Interaction of fibronectin (FN) cell binding fragments and interleukin-8 (IL-8) in regulating neutrophil chemotaxis

This study investigated the possible interaction of FN fragments in regulating IL-8-mediated neutrophil chemotaxis in vitro using Neuroprobe microchambers. Human neutrophil suspensions were incubated with purified FN fragments or an RGD-containing peptide and allowed to migrate in response to chemotactically active concentrations of human recombinant IL-8. The 120-kD fragment of FN containing the RGD sequence or an RGD peptide (GRGDSP) inhibited IL-8-mediated neutrophil chemotaxis; however, these RGD peptides did not inhibit neutrophil chemotaxis in response to other chemotactic agents. Furthermore, FN fragments not containing the RGD sequence had no effect on IL-8-mediated chemotaxis. These data suggest that directed migration of neutrophils in response to IL-8 is inhibited in the presence of cell-binding fragments of FN and may represent a local mechanism for terminating neutrophil migration at areas of tissue injury.     

A reliable sociometric measure for preschool children.

Examined the reliability of a rating-scale sociometric technique with 19 4-yr-old children. The test–retest reliability of scores Ss received over a 4-wk interval was high compared to the stability of the traditional positive and negative nomination scores. This preschool sociometric measure has applications for the study of the behavioral correlates of early peer acceptance and for research on the effects of social skill training on children's acceptance by peers. (10 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

MPI-HMMER-Boost: Distributed FPGA Acceleration

HMMER, based on the profile Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is one of the most widely used sequence database searching tools, allowing researchers to compare HMMs to sequence databases or sequences to HMM databases. Such searches often take many hours and consume a great number of CPU cycles on modern computers. We present a cluster-enabled hardware/software-accelerated implementation of the HMMER search tool hmmsearch. Our results show that combining the parallel efficiency of a cluster with one or more high-speed hardware accelerators (FPGAs) can significantly improve performance for even the most time consuming searches, often reducing search times from several hours to minutes.