The decarboxylation of racemic threo and erythro-3,4-dihydroxyphenylserine (DOPS), norepinephrine (NE) precursors, has been reported in mammalian peripheral and central nervous system tissues in vivo (1-5). It has also been demonstrated both in vitro and in vivo that the rate of racemic erythro-DOPS decarboxylation is more rapid than that of racemic threo-DOPS (6). A recent report on the action...

INTRODUCTION Direct Observation of Procedural Skills (DOPS) is a way of evaluating procedural skills through observation in the workplace. The purpose of this study was to assess the role of DOPS in teaching and assessment of postgraduate students and to know the effect of repeated DOPS on improvement of the skills and confidence of the students. METHODS In both phases, significant difference...

The recognition of phosphatidylserine on the erythrocyte membrane mediates erythrophagocytosis by resident spleen macrophages. The application of phosphatidylserine to a gene vector may be a novel approach for splenic drug delivery. Therefore, we chose 1,2-dioleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phospho-L-serin (DOPS) as an analogue of phosphatidylserine for splenic gene delivery of plasmid DNA (pDNA). In the pr...

OBJECTIVE Sufficient teaching and assessing clinical skills in the undergraduate setting becomes more and more important. In a surgical skills-lab course at the Medical University of Innsbruck fourth year students were teached with DOPS (direct observation of procedural skills). We analyzed whether DOPS worked or not in this setting, which performance levels could be reached compared to tutor t...

In this paper, we use the exact model (or dynamical system approach) to describe the standard evolutionary algorithm (EA) as a discrete dynamical system for dynamic optimization problems (DOPs). Based on this dynamical system model, we analyse the properties of the XOR DOP Generator, which has been widely used by researchers to create DOPs from any binary encoded problem. DOPs generated by this...

Ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms have proved to be able to adapt to dynamic optimization problems (DOPs) when stagnation behaviour is addressed. Usually, permutation-encoded DOPs, e.g., dynamic travelling salesman problems, are addressed using ACO algorithms whereas binary-encoded DOPs, e.g., dynamic knapsack problems, are tackled by evolutionary algorithms (EAs). This is because of the...

Evolutionary dynamic optimisation (EDO), or the study of applying evolutionary algorithms to dynamic optimisation problems (DOPs) is the focus of this thesis. Based on two comprehensive literature reviews on existing academic EDO research and realworld DOPs, this thesis for the first time identifies some important gaps in current academic research where some common types of problems and problem...

Direct observation of procedural skills (DOPS) is a new workplace assessment tool. The aim of this narrative review of literature is to summarize the available evidence about the validity, reliability, feasibility, acceptability and educational impact of DOPS. A PubMed database and Google search of the literature on DOPS published from January 2000 to January 2012 was conducted which yielded 30...

Using x-ray diffraction and NMR spectroscopy, we present structural and material properties of phosphatidylserine (PS) bilayers that may account for the well documented implications of PS headgroups in cell activity. At 30 degrees C, the 18-carbon monounsaturated DOPS in the fluid state has a cross-sectional area of 65.3 A(2) which is remarkably smaller than the area 72.5 A(2) of the DOPC analo...

Brain tumors, either primary (e.g., glioblastoma multiforme) or secondary (metastatic), remain among the most intractable and fatal of all cancers. We have shown that nanovesicles consisting of Saposin C (SapC) and dioleylphosphatidylserine (DOPS) are able to effectively target and kill cancer cells both in vitro and in vivo. These actions are a consequence of the affinity of SapC-DOPS for phos...