THE BIOMECHANICAL ANALYSIS OF ROUNDHOUSE KICK IN TAEKWONDO

The purpose of this research was to compare 360° turning roundhouse kick performed by dominant leg and non-dominant leg on kinetic and kinematic variables, and then to find the variables that correlate to the impact velocity. Nine elite taekwondo athletes were recruited. The data were collected with two Redlake cameras (125 Hz) and two Kistler force plates (1250 Hz). The difference between maximal height and beginning of body CM, max velocity of toe/ankle, impact velocity of toe, maximal vertical force of front leg, vertical/horizontal impulse of front leg, were found to be significantly different between dominant and non-dominant leg; and the difference between maximal height and impact of body CM, max velocity of toe/ankle, maximal vertical force of back leg were found to be significantly correlated with the impact velocity

Predicting RNA-binding residues from evolutionary information and sequence conservation

Abstract Background RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) play crucial roles in post-transcriptional control of RNA. RBPs are designed to efficiently recognize specific RNA sequences after it is derived from the DNA sequence. To satisfy diverse functional requirements, RNA binding proteins are composed of multiple blocks of RNA-binding domains (RBDs) presented in various structural arrangements to provide versatile functions. The ability to computationally predict RNA-binding residues in a RNA-binding protein can help biologists reveal important site-directed mutagenesis in wet-lab experiments. Results The proposed prediction framework named “ProteRNA” combines a SVM-based classifier with conserved residue discovery by WildSpan to identify the residues that interact with RNA in a RNA-binding protein. Although these conserved residues can be either functionally conserved residues or structurally conserved residues, they provide clues on the important residues in a protein sequence. In the independent testing dataset, ProteRNA has been able to deliver overall accuracy of 89.78%, MCC of 0.2628, F-score of 0.3075, and F0.5-score of 0.3546. Conclusions This article presents the design of a sequence-based predictor aiming to identify the RNA-binding residues in a RNA-binding protein by combining machine learning and pattern mining approaches. RNA-binding proteins have diverse functions while interacting with different categories of RNAs because these proteins are composed of multiple copies of RNA-binding domains presented in various structural arrangements to expand the functional repertoire of RNA-binding proteins. Furthermore, predicting RNA-binding residues in a RNA-binding protein can help biologists reveal important site-directed mutagenesis in wet-lab experiments.</p

Document Recommendation in Organizations with Personal Folders

In organizations, knowledge workers usually have their own personal folders that store and organize needed codified knowledge (textual documents) in taxonomy. In such personal folder environments, providing knowledge workers needed knowledge from other workers’ folders is important to facilitate knowledge sharing. This work adopts recommendation techniques to provide knowledge workers needed textual documents from other workers folders. Experiments are conducted to verify the performance of various methods using data collected from a research institute laboratory. The result shows that the CBF approach outperforms other methods

Hospitalized Pediatric Parainfluenza Virus Infections in a Medical Center

Background/PurposeParainfluenza viruses (PIVs) are common pathogens in respiratory tract infections. The aims of this study were to determine the clinical presentation of PIV infections in hospitalized children and to identify particular clinical indications that may effectively distinguish between different PIV serotypes.MethodsA retrospective review of data from children hospitalized with PIV infections at the Mackay Memory Hospital in Taipei between January 2005 and December 2007 was undertaken. Symptoms, signs, laboratory findings and seasonal variations between different types of PIV (serotypes 1, 2 and 3) were compared.ResultsA total of 206 patients [119 (57.8%) boys and 87 (42.2%) girls] were enrolled in the study. Seventy-four (35.9%) patients were infected with PIV serotype 1, 25 (12.1%) with serotype 2 and 107 (51.9%) with serotype 3. The most common clinical presentations were fever (81.1%), cough (66.0%), rhinorrhea (44.2%) and hoarseness (22.3%); 4.9% of the infected children also had skin rashes. No significant differences were found in average white blood cell counts and C-reactive protein levels between the three serotypes. PIV serotype 1 infections were discernible throughout the year; serotype 2 tended to cluster in the late summer and autumn of 2005 and 2007; and serotype 3 was more common in the spring and early summer.ConclusionThe clinical presentation of PIV infection in hospitalized children ranges from upper respiratory tract infection to croup, bronchiolitis and viral bronchopneumonia, with the different types of PIV infections giving rise to similar symptoms. The seasonal distribution of the different serotypes is, nevertheless, quite distinct

Masking Improves Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning for ConvNets, and Saliency Tells You Where

While image data starts to enjoy the simple-but-effective self-supervised learning scheme built upon masking and self-reconstruction objective thanks to the introduction of tokenization procedure and vision transformer backbone, convolutional neural networks as another important and widely-adopted architecture for image data, though having contrastive-learning techniques to drive the self-supervised learning, still face the difficulty of leveraging such straightforward and general masking operation to benefit their learning process significantly. In this work, we aim to alleviate the burden of including masking operation into the contrastive-learning framework for convolutional neural networks as an extra augmentation method. In addition to the additive but unwanted edges (between masked and unmasked regions) as well as other adverse effects caused by the masking operations for ConvNets, which have been discussed by prior works, we particularly identify the potential problem where for one view in a contrastive sample-pair the randomly-sampled masking regions could be overly concentrated on important/salient objects thus resulting in misleading contrastiveness to the other view. To this end, we propose to explicitly take the saliency constraint into consideration in which the masked regions are more evenly distributed among the foreground and background for realizing the masking-based augmentation. Moreover, we introduce hard negative samples by masking larger regions of salient patches in an input image. Extensive experiments conducted on various datasets, contrastive learning mechanisms, and downstream tasks well verify the efficacy as well as the superior performance of our proposed method with respect to several state-of-the-art baselines

A Novel Family of Cyst Proteins with Epidermal Growth Factor Repeats in Giardia lamblia

The biological goal of Giardia lamblia life cycle is differentiation into a cyst form (encystation) that can survive in the environment and infect a new host. Since cystic stages are key to transmission of parasites, this differentiation may be a target for interruption of the life cycle. Synthesis and assembly of the extracellular cyst wall are the major hallmarks of this important differentiation. During encystation, cyst wall structural proteins are coordinately synthesized and are mainly targeted to the cyst wall. However, only a few such proteins have been identified to date. In this study, we used a combination of bioinformatics and molecular approaches to identify new cyst structural proteins from G. lamblia and found a group of Epidermal Growth Factor (EGF)-like Repeats containing Cyst Proteins (EGFCPs). Interestingly, the levels of EGFCPs proteins increased significantly during encystation, which matches the characteristics of the Giardia cyst wall protein. Further characterization and localization studies suggest that EGFCPs may function like cyst wall proteins, involved in differentiation of G. lamblia trophozoites into cysts. Our results provide valuable information regarding the function of a new group of cyst proteins in parasite differentiation into cysts and help develop ways to interrupt the parasite life cycle

Effects of natto extract on endothelial injury in a rat model

Vascular endothelial damage has been found to be associated with thrombus formation, which is considered to be a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. A diet of natto leads to a low prevalence of cardiovascular disease. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of natto extract on vascular endothelia damage with exposure to laser irradiation. Endothelial damage both in vitro and in vivo was induced by irradiation of rose bengal using a DPSS green laser. Cell viability was determined by MTS assay, and the intimal thickening was verified by a histological approach. The antioxidant content of natto extract was determined for the free radical scavenging activity. Endothelial cells were injured in the presence of rose bengal irradiated in a dose-dependent manner. Natto extract exhibits high levels of antioxidant activity compared with purified natto kinase. Apoptosis of laser-injured endothelial cells was significantly reduced in the presence of natto extract. Both the natto extract and natto kinase suppressed intimal thickening in rats with endothelial injury. The present findings suggest that natto extract suppresses vessel thickening as a synergic effect attributed to its antioxidant and anti-apoptosis properties

Sucrose ester micellar-mediated synthesis of Ag nanoparticles and the antibacterial properties

Ag nanoparticles with diameter in the range of 10–25 nm had been synthesized using a simple sucrose ester micellar-mediated method. Ag nanoparticles were formed by adding AgNO3 solution into the sucrose ester micellar solution containing sodium hydroxide at atmospheric condition after 24 h of aging time. Trace amount of dimethyl formamide (DMF) in the sucrose ester solution served as a reducing agent while NaOH acted as a catalyst. The produced Ag nanoparticles were highly stable in the sucrose ester micellar system as there was no precipitation after 6 months of storage. The as-synthesized Ag nanoparticles were characterized using transmission electron microscope (TEM), X-ray diffractometer (XRD), dynamic light scattering (DLS) and UV–vis spectroscopy (UV–vis). Formation mechanism of Ag nanoparticles in the micellar-mediated synthesis is postulated. The antibacterial properties of the Ag nanoparticles were tested against Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) (Gram-positive) and Aeromonas hydrophila (Gram-negative) bacteria. This work provides a simple and “green” method for the synthesis of highly stable Ag nanoparticles in aqueous solution with promising antibacterial property