Mitochondrial roles of the psychiatric disease risk factor DISC1

Ion transport during neuronal signalling utilizes the majority of the brain's energy supply. Mitochondria are key sites for energy provision through ATP synthesis and play other important roles including calcium buffering. Thus, tightly regulated distribution and function of these organelles throughout the intricate architecture of the neuron is essential for normal synaptic communication. Therefore, delineating mechanisms coordinating mitochondrial transport and function is essential for understanding nervous system physiology and pathology. While aberrant mitochondrial transport and dynamics have long been associated with neurodegenerative disease, they have also more recently been linked to major mental illness including schizophrenia, autism and depression. However, the underlying mechanisms have yet to be elucidated, due to an incomplete understanding of the combinations of genetic and environmental factors contributing to these conditions. Consequently, the DISC1 gene has undergone intense study since its discovery at the site of a balanced chromosomal translocation, segregating with mental illness in a Scottish pedigree. The precise molecular functions of DISC1 remain elusive. Reported functions of DISC1 include regulation of intracellular signalling pathways, neuronal migration and dendritic development. Intriguingly, a role for DISC1 in mitochondrial homeostasis and transport is fast emerging. Therefore, a major function of DISC1 in regulating mitochondrial distribution, ATP synthesis and calcium buffering may be disrupted in psychiatric disease. In this review, we discuss the links between DISC1 and mitochondria, considering both trafficking of these organelles and their function, and how, via these processes, DISC1 may contribute to the regulation of neuronal behavior in normal and psychiatric disease states

On-line Learning of Mutually Orthogonal Subspaces for Face Recognition by Image Sets

We address the problem of face recognition by matching image sets. Each set of face images is represented by a subspace (or linear manifold) and recognition is carried out by subspace-to-subspace matching. In this paper, 1) a new discriminative method that maximises orthogonality between subspaces is proposed. The method improves the discrimination power of the subspace angle based face recognition method by maximizing the angles between different classes. 2) We propose a method for on-line updating the discriminative subspaces as a mechanism for continuously improving recognition accuracy. 3) A further enhancement called locally orthogonal subspace method is presented to maximise the orthogonality between competing classes. Experiments using 700 face image sets have shown that the proposed method outperforms relevant prior art and effectively boosts its accuracy by online learning. It is shown that the method for online learning delivers the same solution as the batch computation at far lower computational cost and the locally orthogonal method exhibits improved accuracy. We also demonstrate the merit of the proposed face recognition method on portal scenarios of multiple biometric grand challenge

06311 Executive Summary -- Sensor Data and Information Fusion in Computer Vision and Medicine

Today many technical systems are equipped with multiple sensors and information sources, like cameras, ultrasound sensors or web data bases. It is no problem to generate an exorbitantly large amount of data, but it is mostly unsolved how to take advantage of the expectation that the collected data provide more information than the sum of its parts. The design and analysis of algorithms for sensor data and information acquisition and fusion as well as the usage in a differentiated application field was the major focus of the Seminar held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. 24 researchers, practitioners, and application experts from different areas met to summarize the current state-of-the-art technology in data and information fusion, to discuss current research problems in fusion, and to envision future demands of this challenging research field. The considered application scenarios for data and information fusion were in the fields of computer vision and medicine

06311 Abstracts Collection -- Sensor Data and Information Fusion in Computer Vision and Medicine

From 30.07.06 to 04.08.06, the Dagstuhl Seminar 06311 ``Sensor Data and Information Fusion in Computer Vision and Medicine\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. Sensor data fusion is of increasing importance for many research fields and applications. Multi-modal imaging is routine in medicine, and in robitics it is common to use multi-sensor data fusion. During the seminar, researchers and application experts working in the field of sensor data fusion presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. The second part briefly summarizes the contributions

Revealing the molecular signatures of host-pathogen interactions.

Advances in sequencing technology and genome-wide association studies are now revealing the complex interactions between hosts and pathogen through genomic variation signatures, which arise from evolutionary co-existence

Comparative profiling identifies C13orf3 as a component of the Ska complex required for mammalian cell division

Proliferation of mammalian cells requires the coordinated function of many proteins to accurately divide a cell into two daughter cells. Several RNAi screens have identified previously uncharacterised genes that are implicated in mammalian cell division. The molecular function for these genes needs to be investigated to place them into pathways. Phenotypic profiling is a useful method to assign putative functions to uncharacterised genes. Here, we show that the analysis of protein localisation is useful to refine a phenotypic profile. We show the utility of this approach by defining a function of the previously uncharacterised gene C13orf3 during cell division. C13orf3 localises to centrosomes, the mitotic spindle, kinetochores, spindle midzone, and the cleavage furrow during cell division and is specifically phosphorylated during mitosis. Furthermore, C13orf3 is required for centrosome integrity and anaphase onset. Depletion by RNAi leads to mitotic arrest in metaphase with an activation of the spindle assembly checkpoint and loss of sister chromatid cohesion. Proteomic analyses identify C13orf3 (Ska3) as a new component of the Ska complex and show a direct interaction with a regulatory subunit of the protein phosphatase PP2A. All together, these data identify C13orf3 as an important factor for metaphase to anaphase progression and highlight the potential of combined RNAi screening and protein localisation analyses

Character-level interaction in multimodal computer-assisted transcription of text images

“The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21257-4_85To date, automatic handwriting text recognition systems are far from being perfect and heavy human intervention is often required to check and correct the results of such systems. As an alternative, an interactive framework that integrates the human knowledge into the transcription process has been presented in previous works. In this work, multimodal interaction at character-level is studied. Until now, multimodal interaction had been studied only at whole-word level. However, character-level pen-stroke interactions may lead to more ergonomic and friendly interfaces. Empirical tests show that this approach can save significant amounts of user effort with respect to both fully manual transcription and non-interactive post-editing correction.Work supported by the Spanish Government (MICINN and “Plan E”) under the MITTRAL (TIN2009-14633-C03-01) research project and under the research programme Consolider Ingenio 2010: MIPRCV (CSD2007-00018), and by the Generalitat Valenciana under grant Prometeo/2009/014.Martín-Albo Simón, D.; Romero Gómez, V.; Toselli ., AH.; Vidal, E. (2011). Character-level interaction in multimodal computer-assisted transcription of text images. En Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis. Springer Verlag (Germany). 684-691. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21257-4S68469

Single-electron transitions in one-dimensional native nanostructures

Low-temperature measurements proved the existence of a two-dimensional electron gas at defined dislocation arrays in silicon. As a consequence, single-electron transitions (Coulomb blockades) are observed. It is shown that the high strain at dislocation cores modifies the band structure and results in the formation of quantum wells along dislocation lines. This causes quantization of energy levels inducing the formation of Coulomb blockades

The simultaneous occurrence and relationship of sunlight and skylight under ISO/CIE standard sky types

In daylight science the availability of sunlight and skylight at different times has been studied because of the desire to use daylight in both exterior and interior spaces. Exterior skylight illuminances under overcast skies were adopted as a standard for window design in the past. Current ISO/CIE sky types are standardised as relative luminance patterns normalised to the zenith. In this paper, the zenith luminance in candela/square metre and the resulting diffuse illuminance in lux are determined for all sky types. Furthermore, the proportions of sunlight and skylight under different levels of turbidity are found and documented. Efforts to harmonise electric lighting and daylighting standards need to analyse the data on available daylight in physical units in order to ensure energy savings that respect human requirements as well as providing information suitable for computer-aided design