In Drosophila, male and female gametes begin development when a stem cell divides to produce a cyst precursor. Subsequently, four special divisions give rise to a cluster of 16 interconnected cystocytes that develop into a single egg or 64 sperm. We identified and characterized a gene, bag-of-marbles (bam), that disrupts cyst formation in both sexes. An apparent null mutation causes abnormal cy...

Research has shown that human beings are able to perform various associations, whether linearly separable or nonlinearly separable, with little effort. While bidirectional associative memory (BAM) models show great promise in modeling various types of associations the humans perform, they still have difficulties with solving various types of nonlinearly separable problems. The present study int...

Selection of asymmetric cell fates can involve both intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Previously we have identified the bag-of-marbles (bam) gene as an intrinsic factor for cystoblast fate in Drosophila germline cells and shown that it requires active product from the benign gonial cell neoplasm (bgcn) gene. Here we present the cloning and characterization of bgcn. The predicted Bgcn protein is ...

β-Barrel outer membrane proteins (OMPs) are found in the outer membranes of Gram-negative bacteria and are essential for nutrient import, signaling, and adhesion. A 200-kilodalton five-component complex called the β-barrel assembly machinery (BAM) complex has been implicated in the biogenesis of OMPs. We report the structure of the BAM complex from Escherichia coli, revealing that binding of Ba...

Photodynamic sensitizers are drugs activated by light of a specific wavelength and are used in the photodynamic therapy (PDT) of certain diseases. Second- and third-generation photosensitizers with improved PDT properties are now under investigation. In this issue of the British Journal of Pharmacology, Leung et al. have described the synthesis and investigation of a second-generation photosens...

In this paper, we describe our Brand Association MapTM (BAM) tool which maps and visualizes the way consumers naturally think and talk about brands across billions of unaided conversations online. BAM is a semi-supervised tool that leverages text-mining algorithms to identify key correlated phrases, terms and issues out of millions of candidate terms which were derived from billions of online c...

The temperature distributions of heated turbulent jets of air were determined using two dimensional (planar) laser induced phosphorescence. The jets were heated to specific temperature increments, ranging from 300 - 850 K and several Reynolds numbers were investigated at each temperature. The spectral ratio technique was used in conjunction with thermographic phosphors BAM and YAG:Dy, individua...

β-barrel proteins are the highly abundant in the outer membranes of Gram-negative bacteria and the mitochondria in eukaryotes. The assembly of β-barrels is mediated by two evolutionary conserved machineries; the β-barrel Assembly Machinery (BAM) in Gram-negative bacteria; and the Sorting and Assembly Machinery (SAM) in mitochondria. Although the BAM and SAM have functionally conserved roles in ...

Inverse reinforcement learning algorithms recover an unknown reward function for a Markov decision process, based on observations of user behaviors that optimize this reward function. Here we consider the complementary problem of learning the unknown transition dynamics of an MDP based on such observations. We describe the behavior-aware modeling (BAM) algorithm, which learns models of transiti...

BACKGROUND Bam earthquake was the most catastrophic natural disasters in recent years. The aim of this study was to review different aspects of crisis management during and after the catastrophic earthquake in Bam City, Iran. METHODS Data needed for this systematic review were collected through searching PubMed, EMBASE and SID databases, for the period from 2003 to 2011. Keywords included ear...