32,923 research outputs found
alpha -Lactalbumin (LA) Stimulates Milk beta-1,4-Galactosyltransferase I (beta 4Gal-T1) to Transfer Glucose from UDP-glucose to N-Acetylglucosamine: CRYSTAL STRUCTURE OF beta 4Gal-T1·LA COMPLEX WITH UDP-Glc*
beta-1,4-Galactosyltransferase 1 (Gal-T1) transfers galactose (Gal) from UDP-Gal to N-acetylglucosamine (GlcNAc), which constitutes its normal galactosyltransferase (Gal-T) activity. In the presence of alpha -lactalbumin (LA), it transfers Gal to Glc, which is its lactose synthase (LS) activity. It also transfers glucose (Glc) from UDP-Glc to GlcNAc, constituting the glucosyltransferase (Glc-T) activity, albeit at an efficiency of only 0.3-0.4% of Gal-T activity. In the present study, we show that LA increases this activity almost 30-fold. It also enhances the Glc-T activity toward various N-acyl substituted glucosamine acceptors. Steady state kinetic studies of Glc-T reaction show that the Km for the donor and acceptor substrates are high in the absence of LA. In the presence of LA, the Km for the acceptor substrate is reduced 30-fold, whereas for UDP-Glc it is reduced only 5-fold. In order to understand this property, we have determined the crystal structures of the Gal-T1·LA complex with UDP-Glc·Mn2+ and with N-butanoyl-glucosamine (N-butanoyl-GlcN), a preferred sugar acceptor in the Glc-T activity. The crystal structures reveal that although the binding of UDP-Glc is quite similar to UDP-Gal, there are few significant differences observed in the hydrogen bonding interactions between UDP-Glc and Gal-T1. Based on the present kinetic and crystal structural studies, a possible explanation for the role of LA in the Glc-T activity has been proposed
Simultaneous Multiple Surface Segmentation Using Deep Learning
The task of automatically segmenting 3-D surfaces representing boundaries of
objects is important for quantitative analysis of volumetric images, and plays
a vital role in biomedical image analysis. Recently, graph-based methods with a
global optimization property have been developed and optimized for various
medical imaging applications. Despite their widespread use, these require human
experts to design transformations, image features, surface smoothness priors,
and re-design for a different tissue, organ or imaging modality. Here, we
propose a Deep Learning based approach for segmentation of the surfaces in
volumetric medical images, by learning the essential features and
transformations from training data, without any human expert intervention. We
employ a regional approach to learn the local surface profiles. The proposed
approach was evaluated on simultaneous intraretinal layer segmentation of
optical coherence tomography (OCT) images of normal retinas and retinas
affected by age related macular degeneration (AMD). The proposed approach was
validated on 40 retina OCT volumes including 20 normal and 20 AMD subjects. The
experiments showed statistically significant improvement in accuracy for our
approach compared to state-of-the-art graph based optimal surface segmentation
with convex priors (G-OSC). A single Convolution Neural Network (CNN) was used
to learn the surfaces for both normal and diseased images. The mean unsigned
surface positioning errors obtained by G-OSC method 2.31 voxels (95% CI
2.02-2.60 voxels) was improved to voxels (95% CI 1.14-1.40 voxels) using
our new approach. On average, our approach takes 94.34 s, requiring 95.35 MB
memory, which is much faster than the 2837.46 s and 6.87 GB memory required by
the G-OSC method on the same computer system.Comment: 8 page
Results of a Modified Sugiura's Devascularisation in the Management of “Unshuntable” Portal Hypertension
The results of a modified Sugiura devascularisation
procedure were assessed in 14 patients with thrombosis
of the portal and splenic vein requiring surgery
for variceal hemorrhage, with no vein suitable
for orthodox shunt surgery. The venous anatomy
was determined by ultrasonography with Doppler
studies and portovenography. Liver biochemistry as
well as liver architecture on histopathology was
normal in all. The surgery was elective in 9 cases for
documented bleed from diffuse fundal gastric
varices (FGV) and emergency in 5 cases, 3 having
bleeding FGV and 2 for failure of emergency
esophageal variceal sclerotherapy. All were subjected
to a transabdominal extensive devascularisation
of the upper two third of the stomach and lower
7–10cm of the esophagus. Stapled esophageal
transection (n=11) or esophageal variceal under-running
(n=1) was performed in all with esophageal
varices. FGV were underrun. Follow up endoscopies
were done six monthly. There were 9 males and 5
females with a mean age of 17.2 years (SD 12.8).
There was no operative mortality. Acute variceal
bleeding was controlled in all patients. Over a mean
follow up of 38 months, all but one remain free of
recurrent bleeding. We conclude that a modified
Sugiura devascularisation procedure is effective in
the immediate and medium term control of variceal
bleeding in patients with “unshuntable” portal
hypertension
Skolem Functions for Factored Formulas
Given a propositional formula F(x,y), a Skolem function for x is a function
\Psi(y), such that substituting \Psi(y) for x in F gives a formula semantically
equivalent to \exists F. Automatically generating Skolem functions is of
significant interest in several applications including certified QBF solving,
finding strategies of players in games, synthesising circuits and bit-vector
programs from specifications, disjunctive decomposition of sequential circuits
etc. In many such applications, F is given as a conjunction of factors, each of
which depends on a small subset of variables. Existing algorithms for Skolem
function generation ignore any such factored form and treat F as a monolithic
function. This presents scalability hurdles in medium to large problem
instances. In this paper, we argue that exploiting the factored form of F can
give significant performance improvements in practice when computing Skolem
functions. We present a new CEGAR style algorithm for generating Skolem
functions from factored propositional formulas. In contrast to earlier work,
our algorithm neither requires a proof of QBF satisfiability nor uses
composition of monolithic conjunctions of factors. We show experimentally that
our algorithm generates smaller Skolem functions and outperforms
state-of-the-art approaches on several large benchmarks.Comment: Full version of FMCAD 2015 conference publicatio
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