2‐Periodic self‐dual tilings Delgado-Friedrichs, Olaf; O'Keeffe, Michael
Acta crystallographica. Section A, Foundations and advances,
January 2017, 2017-Jan-01, 2017-01-01, 20170101, Letnik:
73, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
2‐Periodic self‐dual tilings are important in fields ranging from crystal chemistry to mathematical physics. They have been systematically enumerated using combinatorial tiling theory, and 1, 5 and ...62 uninodal, binodal and trinodal self‐dual tilings have been found. This paper illustrates all uninodal and binodal self‐dual tilings and selected trinodal self‐dual tilings. Most of these structures are described for the first time.
All uninodal, binodal and trinodal 2‐periodic self‐dual tilings are enumerated and described.
Death anxiety is powerful, potentially contributes to suffering, and yet has to date not been extensively studied in the context of palliative care. Availability of a validated Death Anxiety and ...Distress Scale (DADDS) opens the opportunity to better assess and redress death anxiety in serious illness.
We explored death anxiety/distress for associations with physical and psychosocial factors.
Ancillary to a randomized clinical trial (RCT) of Dignity Therapy (DT), we enrolled a convenience sample of 167 older adults in the United States with cancer and receiving outpatient palliative care (mean age 65.9 7.3 years, 62% female, 84% White, 62% stage 4 cancer). They completed the DADDS and several measures for the stepped-wedged RCT, including demographic factors, religious struggle, dignity-related distress, existential quality of life (QoL), and terminal illness awareness (TIA).
DADDS scores were generally unrelated to demographic factors (including religious affiliation, intrinsic religiousness, and frequency of prayer). DADDS scores were positively correlated with religious struggle (
< 0.001) and dignity-related distress (
< 0.001) and negatively correlated with existential QoL (
< 0.001). TIA was significantly nonlinearly associated with both the total DADDS (
= 0.007) and its Finitude subscale (
≤ 0.001) scores. There was a statistically significant decrease in Finitude subscale scores for a subset of participants who completed a post-DT DADDS (
= 0.04).
Findings, if replicable, suggest that further research on death anxiety and prognostic awareness in the context of palliative medicine is in order. Findings also raise questions about the optimal nature and timing of spiritual and psychosocial interventions, something that might entail evaluation or screening for death anxiety and prognostic awareness for maximizing the effectiveness of care.
Regular nets are defined as those with symmetry that requires the coordination figure to be a regular polygon or polyhedron. It is shown that this definition leads to five regular 3‐periodic nets. ...There is also one quasiregular net with a quasiregular coordination figure. The natural tiling of a net and its associated essential rings are also defined, and it is shown that the natural tilings of the regular nets have the property that there is just one kind of vertex, one kind of edge, one kind of ring and one kind of tile, i.e. transitivity 1111. The quasiregular net has two kinds of natural tile and transitivity 1112.
Antibodies have enormous therapeutic and biotechnology potential. G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), the main targets in drug development, are of major interest in antibody development programs. ...Metabotropic glutamate receptors are dimeric GPCRs that can control synaptic activity in a multitude of ways. Here we identify llama nanobodies that specifically recognize mGlu2 receptors, among the eight subtypes of mGluR subunits. Among these nanobodies, DN10 and 13 are positive allosteric modulators (PAM) on homodimeric mGlu2, while DN10 displays also a significant partial agonist activity. DN10 and DN13 have no effect on mGlu2-3 and mGlu2-4 heterodimers. These PAMs enhance the inhibitory action of the orthosteric mGlu2/mGlu3 agonist, DCG-IV, at mossy fiber terminals in the CA3 region of hippocampal slices. DN13 also impairs contextual fear memory when injected in the CA3 region of hippocampal region. These data highlight the potential of developing antibodies with allosteric actions on GPCRs to better define their roles in vivo.
SGS1 encodes a DNA helicase whose homologues in human cells include the BLM, WRN, and RECQ4 genes, mutations in which lead to cancer‐predisposition syndromes. Clustering of synthetic genetic ...interactions identified by large‐scale genetic network analysis revealed that the genetic interaction profile of the gene RMI1 (RecQ‐mediated genome instability, also known as NCE4 and YPL024W) was highly similar to that of SGS1 and TOP3, suggesting a functional relationship between Rmi1 and the Sgs1/Top3 complex. We show that Rmi1 physically interacts with Sgs1 and Top3 and is a third member of this complex. Cells lacking RMI1 activate the Rad53 checkpoint kinase, undergo a mitotic delay, and display increased relocalization of the recombination repair protein Rad52, indicating the presence of spontaneous DNA damage. Consistent with a role for RMI1 in maintaining genome integrity, rmi1Δ cells exhibit increased recombination frequency and increased frequency of gross chromosomal rearrangements. In addition, rmi1Δ strains fail to fully activate Rad53 upon exposure to DNA‐damaging agents, suggesting that Rmi1 is also an important part of the Rad53‐dependent DNA damage response.
Developing clinically predictive model systems for evaluating gene transfer and gene editing technologies has become increasingly important in the era of personalized medicine. Liver-directed gene ...therapies present a unique challenge due to the complexity of the human liver. In this work, we describe the application of whole human liver explants in an ex situ normothermic perfusion system to evaluate a set of fourteen natural and bioengineered adeno-associated viral (AAV) vectors directly in human liver, in the presence and absence of neutralizing human sera. Under non-neutralizing conditions, the recently developed AAV variants, AAV-SYD12 and AAV-LK03, emerged as the most functional variants in terms of cellular uptake and transgene expression. However, when assessed in the presence of human plasma containing anti-AAV neutralizing antibodies (NAbs), vectors of human origin, specifically those derived from AAV2/AAV3b, were extensively neutralized, whereas AAV8- derived variants performed efficiently. This study demonstrates the potential of using normothermic liver perfusion as a model for early-stage testing of liver-focused gene therapies. The results offer preliminary insights that could help inform the development of more effective translational strategies.
We recently reported a truncating deletion in the NFKBIE gene, which encodes IκBε, a negative feedback regulator of NF-κB, in clinically aggressive chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). Because ...preliminary data indicate enrichment of NFKBIE aberrations in other lymphoid malignancies, we screened a large patient cohort (n = 1460) diagnosed with different lymphoid neoplasms. While NFKBIE deletions were infrequent in follicular lymphoma, splenic marginal zone lymphoma, and T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (<2%), slightly higher frequencies were seen in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, mantle cell lymphoma, and primary central nervous system lymphoma (3% to 4%). In contrast, a remarkably high frequency of NFKBIE aberrations (46/203 cases 22.7%) was observed in primary mediastinal B-cell lymphoma (PMBL) and Hodgkin lymphoma (3/11 cases 27.3%). NFKBIE-deleted PMBL patients were more often therapy refractory (P = .022) and displayed inferior outcome compared with wild-type patients (5-year survival, 59% vs 78%; P = .034); however, they appeared to benefit from radiotherapy (P = .022) and rituximab-containing regimens (P = .074). NFKBIE aberrations remained an independent factor in multivariate analysis (P = .003) and when restricting the analysis to immunochemotherapy-treated patients (P = .008). Whole-exome sequencing and gene expression profiling verified the importance of NF-κB deregulation in PMBL. In summary, we identify NFKBIE aberrations as a common genetic event across B-cell malignancies and highlight NFKBIE deletions as a novel poor-prognostic marker in PMBL.
•A recurrent 4-bp deletion in the NFKBIE gene is a common event during lymphomagenesis in various lymphoid malignancies.•The deletion occurs in 22.7% of PMBL cases and is associated with a particularly aggressive clinical disease course.
The Ovuscule Thevenaz, P; Delgado-Gonzalo, R; Unser, M
IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence,
02/2011, Letnik:
33, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We propose an active contour (a.k.a. snake) that takes the shape of an ellipse. Its evolution is driven by surface terms made of two contributions: the integral of the data over an inner ellipse, ...counterbalanced by the integral of the data over an outer elliptical shell. We iteratively adapt the active contour to maximize the contrast between the two domains, which results in a snake that seeks elliptical bright blobs. We provide analytic expressions for the gradient of the snake with respect to its defining parameters, which allows for the use of efficient optimizers. An important contribution here is the parameterization of the ellipse which we define in such a way that all parameters have equal importance; this creates a favorable landscape for the proceedings of the optimizer. We validate our construct with synthetic data and illustrate its use on real data as well.
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