Endoplasmic reticulum Ca(2+)-ATPase in microsomal vesicles isolated from bovine retinae

Active Ca2+ transport was measured in microsomal vesicles prepared from bovine retinae and was compared with that in disk membranes of the photoreceptor cells of the same retina. The 45Ca uptake was dependent on the presence of Mg(2+)-ATP and was inhibited by vanadate or when GTP substituted for ATP. The dependence of calcium uptake on the external free Ca2+ concentration gave a KM = 13 microM or a KM = 0.1 microM for disks and microsomal vesicles, respectively. A phosphorylated intermediate (E-P) of Ca(2+)-ATPase of about 100 kDa was isolated in microsomal vesicles. The E-P formation was strongly inhibited by thapsigargin and partially by 2,5-di-(-butyl)benzohydroquinone. Digestion of disks or microsomes with calpain had no effect on the phosphorylated intermediate, while digestion with trypsin produced two fragments of approximately 55 kDa and 35 kDa. These results suggest that bovine retinal microsomes contain a calcium pump belonging to the SERCA family.     

A study on the stability of superconducting YBa2Cu3O7−x phase

The thermal stability of the superconducting phase of nominal composition YBa₂Cu₃O_7–x -sintered pellets has been studied with respect to different temperatures (ranging from 300 to 950° C), time (ranging from 1 to 72 h), oxygen partial pressure (from 4 Pa to 1 atm) and carbon dioxide partial pressure (from 10^–4 Pa to 1 atm). Annealed samples were characterized by X-ray diffraction analysis, optical microscopy, and resistive measurements of the superconductive transition temperature. A stability field of the orthorhombic and tetragonal phases was obtained, showing a region of coexistance. The decomposition of the 1 2 3 phase is found to be strongly influenced by the presence of a small amount of CO₂ (1 p.p.m.) in the sintering atmosphere. A sintering process is proposed to avoid the formation of by-products.     

Proinflammatory Interleukin-33 Induces Dichotomic Effects on Cell Proliferation in Normal Gastric Epithelium and Gastric Cancer

Interleukin (IL)-33 is a member of the interleukin (IL)-1 family of cytokines linked to the development of inflammatory conditions and cancer in the gastrointestinal tract. This study is designed to investigate whether IL-33 has a direct effect on human gastric epithelial cells (GES-1), the human gastric adenocarcinoma cell line (AGS), and the gastric carcinoma cell line (NCI-N87) by assessing its role in the regulation of cell proliferation, migration, cell cycle, and apoptosis. Cell cycle regulation was also determined in ex vivo gastric cancer samples obtained during endoscopy and surgical procedures. Cell lines and tissue samples underwent stimulation with rhIL-33. Proliferation was assessed by XTT and CFSE assays, migration by wound healing assay, and apoptosis by caspase 3/7 activity assay and annexin V assay. Cell cycle was analyzed by means of propidium iodine assay, and gene expression regulation was assessed by RT-PCR profiling. We found that IL-33 has an antiproliferative and proapoptotic effect on cancer cell lines, and it can stimulate proliferation and reduce apoptosis in normal epithelial cell lines. These effects were also confirmed by the analysis of cell cycle gene expression, which showed a reduced expression of pro-proliferative genes in cancer cells, particularly in genes involved in G0/G1 and G2/M checkpoints. These results were confirmed by gene expression analysis on bioptic and surgical specimens. The aforementioned results indicate that IL-33 may be involved in cell proliferation in an environment- and cell-type-dependent manner.     

On Approximate Majority and Probabilistic Time

We prove new results on the circuit complexity of approximate majority, which is the problem of computing the majority of a given bit string whose fraction of 1’s is bounded away from 1/2 (by a constant). We then apply these results to obtain new relationships between probabilistic time, BPTime (t), and alternating time, ∑_O(1)Time (t). Our main results are the following:

Hysteretic Critical State in Coplanar Josephson Junction with Monolayer Graphene Barrier

Coplanar Al/graphene/Al junctions fabricated on the same graphene sheet deposited on silicon carbide (SiC), show robust Josephson coupling at subKelvin temperature, when the separations between the electrodes is below 400 nm. Remarkably, a hysteretic Critical State sets in when ramping an orthogonal magnetic field, with a sudden collapse of the Josephson critical current I _c when turning the field on, and a revival of I _c when inverting the sweep. Similar hysteresis can be found in granular superconducting films which may undergo the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition. Here, we give quantitative arguments to prove that this odd behavior of the magnetoconductance gives evidence for an incipient Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition with drift and pinning of fluctuating free vortices induced by the current bias.     

ISS feedback control redesign for continuous stirred tank reactors

In this paper a new nonlinear feedback control law for continuous stirred tank reactors, obtained by exact Input/Output (I/O) linearization and Sontag's input‐to‐state stability feedback control redesign methods, is studied. By the new feedback control law, a significant attenuation of the disturbance effect is guaranteed, with evident improvement with respect to control laws obtained by the exact I/O linearization method. The performed simulations validate the theoretical results. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Synchronizing automata with finitely many minimal synchronizing words

A synchronizing word for a given synchronizing DFA is called minimal if none of its proper factors is synchronizing. We characterize the class of synchronizing automata having only finitely many minimal synchronizing words (the class of such automata is denoted by FG). Using this characterization we prove that any such automaton possesses a synchronizing word of length at most 3n-5. We also prove that checking whether a given DFA A is in FG is co-NP-hard and provide an algorithm for this problem which is exponential in the number of states A.     

EEG signal preprocessing for biometric recognition

Electroencephalography (EEG) has been recently investigated as a biometric modality for automatic people recognition purposes. Several studies have shown that brain signals possess subject-specific traits that allow distinguishing people. Nonetheless, extracting discriminative characteristics from EEG recordings may be a challenging task, due to the significant presence of artifacts in the acquired data. In order to cope with such issue, in this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of some preprocessing techniques in automatically removing undesired EEG contributions, with the aim of improving the achievable recognition rates. Specifically, methods based on blind source separation and sample entropy estimation are here investigated. An extensive set of experimental tests, performed over a large database comprising recordings taken from 50 healthy subjects during three distinct sessions spanning a period of about one month, in both eyes-closed and eyes-open conditions, is carried out to analyze the performance of the proposed approaches.     

Sensorless supervision of linear dynamical systems: The Feed-Forward Command Governor approach

This paper proposes a novel class of Command Governor (CG) strategies for input and state-related constrained discrete-time LTI systems subject to bounded disturbances in the absence of explicit state or output measurements. While in traditional CG schemes the set-point manipulation is undertaken on the basis of either the actual measure of the state or its suitable estimation, it is shown here that the CG design problem can be solved, with limited performance degradation and with similar properties, also in the case that such an explicit measure is not available. This approach, which will be referred to as the Feed-Forward CG (FF-CG) approach, may be a convenient alternative CG solution in all situations whereby the cost of measuring the state may be a severe limitation, e.g. in distributed or decentralized applications. In order to evaluate the method proposed here, numerical simulations on a physical example have been undertaken and comparisons with the standard state-based CG solution reported.