Insulin-like growth factor I-dependent regulation of prolidase activity in cultured human skin fibroblasts

In metastatic breast cancer the goal to reach must be the best possible palliation with minimum discomfort for the patient. We reviewed our experience with radiotherapy (20 or 30 Gy), systemic therapy and brace. Among 2200 breast cancer patients, we extracted 28 potential candidates for resection. All of them developed new metastases outside the treated field within one year. Local control was achieved in 68%, and 80% of them had stable or better performance status at 3 months. From our analysis, even patients with a so called "solitary lesion" do not seem to have a better prognosis than others. We conclude that radiotherapy (with systemic therapy and a brace) is still first-choice treatment for vertebral metastases; CT-guided percutaneous biopsy can avoid worthless major operations. The role of surgery should be limited to neurological compression, severe mechanical instability and to salvage the failures of conservative treatment.     

Ethnically bounded homeownership: qualitative insights on Los Angeles immigrant homeowners’ experiences during the U.S. Great Recession

Immigrant homeowners’ function within ethnic boundaries in the housing market may have helped or hindered them during the recent U.S. Great Recession. This research explores this theme through interviews with immigrant and non-immigrant homeowners from four ethnic communities in Los Angeles County and the non-profit organizations that tried to assist them. Immigrant homeowners turned to co-ethnics for advice and support and formed multigenerational households as a strategy to achieve and sustain homeownership. Language and cultural barriers primed them for risky loans and thwarted their pursuit of refinance and modification when they struggled to make mortgage payments. These findings conform to existing evidence of ethnic segmentation in the housing market and imply that analyses of home buying and homeownership in areas with significant immigrant populations should factor in the role of ethnicity.     

Spectrophotometric determination of zinc in foods using N-ethyl-3-carbazolecarboxaldehyde-3-thiosemicarbazone: Evaluation of a new analytical reagent

N-ethyl-3-carbazolecarboxaldehyde-3-thiosemicarbazone (ECCT) is proposed as a new sensitive reagent for the extractive spectrophotometric determination of zinc(II). The ECCT forms yellow colored species of zinc(II) at pH range 3.0–5.5 and the complex was extracted into benzene. The Zn(II)–ECCT complex shows maximum absorbance at 420 nm with molar absorptivity and Sandell’s sensitivity being 1.55 × 10⁴ lit mol⁻¹ cm⁻¹ and 4.212 × 10⁻³ μg cm⁻², respectively. The system obeys Beer’s law in the range of 0.4–6.0 mg/l, with an excellent linearity in terms of correlation coefficient value of 0.999. Most of the common metal ions generally found associated with zinc do not interfere. The repeatability of the method was checked by finding relative standard deviation (RSD). The developed method has been successfully employed for the determination of zinc(II) in foods. Various certified reference materials (NIST 1573, NBS 1572 and NIST SRM 8435) have been tested for the determination of zinc for the purpose of validation of the present method.     

Electrosynthesis of dimethylsulfone from dimethylsulfoxide at a dimensionally stable anode

Galvanostatic electrochemical oxidation of dimethylsulphoxide (DMSO) to dimethylsulfone (DMSO₂) has been effected at a dimensionally stable anode (DSA) under different conditions of current density and reaction media, in both a batch and a flow reactor (membrane cell with an ion-exchange membrane between the two working electrodes) functioning in batch recirculation mode. Excellent yields of the sulfone have been obtained under both conditions. The product has been characterized by various physicochemical techniques. The operational conditions giving maximum yield of the product have been established. The electrochemical oxidation of DMSO has also been studied by cyclic voltammetry at a glassy carbon (GC) electrode. The mechanism of electrochemical oxidation and the advantages of the present methods over existing ones, are discussed.     

Investigation of Serine‐Proteinase‐Catalyzed Peptide Splicing in Analogues of Sunflower Trypsin Inhibitor 1 (SFTI‐1)

Serine‐proteinase‐catalyzed peptide splicing was demonstrated in analogues of the trypsin inhibitor SFTI‐1: both single peptides and two‐peptide chains (C‐ and N‐terminal peptide chains linked by a disulfide bridge). In the second series, peptide splicing with catalytic amount of proteinase was observed only when formation of acyl–enzyme intermediate was preceded by hydrolysis of the substrate Lys–Ser peptide bond. Here we demonstrate that with an equimolar amount of the proteinase, splicing occurs in all the two‐peptide‐chain analogues. This conclusion was supported by high resolution crystal structures of selected analogues in complex with trypsin. We showed that the process followed a direct transpeptidation mechanism. Thus, the acyl–enzyme intermediate was formed and was immediately used for a new peptide bond formation; products associated with the hydrolysis of the acyl–enzyme were not observed. The peptide splicing was sequence‐ not structure‐specific.     

A fiber composite laminate endodontic post and core

The goals of endodontic post and core procedures are to provide maximum retention of the post and resistance to fracture of the roots. Presented is a recently developed fiber composite laminate (FCL) post and core technique which results in a bonded structure that is conservative, morphologic, retentive, versatile, esthetic, and helps resist root fracture. To ascertain the durability of FCL posts and cores, an in vitro pilot study with stress testing is included. The results of the study are compared to other post and core materials to show how well this technique approaches the ideal characteristics for endodontic post and cores.     

Tuning parallel symbolic execution engine for better performance

Symbolic execution is widely used in many code analysis, testing, and verification tools. As symbolic execution exhaustively explores all feasible paths, it is quite time consuming. To handle the problem, researchers have paralleled existing symbolic execution tools (e.g., KLEE). In particular, Cloud9 is a widely used paralleled symbolic execution tool, and researchers have used the tool to analyze real code. However, researchers criticize that tools such as Cloud9 still cannot analyze large scale code. In this paper, we conduct a field study on Cloud9, in which we use KLEE and Cloud9 to analyze benchmarks in C. Our results confirm the criticism. Based on the results, we identify three bottlenecks that hinder the performance of Cloud9: the communication time gap, the job transfer policy, and the cache management of the solved constraints. To handle these problems, we tune the communication time gap with better parameters, modify the job transfer policy, and implement an approach for cache management of solved constraints. We conduct two evaluations on our benchmarks and a real application to understand our improvements. Our results show that our tuned Cloud9 reduces the execution time significantly, both on our benchmarks and the real application. Furthermore, our evaluation results show that our tuning techniques improve the effectiveness on all the devices, and the improvement can be achieved upto five times, depending upon a tuning value of our approach and the behaviour of program under test.     

Stacking dependent electronic structure and transport in bilayer graphene nanoribbons

The stacking-dependent electronic structure and transport properties of bilayer graphene nanoribbons suspended between gold electrodes are investigated using density functional theory coupled with non-equilibrium Green’s functional method. We find substantially enhanced electron transmission as well as tunneling currents in the AA stacking of bilayer nanoribbons compared to either single-layer or AB stacked bilayer nanoribbons. Interlayer separation between the nanoribbons appears to have a profound impact on the conducting features of the bilayer nanoribbons, which is found to be closely related to the topology and overlap between the edge-localized π orbitals.