12,830 research outputs found
DNA unwinding heterogeneity by RecBCD results from static molecules able to equilibrate.
Single-molecule studies can overcome the complications of asynchrony and ensemble-averaging in bulk-phase measurements, provide mechanistic insights into molecular activities, and reveal interesting variations between individual molecules. The application of these techniques to the RecBCD helicase of Escherichia coli has resolved some long-standing discrepancies, and has provided otherwise unattainable mechanistic insights into its enzymatic behaviour. Enigmatically, the DNA unwinding rates of individual enzyme molecules are seen to vary considerably, but the origin of this heterogeneity remains unknown. Here we investigate the physical basis for this behaviour. Although any individual RecBCD molecule unwound DNA at a constant rate for an average of approximately 30,000 steps, we discover that transiently halting a single enzyme-DNA complex by depleting Mg(2+)-ATP could change the subsequent rates of DNA unwinding by that enzyme after reintroduction to ligand. The proportion of molecules that changed rate increased exponentially with the duration of the interruption, with a half-life of approximately 1 second, suggesting that a conformational change occurred during the time that the molecule was arrested. The velocity after pausing an individual molecule was any velocity found in the starting distribution of the ensemble. We suggest that substrate binding stabilizes the enzyme in one of many equilibrium conformational sub-states that determine the rate-limiting translocation behaviour of each RecBCD molecule. Each stabilized sub-state can persist for the duration (approximately 1 minute) of processive unwinding of a DNA molecule, comprising tens of thousands of catalytic steps, each of which is much faster than the time needed for the conformational change required to alter kinetic behaviour. This ligand-dependent stabilization of rate-defining conformational sub-states results in seemingly static molecule-to-molecule variation in RecBCD helicase activity, but in fact reflects one microstate from the equilibrium ensemble that a single molecule manifests during an individual processive translocation event
Serological Prevalence of Schistosoma japonicum in Mobile Populations in Previously Endemic but Now Non-Endemic Regions of China: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.
Background:
Schistosomiasis japonica has been resurging in certain areas of China where its transmission was previously well controlled or interrupted. Several factors may be contributing to this, including mobile populations, which if infected, may spread the disease. A wide range of estimates have been published for S. japonicum infections in mobile populations, and a synthesis of these data will elucidate the relative risk presented from these groups.
Methods:
A literature search for publications up to Oct 31, 2014 on S. japonicum infection in mobile populations in previously endemic but now non-endemic regions was conducted using four bibliographic databases: China National Knowledge Infrastructure, WanFang, VIP Chinese Journal Databases, and PubMed. A meta-analysis was conducted by pooling one arm binary data with MetaAnalyst Beta 3.13. The protocol is available on PROSPERO (No. CRD42013005967).
Results:
A total of 41 studies in Chinese met the inclusion criteria, covering seven provinces of China. The time of post-interruption surveillance ranged from the first year to the 31st year. After employing a random-effects model, from 1992 to 2013 the pooled seroprevalence ranged from 0.9% (95% CI: 0.5-1.6%) in 2003 to 2.3% (95% CI: 1.5-3.4) in 1995; from the first year after the disease had been interrupted to the 31st year, the pooled seroprevalence ranged from 0.6% (95% CI: 0.2-2.1%) in the 27th year to 4.0% (95%CI: 1.3-11.3%) in the second year. The pooled seroprevalence in mobile populations each year was significantly lower than among the residents of endemic regions, whilst four papers reported a lower level of infection in the mobile populations than in the local residents out of only 13 papers which included this data.
Conclusions:
The re-emergence of S. japonicum in areas which had previously interrupted transmission might be due to other factors, although risk from re-introduction from mobile populations could not be excluded
The z < 1.2 optical luminosity function from a sample of ∼410,000 galaxies in Boötes
Using a sample of ~410,000 galaxies to a depth of IAB=24 over 8.26 deg2 in the Boötes field (~10 times larger than the z~1 luminosity function (LF) studies in the prior literature), we have accurately measured the evolving B-band LF of red galaxies at z<1.2 and blue galaxies at z<1.0 In addition to the large sample size, we utilize photometry that accounts for the varying angular sizes of galaxies, photometric redshifts verified with spectroscopy, and absolute magnitudes that should have very small random and systematic errors. Our results are consistent with the migration of galaxies from the blue cloud to the red sequence as they cease to form stars and with downsizing in which more massive and luminous blue galaxies cease star formation earlier than fainter less massive ones. Comparing the observed fading of red galaxies with that expected from passive evolution alone, we find that the stellar mass contained within the red galaxy population has increased by a factor of ~3.6 from z~1.1 to z~0.1 The bright end of the red galaxy LF fades with decreasing redshift, with the rate of fading increasing from ~0.2 mag per unit redshift at z = 1.0 to ~0.8 at z = 0.2. The overall decrease in luminosity implies that the stellar mass in individual highly luminous red galaxies increased by a factor of ~2.2 from z = 1.1 to z = 0.1
Semantic topic discovery for lecture video
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020. With more and more lecture, videos are available on the Internet, on-line learning and e-learning are getting increasing concerns because of many advantages such as high degree of interactivity. The semantic content discovery for lecture video is a key problem. In this paper, we propose a Multi-modal LDA model, which discovers the semantic topics of lecture videos by considering audio and visual information. Specifically, the speaking content and the information of presentation slides are extracted from the lecture videos. With the proposed inference and learning algorithm, the semantic topics of the video can be discovered. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively discover the meaningful semantic characters of the lecture videos
Adversarial Sparse-View CBCT Artifact Reduction
We present an effective post-processing method to reduce the artifacts from
sparsely reconstructed cone-beam CT (CBCT) images. The proposed method is based
on the state-of-the-art, image-to-image generative models with a perceptual
loss as regulation. Unlike the traditional CT artifact-reduction approaches,
our method is trained in an adversarial fashion that yields more perceptually
realistic outputs while preserving the anatomical structures. To address the
streak artifacts that are inherently local and appear across various scales, we
further propose a novel discriminator architecture based on feature pyramid
networks and a differentially modulated focus map to induce the adversarial
training. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can greatly
correct the cone-beam artifacts from clinical CBCT images reconstructed using
1/3 projections, and outperforms strong baseline methods both quantitatively
and qualitatively
A Novel Scheme to Search for Fractional Charge Particles in Low Energy Accelerator Experiments
In the Standard Model of particle physics, the quarks and anti-quarks have
fractional charge equal to or of the electron's charge. There
has been a large number of experiments searching for fractional charge,
isolatable, elementary particles using a variety of methods, including
collisions using dE/dx ionization energy loss measurements, but no evidence has
been found to confirm existence of free fractional charge particles, which
leads to the quark confinement theory. In this paper, a proposal to search for
this kind particles is presented, which is based on the conservation law of
four-momentum. Thanks to the CLEOc and BESIII detectors' large coverage, good
particle identification, precision measurements of tracks' momenta and their
large recorded data samples, these features make the scheme feasible in
practice. The advantage of the scheme is independent of any theoretical models
and sensitive for a small fraction of the quarks transitioning to the
unconfinement phase from the confinement phase.Comment: 9 page
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