The middle ear plays an essential role in sound perception: it conducts air-borne sound energy from the external environment into liquid waves inside the inner ear via ossicular vibrations. However, the middle ear is often the site of infections, congenital disorders and other pathologies, which can lead to conductive hearing loss. Tympanometry is an acoustic method to evaluate middle ear funct...

Technology now at hand can integrate all kinds of digital information for individuals, groups, and organizations so their information usefully links together. iInfoTM information integration works by making connections including examples like the following:  A statistical connection between “being in a traffic jam” and “driving in downtown Trenton between 5PM and 6PM on a weekday.”  A termino...

Dimerization of transmembrane (TM) α helices of membrane receptors plays a key role in signaling. We show that molecular dynamics simulations yield models of integrin TM helix heterodimers, which agree well with available NMR structures. We use a multiscale simulation approach, combining coarse-grained and subsequent atomistic simulation, to model the dimerization of wild-type (WT) and mutated ...

We present a distributed transactional memory (TM) scheduler called Bi-interval that optimizes the execution order of transactional operations to minimize conflicts. Bi-interval categorizes concurrent requests for a shared object into read and write intervals to maximize the parallelism of reading transactions. This allows an object to be simultaneously sent to nodes of reading transactions (in...

Multicore computer architectures are now the standard for desktop computers, high-end servers and personal laptops. Due to the multicore shift in computer architecture, software engineers must write multithreaded programs to harness the resources of these parallel machines. Unfortunately, today’s parallel programming techniques are difficult to reason about, highly error-prone and challenging t...

The intestinal microbiota features intricate metabolic interactions involving the breakdown and reuse of host- and diet-derived nutrients. The competition for these resources can limit pathogen growth. Nevertheless, some enteropathogenic bacteria can invade this niche through mechanisms that remain largely unclear. Using a mouse model for Salmonella diarrhea and a transposon mutant screen, we d...

Experimental structure determination remains difficult for G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). We propose a new hybrid protocol to construct GPCR structure models that integrates experimental mutagenesis data with ab initio transmembrane (TM) helix assembly simulations. The method was tested on 24 known GPCRs where the ab initio TM-helix assembly procedure constructed the correct fold for 20 c...

Infertility affects one in seven couples and ascending bacterial infections of the male genitourinary tract by Escherichia coli are an important cause of male factor infertility. Thus understanding mechanisms by which immunocompetent cells such as testicular macrophages (TM) respond to infection and how bacterial pathogens manipulate defense pathways is of importance. Whole genome expression pr...

POAG (Primary Open Angle Glaucoma) is a major cause of blindness. This normally occurs when the IOP (intraocular pressure) increases. High pressure can be caused by an imbalance in the production and drainage of fluid (aqueous humour, AH) in the eye. AH is continually being produced but sometimes cannot be drained because of improperly functioning drainage channels (trabecular meshwork, TM). A ...