The relationship between SNPS in the genes of TLR signal transduction pathway downstream elements and rheumatoid arthritis susceptibility

Toll-like receptors (TLRs) play an important role in the induction and regulation of the innate immune system or adaptive immune responses. Genetic variations within human TLRs have been reported to be associated with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). This study was conducted to investigate correlation between SNP of downstream mononucleotide in signal transduction of Toll-like receptors and predisposing genes of RA. There was obviously correlative between single nucleotide polymorphism and predisposing genes of RA. G-type of IL-1RAP rs766442 may be protecting genes of RA, while T-type alleles of IL-6R rs11265618 and IL-1RAP rs766442 may be susceptible genes of RA. In conclusion, the studies on the nucleis acid polymorphism in TLRs signal pathway contribute to disclose genes’ influence on the attack mechanism of RA, early diagnosis and treatment of RA.Толл-подобные рецепторы (TLRs) играют важную роль в индукции и регуляции врожденной иммунной системы или адаптивных иммунных ответах. Показано, что что генетическая изменчивость TLRs человека связана с ревматоидным артритом (РА). Целью настоящей работы было изучение корреляций между однонуклеотидным полиморфизмом в сигнальной трансдукции TLRs и генами предрасположенности к РА. G-тип IL-1RAP rs766442 могут быть генами, предохраняющими от РА, в то время как аллели T-типа IL-6R rs11265618 и IL-1RAP rs766442 могут быть генами чувствительности к РА. Изучение полиморфизма нуклеиновых кислот в сигнальном пути TLRs может внести вклад в выявление участия генов в механизмах приступов РА, раннюю диагностику и лечение РА.The study was supported by Shandong Province young scientist in incentive fund (Grant № 2006BS03018) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant № 30801025)

Role of induction time and other properties in the recovery of coal from aqueous suspensions by agglomeration with heptane

The percent recovery of fine coal or graphite particles suspended in water by agglomeration with heptane was highly dependent on the measured induction time, i.e., the gas bubble to particle attachment time of the material. The induction time was found to correlate closely with the heat of immersion of the solids in water, another indicator of the hydrophobic/hydrophilic character of the material. For a series of coals and graphite, the agglomeration recovery decreased exponentially with increasing induction time. For the more oleophilic coal or graphite particles, an increase in salt (NaC1) concentration of the suspending medium caused an increase in agglomeration recovery and a decrease in induction time. For the less oleophilic coal or pyrite particles, an increase in salt concentration caused a decrease in agglomeration recovery apd an increase in induction time. Due to the opposing effects of salt concentration on the recoveries of a highly hydrophobic coal and pyrite, it was possible to improve the separation of these materials by an increase in salt concentration. On the other hand, because the recoveries of pyrite and a weakly oleophilic coal were affected similarly by an increase in salt concentration, it was not possible to improve the separation of these materials

Improving Fine-Grained Irregular Shared-Memory Benchmarks by Data Reordering

We demonstrate that data reordering can substantially improve the performance of fine-grained irregular sharedmemory benchmarks, on both hardware and software shared-memory systems. In particular, we evaluate two distinct data reordering techniques that seek to co-locate in memory objects that are in close proximity in the physical system modeled by the computation. The effects of these techniques are increased spatial locality and reduced false sharing. We evaluate the effectiveness of the data reordering techniques on a set of five irregular applications from SPLASH-2 and Chaos. We implement both techniques in a small library, allowing us to enable them in an application by adding less than 10 lines of code. Our results on one hardware and two software shared-memory systems show that, with data reordering during initialization, the performance of these applications is improved by 12%–99% on the Origin 2000, 30%–366% on TreadMarks, and 14%–269% on HLRC

Microstructures and mechanical properties of as cast Mg‐Zr‐Ca alloys for biomedical applications

The microstructures and mechanical properties of as cast Mg-Zr-Ca alloys were investigated for potential use in biomedical applications. The Mg-Zr-Ca alloys were fabricated by commercial pure Mg (99.9 mass-%), Ca (99.9 mass-%) and master Mg-33 mass-%Zr alloy. The microstructures of the alloys were examined by X-ray diffraction analysis and optical microscopy, and the mechanical properties were determined from tensile tests. The experimental results indicate that the Mg-Zr-Ca alloys with 1 mass-%Ca are composed of one single a phase; these alloys with 2 mass-%Ca consist of both Mg 2Ca and α phase, and all the alloys exhibit typical coarse microstructures. An increase in Zr increases the strength of Mg-Zr-Ca alloys with 1 mass-%Ca, and the formation of Mg2Ca decreases the strength of the alloys. Mg-1Zr-1Ca alloy (mass-%) has the highest strength and best ductility among all the studied alloys

OpenMP on Networks of Workstations

We describe an implementation of a sizable subset of OpenMP on networks of workstations (NOWs). By extending the availability of OpenMP to NOWs, we overcome one of its primary drawbacks compared to MPI, namely lack of portability to environments other than hardware shared memory machines. In order to support OpenMP execution on NOWs, our compiler targets a software distributed shared memory system (DSM) which provides multi-threaded execution and memory consistency. This paper presents two contributions. First, we identify two aspects of the current OpenMP standard that make an implementation on NOWs hard, and suggest simple modifications to the standard that remedy the situation. These problems reflect differences in memory architecture between software and hardware shared memory and the high cost of synchronization on NOWs. Second, we present performance results of a prototype implementation of an OpenMP subset on a NOW, and compare them with hand-coded software DSM and MPI results for the same applications on the same platform. We use five applications (ASCI Sweep3d, NAS 3D- FFT, SPLASH-2 Water, QSORT, and TSP) exhibiting various styles of parallelization, including pipelined execution, data parallelism, coarse-grained parallelism, and task queues. The measurements show little difference between OpenMP and hand-coded software DSM, but both are still lagging behind MPI. Further work will concentrate on compiler optimization to reduce these differences

Licensing of primordial germ cells for gametogenesis depends on genital ridge signaling

In mouse embryos at mid-gestation, primordial germ cells (PGCs) undergo licensing to become gametogenesis-competent cells (GCCs), gaining the capacity for meiotic initiation and sexual differentiation. GCCs then initiate either oogenesis or spermatogenesis in response to gonadal cues. Germ cell licensing has been considered to be a cell-autonomous and gonad-independent event, based on observations that some PGCs, having migrated not to the gonad but to the adrenal gland, nonetheless enter meiosis in a time frame parallel to ovarian germ cells -- and do so regardless of the sex of the embryo. Here we test the hypothesis that germ cell licensing is cell-autonomous by examining the fate of PGCs in Gata4 conditional mutant (Gata4 cKO) mouse embryos. Gata4, which is expressed only in somatic cells, is known to be required for genital ridge initiation. PGCs in Gata4 cKO mutants migrated to the area where the genital ridge, the precursor of the gonad, would ordinarily be formed. However, these germ cells did not undergo licensing and instead retained characteristics of PGCs. Our results indicate that licensing is not purely cell-autonomous but is induced by the somatic genital ridge

OpenMP for Networks of SMPs

In this paper, we present the first system that implement OpenMP on network of shared-memory multiprocessors. This system enables the program to rely on a single, standard, shared-memory API for parallelization within a multiprocessor and between multiprocessors. It is implemented via a translator that convert OpenMP directives to appropriate calls to a modified version of the TreadMarks software distributed shared memory(SDSM) system. In contrast to previous SDSM systems for SMPs, the modified TreadMarks system uses POSIX threads for parallelism within an SMP mode. This approach greatly simplifies the changes required to the SDSM in order to exploit the intra-mode hardware shared memory. We present performance results for seven applications (Barnes-Hut, CLU and Water from SPLASH-2, 3D-FFT from NAS, Red-Black SOR, TSP and MGS) running on an SP2 with four four-processor SMP nodes. A comparison between the thread implementation and the original implementation of TreadMarks shows that using the hardware shared memory within an SMP node significantly achieves speedups that are up to 30% better than the original versions. We also compare SDSM against message passing. Overall, the speedups of multithreaded RreadMarks programs are within 7-30% of the MPI versions

Screening of compactin-resistant microorganisms capable of converting compactin to pravastatin

A simple method of using compactin for effective screening of microbial strains with high hydroxylation activity at the 6 beta position of compactin was developed. Agar plates containing different carbon sources and 500 mu g compactin mL(-1) were used to screen the microorganisms that can convert compactin to pravastatin. About 100 compactin-resistant strains were isolated from the Basal agar containing 7% (w/v) mannitol as a carbon source, in which two bacteria, Pseudomocardia autotrophica BCRC 12444 and Streptomyces griseolus BCRC 13677, capable of converting compactin to pravastatin with the yield of 20 and 32% (w/w), respectively, were found. High-performance liquid chromatography using C-18 column and two sequential mobile phases, 30% and 50% (v/v) acetonitrile, was also established to simultaneously determine the concentration of compactin and pravastatin in the culture broth. As such, about 2% of target microorganisms could be obtained from the screening program

OpenMP on Networks of SMPs

In this paper, we present the first system that implements OpenMP on a network of shared-memory multiprocessors. This system enables the programmer to rely on a single, standard, shared-memory API for parallelization within a multiprocessor and between multiprocessors. It is implemented via a translator that converts OpenMP directives to appropriate calls to a modified version of the TreadMarks software distributed memory system (SDSM). In contrast to previous SDSM systems for SMPs, the modified TreadMarks uses POSIX threads for parallelism within an SMP node. This approach greatly simplifies the changes required to the SDSM in order to exploit the intra-node hardware shared memory. We present performance results for six applications (SPLASH-2 Barnes-Hut andWater, NAS 3D-FFT, SOR, TSP and MGS) running on an SP2 with four four-processor SMP nodes. A comparison between the threaded implementation and the original implementation of TreadMarks shows that using the hardware shared memory within an SMP node significantly reduces the amount of data and the number of messages transmitted between nodes, and consequently achieves speedups up to 30% better than the original versions. We also compare SDSM against message passing. Overall, the speedups of multithreaded TreadMarks programs are within 7–30% of the MPI versions