A bacterial gene-drive system efficiently edits and inactivates a high copy number antibiotic resistance locus.

Gene-drive systems in diploid organisms bias the inheritance of one allele over another. CRISPR-based gene-drive expresses a guide RNA (gRNA) into the genome at the site where the gRNA directs Cas9-mediated cleavage. In the presence of Cas9, the gRNA cassette and any linked cargo sequences are copied via homology-directed repair (HDR) onto the homologous chromosome. Here, we develop an analogous CRISPR-based gene-drive system for the bacterium Escherichia coli that efficiently copies a gRNA cassette and adjacent cargo flanked with sequences homologous to the targeted gRNA/Cas9 cleavage site. This "pro-active" genetic system (Pro-AG) functionally inactivates an antibiotic resistance marker on a high copy number plasmid with ~ 100-fold greater efficiency than control CRISPR-based methods, suggesting an amplifying positive feedback loop due to increasing gRNA dosage. Pro-AG can likewise effectively edit large plasmids or single-copy genomic targets or introduce functional genes, foreshadowing potential applications to biotechnology or biomedicine

Video capture and editing as a tool for the storage, distribution, and illustration of morphological characters of nematodes.

Morphological identification and detailed observation of nematodes usually requires permanent slides, but these are never truly permanent and often prevent the same specimens to be used for other purposes. To efficiently record the morphology of nematodes in a format that allows easy archiving, editing, and distribution, we have assembled two micrographic video capture and editing (VCE) configurations. These assemblies allow production of short video clips that mimic multifocal observation of nematode specimens through a light microscope. Images so obtained can be used for training, management, and online access of “virtual voucher specimens” in taxonomic collections, routine screening of fixed or unfixed specimens, recording of ephemeral staining patterns, or recording of freshly dissected internal organs prior to their decomposition. We provide an overview of the components and operation of both of our systems and evaluate their efficiency and image quality. We conclude that VCE is a highly versatile approach that is likely to become widely used in nematology research and teachin

A minimum principle in mRNA editing ?

mRNA editing of sequences of many species is analyzed. The nature of the inserted nucleotides and the position of the insertion sites, once fixed the edited peptide chain, are explained by introducing a minimum principle in the framework of the crystal basis model of the genetic code introduced by the authors.Comment: revised extended version - includes analysis on more dat

GRAPHICAL CONFIGURATION PROGRAMMING - THE STRUCTURAL DESCRIPTION, CONSTRUCTION AND EVOLUTION OF SOFTWARE SYSTEMS USING GRAPHICS

Published versio

Improving the translation environment for professional translators

When using computer-aided translation systems in a typical, professional translation workflow, there are several stages at which there is room for improvement. The SCATE (Smart Computer-Aided Translation Environment) project investigated several of these aspects, both from a human-computer interaction point of view, as well as from a purely technological side. This paper describes the SCATE research with respect to improved fuzzy matching, parallel treebanks, the integration of translation memories with machine translation, quality estimation, terminology extraction from comparable texts, the use of speech recognition in the translation process, and human computer interaction and interface design for the professional translation environment. For each of these topics, we describe the experiments we performed and the conclusions drawn, providing an overview of the highlights of the entire SCATE project

Interactive product browsing and configuration using remote augmented reality sales services

Real-time remote sales assistance is an underdeveloped component of online sales services. Solutions involving web page text chat, telephony and video support prove problematic when seeking to remotely guide customers in their sales processes, especially with configurations of physically complex artefacts. Recently, there has been great interest in the application of virtual worlds and augmented reality to create synthetic environments for remote sales of physical artefacts. However, there is a lack of analysis and development of appropriate software services to support these processes. We extend our previous work with the detailed design of configuration context services to support the management of an interactive sales session using augmented reality. We detail the context and configuration services required, presenting a novel data service streaming configuration information to the vendor for business analytics. We expect that a fully implemented configuration management service, based on our design, will improve the remote sales experience for both customers and vendors alike via analysis of the streamed information

The Problem of the "Prebiotic and Never Born Proteins"

It has been argued that the limited set of proteins used by life as we know it could not have arisen by the process of Darwinian selection from all possible proteins. This probabilistic argument has a number of implicit assumptions that may not be warranted. A variety of considerations are presented to show that the number of amino-acid sequences that need have been sampled during the evolution of proteins is far smaller than assumed by the argument.Comment: 14 Pages; International Journal of Astrobiology / FirstView Article / October 2012, pp 1

Dynamic Facial Expression Generation on Hilbert Hypersphere with Conditional Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Nets

In this work, we propose a novel approach for generating videos of the six basic facial expressions given a neutral face image. We propose to exploit the face geometry by modeling the facial landmarks motion as curves encoded as points on a hypersphere. By proposing a conditional version of manifold-valued Wasserstein generative adversarial network (GAN) for motion generation on the hypersphere, we learn the distribution of facial expression dynamics of different classes, from which we synthesize new facial expression motions. The resulting motions can be transformed to sequences of landmarks and then to images sequences by editing the texture information using another conditional Generative Adversarial Network. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that explores manifold-valued representations with GAN to address the problem of dynamic facial expression generation. We evaluate our proposed approach both quantitatively and qualitatively on two public datasets; Oulu-CASIA and MUG Facial Expression. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in generating realistic videos with continuous motion, realistic appearance and identity preservation. We also show the efficiency of our framework for dynamic facial expressions generation, dynamic facial expression transfer and data augmentation for training improved emotion recognition models