Status Report of Neutral Kaon photo-production study using Neutral Kaon Spectrometer 2 (NKS2) at LNS-Tohoku(I. Nuclear Physics)

The approach described in this paper uses an array of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices to implement a fault tolerant hardware system that can be compared to the running of fault tolerant software on a traditional processor. Fault tolerance is achieved is achieved by using FPGA with on the fly partial programmability feature. Major considerations while mapping to the FPGA includes the size of the area to be mapped and communication issues related to their communication. Area size selection is compared to the page size selection in Operating System Design. Communication issues between modules are compared to the software engineering paradigms dealing with module coupling, fan-in, fan-out and cohesiveness. Finally, the overhead associated with the downloading of the reconfiguration files is discussed

Interaction site prediction by structural similarity to neighboring clusters in protein-protein interaction networks

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Recently, revealing the function of proteins with protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks is regarded as one of important issues in bioinformatics. With the development of experimental methods such as the yeast two-hybrid method, the data of protein interaction have been increasing extremely. Many databases dealing with these data comprehensively have been constructed and applied to analyzing PPI networks. However, few research on prediction interaction sites using both PPI networks and the 3D protein structures complementarily has explored.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We propose a method of predicting interaction sites in proteins with unknown function by using both of PPI networks and protein structures. For a protein with unknown function as a target, several clusters are extracted from the neighboring proteins based on their structural similarity. Then, interaction sites are predicted by extracting similar sites from the group of a protein cluster and the target protein. Moreover, the proposed method can improve the prediction accuracy by introducing repetitive prediction process.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The proposed method has been applied to small scale dataset, then the effectiveness of the method has been confirmed. The challenge will now be to apply the method to large-scale datasets.</p

Angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors attenuated the expression of G-protein coupled receptor kinases in heart failure patients

Background: There are few biological markers, which strictly show the severity of congestive heart failure (CHF). Methods and Results: Lymphocyte G-protein coupled receptor kinase (GRK) mRNA expression was measured by quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction in 15 CHF patients: 5 patients classified as New York Heart Association class-II treated with angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor (ACEI) (IIA), 5 patients in class-II without ACEI (IIC), and 5 patients in class-III treated with ACEI (IIIA). GRK mRNA level in IIIA was significantly higher than those in IIA (p<0.05). GRK mRNA level in IIA were significantly lower than those in IIC (p<0.05). Conclusions: The expression level of lymphocyte GRK might show the severity of CHF, and ACEI treatment could reduce the level of GRK in CHF patients. (Circ J 2006; 70: 362 - 363

Chronic beta-adrenergic receptor stimulation enhances the expression of G-Protein coupled receptor kinases, GRK2 and GRK5, in both the heart and peripheral lymphocytes

Background: Enhanced expression of G protein-coupled receptor kinase (GRK) has been reported in failing hearts and in the present study the stability of enhanced GRK mRNA expression, and the correlation between the expression level of GRK mRNA in peripheral lymphocytes and in the heart were both evaluated. Methods and Results: Isoproterenol was injected into rats for 2 weeks, and then GRK5 mRNA was assessed by quantitative reverse transcriptase-palymerase chain reaction. An enhanced expression of cardiac GRK5 mRNA was observed even after 4 weeks of recovery. The isoproterenol-induced increased expression of GRK2 and GRK5 mRNA was equally observed in the heart and lymphocytes, and there was a close correlation between the heart and lymphocytes in the level of expression of each GRK mRNA. Conclusions: The GRK mRNA level is maintained at a high level for a long period without continuous β-adrenergic receptor stimulation. The level in circulating lymphocytes could be used as a surrogate marker to estimate the level of cardiac GRK expression and, presumably, the β-adrenergic receptor function of cardiomyocytes. (Circ J 2005; 69: 987-990