BACKGROUND The fleece of cashmere goats contains two distinct populations of fibers, a short and fine non-medullated insulating cashmere fiber and a long and coarse medullated guard hair. The former is produced by secondary follicles (SFs) and the later by primary follicles (PFs). Evidence suggests that the induction of PFs and SFs may require different signaling pathways. The regulation of BMP...

INTRODUCTION Enrolling cancer patients in phase I clinical trials (P1s) requires that they fulfill specific criteria. Between the time they sign the consent form and the 1st administration of the experimental drug, some patients may be excluded and considered as screen failures (SFs). Our objective was to assess SF patients profiles and the reasons and risk factors for SFs. MATERIALS AND METH...

Sequential forward selection (SFS) is one of the most widely used feature selection procedures. It starts with an empty set and adds one feature at each step. The estimate of the quality of the candidate subsets usually depends on the training/testing split of the data. Therefore different sequences of features may be returned from repeated runs of SFS. A substantial discrepancy between such se...

The site frequency spectrum (SFS) has long been used to study demographic history and natural selection. Here, we extend this summary by examining the SFS conditional on the alleles found at the same site in other species. We refer to this extension as the "phylogenetically-conditioned SFS" or cSFS. Using recent large-sample data from the Exome Aggregation Consortium (ExAC), combined with prima...

Loss of p53-mediated suppression by its dominant-negative counterpart is commonly observed in human cancers, and activating p73 is a therapeutic strategy in p53-mutated oncological patients. In synovial fibroblasts (SFs) from rheumatoid arthritis (RA), mutant p53 can lead to the transformation-like features with resistance to the apoptosis induction. We examined whether intra-articular (i.a.) a...

AIM We compare performance of noninvasive skin fluorescence spectroscopy (SFS), fasting plasma glucose (FPG), and hemoglobin A1c (A1C) for detection of abnormal glucose tolerance (AGT). METHODS The NSEEDS trial evaluated SFS, FPG, and A1C in an at-risk population of 479 previously undiagnosed subjects from nine US centers, each of whom received a 75 g, 2 h oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT). ...

The objective of this project is the study of Shape from Shading (SfS) problem in a variational framework. Among the other shape recovery methods, SfS is employed to obtain three-dimensional shape using spatial variations of brightness in an image. In this study, SfS problem will be addressed as an energy minimization problem. A constraint which establishes a connection between intensity gradie...

Synovial fibroblasts (SFs) have become a major target for ex vivo gene transfer in rheumatoid arthritis (RA), but efficient transduction of RA-SFs still is a major problem. The low proliferation rate and heterogeneity of RA-SFs, together with their lack of highly specific surface receptors, have hampered a more extensive application of this technique. Improving transduction protocols with conve...

The ability of the site-frequency spectrum (SFS) to reflect the particularities of gene genealogies exhibiting multiple mergers of ancestral lines as opposed to those obtained in the presence of population growth is our focus. An excess of singletons is a well-known characteristic of both population growth and multiple mergers. Other aspects of the SFS, in particular, the weight of the right ta...

In this work, we describe an original method of solving the shape from shading (SFS) problem, which relies on the marriage of two simple ideas. On the one hand, we propose to modelize the scene by a parametric surface, namely a 3D-spline. The key advantage is that boundary conditions are no longer required to render the problem well-posed. On the other hand, we introduce the concept of ‘‘useful...