Antiepileptic drugs in pregnancy and lactation

No antiepileptic drug is completely safe to use in pregnancy as the risk of fetal abnormality is increased. Valproate should be avoided if possible because of the risk of major malformations. Ideally a plan for managing the woman's epilepsy during pregnancy should be prepared before conception. The occurrence of an unexpected pregnancy should not trigger sudden cessation or alteration of antiepileptic drug treatment without medical advice. The smallest effective dose of a drug with a low risk of teratogenicity should be used. Doses may need adjustment as the pharmacokinetics of some drugs change during pregnancy. Data are limited, but most antiepileptic drugs seem to have little effect on full-term breastfed babies

Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism Linkage Map for Arabidopsis thaliana

We have constructed a restriction fragment length polymorphism linkage map for the nuclear genome of the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana. The map, containing 90 randomly distributed molecular markers, is physically very dense; >50% of the genome is within 1.9 centimorgans, or approx 270 kilobase pairs, of the mapped DNA fragments. The map was based on the meiotic segregation of markers in two different crosses. The restriction fragment length polymorphism linkage groups were integrated with the five classically mapped linkage groups by virtue of mapped mutations included in these crosses. Markers consist of both cloned Arabidopsis genes and random low-copy-number genomic DNA clones that are able to detect polymorphisms with the restriction enzymes EcoRI, Bgl II, and/or Xba I. These cloned markers can serve as starting points for chromosome walking, allowing for the isolation of Arabidopsis genes of known map location. The restriction fragment length polymorphism map also can associate clones of unknown gene function with mutant phenotypes, and vice versa

Temperature-dependent Hall scattering factor and drift mobility in remotely doped Si:B/SiGe/Si heterostructures

Hall-and-Strip measurements on modulation-doped SiGe heterostructures and combined Hall and capacitance–voltage measurements on metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS)-gated enhancement mode structures have been used to deduce Hall scattering factors, rH, in the Si1 – xGex two-dimensional hole gas. At 300 K, rH was found to be equal to 0.4 for x = 0.2 and x = 0.3. Knowing rH, it is possible to calculate the 300 K drift mobilities in the modulation-doped structures which are found to be 400 cm2 V – 1 s – 1 at a carrier density of 3.3 × 1011 cm – 2 for x = 0.2 and 300 cm2 V – 1 s – 1 at 6.3 × 1011 cm – 2 for x = 0.3, factors of between 1.5 and 2.0 greater than a Si pMOS control

Missing Heritability in the Tails of Quantitative Traits? A Simulation Study on the Impact of Slightly Altered True Genetic Models

Objective: Genome-wide association studies have identified robust associations between single nucleotide polymorphisms and complex traits. As the proportion of phenotypic variance explained is still limited for most of the traits, larger and larger meta-analyses are being conducted to detect additional associations. Here we investigate the impact of the study design and the underlying assumption about the true genetic effect in a bimodal mixture situation on the power to detect associations. Methods: We performed simulations of quantitative phenotypes analysed by standard linear regression and dichotomized case-control data sets from the extremes of the quantitative trait analysed by standard logistic regression. Results: Using linear regression, markers with an effect in the extremes of the traits were almost undetectable, whereas analysing extremes by case-control design had superior power even for much smaller sample sizes. Two real data examples are provided to support our theoretical findings and to explore our mixture and parameter assumption. Conclusions: Our findings support the idea to re-analyse the available meta-analysis data sets to detect new loci in the extremes. Moreover, our investigation offers an explanation for discrepant findings when analysing quantitative traits in the general population and in the extremes. Copyright (C) 2011 S. Karger AG, Base

5d-5f Electric-multipole Transitions in Uranium Dioxide Probed by Non-resonant Inelastic X-ray Scattering

Non-resonant inelastic x ray scattering (NIXS) experiments have been performed to probe the 5d-5f electronic transitions at the uranium O(4,5) absorption edges in uranium dioxide. For small values of the scattering vector q, the spectra are dominated by dipole-allowed transitions encapsulated within the giant resonance, whereas for higher values of q the multipolar transitions of rank 3 and 5 give rise to strong and well-defined multiplet structure in the pre-edge region. The origin of the observed non-dipole multiplet structures is explained on the basis of many-electron atomic spectral calculations. The results obtained demonstrate the high potential of NIXS as a bulk-sensitive technique for the characterization of the electronic properties of actinide materials.Comment: Submitted to Physical Review Letters on 31 December 200

Tagged particle in a sheared suspension: effective temperature determines density distribution in a slowly varying external potential beyond linear response

We consider a sheared colloidal suspension under the influence of an external potential that varies slowly in space in the plane perpendicular to the flow and acts on one selected (tagged) particle of the suspension. Using a Chapman-Enskog type expansion we derive a steady state equation for the tagged particle density distribution. We show that for potentials varying along one direction only, the tagged particle distribution is the same as the equilibrium distribution with the temperature equal to the effective temperature obtained from the violation of the Einstein relation between the self-diffusion and tagged particle mobility coefficients. We thus prove the usefulness of this effective temperature for the description of the tagged particle behavior beyond the realm of linear response. We illustrate our theoretical predictions with Brownian dynamics computer simulations.Comment: Accepted for publication in Europhys. Let

Further Developments in Gold-stud Bump Bonding

As silicon detectors in high energy physics experiments require increasingly complex assembly procedures, the availability of a wide variety of interconnect technologies provides more options for overcoming obstacles in generic R&D. Gold ball bonding has been a staple in the interconnect industry due to its ease of use and reliability. However, due to some limitations in the standard technique, alternate methods of gold-stud bonding are being developed. This paper presents recent progress and challenges faced in the development of double gold-stud bonding and 0.5 mil wire gold-stud bonding at the UC Davis Facility for Interconnect Technology. Advantages and limitations of each technique are analyzed to provide insight into potential applications for each method. Optimization of procedures and parameters is also presented.Comment: TWEPP 2011 conference proceeding, 8 pages, 7 figure

Well-posedness and asymptotic behavior of a multidimensional model of morphogen transport

Morphogen transport is a biological process, occurring in the tissue of living organisms, which is a determining step in cell differentiation. We present rigorous analysis of a simple model of this process, which is a system coupling parabolic PDE with ODE. We prove existence and uniqueness of solutions for both stationary and evolution problems. Moreover we show that the solution converges exponentially to the equilibrium in $C^1\times C^0$ topology. We prove all results for arbitrary dimension of the domain. Our results improve significantly previously known results for the same model in the case of one dimensional domain

Effective Confinement as Origin of the Equivalence of Kinetic Temperature and Fluctuation-Dissipation Ratio in a Dense Shear Driven Suspension

We study response and velocity autocorrelation functions for a tagged particle in a shear driven suspension governed by underdamped stochastic dynamics. We follow the idea of an effective confinement in dense suspensions and exploit a time-scale separation between particle reorganization and vibrational motion. This allows us to approximately derive the fluctuation-dissipation theorem in a "hybrid" form involving the kinetic temperature as an effective temperature and an additive correction term. We show numerically that even in a moderately dense suspension the latter is negligible. We discuss similarities and differences with a simple toy model, a single trapped particle in shear flow