Voltage-gated potassium channels are well established as critical for setting action potential frequency, membrane potential, and neurotransmitter release in neurons. However, their role in the "nonexcitable" glial cell type is yet to be fully understood. We used whole cell current kinetics, pharmacology, immunocytochemistry, and RT-PCR to characterize A-type current in hippocampal astrocyte cu...

At some point in their processing, natural language dialogue systems typically perform some pragmatic analysis to compute the dialogue act (or speech act, dialogue move, illo-cution, etc.) underlying an utterance. The Verbmobil system, despite the fact that it is not engaged in the dialogue but only mediates it, is no exception. At present, both symbolic reasoning and statistical recognition ar...

In vertebrate neurons, the axon initial segment (AIS) is specialized for action potential initiation. It is organized by a giant 480 Kd variant of ankyrin G (AnkG) that serves as an anchor for ion channels and is required for a plasma membrane diffusion barrier that excludes somatodendritic proteins from the axon. An unusually long exon required to encode this 480Kd variant is thought to have b...

Plate motion and associated tectonics explain the location of magmatic systems along plate boundaries [1], however, they cannot give satisfactory explanations of the origin of intra‐ plate volcanism. Intraplate magmatism such as that which created the Hawaiian Islands (Figure 1, hereafter for the location of geographical places the reader is referred to Figure 1) far from plate boundaries is co...

We have used dye fills and electrophysiological recordings to identify and characterize a cluster of motor neurons in the third instar larval ventral ganglion. This cluster of neurons is similar in position to the well-studied embryonic RP neurons. Dye fills of larval dorsomedial neurons demonstrate that individual neurons within the cluster can be reproducibly identified by observing their mus...

Orogenic gold de pos its are char ac ter ized by struc tur ally con trolled, low-sul phide quartz veins that formed prox i mal to deep-crustal faults in greenschist-fa cies meta mor phic ter ranes. These de pos its, pre vi ously re ferred to as mesothermal, greenstone-hosted, shear-hosted and turbidite-hosted de pos its, have a wide range of as so ci ated min er al iza tion styles and as so ci ...

Shal-type (Kv4) channels are expressed in a large variety of tissues, where they contribute to transient voltage-dependent K+ currents. Kv4 are the molecular correlate of the A-type current of neurons (I(SA)), the fast component of I(TO) current in the heart, and also of the oxygen-sensitive K+ current (K(O2)) in rabbit carotid body (CB) chemoreceptor cells. The enormous degree of variability i...

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common arrhythmia in the clinic. While previous studies have identified AF-associated mutations in several genes, the genetic basis for AF remains unclear. Here, we identified a novel T361S missense mutation in potassium voltage-gated channel, shal-related subfamily, member 3 (KCND3) from a Chinese Han family ancestor with lone AF. The wild-type (WT) or muta...

In object oriented programming, it is sometimes necessary to copy objects and to compare them for equality or inequality. We discuss some of the issues involved in copying and comparing objects and we address the problem of generating appropriate copying and comparing operations automatically, a service that is not provided by most object oriented languages and environments. Automatic generatio...

Charged residues in the S4 transmembrane segment of voltage-gated cation channels play a key role in opening channels in response to changes in voltage across the cell membrane. However, the molecular mechanism of channel activation is not well understood. To learn more about the role of the S4 in channel gating, we constructed chimeras in which S4 segments from several divergent potassium chan...