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ispartof: Journal Of Medical Internet Research vol:22 issue:5 status: published

ispartof: BHI ispartof: IEEE Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI'18) location:Las Vegas date:4 Mar - 7 Mar 2018 status: accepted

The carboxyl methyltransferase, which is claimed to exclusively methylate the carboxyl group of the C-terminal leucine residue of the catalytic subunit of protein phosphatase 2A (Leu(309)), was purified from porcine brain. On the basis of tryptic peptides, the cDNA encoding the human homologue was cloned. The cDNA of this gene encodes for a protein of 334 amino acids with a calculated M(r) of 38 305 and a predicted pI of 5.72. Database screening reveals the presence of this protein in diverse phyla. Sequence analysis shows that the novel methyltransferase is distinct from other known protein methyltransferases, sharing only sequence motifs supposedly involved in the binding of adenosylmethionine. The recombinant protein expressed in bacteria is soluble and the biophysical, catalytic, and immunological properties are indistinguishable from the native enzyme. The methylation of PP2A by the recombinant protein is restricted to Leu(309) of PP2A(C). No direct effects on phosphatase activity changes were observed upon methylation of the dimeric or trimeric forms of PP2A.

Low-power wearable sensing will soon allow the quantitative and continuous measurement of health parameters. In this paper we illustrate how wearable sensors can be used to track activity and energy expenditure, and measure stress. Soon such information may empower people in managing their own health, and provide the necessary data to enable a preventive approach to healthcare.

We propose a new EEG-based wireless brain computer interface (BCI) with which subjects can “mind-type” text on a computer screen. The application is based on detecting P300 event-related potentials in EEG signals recorded on the scalp of the subject. The BCI uses a simple classifier which relies on a linear feature extraction approach. The accuracy of the presented system is comparable to the state-of-the-art for on-line P300 detection, but with the additional benefit that its much simpler design supports a power-efficient on-chip implementation. ispartof: pages:339-346 ispartof: Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol:5803 pages:339-346 ispartof: 32nd Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence location:Paderborn, Germany date:15 Sep - 18 Sep 2009 status: published

Phosphotyrosyl phosphatase activator (PTPA), a 37 kDa cytosolic protein that specifically activates the phosphotyrosyl phosphatase activity of the dimeric form of PP2A, was cloned from Drosophila melanogaster and Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Sequence alignment of PTPA from yeast to human revealed highly conserved regions including the type B fragment of the putative PTPA ATP binding site. We generated PTPA deletion mutants of these conserved regions as well as point mutations within regions that were suggested to be functionally important. The recombinant proteins were expressed in E. coli and subsequently purified. Activity measurements, linked with immunological detection, revealed that most of the well-conserved regions are essential for PTPA activity. However, neither the type A fragment of the putative ATP binding site nor the cysteine-rich region, present in all but the Drosophila and yeast homologues, appeared to be essential for PTPA activity. Moreover, we observed that PTPA truncated at glycine266 behaves as a dominant negative mutant since it is inhibitory to the wild-type PTPA.

Capillarity is pivotal to many important technologies, including capillary self-alignment and self-assembly for heterogeneous microsystem integration and packaging. Lateral capillary forces ensuing from perturbed fluid menisci were the object of substantial theoretical and numerical modeling in recent years. Anyway, those studies were so far unsatisfactorily supported by direct experimental inspections. In this paper we present a comprehensive quasi-static study of lateral capillary forces arising from a constrained cylindrical fluid meniscus subjected to small lateral perturbations. We describe the novel experimental apparatus that we designed to accurately characterize such a fundamental system. We then reproduce our experimental data on lateral meniscus forces and stiffnesses by means of both a finite element and a novel analytical model. The agreement between our measurements and models, while confirming earlier reports, provides a solid foundation for the applications of lateral capillary forces to microsystem assembly. Moreover, our experimental apparatus may enable the exploitation of Gibbs' inequality to measure the advancing contact angles of liquids, and it may be used as a reference testbed for further experimental investigations on constrained fluid menisci.