Desensitization of N-formyl peptide chemoattractant receptors (FPR) in human neutrophils is thought to be achieved by lateral segregation of receptors and G proteins within the plane of the plasma membrane resulting in an interruption of the signalling cascade. Direct coupling of FPR to membrane skeletal actin appears to be the basis of this process; however, the molecular mechanism is unknown....

It is commonly held that skeletons are sensitive to noise. It is also believed that smoothing, typically invoked to combat noise, obeys the causality principle that no new structures are created via smoothing. We demonstrate that both views are incorrect. We characterize how smooth points of the skeleton evolve under a general boundary evolution, with the corollary that, when the boundary is sm...

Development of the facial skeleton depends on interactions between intrinsic factors in the skeletal precursors and extrinsic signals in the facial environment. Hox genes have been proposed to act cell-intrinsically in skeletogenic cranial neural crest cells (CNC) for skeletal pattern. However, Hox genes are also expressed in other facial tissues, such as the ectoderm and endoderm, suggesting t...

A biokinetic model of the systemic distribution of americium in the beagle dog is presented. The model is based on a previous biokinetic model of plutonium. The data sets used for the development of the model are the measurements of excreted activity (urine and feces) and organ burdens (skeleton, liver and other soft tissues). In developing the model, the part of the plutonium model representin...

SKiPPER is a Skeleton-based Parallel Programming EnviRonment being developed since 1996 and running at LASMEA Laboratory, the Blaise-Pascal University, France. The main goal of the project was to demonstrate the applicability of skeleton-based parallel programming techniques to the fast prototyping of reactive vision applications. This paper deals with the special features embedded in the lates...