Asynchronous nuclear division cycles in multinucleated cells

Synchronous mitosis is common in multinucleated cells. We analyzed a unique asynchronous nuclear division cycle in a multinucleated filamentous fungus, Ashbya gossypii. Nuclear pedigree analysis and observation of GFP-labeled spindle pole bodies demonstrated that neighboring nuclei in A. gossypii cells are in different cell cycle stages despite close physical proximity. Neighboring nuclei did not differ significantly in their patterns of cyclin protein localization such that both G1 and mitotic cyclins were present regardless of cell cycle stage, suggesting that the complete destruction of cyclins is not occurring in this system. Indeed, the expression of mitotic cyclin lacking NH(2)-terminal destruction box sequences did not block cell cycle progression. Cells lacking AgSic1p, a predicted cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) inhibitor, however, showed aberrant multipolar spindles and fragmented nuclei that are indicative of flawed mitoses. We hypothesize that the continuous cytoplasm in these cells promoted the evolution of a nuclear division cycle in which CDK inhibitors primarily control CDK activity rather than oscillating mitotic cyclin proteins

Creation of Poseidon's world: adventures of the Aegean board game

In Ancient Greece, water was the way people got around. Before anyone would leave on a journey that involved the sea, they would give the Greek god Poseidon his sacrifices for fear that he would be upset and wreck their travels. He was the god of the sea, making him one of the most important gods in the Olympic pantheon. In speech-language pathology, board games are regularly used to incorporate therapy and to keep the client involved. In this project, a journey across Greece and the incorporation of therapeutic techniques are combined to create a board game that would be informative and entertaining to use in a therapy session while educating children about Ancient Greece.Honors CollegeThesis (B.?

The Ashbya Genome Database (AGD)—a tool for the yeast community and genome biologists

The Ashbya Genome Database (AGD) is a comprehensive online source of information covering genes from the filamentous fungus Ashbya gossypii. The database content is based upon comparative genome annotation between A.gossypii and the closely related budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae taking both sequence similarity and synteny (conserved order and orientation) into account. Release 2 of AGD contains 4718 protein-encoding loci located across seven chromosomes. Information can be retrieved using systematic or standard locus names from A.gossypii as well as budding and fission yeast. Approximately 90% of the genes in the genome of A.gossypii are homologous and syntenic to loci of budding yeast. Therefore, AGD is a useful tool not only for the various yeast communities in general but also for biologists who are interested in evolutionary aspects of genome research and comparative genome annotation. The database provides scientists with a convenient graphical user interface that includes various locus search and genome browsing options, data download and export functionalities and numerous reciprocal links to external databases including SGD, MIPS, GeneDB, KEGG, GermOnline and Swiss-Prot/TrEMBL. AGD is accessible at http://agd.unibas.c

Autonomous construction using scarce resources in unknown environments: Ingredients for an intelligent robotic interaction with the physical world

The goal of creating machines that autonomously perform useful work in a safe, robust and intelligent manner continues to motivate robotics research. Achieving this autonomy requires capabilities for understanding the environment, physically interacting with it, predicting the outcomes of actions and reasoning with this knowledge. Such intelligent physical interaction was at the centre of early robotic investigations and remains an open topic. In this paper, we build on the fruit of decades of research to explore further this question in the context of autonomous construction in unknown environments with scarce resources. Our scenario involves a miniature mobile robot that autonomously maps an environment and uses cubes to bridge ditches and build vertical structures according to high-level goals given by a human. Based on a "real but contrived” experimental design, our results encompass practical insights for future applications that also need to integrate complex behaviours under hardware constraints, and shed light on the broader question of the capabilities required for intelligent physical interaction with the real worl

Adaptive online deployment for resource constrained mobile smart clients

Nowadays mobile devices are more and more used as a platform for applications. Contrary to prior generation handheld devices configured with a predefined set of applications, today leading edge devices provide a platform for flexible and customized application deployment. However, these applications have to deal with the limitations (e.g. CPU speed, memory) of these mobile devices and thus cannot handle complex tasks. In order to cope with the handheld limitations and the ever changing device context (e.g. network connections, remaining battery time, etc.) we present a middleware solution that dynamically offloads parts of the software to the most appropriate server. Without a priori knowledge of the application, the optimal deployment is calculated, that lowers the cpu usage at the mobile client, whilst keeping the used bandwidth minimal. The information needed to calculate this optimum is gathered on the fly from runtime information. Experimental results show that the proposed solution enables effective execution of complex applications in a constrained environment. Moreover, we demonstrate that the overhead from the middleware components is below 2%

OpenStructure: a flexible software framework for computational structural biology

Motivation: Developers of new methods in computational structural biology are often hampered in their research by incompatible software tools and non-standardized data formats. To address this problem, we have developed OpenStructure as a modular open source platform to provide a powerful, yet flexible general working environment for structural bioinformatics. OpenStructure consists primarily of a set of libraries written in C++ with a cleanly designed application programmer interface. All functionality can be accessed directly in C++ or in a Python layer, meeting both the requirements for high efficiency and ease of use. Powerful selection queries and the notion of entity views to represent these selections greatly facilitate the development and implementation of algorithms on structural data. The modular integration of computational core methods with powerful visualization tools makes OpenStructure an ideal working and development environment. Several applications, such as the latest versions of IPLT and QMean, have been implemented based on OpenStructure—demonstrating its value for the development of next-generation structural biology algorithms. Availability: Source code licensed under the GNU lesser general public license and binaries for MacOS X, Linux and Windows are available for download at http://www.openstructure.org. Contact: [email protected] Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics onlin

Identifying SME mortality factors in the life cycle stages: an empirical approach of relevant factors for small business owner-managers in Brazil

Although small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) are an important part of worldwide economy, frequently, researches on SME mortality factors ignores their characteristics. This paper discusses the relation between the SME mortality factors and the small business owner-manager, based on the life cycle stage as an essential part for a better understanding of their closure moment. The research paper was designed in two main complementary phases: (i.) a systematic review focused on failure subject, in order to capture the state of the art of the theme added by the conceptual background of classical SME studies and (ii.) a multiple case study of seven Brazilian SME with a qualitative, descriptive and empirical approach. The results show that small business owner-managers failure business did not use correctly or gave required attention to the mortality factors such as full time dedication, exercising operational activities and managerial roles, discipline, purchase abilities, negotiation, finance and family motivation in keeping up the business. The main contribution for entrepreneurship studies is the indication of an existing relation between mortality factors and the life cycle stages of SME, which evidences the changing importance of the mortality factors throughout the life cycle stages, including closure. The practical results of this paper offers new insights into the relevant SME mortality factors, opening a number of potential avenues for future studies focused on SME, mortality factors and the small business owner-manager

Modelação estatística da evolução da epidemia da gripe: aplicação de modelos de duração

Uma epidemia de gripe é um acontecimento preocupante que, ao propagar-se rapidamente, afeta milhões de pessoas em tudo o mundo colocando em risco a saúde humana. Assim, é importante conhecer a forma como poderá evoluir uma epidemia de gripe e os fatores que podem impulsionar a sua propagação, permitindo que a população, em geral, e as unidades de saúde, em particular, se possam acautelar e preparar. Neste sentido, este trabalho de investigação tem como objetivo acompanhar e analisar a evolução temporal de uma epidemia de gripe, em Portugal, identificando os seus potenciais picos anuais e potenciais fatores que fomentam a propagação do vírus. Para a prossecução do objetivo identificado foram aplicados modelos de duração não-paramétricos, que permitiram estimar os designados estimadores de Kaplan-Meier e Nelson-Aalen, a uma base de dados cross-section com informação anual relativa a um período consecutivo de oito anos (de 2005 a 2012). A base de dados foi fornecida pelo observatório Gripenet que monitoriza a evolução anual do fenómeno da gripe em Portugal, com o apoio de participantes voluntários. Os estimadores permitem calcular a probabilidade dos participantes contraírem gripe tendo em conta os seus comportamentos e as suas características individuais e clínicas Quando se subdivide a amostra tendo em conta as características dos participantes, observa-se que as mulheres têm uma probabilidade menor do que os homens de contrair o vírus nos primeiros dias. O facto de os participantes estarem em casa possui risco de contágio relativamente baixo com tendência para aumentar lentamente ao longo do tempo. Os participantes que andam a pé e utilizam os transportes públicos apresentam um risco de contração do vírus que aumenta muito lentamente com o tempo. Aqueles que fumam diariamente possuem uma probabilidade de contágio que aumenta rapidamente com o tempo, e os que vivem sozinhos têm um risco de contágio reduzido e que aumenta lentamente com o tempo. De forma a minimizar o impacto de uma epidemia é crucial que os planos de contingência sejam colocados em prática durante o período de não ocorrência.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio