This paper describes our work on real-time twoparty and multi-party VoIP (voice-over-IP) systems that can achieve high perceptual conversational quality. It focuses on the fundamental understanding of conversational quality and its trade-offs among the design of speech codecs and strategies for network control, playout scheduling, and loss concealments. We have studied three key aspects that ad...

RNAi is a powerful method for generating loss of function mutants, especially for targeting genes belonging to large gene families. We have recently shown that RNAi functions in the moss Physcomitrella patens. We obtained stable lines that show constitutive silencing of a nuclearly localized GFP:GUS fusion protein (NLS:GFP:GUS). However, lines that display silencing of the protein do not necess...

When humans talk without conventionalized arrangements, they engage in conversation--that is, a continuous and largely nonsimultaneous exchange in which speakers take turns. Turn-taking is ubiquitous in conversation and is the normal case against which alternatives, such as interruptions, are treated as violations that warrant repair. Furthermore, turn-taking involves highly coordinated timing,...

Growth Factor Independence (Gfi) transcription factors play essential roles in hematopoiesis, differentially activating and repressing transcriptional programs required for hematopoietic stem/progenitor cell (HSPC) development and lineage specification. In mammals, Gfi1a regulates hematopoietic stem cells (HSC), myeloid and lymphoid populations, while its paralog, Gfi1b, regulates HSC, megakary...

Nucleosome remodeling and deacetylation (NuRD) complexes are co-transcriptional regulators implicated in differentiation, development, and diseases. Methyl-CpG binding domain (MBD) proteins play an essential role in recruitment of NuRD complexes to their target sites in chromatin. The related SHREC complex in fission yeast drives transcriptional gene silencing in heterochromatin through coopera...

Reversible, covalent modification with small ubiquitin-related modifier proteins (SUMOs) is known to mediate nuclear import/export and activity of transcription factors. Here, the SUMO pathway is shown to operate at the plasma membrane to control ion channel function. SUMO-conjugating enzyme is seen to be resident in plasma membrane, to assemble with K2P1, and to modify K2P1 lysine 274. K2P1 ha...

Tools that allow acute and selective silencing of synaptic transmission in vivo would be invaluable for understanding the synaptic basis of specific behaviors. Here, we show that presynaptic expression of the proton pump archaerhodopsin enables robust, selective, and reversible optogenetic synaptic silencing with rapid onset and offset. Two-photon fluorescence imaging revealed that this effect ...

In Neurospora, a gene not paired with a homolog in prophase I of meiosis generates a signal that transiently silences all sequences homologous to it by a process called meiotic silencing by unpaired DNA (MSUD). Thus a deletion mutation in a heterozygous cross is formally "ascus-dominant" because its unpaired wild-type partner silences itself. We describe in detail the isolation of a mutation, S...

We study the influence of motion on the visibility of flicker distortions in naturalistic videos. A series of human subjective studies were executed to understand how motion silences the visibility of flicker distortions as a function of object motion, flicker frequency, and video quality. We found that flicker visibility is strongly reduced when the speed of coherent motion is large, and the e...