Biodegradation of indole at high concentration by persolvent fermentation with Pseudomonas sp. ST-200

The value of flexible videoendoscopy as a biofeedback tool in conservative swallowing rehabilitation of patients suffering from aspiration after head and neck surgery was examined. For this purpose, the outcomes of conventional swallowing therapy and of swallowing therapy with support of videoendoscopic biofeedback were compared. In the first 40 days of swallowing therapy, videoendoscopic biofeedback significantly increased the chance of therapeutic success, shortening the period of functional rehabilitation in comparison to conventional swallowing therapy. Limitations of this visual biofeedback procedure are poor cognitive skills of the patient, rejection of the procedure by the patient and local factors that make the positioning of the endoscope difficult.     

Cooperative behavior of various agents in dynamic environment

The multi-agent model is a model in which agents with limited ability cooperate each other to accomplish a goal. In this paper, we introduce a multi-agent model in which agents are created to imitate real ants. There are two different type of agents, each type of which has a particular task. We designed agents to communicate each other by using pheromone considering noise. On this model, we observed cooperative behavior of agents and evaluated conditions to make an order of behavior in the model.     

A video DSP with a macroblock-level-pipeline and a SIMD typevector-pipeline architecture for MPEG2 CODEC

A video DSP with macroblock-level-pipeline and a SIMD type vector-pipeline architecture (VDSP2) has been developed, using 0.5 μm triple-layer-metal CMOS technology. This 17.00 mm×15.00 mm chip consists of 2.5 M transistors, and operates at 100 MHz. The real-time encoder and decoder specified in the MPEG2 main profile at the main level can be realized with two VDSP2's and a motion estimation (ME) unit, and one VDSP2 respectively, at an 80 MHz clock rate, with a total power dissipation of 4.2 W at 3.3 V     

DNA-inorganic hybrid material as selective absorbent for harmful compounds

Double-stranded DNA is one of functional polymers, but the large amounts of DNA sources, such as salmon milt and shellfish gonads, have been discarded as industrial wastes. Therefore, conversion of this discarded DNA to be a useful material would be beneficial to utilize the unique property of DNA. These materials including DNA have been prepared by mixing with the organic polymers, such as alginic acid, collagen, and chitosan. However, since these materials have consisted from entirely organic components, these do not have the mechanical strength for a material. So, we prepared the organic-inorganic hybrid materials by mixing DNA with silane coupling reagents bis(trimethoxysilylpropyl)amine or bis[(3-trimethoxysilyl)propyl]ethylenediamine. These hybrid materials with the flexibility were water-insoluble and resistant to hydrolysis by nuclease. In addition, the mechanical strength of this hybrid material was approximately twice as high as that of DNA without mixing with silane coupling reagents. Furthermore, the double-stranded DNA in the hybrid materials has been maintained in a B-form structure in aqueous solution. Thus, we demonstrated the utilization of DNA as a functional material. As a result, this material could selectively accumulate harmful DNA-intercalating compounds with the planar structure, such as dibenzo-p-dioxin, dibenzofuran, and ethidium bromide. Organic-inorganic hybrid material including double-stranded DNA has potential to serve as a useful biomaterial for medical, engineering, and environmental applications.     

Minimum alveolar anesthetic concentrations for airway occlusion in cats: a new concept of minimum alveolar anesthetic concentration-airway occlusion response

The role of ergosterol in yeast stress tolerance, together with heat shock proteins (hsps) and trehalose, was examined in a sterol auxotrophic mutant of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Ergosterol levels paralleled viability data, with cells containing higher levels of the sterol exhibiting greater tolerances to heat and ethanol. Although the mutant synthesised hsps and accumulated trehalose upon heat shock to the same levels as the wild-type cells, these parameters did not relate to stress tolerance. These results indicate that the role of ergosterol in stress tolerance is independent of hsps or trehalose.     

Transvaginal power Doppler angiography of the fetal brain

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The stratum corneum of some of the scaly (parakeratotic) diseases was examined with light and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) with the purpose to reveal the importance of this layer in the diagnosis of some of the diseases associated with the formation of scales. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Two biopsies of the skin surface were taken: one, obtained from 80 patients with various parakeratotic scaly diseases and from 25 control subjects, was processed for light microscopy; the other biopsy for SEM was taken from 10 control subjects and 25 patients. The diagnoses of these patients were: psoriasis (5 patients), erythrodermic psoriasis (2 subjects), parapsoriasis (5 patients), pityriasis rubra pilaris (5 subjects), pityriasis rosea (3 subjects), and seborrheic dermatitis (5 subjects). RESULTS: The light microscopic studies showed that normal corneocytes are of polygonal shape with their largest diameter measuring 42 microns; these cells lacked nuclei. All parakeratotic cells appeared bizarre in shape, smaller than normal, and the cells contained a nucleus. With SEM, normal cells appeared relatively regular in size and shape, trabeculated, and had a flat surface. Cells examined in all the diseases revealed various sizes, outlines, and trabeculae. Specific surface patterns (print) of diseased cells were: "fish-scale" in psoriasis; "marbled" in parapsoriasis, "rocky stone" in pityriasis rubra pilaris; "heart-shaped" in seborrheic dermatitis, and semicrystalloid in pityriasis rosea. CONCLUSIONS: Parakeratosis is characterized not only by the retention of the nucleus in keratinocytes, but is also characterized by a cell of smaller size. The specific print of a disease helps in the diagnosis. The print will change with different stages of a disease.     

Greedy versus social: resource-competing oscillator network as a model of amoeba-based neurocomputer

A single-celled amoeboid organism, the true slime mold Physarum polycephalum, exhibits rich spatiotemporal oscillatory behavior and sophisticated computational capabilities. The authors previously created a biocomputer that incorporates the organism as a computing substrate to search for solutions to combinatorial optimization problems. With the assistance of optical feedback to implement a recurrent neural network model, the organism changes its shape by alternately growing and withdrawing its photosensitive branches so that its body area can be maximized and the risk of being illuminated can be minimized. In this way, the organism succeeded in finding the optimal solution to the four-city traveling salesman problem with a high probability. However, it remains unclear how the organism collects, stores, and compares information on light stimuli using the oscillatory dynamics. To study these points, we formulate an ordinary differential equation model of the amoeba-based neurocomputer, considering the organism as a network of oscillators that compete for a fixed amount of intracellular resource. The model, called the “Resource-Competing Oscillator Network (RCON) model,” reproduces well the organism’s experimentally observed behavior, as it generates a number of spatiotemporal oscillation modes by keeping the total sum of the resource constant. Designing the feedback rule properly, the RCON model comes to face a problem of optimizing the allocation of the resource to its nodes. In the problem-solving process, “greedy” nodes having the highest competitiveness are supposed to take more resource out of other nodes. However, the resource allocation pattern attained by the greedy nodes cannot always achieve a “socially optimal” state in terms of the public cost. We prepare four test problems including a tricky one in which the greedy pattern becomes “socially unfavorable” and investigate how the RCON model copes with these problems. Comparing problem-solving performances of the oscillation modes, we show that there exist some modes often attain socially favorable patterns without being trapped in the greedy one.     

Amoeba-based Chaotic Neurocomputing: Combinatorial Optimization by Coupled Biological Oscillators

We demonstrate a neurocomputing system incorporating an amoeboid unicellular organism, the true slime mold Physarum, known to exhibit rich spatiotemporal oscillatory behavior and sophisticated computational capabilities. Introducing optical feedback applied according to a recurrent neural network model, we induce that the amoeba’s photosensitive branches grow or degenerate in a network-patterned chamber in search of an optimal solution to the traveling salesman problem (TSP), where the solution corresponds to the amoeba’s stably relaxed configuration (shape), in which its body area is maximized while the risk of being illuminated is minimized.Our system is capable of reaching the optimal solution of the four-city TSP with a high probability. Moreover, our system can find more than one solution, because the amoeba can coordinate its branches’ oscillatory movements to perform transitional behavior among multiple stable configurations by spontaneously switching between the stabilizing and destabilizing modes. We show that the optimization capability is attributable to the amoeba’s fluctuating oscillatory movements. Applying several surrogate data analyses, we present results suggesting that the amoeba can be characterized as a set of coupled chaotic oscillators.

An application of the 2-nitrobenzenesulfenyl method to proteomic profiling of human colorectal carcinoma: A novel approach for biomarker discovery

In the development of novel biomarkers, the proteomic approach is advantageous because using it the cancer-associated proteins can be directly identified. We previously developed a 2-nitrobenzenesulfenyl (NBS) method to improve quantitative proteome analysis. Here, we applied this method to proteomic profiling of colorectal carcinoma (CRC) to identify novel proteins with altered expression in CRC. Each pair of tumor and normal tissue specimens from 12 CRC patients was analyzed, and approximately 5000 NBS-labeled paired peaks were quantified. Peaks with altered signal intensities (>1.5-fold) and occurring frequently in the samples (>70%) were selected, and 128 proteins were identified by MS/MS analyses as differentially expressed proteins in CRC tissues. Many proteins were newly revealed to be CRC related; 30 were reported in earlier studies of CRC. Six proteins that were up-regulated in CRC (ZYX, RAN, RCN1, AHCY, LGALS1, and VIM) were further characterized and validated by Western blot and immunohistochemistry. All six were found to be CRC-localized, either in cancer cells or in stroma cells near the cancer cells. These results indicate that the proteins identified in this study are novel candidates for CRC markers, and that the NBS method is useful in proteome mining to discover novel biomarkers.