Interactive Tool for Researching Large Unstructured Document Collections

Reviewing large document collections is an activity that arises commonly in certain professional contexts such as investigative journalism. Such document collections can arise in many use contexts such as investigative journalism; academic research; litigation, arbitration or other legal context; audit; research using document archives; etc. The collections may include a large number of documents, including scanned images of documents or handwritten documents, and are often devoid of structure or organization. This makes it difficult to sift through such collections and identify important pieces of information. This disclosure describes a tool that enables easier access to such collections and features that support review and research based on such document collections. Automated techniques such as optical character recognition, entity recognition, indexing, etc. are utilized to process the document collection to index the documents and to generate timelines, connection graphs, or other views on the collection. A user interface is provided that enables users to search the collection, view event timelines, make annotations, take notes, and collaborate with others. The described techniques facilitate sensemaking and can help surface latent insight

H-Ras Nanocluster Stability Regulates the Magnitude of MAPK Signal Output

H-Ras is a binary switch that is activated by multiple co-factors and triggers several key cellular pathways one of which is MAPK. The specificity and magnitude of downstream activation is achieved by the spatio-temporal organization of the active H-Ras in the plasma membrane. Upon activation, the GTP bound H-Ras binds to Galectin-1 (Gal-1) and becomes transiently immobilized in short-lived nanoclusters on the plasma membrane from which the signal is propagated to Raf. In the current study we show that stabilizing the H-Ras-Gal-1 interaction, using bimolecular fluorescence complementation (BiFC), leads to prolonged immobilization of H-Ras.GTP in the plasma membrane which was measured by fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP), and increased signal out-put to the MAPK module. EM measurements of Raf recruitment to the H-Ras.GTP nanoclusters demonstrated that the enhanced signaling observed in the BiFC stabilized H-Ras.GTP nanocluster was attributed to increased H-Ras immobilization rather than to an increase in Raf recruitment. Taken together these data demonstrate that the magnitude of the signal output from a GTP-bound H-Ras nanocluster is proportional to its stability