Germin and germin-like proteins: evolution, structure, and function

Germin and germin-like proteins (GLPs) are encoded by a family of genes found in all plants. They are part of the cupin superfamily of biochemically diverse proteins, a superfamily that has a conserved tertiary structure, though with limited similarity in primary sequence. The subgroups of GLPs have different enzyme functions that include the two hydrogen peroxide-generating enzymes, oxalate oxidase (OxO) and superoxide dismutase. This review summarizes the sequence and structural details of GLPs and also discusses their evolutionary progression, particularly their amplification in gene number during the evolution of the land plants. In terms of function, the GLPs are known to be differentially expressed during specific periods of plant growth and development, a pattern of evolutionary subfunctionalization. They are also implicated in the response of plants to biotic (viruses, bacteria, mycorrhizae, fungi, insects, nematodes, and parasitic plants) and abiotic (salt, heat/cold, drought, nutrient, and metal) stress. Most detailed data come from studies of fungal pathogenesis in cereals. This involvement with the protection of plants from environmental stress of various types has led to numerous plant breeding studies that have found links between GLPs and QTLs for disease and stress resistance. In addition the OxO enzyme has considerable commercial significance, based principally on its use in the medical diagnosis of oxalate concentration in plasma and urine. Finally, this review provides information on the nutritional importance of these proteins in the human diet, as several members are known to be allergenic, a feature related to their thermal stability and evolutionary connection to the seed storage proteins, also members of the cupin superfamily

What enables Islamic banks to contribute in global financial reintermediation?

Conventional banks which once were competing with non-banking financial institutions and capital markets today face the new challenge of being reintermediated by Islamic banks. Earlier academic research has been debating over disintermediation and reintermediation of conventional banks, but consistently failed to address reintermediation through Islamic banks as a possibility. This study, however, fills the void by addressing the novel possibility of reintermediation “within” the banking sector and is the first attempt to analyze and compare Islamic and conventional banks from the perspective of reintermediated financial markets. After identifying the reintermediation trends led by Islamic banks we investigate several bank specific financial and non-financial characteristics that might have enabled Islamic banks to emerge as an important player in reintermediated financial markets. By keeping our focus on slightly modified version of CAMELS framework where ‘S’ represents “Service Quality” we find that along with better capitalization (C) and improved liquidity (L), better service quality (S) is another distinguished feature of Islamic banks that might be linked with their high degree of intermediation

Protective effect of leaf extract of Ficus carica L. against carbon tetrachloride-induced hepatic toxicity in mice and HepG2 cell line

Purpose: To determine the in vivo and in vitro hepatoprotective effects of Ficus carica.Methods: The methanol leaf extract of Ficus carica L was further fractionated into n-hexane, ethyl acetate and aqueous fractions. For in vivo study, male albino mice were divided into twelve groups. Hepatotoxicity was induced in the mice using carbon tetrachloride (CCl4). The extract of F. carica and its fractions were administered at doses of 200 and 400 mg/kg. Silymarin was used as standardhepatoprotective drug. The protective effects of the extract and fractions were determined via assay of biochemical parameters and antioxidant enzymes in the liver. The histopathology of the liver was also studied. Moreover, the in vitro hepatoprotective effect of the extract and fractions against CCl4-induced damage was determined in HepG2 cell line.Results: There were significant increases in the serum levels of liver biomarkers in CCl4-treated group, whereas treatments with plant extract and fractions significantly reduced the levels of these parameters (p < 0.05). In addition, results from histopathology revealed evidence of protective effect of Ficus carica through reversal of CCl4-induced decreases in the activities of liver antioxidant enzymes.Conclusion: These results indicate that methanol leaf extract of Ficus carica L. and its fractions exert significant and dose-dependent hepatoprotective effects in vivo and in vitro. Keywords: Ficus carica, Hepatoprotection, Carbon tetrachloride, Liver biomarker

Multiple pulses improve electroporation efficiency in Agrobacterium tumefaciens

Electroporation entails brief, high intensity pulse to create transient pores in the cell membrane to facilitate the entry of exogenous macromolecules, which may otherwise be excluded. Removal of the external field leads to the resealing of the membrane electropores permitting the survival of the electrically stimulated recipient cells. Using this technique foreign deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) has been successfully introduced into many cell types both from prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Increase in pulse voltage and length beyond a critical limit has been reported to decrease transformation efficiency, hence in this study we have investigated another strategy i.e. increase in the number of pulses at constant high voltage and pulse duration. Commonly used Agrobacterium strains LBA4404 and EHA101 and binary vector pCAMBIA1301 were used. Transformants were selected on a combination of hygromycin and kanamycin, and confirmed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and restriction analysis. Increase in the number of pulses was found to show a significant and linear increase in transformation efficiency

Multi-Target Tracking and Occlusion Handling with Learned Variational Bayesian Clusters and a Social Force Model

This paper considers the problem of tracking multiple humans in video. A solution is proposed which is able to deal with the challenges of a varying number of targets, occlusions and interactions when every target gives rise to multiple measurements. The developed novel framework comprises a variational Bayesian clustering approach combined with a social force model. It can handle a time-varying number of targets and can cope with complex inter-target occlusions by maintaining the identities of targets during their close physical interactions. It performs measurement to-target association by automatically detecting the measurement relevance. A variational Bayesian clustering technique clusters the measurements and thereby provides an elegant solution to the measurement origin uncertainty problem. A particle filter is developed in which the clustering algorithm and the social force model enhance the prediction step. The performance of the proposed framework is evaluated over several sequences from publicly available data sets: AV16.3, CAVIAR and PETS2006, which demonstrate that the proposed framework successfully initializes and tracks a variable number of human targets in the presence of complex occlusions. The proposed algorithm is compared with state-of-the-art techniques due to Khan et al., Laet et al. and Czyz et al. and is shown to achieve improved tracking performance

Study of one class boundary method classifiers for application in a video-based fall detection system

In this paper, we introduce a video-based robust fall detection system for monitoring an elderly person in a smart room environment. Video features, namely the centroid and orientation of a voxel person, are extracted. The boundary method, which is an example one class classification technique, is then used to determine whether the incoming features lie in the ‘fall region’ of the feature space, and thereby effectively distinguishing a fall from other activities, such as walking, sitting, standing, crouching or lying. Four different types of boundary methods, k-center, k-th nearest neighbor, one class support vector machine and single class minimax probability machine are assessed on representative test datasets. The comparison is made on the following three aspects: 1). True positive rate, false positive rate and geometric means in detection 2). Robustness to noise in the training dataset 3). The computational time for the test phase. From the comparison results, we show that the single class minimax probability machine achieves the best overall performance. By applying one class classification techniques with 3-d features, we can obtain a more efficient fall detection system with acceptable performance, as shown in the experimental part; besides, it can avoid the drawbacks of other traditional fall detection methods

Psychophysiological responses to visceral and somatic pain in functional chest pain identify clinically relevant pain clusters

Background: Despite chronic pain being a feature of functional chest pain (FCP) its experience is variable. The factors responsible for this variability remain unresolved. We aimed to address these knowledge gaps, hypothesizing that the psychophysiological profiles of FCP patients will be distinct from healthy subjects. Methods: 20 Rome III defined FCP patients (nine males, mean age 38.7 years, range 28-59 years) and 20 healthy age-, sex-, and ethnicity-matched controls (nine males, mean 38.2 years, range 24-49) had anxiety, depression, and personality traits measured. Subjects had sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system parameters measured at baseline and continuously thereafter. Subjects received standardized somatic (nail bed pressure) and visceral (esophageal balloon distension) stimuli to pain tolerance. Venous blood was sampled for cortisol at baseline, post somatic pain and post visceral pain. Key Results: Patients had higher neuroticism, state and trait anxiety, and depression scores but lower extroversion scores vs controls (all p < 0.005). Patients tolerated less somatic (p < 0.0001) and visceral stimulus (p = 0.009) and had a higher cortisol at baseline, and following pain (all p < 0.001). At baseline, patients had a higher sympathetic tone (p = 0.04), whereas in response to pain they increased their parasympathetic tone (p ≤ 0.008). The amalgamating the data, we identified two psychophysiologically distinct 'pain clusters'. Patients were overrepresented in the cluster characterized by high neuroticism, trait anxiety, baseline cortisol, pain hypersensitivity, and parasympathetic response to pain (all p < 0.03). Conclusions & Inferences: In future, such delineations in FCP populations may facilitate individualization of treatment based on psychophysiological profiling

Sedimentation record in the Konkan-Kerala Basin: implications for the evolution of the Western Ghats and the Western Indian passive margin

The Konkan and Kerala Basins constitute a major depocentre for sediment from the onshore hinterland of Western India and as such provide a valuable record of the timing and magnitude of Cenozoic denudation along the continental margin. This paper presents an analysis of sedimentation in the Konkan-Kerala Basin, coupledwith a mass balance study, and numerical modelling of flexural responses to onshore denudational unloading and o¡shore sediment loading in order to test competing conceptual models for the development of high-elevation passive margins. The Konkan-Kerala Basin contains an estimated 109,000 km&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;; of Cenozoic clastic sediment, a volume difficult to reconcile with the denudation of a downwarped rift flank onshore, and more consistent with denudation of an elevated rift flank. We infer from modelling of the isostatic response of the lithosphere to sediment loading offshore and denudation onshore that flexure is an important component in the development of the Western Indian Margin.There is evidence for two major pulses in sedimentation: an early phase in the Palaeocene, and a second beginning in the Pliocene. The Palaeocene increase in sedimentation can be interpreted in terms of a denudational response to the rifting between India and the Seychelles, whereas the mechanism responsible for the Pliocene pulse is more enigmatic

Measurement of the Bottom-Strange Meson Mixing Phase in the Full CDF Data Set

We report a measurement of the bottom-strange meson mixing phase \beta_s using the time evolution of B0_s -> J/\psi (->\mu+\mu-) \phi (-> K+ K-) decays in which the quark-flavor content of the bottom-strange meson is identified at production. This measurement uses the full data set of proton-antiproton collisions at sqrt(s)= 1.96 TeV collected by the Collider Detector experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron, corresponding to 9.6 fb-1 of integrated luminosity. We report confidence regions in the two-dimensional space of \beta_s and the B0_s decay-width difference \Delta\Gamma_s, and measure \beta_s in [-\pi/2, -1.51] U [-0.06, 0.30] U [1.26, \pi/2] at the 68% confidence level, in agreement with the standard model expectation. Assuming the standard model value of \beta_s, we also determine \Delta\Gamma_s = 0.068 +- 0.026 (stat) +- 0.009 (syst) ps-1 and the mean B0_s lifetime, \tau_s = 1.528 +- 0.019 (stat) +- 0.009 (syst) ps, which are consistent and competitive with determinations by other experiments.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, Phys. Rev. Lett 109, 171802 (2012