Generalised Acanthosis Nigricans in Childhood with Short Stature Associated with Poor Response to Growth Hormone Provocation

Acanthosis nigricans (AN) is a skin disorder characterised by skin hyperpigmentation and thickening, especially in the intertriginous regions. AN is usually classified as either malignant, benign, obesity-associated, syndromic, unilateral, acral, drug-induced and mixed (1). A generalised form of AN frequently occurs together with internal malignancy in adult patients, but it is rare in childhood (2-7). Here, we report a paediatric case of generalised AN associated with short stature accompanied with decreased growth hormone levels.ArticleACTA DERMATO-VENEREOLOGICA. 94(4):486-487 (2014)journal articl

An Application of Boosting to Graph Classification

This paper presents an application of Boosting for classifying labeled graphs, general structures for modeling a number of real-world data, such as chemical compounds, natural language texts, and bio sequences. The proposal consists of i) decision stumps that use subgraph as features, and ii) a Boosting algorithm in which subgraph-based decision stumps are used as weak learners. We also discuss the relation between our algorithm and SVMs with convolution kernels. Two experiments using natural language data and chemical compounds show that our method achieves comparable or even better performance than SVMs with convolution kernels as well as improves the testing efficiency

Improved Affinity of a Human Anti-Entamoeba histolytica Gal/GalNAc Lectin Fab Fragment by a Single Amino Acid Modification of the Light Chain

We previously produced, in Escherichia coli, a human monoclonal antibody Fab fragment, CP33, specific for the galactose- and N-acetyl-d-galactosamine-inhibitable lectin of Entamoeba histolytica. To prepare antibodies with a higher affinity to the lectin, recombination PCR was used to exchange Ser(91) and Arg(96) in the third complementarity-determining region of the light chain with other amino acids. The screening of 200 clones of each exchange by an indirect fluorescent antibody test showed that 14 clones for Ser(91) and nine clones for Arg(96) reacted strongly with E. histolytica trophozoites. Sequence analyses revealed that the substituted amino acids at Ser(91) were Ala in five clones, Gly in three clones, Pro in two clones, and Val in two clones, while the amino acid at position 96 was substituted with Leu in three clones. The remaining eight clones exhibited no amino acid change at position 91 or 96. These mutant Fab fragments were purified and subjected to a surface plasmon resonance assay to measure the affinity of these proteins to the cysteine-rich domain of lectin. Pro or Gly substitution for Ser(91) caused an increased affinity of the Fab, but substitution with Ala or Val did not. The replacement of Arg(96) with Leu did not affect affinity. These results demonstrate that modification of antibody genes by recombination PCR is a useful method for affinity maturation and that amino acid substitution at position 91 yields Fabs with increased affinity for the lectin

Additional file 2: of A computational tool to detect DNA alterations tailored to formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded samples in cancer clinical sequencing

Text S1, Tables S2 and S4, and Figures S1–S9. (PDF 1210 kb

Additional file 1: of A computational tool to detect DNA alterations tailored to formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded samples in cancer clinical sequencing

Table S1. Samples and datasets used in this study. (XLSX 12 kb

Additional file 3: of A computational tool to detect DNA alterations tailored to formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded samples in cancer clinical sequencing

Table S3. TaqMan primer IDs used for validation of CNAs. (XLSX 10 kb