Molecular Mechanism of Tetraspanin CD9 Mediated Cell Motility

CD9, a member of the tetraspanin superfamily of proteins participates in the regulation of cell adhesive functions such as cell migration. The mechanisms underlying CD9 mediated cell migration are not known. In the current study, we investigated the molecular basis for the CD9 promoted cell migration. Our findings show that the phosphatidylinositol-3 kinase (PI-3K) inhibitors, wortamannin and LY294002 inhibited CD9 promoted cell motility in Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells. In contrast, inhibitors targeting protein kinase C or mitogen-activated protein kinase had no effect on CD9 driven CHO cell motility. Furthermore, inhibition of PI-3K activity in CHO cells by dominant/negative PI-3K cDNA transfection abolished CD9 mediated pro-migratory effects. Consistent with these observations, CD9 expression in CHO cells and in the rat aortic smooth muscle (RASM) cells induced enhanced phosphorylation of PI-3K substrate, Akt. In CHO cells, CD9 expression also enhanced protein levels and tyrosine phosphorylation of the adaptor protein p130Cas. However, no significant changes in the CD9 enhanced migration were observed in CHO cells upon down regulation of p130Cas CD9, a member of the tetraspanin superfamily of proteins participates in the regulation of cell adhesive functions such as cell migration. The mechanisms underlying CD9 mediated cell migration are not known. In the current study, we investigated the molecular basis for the CD9 promoted cell migration. Our findings show that the phosphatidylinositol-3 kinase (PI-3K) inhibitors, wortamannin and LY294002 inhibited CD9 promoted cell motility in Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells. In contrast, inhibitors targeting protein kinase C or mitogen-activated protein kinase had no effect on CD9 driven CHO cell motility. Furthermore, inhibition of PI-3K activity in CHO cells by dominant/negative PI-3K cDNA transfection abolished CD9 mediated pro-migratory effects. Consistent with these observations, CD9 expression in CHO cells and in the rat aortic smooth muscle (RASM) cells induced enhanced phosphorylation of PI-3K substrate, Akt. In CHO cells, CD9 expression also enhanced protein levels and tyrosine phosphorylation of the adaptor protein p130Cas. However, no significant changes in the CD9 enhanced migration were observed in CHO cells upon down regulation of p130Cas by siRNA transfection suggesting that p130Cas dependent pathways are not mandatory for CD9 mediated motility. To further understand the mechanisms by which CD9 regulates cell migration, we studied the relative contribution of the fibronectin (FN) receptor integrin, alpha-5-beta-1 in CD9 mediated cell motility. Our findings show that CD9 is in molecular complex with alpha-5-beta-1 and that CD9 promoted migration can be completely blocked by an alpha-5-beta-1 function blocking antibody. Further studies revealed that CD9 expression may stabilize the active conformer of the beta-1 integrin. Taken togeather, our study demonstrates key molecular mechanisms governing CD9 mediated haptotactic cell motility to FN in CHO cells. Our findings indicate that CD9 in concert with integrin alpha-5-beta-1 requires activation of the PI-3K pathway leading to enhanced haptotactic cell migration on FN

Optimization of aeroengine utilization through improved estimation of remaining useful life (RUL) of on condition (OC) parts

Gas Turbine Operators and Maintainers face the challenge of increasing the operationallife, availability, and reliability of Aero Engine during the operations amid the advancements in the technology for the speed, Power, SFC, and Comfort which led to closing in the safety margins and increasing in the failure rate of Aero Engines, and low serviceability of aero engines due to the rapid increase in demand and expansion of the aircraft fleet by the various airlines for various reasons which led to increase in downtime and lead time of serviceability of Aero Engines. This study focuses on the inherent Aero Engine deterioration caused due to various Gas Turbine Faults or Physical Problems and how Performance, Trend, and Systems Monitoring contain this deterioration and contribute to the optimization of aero engine utilization. The purpose of thispaper is to present the importance of accurate estimation of Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of On Condition (OC) Parts and how it optimizes aero engine life. The benefits associated with the introduction of a novel estimation of RUL of OC Parts are also presented. A Standardized Replacement Model (SRM), which improves the estimation of RUL of OC Parts, is proposed for optimization of Aero Engine Utilization

Customer-Centric Service Management Using Servicenow

ServiceNow enterprise IT service automation platform combines ITIL v3 process support, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) delivery, and Web functionality, to provide a flexible, intuitive and self-managing application (Muir, 2014). Fundamentally, it is a service management ticketing tool for every department in the enterprise that offers functional flexibility, relative ease of deployment, and competitive pricing (About ServiceNow: TechWeb, n.d.). ServiceNow is a PaaS model, where a platform is also supplied, allowing customers to develop and extend the OOB (Out of the box) functionality. With unique pre‑built services and reusable components, we can rapidly build, integrate, and extend the features or scope of our applications to meet the dynamic requirements of our business. The goal of this paper is to construct an optimal and efficient solution by utilizing the ServiceNow provided functionality and customize it to meet the business needs

Automatic Parallelization of Affine Loops using Dependence and Cache analysis in a Binary Rewriter

Today, nearly all general-purpose computers are parallel, but nearly all software running on them is serial. Bridging this disconnect by manually rewriting source code in parallel is prohibitively expensive. Automatic parallelization technology is therefore an attractive alternative. We present a method to perform automatic parallelization in a binary rewriter. The input to the binary rewriter is the serial binary executable program and the output is a parallel binary executable. The advantages of parallelization in a binary rewriter versus a compiler include (i) compatibility with all compilers and languages; (ii) high economic feasibility from avoiding repeated compiler implementation; (iii) applicability to legacy binaries; and (iv) applicability to assembly-language programs. Adapting existing parallelizing compiler methods that work on source code to work on binary programs instead is a significant challenge. This is primarily because symbolic and array index information used in existing compiler parallelizers is not available in a binary. We show how to adapt existing parallelization methods to achieve equivalent parallelization from a binary without such information. We have also designed a affine cache reuse model that works inside a binary rewriter building on the parallelization techniques. It quantifies cache reuse in terms of the number of cache lines that will be required when a loop dimension is considered for the innermost position in a loop nest. This cache metric can be used to reason about affine code that results when affine code is transformed using affine transformations. Hence, it can be used to evaluate candidate transformation sequences to improve run-time directly from a binary. Results using our x86 binary rewriter called SecondWrite on a suite of dense- matrix regular programs from Polybench suite of benchmarks shows an geomean speedup of 6.81X from binary and 8.9X from source with 8 threads compared to the input serial binary on a x86 Xeon E5530 machine; and 8.31X from binary and 9.86X from source with 24 threads compared to the input serial binary on a x86 E7450 machine. Such regular loops are an important component of scientific and multi- media workloads, and are even present to a limited extent in otherwise non-regular programs. Further in this thesis we present a novel algorithm that enhances the past techniques significantly for loops with unknown loop bounds by guessing the loop bounds using only the memory expressions present in a loop. It then inserts run-time checks to see if these guesses were indeed correct and if correct executes the parallel version of the loop, else the serial version executes. These techniques are applied to the large affine benchmarks in SPEC2006 and OMP2001 and unlike previous methods the speedups from binary are as good as from source. We also present results on the number of loops parallelized directly from a binary with and without this algorithm. Among the 8 affine benchmarks among these suites, the best existing binary parallelization method achieves an geo-mean speedup of 1.33X, whereas our method achieves a speedup of 2.96X. This is close to the speedup from source code of 2.8X

Vitamin A toxicity

This issue of eMedRef provides information to clinicians on the pathophysiology, diagnosis, and therapeutics of Vitamin A toxicity

A methodology for deriving performance measures from spatio-temporal traffic contour maps using digital image analysis procedures

The main focus of this study is to improve the data analysis tools used in performance monitoring and level of service assessment of freeway systems. The proposed study presents a methodology to develop new second-order statistical measures that are derived from texture characterization techniques in the field of digital image analysis. The new measures are capable of extracting properties such as smoothness, homogeneity, regularity, and randomness in traffic behavior from the spatio-temporal traffic contour maps. To study the new performance measures a total of 14270, 15-min traffic contour maps were generated for a section of 3.4 miles of I-4 in Orlando, Florida for 24 hours over a period of 5 weekdays. A correlation matrix was examined using the obtained measures for all the constructed maps, which is used to check for information redundancy. This resulted in retaining a set of three second-order statistical measures: angular second moment (ASM), contrast (CON), and entropy (ENT). The retained measures were analyzed to examine their sensitivity to various traffic conditions, expressed by the overall mean speed of each contour map. The measures were also used to evaluate level of service for each contour map. The sensitivity analysis and level of service criteria can be implemented in real time using a stand-alone module that was developed in this study. The study also presents a methodology to compare the traffic characteristics of various congested conditions. To examine the congestion characteristics, a total of 10,290 traffic contour maps were generated from a 7.5-mile section of the freeway for a period of 5 weekdays

Gene tree reconciliation: new developments in Bayesian concordance analysis with BUCKy

When phylogenetic trees inferred from different genes are incongruent, several methods are available to reconcile gene trees and extract the shared phylogenetic information from the sequence data. Bayesian Concordance Analysis, implemented in BUCKy, aims to extract the vertical signal and to infer clusters of genes that share the same tree topology. The new version of BUCKy includes a quartet-based estimate of the species tree with branch lengths in coalescent units

Factors Involved in the Successful Transition to and Subsequent use of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) Systems by Individual and Group-Practice Physicians

The use of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) by healthcare professionals has been recommended as a way of improving healthcare quality, patient safety, and workflow efficiency, and lowering costs in the long run. While large hospital systems integrate EHRs into their services, individual and group practice-owning physicians, especially those of specialties and subspecialties, are often left wondering whether they should follow the trend and whether the transition from traditional, paper-chart systems or older EHRs to newer, commercial ones will truly benefit their patients and their practice as a whole. These physicians also often wonder whether benefits such as electronic-prescribing, clinical decision support, and patient results tracking outweigh obstacles such as initial costs, reliability, and user adaptability. This investigation sought to provide a more informed perspective in considering the decision to either transition to an Electronic Health Records system or maintain a traditional paper-chart style system. A number of studies examining care quality improvement and physician satisfaction in regards to transitions to EHRs under various conditions, such as specialty type, previous EHR-experience, and difficulty of transition, among others, were investigated to form this perspective. The improvement of care quality and physician satisfaction as a result of adopting EHRs relies heavily on both the efficiency and completeness of the transition and the EHR\u27s degree of customization towards a practice’s specific needs. Since EHRs are continuously being developed and improved, the transition to an EHR system and its subsequent use can be successful with proper preparation for the transition, extended clinician training, and choosing one that is well-tailored to the needs of the specialty and its patients’ medical conditions.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/uresposters/1169/thumbnail.jp

Matching Forensic Sketches to Mug Shot Photos using Speeded Up Robust Features

The problem that is dealt in the project is to match a forensic sketch against a gallery of mug shot photos. Research in past decade offered solutions for matching sketches that were drawn while looking at the subject (viewed sketches). In this thesis, emphasis is made on matching the forensic sketches, which are the sketches drawn by specially trained artists in police department based on the description of subject by an eyewitness. Recently, a method for forensic sketch matching using LFDA (Local Feature based Discriminant Analysis) was published. Here, the same problem is addressed using a novel preprocessing technique combined with a local feature descriptor called SURF (Speeded Up Robust Features). In our method, first, the images are preprocessed using a novel preprocessing technique suitable for forensic sketch matching that is based on the cognitive research on human memory. After the preprocessing, SURF is used for matching. SURF extracts features in the form of 64-variable vectors for each image. Then all these vectors of one image are combined to form the SURF descriptor vector for that image. These descriptor vectors are then used for matching. This method of forensic sketch matching was applied to match a dataset of 64 Forensic Sketches against a gallery of 1058 photos. From our experiments, it was observed that our approach of image preprocessing combined with SURF had shown promising results with a good accuracy