Differential disease restriction of Moloney and Friend murine leukemia viruses by the mouse Rmcf gene is governed by the viral long terminal repeat.

Neonatal CxD2 (Rmcfr) and Balb/c (Rmcfs) mice inoculated with Moloney murine leukemia virus (M-MuLV) exhibited approximately equivalent time course and pathology for disease. CxD2 mice showed only slightly reduced presence of Moloney mink cell focus-forming virus (M-MCF) provirus as seen by Southern blot analysis compared to Balb/c mice. This lack of restriction for disease and spread of MCF was in sharp contrast to that seen for CxD2 mice inoculated with Friend murine leukemia virus (F-MuLV), where incidence of disease and propagation of MCFs were severely restricted, as previously reported. Inoculation of CxD2 mice with FM-MuLV, a recombinant F-MuLV virus containing M-MuLV LTR sequences (U3 and R), resulted in T cell disease of time course equal to that seen in Balb/c mice; there also was little restriction for propagation of MCFs. This indicated that presence of the M-MuLV long terminal repeat (LTR) was sufficient for propagation of MCFs in CxD2 mice. Differing restriction for F-MuLV vs. M-MuLV in CxD2 mice was explained on the basis of different "MCF propagator cells" for the two viruses. It was suggested that cells propagating F-MCF (e.g., erythroid progenitors) are blocked by endogenous MCF-like gp70env protein, whereas cells propagating M-MCF (e.g., lymphoid) do not express this protein on their surface. F-MuLV disease in CxD2 mice was greatly accelerated when neonates were inoculated with a F-MuLV/F-MCF pseudotypic mixture. However, F-MCF provirus was not detectable or only barely detectable in F-MuLV/F-MCF-induced tumors, suggesting that F-MCF acted indirectly in induction of these tumors

Impact of Driving Cycles on Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions, Global Warming Potential (GWP) and Fuel Economy for SI Car Real World Driving

The transport sector is one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. This study investigated three greenhouse gases emitted from road transport: CO2, N2O and CH4 emissions as a function of engine warm up and driving cycles. Five different urban driving cycles were developed and used including free flow driving and congested driving. An in-vehicle FTIR (Fourier Transform Inferred) emission measurement system was installed on a EURO2 emission compliant SI (Spark Ignition) car for emissions measurement at a rate of 0.5 HZ under real world urban driving conditions. This emission measurement system was calibrated on a standard CVS (Constant Volume Sampling) measurement system and showed excellent agreement on CO2 measurement with CVS results. The N2O and CH4 measurement was calibrated using calibration gas in lab. A MAX710 real time in-vehicle fuel consumption measurement system was installed in the test vehicle and real time fuel consumption was then obtained. The temperatures across the TWC (Three Way Catalyst) and engine out exhaust gas lambda were measured. The GHG (greenhouse gas) mass emissions and consequent GWP (Global Warming Potential) for different urban diving conditions were analyzed and presented. The results provided a better understanding of traffic related greenhouse gas emission profile in urban area and will contribute to the control of climate change

Dynamic routing model and solution methods for fleet management with mobile technologies

Author name used in this publication: K. L. ChoyAuthor name used in this publication: Wenzhong Shi2007-2008 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalAccepted ManuscriptPublishe

Statistical Analysis of the Road Network of India

In this paper we study the Indian Highway Network as a complex network where the junction points are considered as nodes, and the links are formed by an existing connection. We explore the topological properties and community structure of the network. We observe that the Indian Highway Network displays small world properties and is assortative in nature. We also identify the most important road-junctions (or cities) in the highway network based on the betweenness centrality of the node. This could help in identifying the potential congestion points in the network. Our study is of practical importance and could provide a novel approach to reduce congestion and improve the performance of the highway networ

Overexpression Of Chd1l Is Positively Associated With Metastasis Of Lung Adenocarcinoma And Predicts Patients Poor Survival

CHD1L (chromodomain helicase/ATPase DNA binding protein 1-like gene) has been demonstrated as an oncogene in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), however, the role of CHD1L in non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) tumorigenesis hasn't been elucidated. In this study, the expression and amplification status of CHD1L were examined by immunohistochemistry and fluorescence in situ hybridization respectively in 248 surgically resected NSCLCs. The associations between CHD1L expression and clinicopathologic features and the prognostic value of CHD1L were analyzed. Overexpression and amplification of CHD1L was found in 42.1% and 17.7% of NSCLCs, respectively. The frequency of CHD1L overexpression (53.2% vs. 28.1%, P = 0.002) and amplification (25.2% vs. 8.2%, P = 0.020) in adenocarcinoma (ADC), was much higher than that in squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). CHD1L overexpression was associated closely with ascending pN status (P < 0.001), advanced clinical stage (P = 0.001) and tumor distant metastasis (P = 0.001) in ADCs, but not in SCCs. For the whole cohort and ADC patients, univariate survival analysis demonstrated a significant association of CHD1L overexpression with shortened survival; and in multivariate analysis, CHD1L overexpression was evaluated as a independent predictor for overall survival and distant metastasis free survival. These results suggested that overexpression of CHD1L is positively associated with tumor metastasis of lung ADC, and might serve as a novel prognostic biomarker and potential therapeutic target for lung ADC patients.published_or_final_versio

Learning Shape Priors for Single-View 3D Completion and Reconstruction

The problem of single-view 3D shape completion or reconstruction is challenging, because among the many possible shapes that explain an observation, most are implausible and do not correspond to natural objects. Recent research in the field has tackled this problem by exploiting the expressiveness of deep convolutional networks. In fact, there is another level of ambiguity that is often overlooked: among plausible shapes, there are still multiple shapes that fit the 2D image equally well; i.e., the ground truth shape is non-deterministic given a single-view input. Existing fully supervised approaches fail to address this issue, and often produce blurry mean shapes with smooth surfaces but no fine details. In this paper, we propose ShapeHD, pushing the limit of single-view shape completion and reconstruction by integrating deep generative models with adversarially learned shape priors. The learned priors serve as a regularizer, penalizing the model only if its output is unrealistic, not if it deviates from the ground truth. Our design thus overcomes both levels of ambiguity aforementioned. Experiments demonstrate that ShapeHD outperforms state of the art by a large margin in both shape completion and shape reconstruction on multiple real datasets.Comment: ECCV 2018. The first two authors contributed equally to this work. Project page: http://shapehd.csail.mit.edu

Development of specific PCR assays for the detection of Cryptocaryon irritans

Cryptocaryon irritans is one of the most important protozoan pathogens of marine fish, causing the “white spot” disease and posing a significant problem to marine aquaculture. In the present study, a C. irritans-specific reverse primer (S15) was designed based on the published sequence of the second internal transcribed spacer (ITS-2) of ribosomal DNA (rDNA) of C. irritans and used together with the conserved forward primer P1 to develop a specific polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay for direct, rapid, and specific detection of C. irritans. The specificity of these primers was tested with both closely and distantly related ciliates (Pseudokeroronpsis rubra, Pseudokeroronpsis carnae, Euplotes sp. 1, Ichthyophthirius multifiliis, Pseudourostyla cristata, and Paramecium caudaium), and only C. irritans was detected and no product was amplified from any other ciliates examined in this study using the specific primer set P1-S15. The specific PCR assay was able to detect as low as 45 pg of C. irritans DNA and a nested PCR assay using two primer sets (P1/NC2, P1/S15) increased the sensitivity, allowing the detection of a single C. irritans. The species-specific PCR assays should provide useful tools for the diagnosis, prevention, and molecular epidemiological investigations of C. irritans infection in marine fish

Rhesus TRIM5α disrupts the HIV-1 capsid at the inter-hexamer interfaces

TRIM proteins play important roles in the innate immune defense against retroviral infection, including human immunodeficiency virus type-1 (HIV-1). Rhesus macaque TRIM5α (TRIM5αrh) targets the HIV-1 capsid and blocks infection at an early post-entry stage, prior to reverse transcription. Studies have shown that binding of TRIM5α to the assembled capsid is essential for restriction and requires the coiled-coil and B30.2/SPRY domains, but the molecular mechanism of restriction is not fully understood. In this study, we investigated, by cryoEM combined with mutagenesis and chemical cross-linking, the direct interactions between HIV-1 capsid protein (CA) assemblies and purified TRIM5αrh containing coiled-coil and SPRY domains (CC-SPRYrh). Concentration-dependent binding of CC-SPRYrh to CA assemblies was observed, while under equivalent conditions the human protein did not bind. Importantly, CC-SPRYrh, but not its human counterpart, disrupted CA tubes in a non-random fashion, releasing fragments of protofilaments consisting of CA hexamers without dissociation into monomers. Furthermore, such structural destruction was prevented by inter-hexamer crosslinking using P207C/T216C mutant CA with disulfide bonds at the CTD-CTD trimer interface of capsid assemblies, but not by intra-hexamer crosslinking via A14C/E45C at the NTD-NTD interface. The same disruption effect by TRIM5αrh on the inter-hexamer interfaces also occurred with purified intact HIV-1 cores. These results provide insights concerning how TRIM5α disrupts the virion core and demonstrate that structural damage of the viral capsid by TRIM5α is likely one of the important components of the mechanism of TRIM5α-mediated HIV-1 restriction. © 2011 Zhao et al

Time separation as a hidden variable to the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics

The Bohr radius is a space-like separation between the proton and electron in the hydrogen atom. According to the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics, the proton is sitting in the absolute Lorentz frame. If this hydrogen atom is observed from a different Lorentz frame, there is a time-like separation linearly mixed with the Bohr radius. Indeed, the time-separation is one of the essential variables in high-energy hadronic physics where the hadron is a bound state of the quarks, while thoroughly hidden in the present form of quantum mechanics. It will be concluded that this variable is hidden in Feynman's rest of the universe. It is noted first that Feynman's Lorentz-invariant differential equation for the bound-state quarks has a set of solutions which describe all essential features of hadronic physics. These solutions explicitly depend on the time separation between the quarks. This set also forms the mathematical basis for two-mode squeezed states in quantum optics, where both photons are observable, but one of them can be treated a variable hidden in the rest of the universe. The physics of this two-mode state can then be translated into the time-separation variable in the quark model. As in the case of the un-observed photon, the hidden time-separation variable manifests itself as an increase in entropy and uncertainty.Comment: LaTex 10 pages with 5 figure. Invited paper presented at the Conference on Advances in Quantum Theory (Vaxjo, Sweden, June 2010), to be published in one of the AIP Conference Proceedings serie