Accurate measurements of plasma flows in the scrape-off layer (SOL) are a necessary requirement for understanding the physics of tokamak edge plasmas. A system is being developed on Alcator C-Mod for inferring flows parallel (v‖) and perpendicular (vE×B) to local magnetic field lines from impurity emission patterns (“plumes”) generated by local gas injection. Carbon plumes are generated at vari...

The precipitation hardening behavior of an Al-0.08Zr-0.014Sc-0.008Er-0.10Si (at.%) alloy was investigated utilizing microhardness, electrical conductivity, atom-probe tomography (APT), and compressive creepmeasurements. This new composition, with a Sc:Zr atomic ratio of less than 1:5 represents a significant reduction of the alloy's cost when compared to the more usual Al-0.06Sc-0.02Zr based al...

Altered protein homeostasis underlies degenerative diseases triggered by misfolded proteins, including spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy (SBMA), a neuromuscular disorder caused by a CAG/glutamine expansion in the androgen receptor. Here we show that the unfolded protein response (UPR), an ER protein quality control pathway, is induced in skeletal muscle from SBMA patients, AR113Q knock-in male...

George Palade, a founding father of cell biology and of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB), established the ultrastructural framework for an analysis of how proteins are secreted and membranes are assembled in eukaryotic cells. His vision inspired a generation of investigators to probe the molecular mechanisms of protein transport. My laboratory has dissected these pathways with compl...

To explore how far into the Golgi stack the capacity to retrieve KDEL proteins extends, we have introduced an exogenous probe (the peptide YHPNSTCSEKDEL) into the TGN of living cells. For this purpose, a CHO cell line expressing a c-myc-tagged version of the transmembrane protein TGN38--which cycles between the TGN and the cell surface--was generated. The cells internalized peptides that were d...

The ability to regulate protein levels in live cells is crucial to understanding protein function. In the interest of advancing the tool set for protein perturbation, we developed a protein destabilizing domain (DD) that can confer its instability to a fused protein of interest. This destabilization and consequent degradation can be rescued in a reversible and dose-dependent manner with the add...

We have developed a unique DNA-assembled gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) dimer for dynamic light scattering (DLS) sensing of transcription factors, exemplified by estrogen receptor (ER) that binds specifically to a double-stranded (ds) DNA sequence containing estrogen response element (ERE). Here, ERE sequence is incorporated into the DNA linkers to bridge the AuNPs dimer for ER binding. Coupled wit...

The magnetic field dependence of the transport critical current density has been investigated at temperatures of 78K and 68K in bulk polycrystalline samples of the hightemperature superconductor ReBa2Cu3O7-x, where Re (rare earth) = Y (yttrium), Er (erbium), Yb (ytterbium), Ho (holmium), and Dy (dysprosium). Samples were sintered in 1⁄4 inch pellet form after the conventional ceramic processing...

Within the context face expression classi cation using the facial action coding system (FACS), we address the problem of detecting facial action units (AUs). The method adopted is to train a single error-correcting output code (ECOC) multiclass classi er to estimate the probabilities that each one of several commonly occurring AU groups is present in the probe image. Platt scaling is used to ca...

Detection of early malignant tumors remains clinically difficult; developing ultrasensitive imaging agents is therefore highly demanded. Owing to the unusual magnetic and optical properties associated with f-electrons, rare-earth elements are very suitable for creating functional materials potentially useful for tumor imaging. Nanometer-sized particles offer such a platform with which versatile...