Hyperconnectivity is a fundamental response to neurological disruption

In the cognitive and clinical neurosciences, the past decade has been marked by dramatic growth in a literature examining brain "connectivity" using noninvasive methods. We offer a critical review of the blood oxygen level dependent functional MRI (BOLD fMRI) literature examining neural connectivity changes in neurological disorders with focus on brain injury and dementia. The goal is to demonstrate that there are identifiable shifts in local and large-scale network connectivity that can be predicted by the degree of pathology. We anticipate that the most common network response to neurological insult is hyperconnectivity but that this response depends upon demand and resource availability

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Not AvailableThe freezing of bull semen significantly hamper the motility of sperm which reduces the conception rate in dairy cattle. The prediction of postthaw motility (PTM) before freezing will be useful to take the decision on discarding or freezing of the germplasm. The artificial neural network (ANN) methodology found to be useful in prediction and classification problems related to animal science, and hence, the present study was undertaken to compare the efficiency of ANN in prediction of PTM on the basis of the number of ejaculates, volume, and concentration of sperms. The combined effect of Y-specific microsatellite alleles on the actual and predicted PTM was also studied. The results revealed that the prediction accuracy of PTM based on the semen quality parameters was comparatively lower because of higher variability in the data set. The ANN gave better prediction accuracy (34.88%) than the multiple regression analysis models (32.04%). The root mean square error was lower for ANN (8.4353) than that in the multiple regression analysis (8.6168). The haplotype or combined effect of microsatellite alleles on actual and predicted PTM was found to be highly significant (P < 0.01). On the basis of results, it was concluded that the ANN methodology can be used for prediction of PTM in crossbred bulls.Not Availabl

Molecular effects of encapsulation of glucose oxidase dimer by graphene

Knowing the nature of the enzyme-graphene interface is critical for a design of graphene-based biosensors. Extensive contacts between graphene and enzyme could be obtained by employing a suitable encapsulation which does not impede its enzymatic reaction. We have performed molecular dynamics simulations to obtain an insight on many forms of contact between glucose oxidase dimer and the single-layer graphene nano-sheets. The unconnected graphene sheets tended to form a flat stack regardless of their initial positions around the enzyme, whereas the same graphene sheets linked together formed a flower-like shape engendering different forms of wrapping of the enzyme. During the encapsulation no core hydrophobic residues of the enzyme were exposed. Since the polar and charged amino acids populated the enzyme's surface we also estimated, using DFT calculations, the interaction energies of individual polar and charged amino acid residues with graphene. It was found that the negatively charged residues can bind to graphene unexpectedly strongly; however, the main effect of encapsulation comes from the overlap of adjacent edges of graphene sheets

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Not AvailableNearly 5 000 aphid species damage crops, either by sucking plant sap or as disease-transmitting vectors. Microsatellites are used for understanding molecular diversity and eco-geographical relationships among aphid species. Expressed sequence tag (EST)-microsatellite motifs were identified through an in silico approach using inbuilt simple sequence repeat mining tools in aphid EST dataset. Microsatellite mining revealed one in every five aphid genes as containing a repeat motif, and out of 9 290 EST microsatellites mined from Aphis gossypii Glover and Acyrthosiphon pisum (Harris) (both Hemiptera: Aphididae), 80% were of A and/or T (AT, ATA, AAT, AATA, and ATTT) motifs, and the rest contained G and/or C motifs. All microsatellite sequences were annotated using BLAST. Primers for EST microsatellites were designed using the Primer 3.0 tool. 106 primer pairs of both dinucleotide repeats (DNRs) and trinucleotide repeats (TNRs), representing open reading frames (ORFs) and untranslated regions (UTRs), were synthesized to amplify 15 aphid species belonging to the subfamily Aphidinae, collected from diverse hosts. Four hundred forty-five polymorphic alleles were amplified. Fifty TNR and 23 DNR microsatellites amplified across the species studied. Polymorphism information content values of microsatellites ranged from 0.23 to 0.91, amplifying 2–16 alleles.Genetic similarity indices were estimated using the ‘NTSYS-pc’ software package. Unweighted pair group with arithmetic mean and principal component analysis resolved taxonomic relationships of the aphid species studied. The new aphid microsatellites developed will provide valuable information to researchers to study Indian aphid species diversity and genetic relationships.Not Availabl