Designing effective antisense sequences is a formidable problem. A method for predicting efficacious antisense holds the potential to provide fundamental insight into this biophysical process. More practically, such an understanding increases the chance of successful antisense design as well as saving considerable time, money and labor. The secondary structure of an mRNA molecule is believed to...

Designing cognitive tutors and modeling behavior for ill-defined domains require innovative methods and techniques. We combine a top-down, theoretical approach with a bottom-up, empirical approach to develop a student model for the selection of aspect in French verbs. In performing this task, we design a new representation applicable to feature-driven ill-defined problem spaces and utilize tuto...

Oceanic uptake of anthropogenic carbon dioxide results in decrease in seawater pH and increase in temperature. In this study, we demonstrated the synergistic effects of elevated seawater temperature and declined seawater pH on gene expression patterns of aspein, calmodulin, nacrein, she-7-F10 and hsp70 in the pearl oyster Pinctada fucata. Under 'business-as-usual' scenarios, four treatments wer...

BACKGROUND Microarray technology has become highly valuable for identifying complex global changes in gene expression patterns. The assignment of functional information to these complex patterns remains a challenging task in effectively interpreting data and correlating results from across experiments, projects and laboratories. Methods which allow the rapid and robust evaluation of multiple fu...

The BAR (Bin/amphiphysin/Rvs) domain defines an emerging superfamily of proteins implicated in fundamental biological processes by sensing and inducing membrane curvature. We identified a novel autoregulatory function for the BAR domain of two related GAPs' (GTPase-activating proteins) of the GRAF (GTPase regulator associated with focal adhesion kinase) subfamily. We demonstrate that the N-term...

BACKGROUND It is well known that prioritization of the processing of threatening stimuli generally induces deleterious effects on task performance. However, a study recently reported that emotion (possibly fear) evoked by viewing images of snakes exerts a facilitating effect upon making judgments of the images' color in neurotypical adults and schoolchildren. Here, the author has attempted to c...

Speech behaviours and their assessment in children with Down syndrome Three types of problems with speech motor control are typically experienced by children with Down syndrome: 1) early articulation and phonological difficulties, 2) fluency disorders such as stuttering and cluttering, and 3) developmental aphasia-type problems. The first and second involve speech motor processes and the second...

OBJECTIVE This study aims to evaluate the efficiency of top-down and bottom-up processes in the extrastriate cortex of cirrhotic patients without overt hepatic encephalopathy (HE). METHODS Reaction times (RTs), accuracy and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during the execution of a visual Simon task in 17 cirrhotic patients and 10 healthy controls. Amplitude and latency of the P1...