Applications of Transition Metals in Organic Synthesis and Polymerization

1 Results Classic oxidants require rigorous control of the experimental conditions added with the problem of lack of selectivity. Catalysis by transition metals with environmentally safe oxidants provides synthetic routes to minimize pollution by giving environmental benign by-products. Fe (Ⅵ) is a powerful and a selective oxidant with Fe(Ⅲ) as a by-product, while hydrogen peroxide is clean with water as the only by-product. Separation of sodium or potassium ferrates requires tedious processes. Associat...     

Cooperative Sensor Anomaly Detection Using Global Information

Sensor networks are deployed in many application areas nowadays ranging from environment monitoring, industrial monitoring, and agriculture monitoring to military battlefield sensing. The accuracy of sensor readings is without a doubt one of the most important measures to evaluate the quality of a sensor and its network. Therefore, this work is motivated to propose approaches that can detect and repair erroneous (i.e., dirty) data caused by inevitable system problems involving various hardware and software components of sensor networks. As information about a single event of interest in a sensor network is usually reflected in multiple measurement points, the inconsistency among multiple sensor measurements serves as an indicator for data quality problem. The focus of this paper is thus to study methods that can effectively detect and identify erroneous data among inconsistent observations based on the inherent structure of various sensor measurement series from a group of sensors. Particularly, we present three models to characterize the inherent data structures among sensor measurement traces and then apply these models individually to guide the error detection of a sensor network. First, we propose a multivariate Gaussian model which explores the correlated data changes of a group of sensors. Second, we present a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) model which captures the sparse geometric relationship among sensors in a network. The PCA model is motivated by the fact that not all sensor networks have clustered sensor deployment and clear data correlation structure. Further, if the sensor data show non-linear characteristic, a traditional PCA model can not capture the data attributes properly. Therefore, we propose a third model which utilizes kernel functions to map the original data into a high dimensional feature space and then apply PCA model on the mapped linearized data. All these three models serve the purpose of capturing the underlying phenomenon of a sensor network from its global view, and then guide the error detection to discover any anomaly observations. We conducted simulations for each of the proposed models, and evaluated the performance by deriving the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves.     

Mutations in SWI/SNF chromatin remodeling complex gene ARID1B cause Coffin-Siris syndrome

We identified de novo truncating mutations in ARID1B in three individuals with Coffin-Siris syndrome (CSS) by exome sequencing. Array-based copy-number variation (CNV) analysis in 2,000 individuals with intellectual disability revealed deletions encompassing ARID1B in 3 subjects with phenotypes partially overlapping that of CSS. Taken together with published data, these results indicate that haploinsufficiency of the ARID1B gene, which encodes an epigenetic modifier of chromatin structure, is an important cause of CSS and is potentially a common cause of intellectual disability and speech impairment.     

Transport of oxygen through membranes containing haemoglobin solutions

Zusammenfassung Die Scholanderschen Befunde über den Sauerstofftransport durch Hämoglobinlösungen werden auf der Basis der irreversiblen Thermodynamik behandelt.     

Thymosin beta4 activates integrin-linked kinase and promotes cardiac cell migration, survival and cardiac repair

Heart disease is a leading cause of death in newborn children and in adults. Efforts to promote cardiac repair through the use of stem cells hold promise but typically involve isolation and introduction of progenitor cells. Here, we show that the G-actin sequestering peptide thymosin beta4 promotes myocardial and endothelial cell migration in the embryonic heart and retains this property in postnatal cardiomyocytes. Survival of embryonic and postnatal cardiomyocytes in culture was also enhanced by thymosin beta4. We found that thymosin beta4 formed a functional complex with PINCH and integrin-linked kinase (ILK), resulting in activation of the survival kinase Akt (also known as protein kinase B). After coronary artery ligation in mice, thymosin beta4 treatment resulted in upregulation of ILK and Akt activity in the heart, enhanced early myocyte survival and improved cardiac function. These findings suggest that thymosin beta4 promotes cardiomyocyte migration, survival and repair and the pathway it regulates may be a new therapeutic target in the setting of acute myocardial damage.