Why not Merge the International Monetary Fund (IMF) with the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank)

Motivation: Cellular Electron CryoTomography (CECT) is an emerging 3D imaging technique that visualizes subcellular organization of single cells at sub-molecular resolution and in near-native state. CECT captures large numbers of macromolecular complexes of highly diverse structures and abundances. However, the structural complexity and imaging limits complicate the systematic de novo structural recovery and recognition of these macromolecular complexes. Efficient and accurate reference-free subtomogram averaging and classification represent the most critical tasks for such analysis. Existing subtomogram alignment based methods are prone to the missing wedge effects and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Moreover, existing maximum-likelihood based methods rely on integration operations, which are in principle computationally infeasible for accurate calculation. Results: Built on existing works, we propose an integrated method, Fast Alignment Maximum Likelihood method (FAML), which uses fast subtomogram alignment to sample sub-optimal rigid transformations. The transformations are then used to approximate integrals for maximum-likelihood update of subtomogram averages through expectation-maximization algorithm. Our tests on simulated and experimental subtomograms showed that, compared to our previously developed fast alignment method (FA), FAML is significantly more robust to noise and missing wedge effects with moderate increases of computation cost. Besides, FAML performs well with significantly fewer input subtomograms when the FA method fails. Therefore, FAML can serve as a key component for improved construction of initial structuralmodels frommacromolecules captured by CECT

Numerical simulation of solid tumor blood perfusion and drug delivery during the “vascular normalization window” with antiangiogenic therapy

This Article is provided by the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund - Copyright @ 2011 Hindawi PublishingTo investigate the influence of vascular normalization on solid tumor blood perfusion and drug delivery, we used the generated blood vessel network for simulations. Considering the hemodynamic parameters changing after antiangiogenic therapies, the results show that the interstitial fluid pressure (IFP) in tumor tissue domain decreases while the pressure gradient increases during the normalization window. The decreased IFP results in more efficient delivery of conventional drugs to the targeted cancer cells. The outcome of therapies will improve if the antiangiogenic therapies and conventional therapies are carefully scheduled