11,867 research outputs found
Slow intermixing of cells during Xenopus embryogenesis contributes to the consistency of the blastomere fate map
The relatively consistent fates of the blastomeres of the frog embryo could result from (i) predetermination of the blastomeres or (ii) reproducible morphogenetic cell movements. In some species, the mixing of the cells during development provides a test between these alternative hypotheses. If blastomeres are predetermined, then random intermixing of the descendants with neighboring cells could not alter their fate. To follow cell mixing during Xenopus development, fluorescent dextran lineage tracers were microinjected into identified blastomeres at the 16-cell stage. The labelled descendants of the injected blastomeres were followed over several stages of embryogenesis. After gastrulation, the labelled descendants formed relatively coherent groups in characteristic regions of the embryo. By larval stages, most of the labelled descendants were still located in characteristic regions. However, coherence was less pronounced and individual descendants were located in many regions of the embryo. Hence, cell mixing is a slow, but progressive, process throughout Xenopus development. This is in sharp contrast to the extensive mixing that occurs during the early development of other vertebrates, such as zebrafish and mice. The slow cell mixing in Xenopus development suggests a simple mechanism for the consistent fates of cleavage-stage blastomeres. The stereotyped cell movements of embryogenesis redistribute the largely coherent descendants to characteristic locations in the embryo. The small amount of mixing that does occur would result in variable locations of a small proportion of the descendants; this could contribute to the observed variability of the blastomere fate map. Because cell mixing during Xenopus development is insufficient to challenge possible lineage restrictions, additional experiments must be performed to establish when and if lineage restrictions occur
An architecture for efficient gravitational wave parameter estimation with multimodal linear surrogate models
The recent direct observation of gravitational waves has further emphasized
the desire for fast, low-cost, and accurate methods to infer the parameters of
gravitational wave sources. Due to expense in waveform generation and data
handling, the cost of evaluating the likelihood function limits the
computational performance of these calculations. Building on recently developed
surrogate models and a novel parameter estimation pipeline, we show how to
quickly generate the likelihood function as an analytic, closed-form
expression. Using a straightforward variant of a production-scale parameter
estimation code, we demonstrate our method using surrogate models of
effective-one-body and numerical relativity waveforms. Our study is the first
time these models have been used for parameter estimation and one of the first
ever parameter estimation calculations with multi-modal numerical relativity
waveforms, which include all l <= 4 modes. Our grid-free method enables rapid
parameter estimation for any waveform with a suitable reduced-order model. The
methods described in this paper may also find use in other data analysis
studies, such as vetting coincident events or the computation of the
coalescing-compact-binary detection statistic.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, and 1 tabl
Multi-rate, real time image compression for images dominated by point sources
An image compression system recently developed for compression of digital images dominated by point sources is presented. Encoding consists of minimum-mean removal, vector quantization, adaptive threshold truncation, and modified Huffman encoding. Simulations are presented showing that the peaks corresponding to point sources can be transmitted losslessly for low signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) and high point source densities while maintaining a reduced output bit rate. Encoding and decoding hardware has been built and tested which processes 552,960 12-bit pixels per second at compression rates of 10:1 and 4:1. Simulation results are presented for the 10:1 case only
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