Tetramers of alpha- and beta-spectrin heterodimers, linked by intermediary proteins to transmembrane proteins, stabilize the red blood cell cytoskeleton. Deficiencies of either alpha- or beta-spectrin can result in severe hereditary spherocytosis (HS) or hereditary elliptocytosis (HE) in mice and humans. Four mouse mutations, sph, sph(Dem), sph(2BC), and sph(J), affect the erythroid alpha-spect...

Tetramers of αand β-spectrin heterodimers, linked via intermediary proteins to transmembrane proteins, stabilize the red blood cell cytoskeleton. Deficiencies of either αor β-spectrin can result in severe hereditary spherocytosis or elliptocytosis (HS/HE) in mice and humans. Four mouse mutations, sph, sph, sph, and sph, affect the erythroid αspectrin gene, Spna1, on Chromosome 1 and cause sever...

A new Genetic Algorithm (GA) for the Steiner Problem in a Graph (SPG) is presented. The algorithm is based on a bit-string encoding. A bitstring specifies selected Steiner vertices and the corresponding Steiner tree is computed using the Distance Network Heuristic. This scheme ensures that every bitstring correspond to a valid Steiner tree and thus eliminate the need for penalty terms in the co...

Thrombosis is a life-threatening complication of hemolytic anemia in humans. Cardiac thrombi are present in all adult a-spectrin–deficient (sph/sph) mice with severe hereditary spherocytosis, providing a model for events preceding thrombosis. The current study evaluated (1) the timing of thrombosis initiation and (2) the effect of postnatal transplantation of normal cells on life span and throm...

Thrombosis is a life-threatening complication of hemolytic anemia in humans. Cardiac thrombi are present in all adult alpha-spectrin-deficient (sph/sph) mice with severe hereditary spherocytosis, providing a model for events preceding thrombosis. The current study evaluated (1) the timing of thrombosis initiation and (2) the effect of postnatal transplantation of normal cells on life span and t...

We present a brief introduction to Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), where we focus on an approach to treat the physical viscosity. Additionally we describe in detail the basic principles of our parallel implementation of the SPH method. In the second part we summarise some results of test simulations performed to achieve general features of the method, and we end discussing some astrophys...

OBJECTIVES Psychological studies have identified that different coping strategies affect outcome in bipolar disorder (BD), with the possibility of preventing mania by effective coping with prodromes. This study seeks to examine coping mechanisms using a recently developed scale to clarify the relationship of coping styles to clinical and demographic characteristics, and to identify coping diffe...

Spheroidin (SPH) is the most highly expressed gene of the entomopoxvirus isolated from Amsacta moorei (AmEPV). The level of expression of poxvirus genes is believed to be governed in large part by the promoter. Poxvirus promoters generally consist of approximately 40 bp which frequently terminate at the 3' end with a translation initiating TAAATG sequence. We have examined the requirements for ...