The Pathophysiological Role of CoA

The importance of coenzyme A (CoA) as a carrier of acyl residues in cell metabolism is well understood. Coenzyme A participates in more than 100 different catabolic and anabolic reactions, including those involved in the metabolism of lipids, carbohydrates, proteins, ethanol, bile acids, and xenobiotics. However, much less is known about the importance of the concentration of this cofactor in various cell compartments and the role of altered CoA concentration in various pathologies. Despite continuous research on these issues, the molecular mechanisms in the regulation of the intracellular level of CoA under pathological conditions are still not well understood. This review summarizes the current knowledge of (a) CoA subcellular concentrations; (b) the roles of CoA synthesis and degradation processes; and (c) protein modification by reversible CoA binding to proteins (CoAlation). Particular attention is paid to (a) the roles of changes in the level of CoA under pathological conditions, such as in neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, myopathies, and infectious diseases; and (b) the beneficial effect of CoA and pantethine (which like CoA is finally converted to Pan and cysteamine), used at pharmacological doses for the treatment of hyperlipidemia.     

Modeling threats

This paper discusses the prior information of choosing model parameters for constant threat from well planned, sophisticated and coordinated terrorist operations against geographically diverse targets, which causes significant loss to human life and property. A semiautomated model-based tool to detect and track terrorist activity are developed based on the analysis of prior terrorist attacks through the clues about the enabling events and the information from open sources. A pattern of transactions is a potential realization and prediction of a possible terrorist event. The HMMs is a stochastic model used to detect the monitored terrorist activity and measure local threat levels. The Bayesian network probabilistic model is well-suited for modelling the global threats and for computing/assessing the overall threat. Optimization techniques can be used to allocate counter terrorism resources and software to track multiple terrorist activities using multitarget tracking algorithms for intelligence analysis.     

Morphological query expansion and language-filtering words for improving Basque web retrieval

The experience of a user of major search engines or other web information retrieval services looking for information in the Basque language is far from satisfactory: they only return pages with exact matches but no inflections (necessary for an agglutinative language like Basque), many results in other languages (no search engine gives the option to restrict its results to Basque), etc. This paper proposes using morphological query expansion and language-filtering words in combination with the APIs of search engines as a very cost-effective solution to build appropriate web search services for Basque. The implementation details of the methodology (choosing the most appropriate language-filtering words, the number of them, the most frequent inflections for the morphological query expansion, etc.) have been specified by corpora-based studies. The improvements produced have been measured in terms of precision and recall both over corpora and real web searches. Morphological query expansion can improve recall up to 47 % and language-filtering words can raise precision from 15 % to around 90 %, although with a loss in recall of about 30–35 %. The proposed methodology has already been successfully used in the Basque search service Elebila (http://www.elebila.eu) and the web-as-corpus tool CorpEus (http://www.corpeus.org), and the approach could be applied to other morphologically rich or under-resourced languages as well.     

Identification of branched alkanes in lipids ofLeptinotarsa decemlineata say andTribolium destructor by GC-MS: A comparison of main-beam and link-scanned spectra

Branched hydrocarbons were identified in the lipids ofLeptinotarsa decemlineata Say andTribolium destructor by gas chromatography, ordinary electron impact mass spectrometry, and linked, scanned, daughterion monitoring. This methodology allowed us to revise our earlier results based only on GC-MS data confirming the existence of only monomethyl-, dimethyl-, and trimethylalkanes in the hydrocarbons ofL. decemlineata Say. The hydrocarbons fromTribolium destructor consist ofn-alkanes, 3-methylalkanes, internally branched monomethylalkanes and dimethylalkanes. Daughter-ion monitoring can be particularly important for distinguishing between incidentally overlapped GC peaks of hydrocarbons from different series. A trace, for example, of dimethylalkane coeluating withn-alkane was easily identified in GC peak of hydrocarbon mixture ofT. destructor. Link scans confirmed also molecular weights for the compounds without molecular ions in the mass spectra. Structural assignment of the compounds were verified by comparison of the experimental and calculated values of the GC retention Kovats indexes (KI).