Search

Cell-free protein expression systems are here combined with 3D-printed structures to study the challenges and opportunities as biofabrication enters the spaces of architecture and design. Harnessing large-scale additive manufacturing of biological materials, we examined the addition of cell-free protein expression systems (“TXTL” i.e., biological transcription-translation machinery without the use of living cells) to printed structures. This allowed us to consider programmable, living-like, responsive systems for product design and indoor architectural applications. This emergent, pluripotent technology offers exciting potential in support of health, resource optimization, and reduction of energy use in the built environment, setting a new path to interactivity with mechanical, optical, and (bio) chemical properties throughout structures. We propose a roadmap towards creating healthier, functional and more durable systems by deploying a multiscale platform containing biologically-active components encapsulated within biopolymer lattices operating at three design scales: (i) supporting cell-free protein expression in a biopolymer matrix (microscale), (ii) varying material properties of porosity and strength within two-dimensional lattices to support biological and structural functions (mesoscale), and (iii) obtaining folded indoor surfaces that are structurally sound at the meter scale and biologically active (we label that regime macroscale). We embedded commercially available cell-free protein expression systems within silk fibroin and sodium alginate biopolymer matrices and used green fluorescent protein as the reporter to confirm their compatibility. We demonstrate mechanical attachment of freeze-dried bioactive pellets into printed foldable fibrous biopolymer lattices showing the first steps towards modular multiscale fabrication of large structures with biologically active zones. Our results discuss challenges to experimental setup affecting expression levels and show the potential of robust cell-free protein-expressing biosites within custom-printed structures at scales relevant to everyday consumer products and human habitats.

© 2018, Grupo de Investigacion en Atencion Farmaceutica. All rights reserved. The peer-review crisis is posing a risk to the scholarly peer-reviewed journal system. Journals have to ask many potential peer reviewers to obtain a minimum acceptable number of peers accepting reviewing a manuscript. Several solutions have been suggested to overcome this shortage. From reimbursing for the job, to eliminating pre-publication reviews, one cannot predict which is more dangerous for the future of scholarly publishing. And, why not acknowledging their contribution to the final version of the article published? PubMed created two categories of contributors: authors [AU] and collaborators [IR]. Why not a third category for the peer-reviewer?.

The peer-review crisis is posing a risk to the scholarly peer-reviewed journal system. Journals have to ask many potential peer reviewers to obtain a minimum acceptable number of peers accepting reviewing a manuscript. Several solutions have been suggested to overcome this shortage. From reimbursing for the job, to eliminating pre-publication reviews, one cannot predict which is more dangerous for the future of scholarly publishing. And, why not acknowledging their contribution to the final version of the article published? PubMed created two categories of contributors: authors [AU] and collaborators [IR]. Why not a third category for the peer-reviewer? published

Purpose: To implement a web-based PRS for prospective registry, peer review, quality assurance and clinical outcome studies in proton therapy. The system is designed to store not only treatment plans but also information on planning strategies employed to get an optimal plan for each patient. There [for full text, please go to the a.m. URL], PTCOG 48; Meeting of the Particle Therapy Co-Operative Group

Purpose: To implement an automated system to streamline clinical workflow at a proton therapy center. Many routine clinical operations that have direct impact on patient care are often time consuming and resource intensive. One example is the treatment planning review process, which requires rigorous[for full text, please go to the a.m. URL], PTCOG 48; Meeting of the Particle Therapy Co-Operative Group

Introduction: Since January of 2007, twenty-six patients with tumors of the nasal cavity and paranasal sinuses with skull base extension have completed treatment with proton therapy at UFPTI. The disease characteristics, treatment planning and delivery techniques, and initial follow-up results are presented.[for full text, please go to the a.m. URL], PTCOG 48; Meeting of the Particle Therapy Co-Operative Group

TEP1 is a mammalian telomerase-associated protein with similarity to the Tetrahymena telomerase protein p80. Like p80, TEP1 is associated with telomerase activity and the telomerase reverse transcriptase, and it specifically interacts with the telomerase RNA. To determine the role of mTep1 in telomerase function in vivo, we generated mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells and mice lacking mTep1. The mTep1-deficient (mTep1−/−) mice were viable and were bred for seven successive generations with no obvious phenotypic abnormalities. All murine tissues from mTep1−/− mice possessed a level of telomerase activity comparable to that in wild-type mice. In addition, analysis of several tissues that normally lack telomerase activity revealed no reactivation of telomerase activity in mTep1−/− mice. Telomere length, even in later generations of mTep1−/− mice, was equivalent to that in wild-type animals. ES cells deficient in mTep1 also showed no detectable alteration in telomerase activity or telomere length with increased passage in culture. Thus, mTep1 appears to be completely dispensable for telomerase function in vivo. Recently, TEP1 has been identified within a second ribonucleoprotein (RNP) complex, the vault particle. TEP1 can also specifically bind to a small RNA, vRNA, which is associated with the vault particle and is unrelated in sequence to mammalian telomerase RNA. These results reveal that TEP1 is an RNA binding protein that is not restricted to the telomerase complex and that TEP1 plays a redundant role in the assembly or localization of the telomerase RNP in vivo.

Collaborative filtering is an effective recommendation approach in which the preference of a user on an item is predicted based on the preferences of other users with similar interests. A big challenge in using collaborative filtering methods is the data sparsity problem which often arises because each user typically only rates very few items and hence the rating matrix is extremely sparse. In this paper, we address this problem by considering multiple collaborative filtering tasks in different domains simultaneously and exploiting the relationships between domains. We refer to it as a multi-domain collaborative filtering (MCF) problem. To solve the MCF problem, we propose a probabilistic framework which uses probabilistic matrix factorization to model the rating problem in each domain and allows the knowledge to be adaptively transferred across different domains by automatically learning the correlation between domains. We also introduce the link function for different domains to correct their biases. Experiments conducted on several real-world applications demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods when compared with some representative methods., Appears in Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI2010)

This report describes the game structures implemented in the TOCSIN project to find self-enforcing and stable international environmental agreements. It presents the first results obtained with the use of these models. The document starts with a review of the different approaches that have been proposed in the literature to represent in a game theoretic framework the concept of self-enforcing or stable international environmental agreement.

Despite the advent of tyrosine kinase inhibitors, a proportion of chronic myeloid leukemia patients in chronic phase fails to respond to Imatinib or to second generation inhibitors and progress to blast crisis. Limited improvements in the understanding of the molecular mechanisms responsible for chronic myeloid leukemia transformation from chronic phase to the aggressive blast crisis were achieved until now. We present here a massive parallel sequencing analysis of 10 blast crisis samples and of the corresponding autologous chronic phase controls which reveals, for the first time, recurrent mutations affecting the ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme E2A gene (UBE2A, formerly RAD6A). Additional analyses on a cohort of 24 blast crisis, 41 chronic phase as well as 40 acute myeloid leukemia and 38 atypical chronic myeloid leukemia patients at onset confirmed that UBE2A mutations are specifically acquired during chronic myeloid leukemia progression with a frequency of 16.7% in advanced phases. In vitro studies show that the mutations here described cause a decrease in UBE2A activity, leading to an impairment of myeloid differentiation in chronic myeloid leukemia cells.

The paper considers a general approach for linear parameter varying (LPV) control. The approach is based on polytopic representation of the LPV system. First, a grid point based control design is applied for a set of linearized models of the LPV system. The design is based on linear time invariant (LTI) techniques. Such control design allows a larger flexibility in the controller structure than the conventional parallel distributed compensation (PDC) based polytopic control. The LPV controller is obtained by linear interpolation between the LTI controllers. The paper proposes linear matrix inequality (LMI) based convex optimization for robustness analysis of the resulting controller. The approach requires the plant and the controller to be defined by a common polytopic structure. It is proposed to obtain this common structure via unified TP model transformation. A simple numerical example shows the efficiency of the proposed control design approach.

The puzzle assembly problem has many application areas such as restoration and reconstruction of archeological findings, repairing of broken objects, solving jigsaw type puzzles, molecular docking problem, etc. The puzzle pieces usually include not only geometrical shape information but also visual information such as texture, color, and continuity of lines. This paper presents a new approach to the puzzle assembly problem that is based on using textural features and geometrical constraints. The texture of a band outside the border of pieces is predicted by inpainting and texture synthesis methods. Feature values are derived from these original and predicted images of pieces. An affinity measure of corresponding pieces is defined and alignment of the puzzle pieces is carried out using an FFT based image registration technique. The optimization of total affinity gives the best assembly of puzzle. Experimental results are presented on real and artificial data sets.

Baiou and Balinski (Math. Oper. Res., 27 (2002) 485) studied schedule matching where one determines the partnerships that form and how much time they spend together, under the assumption that each agent has a ranking on all potential partners. Here we study schedule matching under more general preferences that extend the substitutable preferences in Roth (Econometrica 52 (1984) 47) by an extension of the revealed preference approach in Alkan (Econom. Theory 19 (2002) 737). We give a generalization of the GaleShapley algorithm and show that some familiar properties of ordinary stable matchings continue to hold. Our main result is that, when preferences satisfy an additional property called size monotonicity, stable matchings are a lattice under the joint preferences of all agents on each side and have other interesting structural properties.