be achieved by reducing the number of BBUs used. This paper proposes a bin packing scheme with three variants such as First-fit (FT), First-fit decreasing (FFD) and Next-fit (NF) for minimizing energy consumption in 5G C-RAN. The number of BBUs are reduced by matching the right amount of baseband computing load with traffic load. In the proposed scheme, BS traffic items that are mapped into processing requirements, are to be packed into computing servers, called bins, such that the number of bins used are minimized and idle servers can then be switched off to save energy. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed bin packing scheme achieves an enhanced energy performance compared to the existing distributed BS architecture.

Yes / By 2020, next generation (5G) cellular networks are expected to support a 1000 fold traffic increase. To meet such traffic demands, Base Station (BS) densification through small cells are deployed. However, BSs are costly and consume over half of the cellular network energy. Meanwhile, Cloud Radio Access Networks (C-RAN) has been proposed as an energy efficient architecture that leverage cloud computing technology where baseband processing is performed in the cloud. With such an arrangement, more energy gains can be acquired through statistical multiplexing by reducing the number of BBUs used. This paper proposes a green Intelligent Traffic and Resource Elastic Energy (iTREE) scheme for C-RAN. In iTREE, BBUs are reduced by matching the right amount of baseband processing with traffic load. This is a bin packing problem where items (BS aggregate traffic) are to be packed into bins (BBUs) such that the number of bins used are minimized. Idle BBUs can then be switched off to save energy. Simulation results show that iTREE can reduce BBUs by up to 97% during off peak and 66% at peak times with RAN power reductions of up to 27% and 18% respectively compared with conventional deployments.

Yes / It has been shown previously that cancer cells with an activated oncogenic pathway, including Met activation, require Ran for growth and survival. Here, we show that knockdown of Ran leads to a reduction of Met receptor expression in several breast and lung cancer cell lines. This, in turn suppressed HGF expression and the Met-mediated activation of the Akt pathway, as well as cell adhesion, migration, and invasion. In a cell line model where Met amplification has previously been shown to contribute to gefitinib resistance, Ran knockdown sensitized cells to gefitinib-mediated inhibition of Akt and ERK1/2 phosphorylation and consequently reduced cell proliferation. We further demonstrate that Met reductionmediated by knockdown of Ran, occurs at the post-transcriptional level, probably via a matrix metalloproteinase. Moreover, the level of immunoreactive Ran and Met are positively associated in human breast cancer specimens, suggesting that a high level of Ran may be a prerequisite for Met overexpression. Interestingly, a high level of immunoreactive Ran dictates the prognostic significance of Met, indicating that the co-overexpression of Met and Ran may be associated with cancer progression and could be used in combination as a prognostic indicator. / The authors would like to thank Cancer Research UK for the post-doctoral fellowship to H.F.Y.

The hexanucleotide repeat expansion GGGGCCn (also known as G4C2n) localizes in the first intron of the C9ORF72 gene and is the most common genetic cause of ALS and FTD (C9ALS/FTD). The pathomechanisms proposed for C9ALS/FTD suggest that from sense (G4C2)n- and anti-sense (C4G2)n-containing transcripts originate two different mechanisms of toxicity: i) by the alteration of RNA processing due to binding and sequestration of RNA-binding proteins, thereby leading to impairment of RNA metabolism; and ii) by their unconventional Repeat-associated non AUG (RAN) translation into five different dipeptide-repeats (DPRs). In addition, pathological expansion of (G4C2)n reduces the C9orf72 transcription causing loss of function of the C9ORF72 protein. The toxicity of some of these DPRs has been showed in several cell lines, in iPSC-derived neurons, in Drosophila and in mouse models. An impairment of the ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) due to aggregation of toxic proteins is largely demonstrated in neurodegenerative disorders and among the mechanisms of DPR-related toxicity. RAN translation of (G4C2)n-RNAs has been recently shown to require a near-cognate start codon upstream of the repeat in frame +1 and to be triggered by stress conditions in a cap-dependent or cap-independent way. However, the mechanism regulating RAN translation is still largely unknown. Importantly, no small molecules are known to selectively modulate RAN translation, even if antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) and small molecules binding the r(GGGGCC)n have been proposed as therapeutics for C9ALS/FTD. In addition, no effective pharmacological approach to reduce the pathological load of DPRs is currently available. Here, I developed a high-throughput drug-screening assay to identify small molecules and relative molecular targets that can modulate the DPR level. Among the identified hits, two hits reduced DPRs expression levels triggering the protein clearance system in vitro. Moreover, the screening identified compounds having the same target that increased DPRs expression levels indicating the targeted pathway as a crucial modulator of the translation process of the C9orf72 repeat-containing mRNAs. Conversely, I showed that pharmacological inhibition of the pathway reduced DPRs expression levels in vitro, while in vivo it rescued climbing ability and increased life span of Drosophila flies carrying G4C2X36 repeats. Moreover, genetic ablation of the target reduced DPRs expression levels by decreasing their translation efficiency in vitro and rescued the pathological phenotype in vivo. Together, the results show the identification of new pathways as new drug targets for C9ALS/FTD.

No description available.

More than 40 neurological diseases are known to be caused by large expansions oftandem repeat sequences scattered throughout the human genome in introns, exons and untranslated regions. The GGGGCC (G4C2) repeat expansion located in the first intron of the C9ORF72 gene is the most common genetic cause of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia (ALS/FTD). In C9 FTD/ALS, expanded transcripts are known to aggregate and accumulate in the cell nucleus, sequestering RNA binding proteins. Other expanded RNA species are exported to the cytoplasm to undergo a non-canonical form of translation termed ‘repeat-associated non-AUG (RAN) translation’. RAN translation leads to the production of toxic polydipeptide repeat proteins in the absence of a canonical AUG start codon. This dissertation will highlight new mechanistic features of translation across the G4C2 repeat expansion, identify a potential therapeutic for C9 FTD/ALS using RNAi and develop a cellular system to explore the G4C2 repeat RNA lifecycle. First, we demonstrate that increasing G4C2 repeat expansion size results in suppression of translation from both canonical and non-canonical start codons, suggesting that large polydipeptide repeats are rarely fully translated. We further find that initiation does not occur from within the repeat expansion, relying on upstream sequence for initiation. However, some reading frames are prone to substantial frameshifting, such as poly-GA. We also show that a bias in ii codon usage efficiency contributes to previously observed variations in the levels of each polydipeptide. Our results support and extend previous studies by identifying two new mechanisms that bias production of poly-dipeptides toward poly-GA in C9 FTD/ALS. Further, we generated central mismatch-containing short hairpin RNAs (shRNAs) targeting the G4C2 repeat expansion to reduce aggregation or block translation of repeatcontaining transcripts. Iterative design was able to improve shRNA processing efficiency and cellular abundance, yet they were unable to reduce nuclear RNA foci in patient-derived cells. Despite this, we show preliminary data suggesting that these shRNAs are able to target cytoplasmic repeat-containing transcripts and resulting in a reduced translation of poly-GP. Finally, we optimized the previously published RNA-protein interaction detection (RaPID) technique, which uses proximity dependent labelling by a mutant biotin ligase and mass spectrometry for protein identification in living cells, to identify proteins interacting with the G4C2 repeat expansion. We embedded the box B RNA hairpin between G4C2 repeats and tested the ability for λN fused to a biotin ligase mutant, BASU, to specifically bind the box B hairpin in vitro. We show that 6 repeats each side of the hairpin combined with an extended hairpin stem promotes specific binding of the λN-BASU fusion protein and is likely to be successful in cells. C9 FTD/ALS is a currently incurable neurodegenerative disorder largely due to the limited understanding of disease mechanism. This dissertation demonstrates new mechanisms of translation across the G4C2 repeat expansion that results in toxic DPR production while also developing a nucleic acid therapeutic for long-term treatment of C9 FTD/ALS and further developing systems to explore RNA-mediated toxicity in cells.

Yes / Next-generation cellular systems like fth generation (5G) is are expected to experience tremendous tra c growth. To accommodate such tra c demand, there is a need to increase the network capacity that eventually requires the deployment of more base stations (BSs). Nevertheless, BSs are very expensive and consume a lot of energy. With growing complexity of signal processing, baseband units are now consuming a signi cant amount of energy. As a result, cloud radio access networks (C-RAN) have been proposed as anenergy e cient (EE) architecture that leverages cloud computing technology where baseband processing is performed in the cloud. This paper proposes an energy reduction technique based on baseband workload consolidation using virtualized general purpose processors (GPPs) in the cloud. The rationale for the cloud based workload consolidation technique model is to switch o idle baseband units (BBUs) to reduce the overall network energy consumption. The power consumption model for C-RAN is also formulated with considering radio side, fronthaul and BS cloud power consumption. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves an enhanced energy performance compared to the existing distributed long term evolution (LTE) RAN system. The proposed scheme saves up to 80% of energy during low tra c periods and 12% during peak tra c periods compared to baseline LTE system. Moreover, the proposed scheme saves 38% of energy compared to the baseline system on a daily average.