Background: Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is the second most common lethal autosomal recessive disease. It is a neuromuscular disorder caused by degenerative of lower motor neurons and occasionally bulbar neurons leading to progressive limb paralysis and muscular atrophy. The SMN1 gene is recognized as a SMA causing gene while NAIP has been characterized as a modifying factor for the clinical ...

In this paper the design of a biped robot actuated with Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) springs with minimum degrees of freedom is presented. SMA springs are a class of smart materials that are known for their high power to mass and volume ratios. It was shown that utilizing spring type of SMAs have many advantages as large deformation, smooth motion, silent and clean movement compared to ordinary typ...

Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is a genetic disorder which affect nervous system and is characterized with progressive distal motor neuron weakness. The survival motor neuron (SMN) protein level reduces in patients with SMA. Two different genes code survival motor neuron protein in human genome. Skeletal and intercostal muscles denervation lead to weakness, hypotony, hyporeflexia, respiratory fa...

A synthesis route is presented for the subsequent intercalation, exfoliation and surface modification of kaolinite (Kln) by an imidization reaction of high-molecular weight poly(styrene-co-maleic anhydride) or SMA in the presence of ammonium hydroxide. In a first step, the intercalation of ammonolyzed SMA by guest displacement of intercalated dimethylsulfoxide has been proven. In a second step,...

Studies of urban ecological systems can be greatly enhanced by combining ecosystem modelling and remote sensing which often requires establishing statistical relationships between field and remote sensing data. At the Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAPLTER) site in the southwestern USA, we estimated vegetation abundance from Landsat ETM + acquired at three dates by compu...

Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is a common autosomal recessive neuromuscular disorder which presents with various clinical phenotypes ranging from severe to very mild. All forms are caused by the homozygous absence of the survival motor neuron ( SMN1 ) gene. SMN1 and a nearly identical copy ( SMN2 ) are located in a duplicated region at 5q13 and encode identical proteins. The genetic basis for t...

Three types of stearyl poly(ethylene oxide) (SPEO) with Mn of 2,300, 6,000 and 12,000 were synthesized; accordingly, three types of amphiphilic coupling-polymer SPEO-MDI-SPEO (MSPEO) were prepared by the reactions with 4,4'-methylene diphenyl diisocyanate (MDI). As the surface-modifying additives (SMA), MSPEOs were coated onto the outer wall of the medical guiding catheters. Due to the lack of ...

Fatigue cracking is an essential problem of asphalt concrete that contributes to pavement damage. Although stone matrix asphalt (SMA) has significantly provided resistance to rutting failure, its resistance to fatigue failure is yet to be fully addressed. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of crumb rubber modifier (CRM) on stiffness and fatigue properties of SMA mixtures at optimum...

Linear spectral mixture analysis (SMA) is commonly used to infer fractional vegetation cover (FVC), especially for pixel dichotomy models. However, several sources of uncertainty including normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) saturation and selection of endmembers inhibit the effectiveness of SMA for the estimation of FVC. In this study, Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (M...

Single units were recorded from the primary motor (MI) and supplementary motor (SMA) areas of Rhesus monkeys performing one-arm (unimanual) and two-arm (bimanual) proximal reaching tasks. During execution of the bimanual movements, the task related activity of about one-half the neurons in each area (MI: 129/232, SMA: 107/206) differed from the activity during similar displacements of one arm w...