Glucose-induced positive cooperativity of fructose phosphorylation by human B-cell glucokinase

Human B-cell glucokinase displays sigmoidal kinetics towards D-glucose or D-mannose, but fails to do so towards D-fructose. Yet, D-glucose, D-mannose and 2-deoxy-D-glucose confer to the enzyme positive cooperativity towards D-fructose. For instance, in the presence of 5 mM D-[U-14C]fructose, its rate of phosphorylation is increased to 214.3 +/- 11.0%, 134.0 +/- 4.3% and 116.5 +/- 3.0% of paired control value by D-glucose, D-mannose and 2-deoxy-D-glucose (each 6 mM), respectively. D-glucose and, to a lesser extent, D-mannose also display reciprocal kinetic cooperativity. D-fructose, however, fails to affect D-glucose or D-mannose phosphorylation under conditions in which positive cooperativity is otherwise observed. These findings are relevant to the reciprocal effects of distinct hexoses upon their phosphorylation by B-cell glucokinase and, as such, to the metabolic and functional response evoked in pancreatic islet B-cells by these sugars, when tested either separately or in combination.     

Hydrogen Sulfide Metabolite,Sodium Thiosulfate: Clinical Applications and Underlying Molecular Mechanisms

Thiosulfate in the form of sodium thiosulfate (STS) is a major oxidation product of hydrogen sulfide (H₂S), an endogenous signaling molecule and the third member of the gasotransmitter family. STS is currently used in the clinical treatment of acute cyanide poisoning, cisplatin toxicities in cancer therapy, and calciphylaxis in dialysis patients. Burgeoning evidence show that STS has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, making it a potential therapeutic candidate molecule that can target multiple molecular pathways in various diseases and drug-induced toxicities. This review discusses the biochemical and molecular pathways in the generation of STS from H₂S, its clinical usefulness, and potential clinical applications, as well as the molecular mechanisms underlying these clinical applications and a future perspective in kidney transplantation.     

Ensemble of multiple instance classifiers for image re-ranking

Text-based image retrieval may perform poorly due to the irrelevant and/or incomplete text surrounding the images in the web pages. In such situations, visual content of the images can be leveraged to improve the image ranking performance. In this paper, we look into this problem of image re-ranking and propose a system that automatically constructs multiple candidate “multi-instance bags (MI-bags)”, which are likely to contain relevant images. These automatically constructed bags are then utilized by ensembles of Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) classifiers and the images are re-ranked according to the final classification responses. Our method is unsupervised in the sense that, the only input to the system is the text query itself, without any user feedback or annotation. The experimental results demonstrate that constructing multiple instance bags based on the retrieval order and utilizing ensembles of MIL classifiers greatly enhance the retrieval performance, achieving on par or better results compared to the state-of-the-art.     

Lung lamellar bodies lack certain key enzymes of phospholipid metabolism

Palmitoyl CoA-glycerol-3-phosphate acyltransferase, phosphatidate phosphohydrolase, and phospholipase A were assayed in subcellular fractions of rat lung, including lamellar bodies, the putative site of storage and secretion of lung surfactant. The specific activity of each of these enzymes in lamellar bodies was relatively low and could be entirely accounted for by a small contamination of the lamellar bodies fraction by microsomes, as quantitated by the presence of the microsomal marker reduced triphosphopyridine nucleotide cytochromec reductase. These data indicate that lamellar bodies are not the site of synthesis of the lipid component of pulmonary surfactant by pathways involving these enzymes.     

A combined fuzzy linear regression and fuzzy multiple objective programming approach for setting target levels in quality function deployment

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a systematic process for translating customer needs into engineering characteristics, and then communicating them throughout the enterprise in a way to ensure that details are quantified and controlled. The inherent fuzziness of relationships in QFD modeling justifies the use of fuzzy regression for estimating the relationships between both customer needs and engineering characteristics, and among engineering characteristics. Albeit QFD aims to maximize customer satisfaction, requirements related to enterprise satisfaction such as cost budget, extendibility, and technical difficulty also need to be considered. This paper presents a fuzzy multiple objective decision framework that includes not only fulfillment of engineering characteristics to maximize customer satisfaction, but also maximization of extendibility and minimization of technical difficulty of engineering characteristics as objectives subject to a financial budget constraint to determine target levels of engineering characteristics in product design. A real-world quality improvement problem is presented to illustrate the application of the decision approach.     

MFLP: a low power encoding for on chip networks

Network on chip (NoC) has been proposed as an appropriate solution for today’s on-chip communication challenges. Power dissipation has become a key factor in the NoCs because of their shrinking sizes. In this paper, we propose a new encoding approach aimed at power reduction by decreasing the number of switching activities on the buses. This approach assigns the symbols to data word in such a way that the more frequent words are sent by less power consumption. This algorithm dedicates the symbols with less ones to high probability data and uses transition signaling to transmit data. The proposed method, unlike the existing low power encoding, does not rely on spatial redundancy and keeps the width of the bus constant. Experimental evaluations show that our approach reduces the power dissipation up to 46 % with 2.70, 0.51, and 15.43 % power, critical path and area overhead in the NoCs, respectively.     

Product design, semantics and emotional response

This paper explores theoretical issues in ergonomics related to semantics and the emotional content of design. The aim is to find answers to the following questions: how to design products triggering "happiness" in one's mind; which product attributes help in the communication of positive emotions; and finally, how to evoke such emotions through a product. In other words, this is an investigation of the "meaning" that could be designed into a product in order to "communicate" with the user at an emotional level. A literature survey of recent design trends, based on selected examples of product designs and semantic applications to design, including the results of recent design awards, was carried out in order to determine the common attributes of their design language. A review of Good Design Award winning products that are said to convey and/or evoke emotions in the users has been done in order to define good design criteria. These criteria have been discussed in relation to user emotional responses and a selection of these has been given as examples.     

Real time virtual window management for bit mapped raster graphics

In this paper we present a hardware real time window system which uses a virtual address mapping scheme based on associative memory. Until now, bit block transfer operations were used to update screen contents from main memory window information. Since these operations transfer large blocks of data from main memory to the frame buffer whenever window parameters are changed, response times of window systems were slow. With the proposed approach, the frame buffer may be completely eliminated and replaced by a large virtual video memory which is capable of holding all the window data in non-overlapping locations. Mapping becomes now a dynamic real-time function which assigns screen addresses to different areas of the virtual video memory at different times.     

Informed consent and dual purpose research.

The ethical treatment of human participants in psychological research is regulated by both federal guidelines and the ethical standards of the American Psychological Association (APA). Under certain circumstances, however, both APA standards and federal regulations allow for exceptions for informed consent. In spite of the possibility of exception, a number of factors have made it difficult to conduct and publish research that does not incorporate informed consent. The authors consider these factors and propose 2 approaches that may reduce reluctance to consider exceptions to informed consent under appropriate circumstances. First, journals should not rely on informed consent as the only method of screening research for the ethical treatment of human participants. Second, efforts must be made to work with institutional review boards and other units that review psychological research to ensure that their members are aware of the conditions under which informed consent is considered reasonable. Failure to consider ethical research without informed consent may have serious ethical consequences for research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)