Plant Copper Amine Oxidases: Key Players in Hormone Signaling Leading to Stress-Induced Phenotypic Plasticity

Polyamines are ubiquitous, low-molecular-weight aliphatic compounds, present in living organisms and essential for cell growth and differentiation. Copper amine oxidases (CuAOs) oxidize polyamines to aminoaldehydes releasing ammonium and hydrogen peroxide, which participates in the complex network of reactive oxygen species acting as signaling molecules involved in responses to biotic and abiotic stresses. CuAOs have been identified and characterized in different plant species, but the most extensive study on a CuAO gene family has been carried out in Arabidopsis thaliana. Growing attention has been devoted in the last years to the investigation of the CuAO expression pattern during development and in response to an array of stress and stress-related hormones, events in which recent studies have highlighted CuAOs to play a key role by modulation of a multilevel phenotypic plasticity expression. In this review, the attention will be focused on the involvement of different AtCuAOs in the IAA/JA/ABA signal transduction pathways which mediate stress-induced phenotypic plasticity events.     

Design and Characterization of a New pVII Combinatorial Phage Display Peptide Library for Protease Substrate Mining Using Factor VII Activating Protease (FSAP) as Model

We describe a novel, easy and efficient combinatorial phage display peptide substrate-mining method to map the substrate specificity of proteases. The peptide library is displayed on the pVII capsid of the M13 bacteriophage, which renders pIII necessary for infectivity and efficient retrieval, in an unmodified state. As capture module, the 3XFLAG was chosen due to its very high binding efficiency to anti-FLAG mAbs and its independency of any post-translational modification. This library was tested with Factor-VII activating protease (WT-FSAP) and its single-nucleotide polymorphism variant Marburg-I (MI)-FSAP. The WT-FSAP results confirmed the previously reported Arg/Lys centered FSAP cleavage site consensus as dominant, as well as reinforcing MI-FSAP as a loss-of-function mutant. Surprisingly, rare substrate clones devoid of basic amino acids were also identified. Indeed one of these peptides was cleaved as free peptide, thus suggesting a broader range of WT-FSAP substrates than previously anticipated.     

A novel compact circuit for 4-PAM energy-efficient high speed interconnect data transmission and reception

Transmission of signals, whether on-chip or off-chip, places severe constraints on timing and extracts a large price in energy. New silicon device technologies, such as back-plane CMOS, provide a programmable and adaptable threshold voltage as an additional tool that can be used for low power design. We show that one particularly desirable use of this freedom is energy-efficient high-speed transmission across long interconnects using multi-valued encoding. Our multi-valued CMOS circuits take advantage of the threshold voltage control of the transistors, by using the signal-voltage-to-threshold-voltage span, in order to make area-efficient implementations of 4-PAM (pulse amplitude modulation) transceivers operating at high speed. In a comparison of a variety of published technologies, for signal transmission with interconnects of 10-15 mm length, we show up to 50% improvement in energy for on-chip signal transmission over binary encoding together with higher limits for operating speeds without a penalty in circuit noise margin.     

钻井过程中水合物层化学稳定实验研究

油田试验显示,钻井液中加入Lecithin可稳定北极Cascade地区水合物层。针对这一现象开展了一系列实验研究。通过特制的实验装置,对加入不同含量Lecithin后钻井液Ⅰ、Ⅱ、Ⅲ(或加入部分水)体系中甲烷水合物形成的热力学条件和甲烷水合物的生成速度与数量进行了测定。实验结果表明:Lecithin的加入基本上不影响钻井液中甲烷水合物形成的热力学条件;对于钻井液Ⅰ和钻井液Ⅲ的实验流体体系,Lecithin是很好的甲烷水合物生成促进剂。     

Effects of a quick-release form of bromocriptine (Ergoset) on fasting and postprandial plasma glucose, insulin, lipid, and lipoprotein concentrations in obese nondiabetic hyperinsulinemic women

OBJECTIVE: To assess the effect on various aspects of carbohydrate and lipid metabolism of administering a quick-release formulation of bromocriptine (Ergoset) to obese, nondiabetic, hyperinsulinemic women. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: Hourly concentrations of prolactin, glucose, insulin, free fatty acid (FFA), and triglyceride were measured for 24 h before and after approximately 8 weeks of treatment with Ergoset. In addition, fasting lipid and lipoprotein concentrations and the steady-state plasma glucose (SSPG) concentration in response to a continuous infusion of somatostatin, insulin, and glucose were determined before and after Ergoset administration. RESULTS: Circulating prolactin concentrations were dramatically decreased (P < 0.001) following treatment, associated with a significant fall (P < 0.05) in 24-h-long plasma glucose, FFA, and triglyceride concentrations. Neither circulating plasma insulin concentrations nor the ability of insulin to mediate glucose disposal changed with treatment. Finally, fasting total cholesterol fell (P < 0.05) and the ratio of total to HDL cholesterol decreased (P = 0.06) in association with Ergoset treatment. CONCLUSIONS: The fact that significant metabolic improvement was seen in the obese nondiabetic hyperinsulinemic women studied suggests that Ergoset could be of therapeutic benefit in clinical conditions of hyperglycemia and/or dyslipidemia.     

Inducing oblique decision trees with evolutionary algorithms

This paper illustrates the application of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to the problem of oblique decision-tree (DT) induction. The objectives are to demonstrate that EAs can find classifiers whose accuracy is competitive with other oblique tree construction methods, and that, at least in some cases, this can be accomplished in a shorter time. We performed experiments with a (1+1) evolution strategy and a simple genetic algorithm on public domain and artificial data sets, and compared the results with three other oblique and one axis-parallel DT algorithms. The empirical results suggest that the EAs quickly find competitive classifiers, and that EAs scale up better than traditional methods to the dimensionality of the domain and the number of instances used in training. In addition, we show that the classification accuracy improves when the trees obtained with the EAs are combined in ensembles, and that sometimes it is possible to build the ensemble of evolutionary trees in less time than a single traditional oblique tree.     

Cardiac autonomic dysfunction in survivors of acute lymphoblastic leukemia in childhood

Lower levels of baseline ventilatory function have consistently been associated with increased risk of cardiovascular mortality in prospective studies, but the underlying mechanisms are not known. Increased risk of coronary heart disease is associated with higher serum insulin levels. This report examines the relationship between ventilatory function and indirect measures of insulin resistance. Cross-sectional data from 922 nondiabetic participants in the Normative Aging Study were analysed using multiple linear regression models with adjustment for potential confounders. Forced vital capacity (FVC) and forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) were examined in relation to indicators of insulin resistance, i.e. fasting insulin and the fasting insulin resistance index (FIRI). Diabetics were excluded because impaired insulin secretion interferes with the validity of these as measures of insulin resistance. Fasting insulin and FIRI were negatively correlated with FVC and FEV1 (all p< 0.001). These associations persisted after adjusting for potential confounders including age, height, body mass index, waist to hip circumference ratio, physical activity, alcohol intake and smoking in separate multiple linear regression models, for both insulin (all p< or =0.0008) and FIRI (all p< or =0.0001). Negative cross-sectional associations between ventilatory function and indirect measures of insulin resistance were found in nondiabetic males. Insulin resistance may contribute to the previously unexplained association between ventilatory function impairment and cardiovascular mortality. Mechanisms underlying the relationship between insulin resistance and decreased ventilatory function remain to be elucidated.     

Designing linear distributed algorithms with memory for fast convergence

Motivated by both distributed computation and decentralized control applications, we studied the distributed linear iterative algorithms with memory. Specifically, we showed that the system of linear equations G x = b can be solved through a distributed linear iteration for arbitrary invertible G using only a single memory element at each processor. Further, we demonstrated that the memoried distributed algorithm can be designed to achieve much faster convergence than a memoryless distributed algorithm. Two small simulation examples were included to illustrate the results. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Security concepts for the dynamics of autonomous vehicle networks

The secure operation of autonomous vehicle networks in the presence of adversarial observation is examined, in the context of a canonical double-integrator-network (DIN) model. Specifically, we study the ability of a sentient adversary to estimate the full network’s state, from noisy local measurements of vehicle motions. Algebraic, spectral, and graphical characterizations are provided, which indicate the critical role of the inter-vehicle communication topology and control scheme in achieving security.