Phase diagrams of ternary lipid mixtures containing cholesterol have provided valuable insight into cell membrane behaviors, especially by describing regions of coexisting liquid-disordered (Ld) and liquid-ordered (Lo) phases. Fluorescence microscopy imaging of giant unilamellar vesicles has greatly assisted the determination of phase behavior in these systems. However, the requirement for opti...

Phospholipid molecules are one of the fundamental building blocks of cell membranes in living organisms. These molecules are amphipathic with two hydrophobic fatty acid chains (tails) linked to a phosphate containing hydrophilic group (head) by a glycerol molecule. A bilayer lipid membrane (BLM), which is two phospholipids thick, is a 6-10 nm thick membrane and can be used to seal a porous mate...

This paper presents a survey of the characteristics of a vision system implemented in a reconfigurable/programmable chip (FPGA). System limitations and performance have been evaluated in order to derive specifications and constraints for further vision system synthesis. The system hereby reported has a conventional architecture. It consists in a central microprocessor (CPU) and the necessary pe...

Since few years, the gastroenterologic examinations could have been realised by wireless video capsules. Although the images make it possible to analyse some diseases, the diagnosis could be improved by the use of the 3D Imaging techniques implemented in the video capsule. The work presented here is related to Cyclope, an embedded active vision system that is able to give in real time both 3D i...

Solving a system of linear equations i s a key problem in engineering and science. Matrix factorization is a key component of many methods used to solve such equations. However, the factorization process is very time consuming, so these problems have often been targeted for parallel machines rather than sequential ones. Nevertheless, commercially available supercomputers are expensive and only ...

Paclitaxel (PTX) is approved for the treatment of ovarian and breast cancer. The commercially available preparation of PTX, Cremophor EL(R) is associated with hypersensitivity reactions in spite of a suitable premedication. In general, the developed liposomal PTX formulations are troubled with low PTX encapsulation capacity (maximal content, 3 mol%) and accompanied by PTX crystallisation. The a...

Using coarse grained models of heterogeneous vesicles we demonstrate the potential for small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) to detect and distinguish between two different categories of lateral segregation: 1) unilamellar vesicles (ULV) containing a single domain and 2) the formation of several small domains or "clusters" (approximately 10 nm in radius) on a ULV. Exploiting the unique sensitiv...

The biological function of transmembrane proteins is closely related to their insertion, which has most often been studied through their lateral mobility. For >30 years, it has been thought that hardly any information on the size of the diffusing object can be extracted from such experiments. Indeed, the hydrodynamic model developed by Saffman and Delbrück predicts a weak, logarithmic dependenc...

This paper presents an object recognition approach of outdoor autonomous systems identifying the nature of the interested object when observing an image. Therefore, seeking for effective and robust recognition method, the proposed approach is performed using a novel saliency based feature detector/descriptor which is combined with an object classifier to identify the nature of objects in an ind...

Increasingly diverse types of cargo are being found to be segregated and positioned by ParA-type ATPases. Several minimalistic systems described in bacteria are self-organizing and are known to affect the transport of plasmids, protein machineries, and chromosomal loci. One well-studied model is the F plasmid partition system, SopABC. In vivo, SopA ATPase forms dynamic patterns on the nucleoid ...