Differential Cyclic Voltammetry - a Novel Technique for Selective and Simultaneous Detection using Redox Cycling Based Sensors

Redox cycling (RC) is an effect that is used to amplify electrochemical signals. However, traditional techniques such as cyclic voltammetry (CV) do not provide clear insight for a mixture of multiple redox couples while RC is applied. Thus, we have developed a new measurement technique which delivers electrochemical spectra of all reversible redox couples present based on concentrations and standard potentials. This technique has been named differential cyclic voltammetry (DCV). We have fabricated micrometer-sized interdigitated electrode (IDE) sensors to conduct DCV measurements in mixtures of 1mM catechol and 4mM [Ru(NH3)6]Cl3. To simulate the electrochemical behavior of these sensors we have also developed a finite element model (FEM) in Comsol®. The\ud experimental data corresponds to the calculated spectra obtained from simulations. Additionally, the measured spectra can be used to easily derive standard potentials and concentrations simultaneously and selectively.\u

Creating a Language Archive of Insular South East Asia and West New Guinea

The geographical region of Insular South East Asia and New Guinea is well-known as an area of mega-biodiversity. Less well-known is the extreme linguistic diversity in this area: over a quarter of the world’s 6,000 languages are spoken here. As small minority languages, most of them will cease to be spoken in the coming few generations. The project described here ensures the preservation of unique records of languages and the cultures encapsulated by them in the region. The language resources were gathered by twenty linguists at, or in collaboration with, Dutch universities over the last 40 years, and were compiled and archived in collaboration with The Language Archive (TLA) at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen. The resulting archive constitutes a collection ofmultimediamaterials and written documents from 48 languages in Insular South East Asia and West New Guinea. At TLA, the data was archived according to state-of-the-art standards (TLA holds the Data Seal of Approval): the component metadata infrastructure CMDI was used; all metadata categories as well as relevant units of annotation were linked to the ISO data category registry ISOcat. This guaranteed proper integration of the language resources into the CLARIN framework. Through the archive, future speaker communities and researchers will be able to extensively search thematerials for answers to their own questions, even if they do not themselves know the language, and even if the language dies

Generation of a Vero-Based Packaging Cell Line to Produce SV40 Gene Delivery Vectors for Use in Clinical Gene Therapy Studies

Replication-defective (RD) recombinant simian virus 40 (SV40)-based gene delivery vectors hold a great potential for clinical applications because of their presumed non-immunogenicity and capacity to induce immune tolerance to the transgene products in humans. However, the clinical use of SV40 vectors has been hampered by the lack of a packaging cell line that produces replication-competent (RC) free SV40 particles in the vector production process. To solve this problem, we have adapted the current SV40 vector genome used for the production of vector particles and generated a novel Vero-based packaging cell line named SuperVero that exclusively expresses the SV40 large T antigen. SuperVero cells produce similar numbers of SV40 vector particles compared to the currently used packaging cell lines, albeit in the absence of contaminating RC SV40 particles. Our unique SV40 vector platform named SVac paves the way to clinically test a whole new generation of SV40-based therapeutics for a broad range of important diseases

Detecting syntactic differences automatically using the Minimum Description Length principle

In this paper we present a systematic approach to detect and rank hypotheses about possible syntactic differences for further investigation by leveraging parallel data and using the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle. We deploy the SQS-algorithm (‘Summarising event seQuenceS’; Tatti and Vreeken 2012) – an MDL-based algorithm – to mine ‘typical’ sequences of Part of Speech (POS) tags for each language under investigation. We create a shortlist of potential syntactic differences based on the number of parallel sentences with a mismatch in pattern occurrence. We applied our method to parallel corpora of English, Dutch and Czech sentences from the Europarl v7 corpus (Koehn 2005). The approach proved useful in both retrieving POS building blocks of a language as well as pointing to meaningful syntactic differences between languages. Despite a clear sensitivity to tagging accuracy, our results and approach are promising. Analysis and Stochastic

A filter for syntactically incomparable parallel sentences

Massive automatic comparison of languages in parallel corpora will greatly speed up and enhance the development of a theoretical model of the syntactic properties all languages have in common and the range and limits of syntactic variation. When extracting syntactic differences from parallel corpora it is essential only to compare sentence pairs that are sufficiently similar syntactically. We explore four measures to automatically filter out syntactically incomparable sentence pairs: the Damerau-Levenshtein distance between POS- tags, the sentence-length ratio, the graph-edit distance between dependency parses, and a combination of the three in a logistic regression model. For all approaches we experiment with ignoring specific functional material and other parameters. We evaluate the filters on three labelled datasets consisting of sentence pairs that are and that are not syntactically comparable. Results suggest that the dependency-parse filter is the most stable throughout language pairs, while the combination filter achieves the best results.Theoretical and Experimental Linguistic

Evolution and mutagenesis of the mammalian excision repair gene ERCC-1

The human DNA excision repair protein ERCC-1 exhibits homology to the yeast RADIO repair protein and its longer C-terminus displays similarity to parts of the E.coli repair proteins uvrA and uvrC. To study the evolution of this 'mosaic' ERCC-1 gene we have isolated the mouse homologue. Mouse ERCC-1 harbors the same pattern of homology with RAD10 and has a comparable C-terminal extension as its human equivalent. Mutation studies show that the strongly conserved C-terminus is essential in contrast to the less conserved N-terminus which is even dispensible. The mouse ERCC-1 amino acid sequence is compatible with a previously postulated nuclear location signal and DNA-binding domain. The ERCC-1 promoter harbors a region which is highly conserved in mouse and man. Since the ERCC-1 promoter is devoid of all classical promoter elements this region may be responsible for the low constitutive level of expression in all mouse tissues and stages of embryogenesis examined

Molecular characterization of the human excision repair gene ERCC-1: cDNA cloning and aminoacid homology with the yeast DNA repair gene RAD10.

The human excision repair gene ERCC-7 was cloned after DNA mediated gene transfer to the CHO mutant 43-38, which is sensitive to ultraviolet light and mitomycin-C. We describe the cloning and sequence analysis of the ERCC-7 cDNA and partial characterization of the gene. ERCC.1 has a size of 15 kb and is located on human chromosome 19. The ERCC.1 precursor RNA is subject to alternative splicing of an internal 72 bp coding exon. Only the cDNA of the larger 1.1 kb transcript, encoding a protein of 297 amino acids, was able to confer resistance to ultraviolet light and mitomycin-C on 43-38 cells. Significant amino acid sequence homology was found between the ERCC.7 gene product and the yeast excision repair protein RADIO. The most homologous region displayed structural homology with DNA binding domains of various polypeptides

Chromatin: a tunable spring at work inside chromosomes

This paper focuses on mechanical aspects of chromatin biological functioning. Within a basic geometric modeling of the chromatin assembly, we give for the first time the complete set of elastic constants (twist and bend persistence lengths, stretch modulus and twist-stretch coupling constant) of the so-called 30-nm chromatin fiber, in terms of DNA elastic properties and geometric properties of the fiber assembly. The computation naturally embeds the fiber within a current analytical model known as the ``extensible worm-like rope'', allowing a straightforward prediction of the force-extension curves. We show that these elastic constants are strongly sensitive to the linker length, up to 1 bp, or equivalently to its twist, and might locally reach very low values, yielding a highly flexible and extensible domain in the fiber. In particular, the twist-stretch coupling constant, reflecting the chirality of the chromatin fiber, exhibits steep variations and sign changes when the linker length is varied. We argue that this tunable elasticity might be a key feature for chromatin function, for instance in the initiation and regulation of transcription.Comment: 38 pages 15 figure