Multiple system atrophy (MSA) is a fatal adult-onset neurodegenerative disorder of uncertain etiopathogenesis manifesting with autonomic failure, parkinsonism, and ataxia in any combination. The underlying neuropathology affects central autonomic, striatonigral and olivopontocerebellar pathways and it is associated with distinctive glial cytoplasmic inclusions (GCIs, Papp-Lantos bodies) that co...

Antigens associated with the surface of merozoites of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum are directly accessible to immune attack and therefore are prime vaccine candidates. We have previously shown that one of the two known merozoite surface antigens (merozoite surface antigen 2; MSA-2) exhibits considerable sequence and antigenic diversity in different isolates. The sequences of MSA-2...

Dialectal Arabic (DA) poses serious challenges for Natural Language Processing (NLP). The number and sophistication of tools and datasets in DA are very limited in comparison to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and other languages. MSA tools do not effectively model DA which makes the direct use of MSA NLP tools for handling dialects impractical. This is particularly a challenge for the creation of...

OBJECTIVE To explore the transverse relaxation rate with gradient echo R2(*) changes in patients with Parkinsonian variant of multiple system atrophy (MSA-P) with a voxel-based analysis of R2(*) map. METHODS Whole brain structural images and multi-echo T2(*) weighted image were acquired in 27 patients with probable MSA-P and 24 healthy individuals. R2(*) maps of the MSA-P were compared with t...

Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is important in functional, structural and evolutionary studies of sequence data. Much research has focussed on posing MSA as an optimization problem, and several optimization criteria have been explored. In this paper, we discuss biological and mathematical problems that arise in cost function design for the multiple sequence alignment problem. In particular, ...

The molecular organization at the aqueous dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) and methanesulfonic acid (MSA) surfaces was investigated using vibrational sum frequency generation (VSFG) spectroscopy and molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. The molecular orientation of surface DMSO and MSA is deduced based on the VSFG spectra of both C-H stretch and S-O stretch regions. The S-O stretch region was studied fo...

The MSA program is one of the few existing programs that attempts to nd optimal alignments of multiple protein or DNA sequences. The MSA program was written and distributed in 1989. It implements a branch-and-bound technique together with a variant of Dijkstra's shortest paths algorithm to prune the basic dynamic programming graph. We have made substantial improvements in the time and space usa...

The MSA program, written and distributed in 1989, is one of the few existing programs that attempts to nd optimal alignments of multiple protein or DNA sequences. The MSA program implements a branch-and-bound technique together with a variant of Dijkstra's shortest paths algorithm to prune the basic dynamic programming graph. We have made substantial improvements in the time and space usage of ...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate data of quantitative anal sphincter EMG in normal controls and to compare them with patients with multiple system atrophy (MSA). METHODS Quantitative anal sphincter EMG were performed on 100 normal controls and 11 patients with MSA to characterise EMG data in these two groups. RESULTS In the normal controls, there was a trend for increased motor unit potential (MUP) am...

Nowadays in tunisia, the arabic Tunisian Dialect (TD) has become progressively used in interviews, news and debate programs instead of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Thus, this gave birth to a new kind of language. Indeed, the majority of speech is no longer made in MSA but alternates between MSA and TD. This situation has important negative consequences on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR): si...