A regulatory role for Fcgamma receptors CD16 and CD32 in the development of murine B cells

Early in development, murine B-lineage progenitor cells express two classes of IgG Fc receptors (FcgammaR) designated as FcgammaRII (CD32) and FcgammaRIII (CD16), but mature B lymphocytes only express FcgammaRII (CD32), which functions as an inhibitor of B-cell activation when it is induced to associate with mIgM. The functions of CD16 and CD32 on B-lineage precursor cells have not previously been investigated. To search for FcgammaR functions on developing B-lineage cells, normal murine bone marrow cells were cultured in the presence of 2.4G2, a rat monoclonal antibody that binds to CD16 and CD32, or in the presence of control normal rat IgG, and then the B-lineage compartment was analyzed for effects. Cultures that contained 2.4G2 showed enhanced growth and differentiation of B-lineage cells compared with control cultures. The enhancing effect of 2.4G2 also occurred when fluorescence-activated cell-sorted B-cell precursors (B220(+), sIgM-, HSAhigh, FcgammaR+) from normal bone marrow were cocultured with BMS2, a bone marrow stromal cell line, but not when they were cultured in BMS2-conditioned media. The enhancement of B-lineage development induced by 2.4G2 was CD16-dependent and CD32-dependent, because 2.4G2 did not effect B-lineage growth or differentiation in cultures of bone marrow from mice in which either the gene encoding CD16 or CD32 had been disrupted. Analysis of fresh bone marrow from the CD16 gene-disrupted mice showed normal numbers and distribution of cells within the B-cell compartment, but in CD32 gene-disrupted mice, the B-cell compartment was significantly enlarged. These experiments provide several lines of evidence that the FcgammaR expressed on murine B-cell precursors can influence their growth and differentiation.     

Doctoral students' comparative evaluations of best and worst psychotherapy supervision.

68 male and 74 female advanced clinical and counseling psychology graduate students from 37 programs completed questionnaires comparing their best and worst supervisory experiences in terms of context, personal attributes of the supervisor, and specific interactional aspects. Results indicate that quality of supervision was not related to self-reported intellectual or emotional resources of trainees; training site; population serviced; or the gender, experience, sociability, or primary career activity of the supervisor. The best discriminators of quality were perceived expertise and trustworthiness of the supervisor, duration of training, and an emphasis on personal growth issues over the teaching of technical skills. Highly regarded supervisors were psychodynamic as opposed to behavioral, established supportive relationships, and communicated expectations and feedback clearly. Sexist behavior and authoritarian treatment were particularly detrimental to quality of supervision. These differences were not mediated by prior experience, gender, or theoretical orientation of the respondents. (28 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Exploring legibility of augmented reality X-ray

Virtual objects can be visualized inside real objects using augmented reality (AR). This visualization is called AR X-ray because it gives the impression of seeing through the real object. In standard AR, virtual information is overlaid on top of the real world. To position a virtual object inside an object, AR X-ray requires partially occluding the virtual object with visually important regions of the real object. In effect, the virtual object becomes less legible compared to when it is completely unoccluded. Legibility is an important consideration for various applications of AR X-ray. In this research, we explored legibility in two implementations of AR X-ray, namely, edge-based and saliency-based. In our first experiment, we explored on the tolerable amounts of occlusion to comfortably distinguish small virtual objects. In our second experiment, we compared edge-based and saliency-based AR X-ray methods when visualizing virtual objects inside various real objects. Moreover, we benchmarked the legibility of these two methods against alpha blending. From our experiments, we observed that users have varied preferences for proper amounts of occlusion cues for both methods. The partial occlusions generated by the edge-based and saliency-based methods need to be adjusted depending on the lighting condition and the texture complexity of the occluding object. In most cases, users identify objects faster with saliency-based AR X-ray than with edge-based AR X-ray. Insights from this research can be directly applied to the development of AR X-ray applications.     

Clustering of domains of functionally related enzymes in the interaction database PRECISE by the generation of primary sequence patterns

The PRECISE database was developed by our laboratory to allow for the systematic study of the ligand interactions common to a set of functionally related enzymes, where an interaction site is defined broadly as any residue(s) that interact with a ligand. During the construction of PRECISE, enzyme chains are extracted from the protein data bank (PDB) and clustered according to functional homology as defined by the enzyme commission (EC) nomenclature system. A sequence representative is chosen from each cluster based on the criterion set forth by the non-redundant PDB set, and pair-wise alignments of each cluster member to the representative are performed. Atom-based residue–ligand interactions are calculated for each cluster member, and the summation of ligand interactions for all cluster members at each aligned position is determined. Although we were able to successfully align most clusters using a simple dynamic programming algorithm, several cluster created exhibited poor pair-wise alignments of each cluster member to its sequence representative. We hypothesized that the observed alignment problems were, in most cases, due to the incorrect separation and alignment of different domains in multi-domain proteins, a mistake that frequently causes error proliferation in functional annotation. Here we present the results of generating primary sequence patterns for each poorly aligned cluster in PRECISE to assess the extent to which multi-domain proteins that are incorrectly aligned contributes to poor pair-wise alignments of each cluster member to its representative. This requires the use of an iterative locally optimal pair-wise alignment algorithm to build a hierarchical similarity-based sequence pattern for a set of functionally related enzymes. Our results show that poor alignments in PRECISE are caused most frequently by the misalignment of multi-domain proteins, and that the generation of primary sequence patterns for the assignment of sequence family membership yields better alignments for the functionally related enzyme clusters in PRECISE than our original alignment algorithm.     

What Wearable Augmented Reality Can Do for You

This paper focuses on the present and near-future possibilities and technologies for wearable augmented reality. The paper provides an overview of the concept of wearable augmented reality and describes a current state-of-the-art system Tinmith. A number of benefits are presented, such as in situ information presentation, hands-free operation, ability to multitask, and navigation aids. The following five major application domains are examined as a means of highlighting the effectiveness of this technology: consumer help, entertainment, manufacturing, medicine, and navigation. The article provides some insights into technological hurdles yet to be overcome.     

Complications of "slow-K" therapy

(1) The failure of ;Slow-K' tablets to disintegrate prevents rapid release but allows them to be trapped by their bulk in the intestine.(2) Two cases are reported. In the first the tablet was trapped in a caecal diverticulum and the patient developed an abcess. In the second, abdominal pain developed which subsided when ;Slow-K' was stopped. Later ;Slow-K' was again started and the patient developed dysphagia.(3) The possibility of abdominal complications with this treatment should be remembered.(4) Effervescent KC1 preparations may replace ;Slow-K' but KC1 supplementation may be necessary only in cardiac disease.     

Automated vehicle detection in forward-looking infrared imagery

We describe an algorithm for the detection and clutter rejection of military vehicles in forward-looking infrared (FLIR) imagery. The detection algorithm is designed to be a prescreener that selects regions for further analysis and uses a spatial anomaly approach that looks for target-sized regions of the image that differ in texture, brightness, edge strength, or other spatial characteristics. The features are linearly combined to form a confidence image that is thresholded to find likely target locations. The clutter rejection portion uses target-specific information extracted from training samples to reduce the false alarms of the detector. The outputs of the clutter rejecter and detector are combined by a higher-level evidence integrator to improve performance over simple concatenation of the detector and clutter rejecter. The algorithm has been applied to a large number of FLIR imagery sets, and some of these results are presented here.     

Microscopic and macroscopic models of photo-induced volume changes in amorphous selenium

We have proposed a new explanation for the photo-induced volume changes in chalcogenide glasses. We have found that the covalent bond breaking occurs in these glasses with excited electrons, whereas holes contribute to the formation of inter-chain bonds. We have calculated the charge distribution in a-Se, too.     

The SBASE domain library: a collection of annotated protein segments

SBASE is a database of annotated protein domain sequences representingvarious structural, functional, ligand binding and topogenicsegments of proteins. The current release of SBASE contains27 211 entries which are provided with standardized names inorder to facilitate retrieval. SBASE is cross-referenced tothe major protein and nucleic acid databanks as well as to thePROSITE catalog of protein sequence patterns [Bairoch, A. (1992)Nucleic Acids Res., 20, Suppl., 2013–2118]. SBASE canbe used to establish domain homologies through database searchusing programs such as FASTA [Lipman and Pearson (1985) Science,227, 1436–1441], FASTDB [Brutlag et al. (1990) Comp. Appl.Biosci., 6, 237–245] or BLAST3 [Altschul and Lipman (1990)Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 87, 5509–5513], which is especiallyuseful in the case of loosely defined domain types for whichefficient consensus patterns cannot be established. The useof SBASE is illustrated on the DNA binding protein Brain-4.The database and a set of search and retrieval tools are freelyavailable on request to the authors or by anonymous ‘ftp’file transfer from <ftp.icgeb.trieste.it>.     

Improving γ-radiation stability of pvc—a review

PVC has a significant tendency to degrade under γ irradiation. Therefore, considerable efforts have been made to improve its γ-radiation stability. The purpose of this review is to summarize recent results in this area, with a special emphasis on the improvement of color stability of PVC-based materials used in medical applications.