Microsatellite instability in follicle centre cell lymphoma

Fluorescent polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was used to assay 12 microsatellite markers (APC x 2, DCC, P53 x 2, RB1, NM23, WT1, D6S260, D6S262, D6S281 and TNFa) to look for evidence of microsatellite instability in 40 cases of follicle centre cell lymphoma (FCC). Evidence of novel alleles seen in the tumour tissue but not the normal uninvolved tissue was seen in seven cases (17%). In only two of these cases (5%) was more than one locus involved but in these cases multiple affected loci were seen (4/12 and 7/12 respectively). The detection of microsatellite instability indicates a DNA repair defect such as that which would be predicted to occur in cells with mutated mismatch repair genes, a novel finding in FCC lymphoma.     

Medication status of participants in psychopathology research: Selective review of current reporting practices.

The majority of Ss included in studies of psychopathology are typically receiving psychoactive medication. In view of concerns regarding the confounding effects of psychoactive medication, it appears that researchers should provide information regarding at least the drug status of the Ss studied. A review of the articles on adult psychopathology that appeared in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology during a 5-yr period, however, revealed that nearly 50% of reports on Ss presumably receiving psychoactive medications failed to specify the medication status of those Ss. Few studies (15%) provided adequate information regarding the types and dosages of psychoactive drugs received by the Ss. It is argued that researchers should provide a full report of the psychoactive drugs received by research participants and, when participants are unmedicated, to indicate the reasons for drug-free status. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Undesirable sensory properties of the dried pea (Pisum sativum). The rôle of saponins

The rôle of saponins in the undesirable sensory properties of the dried pea P sativum is reported. The sensory properties of isolated soyasaponin I are defined and described as bitter, astringent and metallic. The distribution of saponin in various air-classified pea flour fractions shows that the protein-rich fraction may contain sufficient saponin to cause undesirable tastes.     

Formant labelling using pole-focused spectra

An algorithm is introduced which labels formants from the peaks of pole-focused spectra. A clustering procedure is first used to produce line segments of possible formants. These can be considered as anchor traces for the later processing. Rule-based labelling is then applied to provide final formant trace estimates. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm offers improved formant labelling accuracy.     

FTIR-ATR studies of diffusion and perturbation of water in polyelectrolyte thin films. Part 4. Diffusion, perturbation and swelling processes for ionic solutions in SPEES/PES membranes

We report diffusion rates and equilibrium concentrations of water in a polyelectrolyte SPEES/PES film using ATR/FTIR spectroscopy. The data for water obtained by fitting spectral intensities to a dual mode diffusion model in the presence of different counter ions (at 0.2 mol dm⁻³) follow the order Li⁺>Cs⁺>Na⁺>Ca²⁺>K⁺. Diffusion is progressively slower for higher concentrations of NaCl (0.2-0.85 mol dm⁻³) and the NO₃⁻ counter anion leads to a faster diffusion rate than for Cl⁻ at the same concentration. Both water uptake and diffusion rates are broadly consistent with expectations based on the differential degrees of swelling, caused by changes in the SO₃⁻/SO₃⁻ interpolymer chain repulsive forces leading to a decrease in volume diffusion compared with the value for pure water. Direct spectral measurements of the degree of swelling confirm that the process does occur, although the order of the swelling amounts does not map directly onto that of the diffusion rates. This is probably because the interfacial dissociation processes are hydration dependent.     

Measurement selection for parametric IC fault diagnosis

This article presents experimental results which show feedforward neural networks are well-suited for analog IC fault diagnosis. Boundary band data (BBD) measurement selection is used to reduce the computational overhead of the FFN training phase. We compare the diagnostic accuracy between traditional statistical classifiers and feedforward neural networks trained with various measurement selection criteria. The feedforward networks consistently perform as well as or better than the other classifiers in term of accuracy. Training using BBD consistently reduces the FFN training efforts without degrading the performance. Experimental results suggest that feedforward networks provide a cost efficient method for IC fault diagnosis in a large scale production testing environment.This work is supported by NSF-IUC CDADIC, Project 90-1.     

Tower of London performance in relation to Magnetic Resonance Imaging following closed head injury in children.

To investigate the relationship of severity of pediatric closed head injury (CHI), the contribution of frontal lobe lesions, and age at testing (6–10 yr olds vs 11–15 yr olds) to cognitive deficit, 134 head-injured patients were given the Tower of London (TOL) task and underwent magnetic resonance imaging. 89 normal controls were given the TOL for comparison. Severity of CHI and age at testing were strongly related to cognitive performance on the TOL, including the frequency of breaking the rules. Volume of frontal lobe lesion (but not extrafrontal lesion) contributed to the prediction of perfomance on the TOL even after severity of injury was taken into account. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)