Shock tubes simulate blast waves to study their effects in air under laboratory conditions; however, few experimental models exist for simulating underwater blast waves that are needed for facilitating experiments in underwater blast transmission, determining injury thresholds in marine animals, validating numerical models, and exploring mitigation strategies for explosive well removals. This m...

This service integrates primer designing code from the popular Primer3 1 software with a specificity check that uses a custom BLAST search. Primer-BLAST eliminates the need to design primers at another site and then perform a search with those primers using the main NCBI BLAST service to check specificity. Moreover, Primer-BLAST can design primers that amplify only a particular splice variant o...

R3D-BLAST is a BLAST-like search tool that allows the user to quickly and accurately search against the PDB for RNA structures sharing similar substructures with a specified query RNA structure. The basic idea behind R3D-BLAST is that all the RNA 3D structures deposited in the PDB are first encoded as 1D structural sequences using a structural alphabet of 23 distinct nucleotide conformations, a...

The BLAST programs are widely used tools for searching protein and DNA databases for sequence similarities. For protein comparisons, a variety of definitional, algorithmic and statistical refinements described here permits the execution time of the BLAST programs to be decreased substantially while enhancing their sensitivity to weak similarities. A new criterion for triggering the extension of...

Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) is one of the most heavily used sequence analysis tools available in the public domain. There is now a wide choice of BLAST algorithms that can be used to search many different sequence databases via the BLAST web pages (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/). All the algorithm-database combinations can be executed with default parameters or with customize...

We present an add-on to BLAST and PSI-BLAST programs to reorder their hits using pairwise statistical significance. Using position-specific substitution matrices to estimate pairwise statistical significance has been recently shown to give promising results in terms of retrieval accuracy, which motivates its use to refine PSI-BLAST results, since PSI-BLAST also constructs a position-specific su...

Predicting non-ideal airblast loads is presently a complex computational art requiring many hours of high-performance computing to evaluate a single blast scenario. The goal of this research is to develop a method for predicting blast loads in a non-ideal environment in real time. The proposed method is incorporated in a fast-running model for rapid assessment of blast loads in complex configur...

Adenosine deaminase (ADA) and ecto-5'-nucleotidase (5'-N) activities were examined in peripheral leukocytes from patients with leukemias, including nine patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) in blast crisis. Four of none cases of CML in blast crisis were myeloid and the remaining lymphoid morphologically. The diagnosis of CML in lymphoid blast crisis was further contributed by the measur...

The modelling of consequences to built infrastructure when subject to blast loading is well developed; however, there is considerable uncertainty and variability with explosive loading and system response; which provides many challenges for collateral damage estimation. In this paper, structural facades are assessed – with a focus on glazing – as this is a structural and load-capacity system th...

Blast-associated shock wave-induced traumatic brain injury (bTBI) remains a persistent risk for armed forces worldwide, yet its detailed pathophysiology remains to be fully investigated. In this study, we have designed and characterized a laboratory-scale shock tube to develop a rodent model of bTBI. Our blast tube, driven by a mixture of oxygen and acetylene, effectively generates blast overpr...