BACKGROUND DNA-based methods are useful for enhancing immunohematology typings. Ready-to-use Conformité Européenne (CE)-marked test kits based on polymerase chain reaction with sequence-specific priming (PCR-SSP) have been developed, which enable the examination of weak, unexpected, or unclear serologic findings. DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION: Primers were designed according to established mutatio...

The crop species Brassica rapa L. has significant economic importance around the world. However, the global distribution and complex evolutionary history of the species has made investigating its genetic population structure difficult. Crop domestication and improvement has resulted in extreme phenotypic diversity and subspecies that are used for oilseed, food for human consumption, and fodder ...

Speakers communicate pragmatic and discourse meaning through the prosodic form assigned to an utterance, and listeners must attend to the acoustic cues to prosodic form to fully recover the speaker’s intended meaning. While much of the research on prosody examines supra-segmental cues such as F0 and temporal patterns, prosody is also known to affect the phonetic properties of segments as well. ...

Vowel onset point (VOP) refers to the starting event of a vowel, that may be reflected in different aspects of the speech signal. The major issue in VOP detection using existing methods is the confusion among the vowels and other categories of sounds preceding them. This work explores the usefulness of sonority information to reduce this confusion and improve VOP detection. Vowels are the most ...

Previous research has shown that speakers do not produce all non-native phonotactic sequences with equal accuracy. Several reasons for these accuracy differences have been proposed, including markedness, analogical extension from permitted sequences, and language-independent phonetic factors. In this study, evidence from the production of unattested obstruent-initial onset clusters by English a...

ABSRACT: Phoneme inventories of the world’s languages as depicted by the UPSID database (Maddieson and Precoda 1990) are analyzed using multivariate statistical techniques of principal components analysis and k-means and hierarchical clustering. The first two meaningful principal components, representing dimensions that account for the most variance in sound systems but are not caused by differ...

MALDI-TOF-MS of microorganisms, which identifies microbes based on masses of high abundant low molecular weight proteins, is rapidly advancing to become another standard method in clinical routine laboratory diagnostics. Allelic isoforms of these proteins result in varying masses of detectable biomarker ions. These variations give rise to a novel typing method for microorganisms named mass spec...