Endothelium-selective activation of AMP-activated protein kinase alleviates diabetes-induced endothelial dysfunction by enhancing reendothelialisation and endothelial progenitor cell mobilisation in mice

Oral PresentationThis journal supplement contains abstracts from the 17th MRC; Dept. of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, Queen Mary Hospital, Hong KongTopics: Basic science, translational and clinical researchINTRODUCTION: Vascular dysfunction is commonly observed in diabetic patients. Endothelial injury can be repaired in part by endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs). In diabetes, impaired functionality and reduced number of EPCs are reported. AMP-activated kinase (AMPK) is a well-known target of several anti-diabetic and cardiovascular drugs. The objective of this study was to examine whether the activation of AMPK in endothelium alone is sufficient to prevent diabetes-induced impairment in vascular function, possibly by improving EPC function and endothelial repair using a tissue-specific transgenic mouse model. METHODS: Transgenic mice with endothelium-selective expression of a …published_or_final_versionThe 17th Medical Research Conference (MRC), Department of Medicine, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 14 January 2012. In Hong Kong Medical Journal, 2012, v. 18 suppl. 1, p. 37, abstract no. 5

Multimedia object placement for hybrid transparent data replication

In this paper, we address present an optimal solution for the problem of multimedia object placement for hybrid transparent data replication. The performance objective is to minimize the total access cost by considering both transmission cost and transcoding cost. The performance of the proposed solution is evaluated with a set of carefully designed simulation experiments for various performance metrics over a wide range of system parameters. The simulation results show that our solution consistently and significantly outperforms comparison solutions in terms of all the performance metrics considered. © 2005 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Endothelium-specific activation of AMP-activated protein kinase alleviates diabetes-induced impairment in endothelial repair in mice

Poster Session 1: Basic Science - Abstract no. 101published_or_final_versionThe 16th Medical Resarch Conference (MRC), The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China, 22 January 2011. In Hong Kong Medical Journal, 2011, v. 17, suppl. 1, p. 43, abstract no. 6

Inactivation of toll-like receptor 4 improves reendothelialisation in ApoE-deficient mice: impact of oxidative stress on endothelial progenitor cells

Oral presentationpublished_or_final_versionThe 15th Annual Research Conference of the Department of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 16 January 2010. In Hong Kong Medical Journal, 2010, v. 16, suppl. 1, p. 37, abstract no. 5

Endothelium-selective activation of AMP-activated protein kinase improves re-endothelialization and vascular function via induction of heme oxygenase-1 in diabetic mice

This journal suppl. entitled: EDHF 2012 - 10th Anniversary MeetingReduced number and impaired function of endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) exacerbate vascular injury in diabetes. As AMP-activated kinase (AMPK) is a target of several anti-diabetic and cardiovascular drugs, this study investigated whether endothelium-selective activation of AMPK prevents diabetes-induced impairment in endothelial repair and vasoreactivity by impro...postprin

A robust and accurate binning algorithm for metagenomic sequences with arbitrary species abundance ratio

Motivation: With the rapid development of next-generation sequencing techniques, metagenomics, also known as environmental genomics, has emerged as an exciting research area that enables us to analyze the microbial environment in which we live. An important step for metagenomic data analysis is the identification and taxonomic characterization of DNA fragments (reads or contigs) resulting from sequencing a sample of mixed species. This step is referred to as 'binning'. Binning algorithms that are based on sequence similarity and sequence composition markers rely heavily on the reference genomes of known microorganisms or phylogenetic markers. Due to the limited availability of reference genomes and the bias and low availability of markers, these algorithms may not be applicable in all cases. Unsupervised binning algorithms which can handle fragments from unknown species provide an alternative approach. However, existing unsupervised binning algorithms only work on datasets either with balanced species abundance ratios or rather different abundance ratios, but not both. Results: In this article, we present MetaCluster 3.0, an integrated binning method based on the unsupervised top-down separation and bottom-up merging strategy, which can bin metagenomic fragments of species with very balanced abundance ratios (say 1:1) to very different abundance ratios (e.g. 1:24) with consistently higher accuracy than existing methods. © The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.postprin

Fast motif recognition via application of statistical thresholds

Background: Improving the accuracy and efficiency of motif recognition is an important computational challenge that has application to detecting transcription factor binding sites in genomic data. Closely related to motif recognition is the Consensus String decision problem that asks, given a parameter d and a set of ℓ-length strings S = {s1,...,sn}, whether there exists a consensus string that has Hamming distance at most d from any string in S. A set of strings S is pairwise bounded if the Hamming distance between any pair of strings in S is at most 2d. It is trivial to determine whether a set is pairwise bounded, and a set cannot have a consensus string unless it is pairwise bounded. We use Consensus String to determine whether or not a pairwise bounded set has a consensus. Unfortunately, Consensus String is NP-complete. The lack of an efficient method to solve the Consensus String problem has caused it to become a computational bottleneck in MCL-WMR, a motif recognition program capable of solving difficult motif recognition problem instances. Results: We focus on the development of a method for solving Consensus String quickly with a small probability of error. We apply this heuristic to develop a new motif recognition program, sMCL-WMR, which has impressive accuracy and efficiency. We demonstrate the performance of sMCL-WMR in detecting weak motifs in large data sets and in real genomic data sets, and compare the performance to other leading motif recognitio

Cooperative Determination on Cache Replacement Candidates for Transcoding Proxy Caching (Best Paper Award)

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Toll-like receptor 4 inactivation alleviates impaired vascular reendothelialisation by improving endothelial progenitor cell adhesion

This journal supplement entitled: Final Programme and Abstract Book of: Frontiers in Cardiovascular Biology Berlin 16-19 July 2010 First Congress of the ESC Council on Basic Cardiovascular ScienceConference Theme: Frontiers in Cardiovascular BiologyThe 1st Congress of the ESC Council on Basic Cardiovascular Science: Frontiers in Cardiovascular Biology, Berlin, Germany, 16-19 July 2010. In Cardiovascular Research, 2010, v. 87 suppl. 1, p. S4