bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Industrial production of clotting factors: Challenges of expression, and choice of host cells
Authors: Kumar Sampath R. 
Published: June 2015

AbstractThe development of recombinant forms of blood coagulation factors as safer alternatives to plasma derived factors marked a major advance in the treatment of common coagulation disorders. These are complex proteins, mostly enzymes or co‐enzymes, involving multiple post‐translational modifications, and therefore are difficult to express. This article reviews the nature of the expression challenges for the industrial production of these factors, vis‐à‐vis the translational and post‐translational bottlenecks, as well as the choice of host cell lines for high‐fidelity production. For achieving high productivities of vitamin K dependent proteins, which include factors II (prothrombin), VII, IX and X, and protein C, host cell limitation of γ‐glutamyl carboxylation is a major bottleneck. Despite progress in addressing this, involvement of yet unidentified protein(s) impedes a complete cell engineering solution. Human factor VIII expresses at very low levels due to limitations at several steps in the protein secretion pathway. Protein and cell engineering, vector improvement and alternate host cells promise improvement in the productivity. Production of Von Willebrand factor is constrained by its large size, complex structure, and the need for extensive glycosylation and disulfide‐bonded oligomerization. All the licensed therapeutic factors are produced in CHO, BHK or HEK293 cells. While HEK293 is a recent adoption, BHK cells appear to be disfavored.
The Development of Stirring Technology from an Empirical Art to Science
Authors: Kraume Matthias 
Published: June 2015

AbstractUntil the beginning of the 20th century, stirring was mostly regarded only marginally in most production processes. A century later, many aspects of stirring technology have been largely understood scientifically. This paper presents ground‐breaking publications which have contributed significantly to the impressive gains in scientific knowledge. Here, the focus is on work to determine the power consumption as well as to characterize liquid mixing, suspension of solids and dispersion of liquids and gases.
The expression of tubb2b undergoes a developmental transition in murine cortical neurons
Authors: Breuss Martin , Morandell Jasmin , Nimpf Simon , Gstrein Thomas , Lauwers Mattias , Hochstoeger Tobias , Braun Andreas , Chan Kelvin , Sánchez Guajardo Edmundo R. , Zhang Lijuan , Suplata Marek , Heinze Katrin G. , Elsayad Kareem , Keays David A. 
Published: June 2015

ABSTRACTThe development of the mammalian brain requires the generation, migration, and differentiation of neurons, cellular processes that are dependent on a dynamic microtubule cytoskeleton. Mutations in tubulin genes, which encode for the structural subunits of microtubules, cause detrimental neurological disorders known as the tubulinopathies. The disease spectra associated with different tubulin genes are overlapping but distinct, an observation believed to reflect functional specification of this multigene family. Perturbation of the β‐tubulin TUBB2B is known to cause polymicrogyria, pachygyria, microcephaly, and axon guidance defects. Here we provide a detailed analysis of the expression pattern of its murine homolog Tubb2b. The generation and characterization of BAC‐transgenic eGFP reporter mouse lines has revealed that it is highly expressed in progenitors and postmitotic neurons during cortical development. This contrasts with the 8‐week‐old cortex, in which Tubb2b expression is restricted to macroglia, and expression is almost completely absent in mature neurons. This developmental transition in neurons is mirrored in the adult hippocampus and the cerebellum but is not a universal feature of Tubb2b; its expression persists in a population of postmitotic neurons in the 8‐week‐old retina. We propose that the dynamic spatial and temporal expression of Tubb2b reflects specific functional requirements of the microtubule cytoskeleton. J. Comp. Neurol. 523:2161–2186, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Detection of Significant Aprotic Solvent Effects on the Conformational Distribution of Methyl 4‐Nitrophenyl Sulfoxide: From Gas‐Phase Rotational to Liquid‐Crystal NMR Spectroscopy
Authors: Celebre Giorgio , De Luca Giuseppina , Di Pietro Maria Enrica , Giuliano Barbara Michela , Melandri Sonia , Cinacchi Giorgio 
Published: June 2015

AbstractThe conformational equilibrium of methyl 4‐nitrophenyl sulfoxide (MNPSO) was experimentally investigated in the gas phase by using microwave spectroscopy and in isotropic and nematic liquid‐crystal solutions, in which the solvents are nonaqueous and aprotic, by using NMR spectroscopy; moreover, it was theoretically studied in vacuo and in solution at different levels of theory. The overall set of results indicates a significant dependence of the solute conformational distribution on the solvent dielectric permittivity constant: when dissolved in low‐polarity media, the most stable conformation of MNPSO proved to be strongly twisted with respect to that in more polar solvents, in which the conformational distribution maximum essentially coincides with that obtained in the gas phase. We discuss a possible explanation of this behavior, which rests on electrostatic solute–solvent interactions and is supported by calculations of the solute electric dipole moment as a function of the torsional angle. This function shows that the least polar conformation of MNPSO is located at a twist angle close to that of the conformational distribution maximum found in less‐polar solvents. This fact, associated with a relatively flat torsional potential, can justify the stabilization of the twisted conformation by the less‐polar solvents.
A Facile and One‐Step Synthesis of Visible‐Light‐Responsive Silver and Mesoporous Carbon Comodified Carbon–Zinc Oxide Composites
Authors: Wang Fangxiao , Liang Lin , Shi Lei , Liu Mengshuai , Sun Jianmin 
Published: June 2015

AbstractSilver and mesoporous carbon (mC) comodified CZnO composites (Ag/mC/CZnO) were fabricated by a facile, one‐step process directly from C, Ag, and Zn precursors in CO2‐expanded ethanol, which provided a unique medium and did not require additional precipitant and mesoscaled organic templates. When the composite photocatalyst was applied to the degradation of rhodamine B and phenol, Ag/mC/CZnO exhibited excellent photocatalytic activity in visible light. The remarkably improved catalytic activity of the composites was attributed to the following synergistic effects. The modification of mC enriched the adsorption of pollutants on the photocatalyst. Additionally, the mesopores of carbon provided a spacious path for the separation of photogenerated electrons and holes. In addition to mC, carbon was also doped into ZnO, which narrowed the ZnO band gap. The modification of silver strengthened the absorbance of the visible region and improved the electron‐trapping ability.
Health Consequences of Rural‐to‐Urban Migration: Evidence from Panel Data in China
Authors: Song Yang , Sun Wenkai 
Published: June 2015

AbstractThis paper provides new empirical evidence on the health consequences of rural‐to‐urban migration in China. We use a panel dataset from 2003 to 2006 constructed by the Research Center on the Rural Economy at the Ministry of Agriculture in China to investigate the effects of short‐term and medium‐term migration on health status. By combining propensity‐score matching and the difference‐in‐difference model, we attempt to overcome the migration endogeneity issue and estimate the average treatment effect on the treated. We find that the effect of short‐term migration on health in China is significantly positive mostly because of the income effect. However, the effect of longer‐term continuous migration on health is insignificant and close to zero. Our results are robust to several alternative estimation techniques and a series of robustness checks. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Institutionalization of Genocidal Leadership: Pol Pot and a Cambodian Dystopia
Authors: Cunha Miguel Pina e , Rego Arménio , Clegg Stewart 
Published: June 2015

AbstractMisleadership is defined as leadership process involving a complex interplay of leader, follower, and situational elements, inscribing a vicious circle of intensifying dysfunctional action. It is tempting to see misleadership as the result of the madness of one leader. It is also misleading. Leadership research has been insufficiently attentive to misleadership and, in particular, to the misleadership factors intervening in genocidal processes. Discussed in the current article are the antecedents and the rule of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in the 1970s as an extreme case of misleadership. Lessons from the Polpotist dystopia are derived and reflections on possible contra‐strategies are presented. In particular, it is suggested that it is necessary to distinguish measures for social change that are admissible and positive, from negative utopian visions that are negative, inadmissible, and facilitative of evil leadership.
The Limits of Observation for Understanding Mass Violence
Authors: Price Megan , Ball Patrick 
Published: June 2015

AbstractQuantitative analyses have the potential to contribute to transitional justice mechanisms, via empirical evidence supporting the memory of victims, allocating proportional responsibility among perpetrators, determining legal responsibility, and supporting historical memory and clarity. However, most data available in transitional justice settings are incomplete. Conducting quantitative analyses relying solely on what is observable and knowable leads to not only incomplete but often incorrect analytical results. This can harm rather than contribute to transitional justice mechanisms. This article outlines different types of data, the ways in which observable data, on their own, are insufficient for most quantitative analyses of interest, presents these limitations via a case study from Syria, and introduces statistical methods to overcome these limitations.
Maxwell’s demon in biochemical signal transduction with feedback loop
Authors: Ito Sosuke , Sagawa Takahiro 
Published: June 2015

AbstractSignal transduction in living cells is vital to maintain life itself, where information transfer in noisy environment plays a significant role. In a rather different context, the recent intensive research on ‘Maxwell's demon’—a feedback controller that utilizes information of individual molecules—have led to a unified theory of information and thermodynamics. Here we combine these two streams of research, and show that the second law of thermodynamics with information reveals the fundamental limit of the robustness of signal transduction against environmental fluctuations. Especially, we find that the degree of robustness is quantitatively characterized by an informational quantity called transfer entropy. Our information-thermodynamic approach is applicable to biological communication inside cells, in which there is no explicit channel coding in contrast to artificial communication. Our result could open up a novel biophysical approach to understand information processing in living systems on the basis of the fundamental information–thermodynamics link.
Towards combinatorial mixing devices without any pumps by open-capillary channels: fundamentals and applications
Authors: Tani Marie , Kawano Ryuji , Kamiya Koki , Okumura Ko 
Published: June 2015

AbstractIn chemistry, biology, medical sciences and pharmaceutical industries, many reactions have to be checked by transporting and mixing expensive liquids. For such purposes, microfluidics systems consisting of closed channels with external pumps have been useful. However, the usage has been limited because of high fabrication cost and need for a fixed setup. Here, we show that open-capillary channels, which can be fabricated outside a clean room on durable substrates and are washable and reusable, are considerably promising for micro-devices that function without pumps, as a result of detailed studies on the imbibition of open micro-channels. We find that the statics and dynamics of the imbibition follow simple scaling laws in a wide and practical range; although a precursor film obeying a universal dynamics appears in the vertical imbibition, it disappears in the horizontal mode to make the design of complex micro-channel geometry feasible. We fabricate micro open-channel devices without any pumps to express the green florescent protein (GFP) by transporting highly viscous solutions and to accomplish simultaneous chemical reactions for the Bromothymol blue (BTB) solution. We envision that open-capillary devices will become a simple and low-cost option to achieve microfluidic devices that are usable in small clinics and field studies.
Universal elastic-hardening-driven mechanical instability in α-quartz and quartz homeotypes under pressure
Authors: Dong Juncai , Zhu Hailiang , Chen Dongliang 
Published: June 2015

AbstractAs a fundamental property of pressure-induced amorphization (PIA) in ice and ice-like materials (notably α-quartz), the occurrence of mechanical instability can be related to violation of Born criteria for elasticity. The most outstanding elastic feature of α-quartz before PIA has been experimentally reported to be the linear softening of shear modulus C44, which was proposed to trigger the transition through Born criteria B3. However, by using density-functional theory, we surprisingly found that both C44 and C66 in α-quartz exhibit strong nonlinearity under compression and the Born criteria B3 vanishes dominated by stiffening of C14, instead of by decreasing of C44. Further studies of archetypal quartz homeotypes (GeO2 and AlPO4) repeatedly reproduced the same elastic-hardening-driven mechanical instability, suggesting a universal feature of this family of crystals and challenging the long-standing idea that negative pressure derivatives of individual elastic moduli can be interpreted as the precursor effect to an intrinsic structural instability preceding PIA. The implications of this elastic anomaly in relation to the dispersive softening of the lowest acoustic branch and the possible transformation mechanism were also discussed.
Power generating reflective-type liquid crystal displays using a reflective polariser and a polymer solar cell
Authors: Ho Huh Yoon , Park Byoungchoo 
Published: June 2015

AbstractWe herein report the results of a study of a power generating reflective-type liquid crystal display (LCD), composed of a 90° twisted nematic (TN) LC cell attached to the top of a light-absorbing polymer solar cell (PSC), i.e., a Solar-LCD. The PSC consisted of a polymer bulk-heterojunction photovoltaic (PV) layer of poly[[9-(1-octylnonyl)-9H-carbazole-2,7-diyl]-2,5-thiophenediyl-2,1,3-benzothiadiazole-4,7-diyl-2,5-thiophenediyl] and [6,6]-phenyl C71 butyric acid methyl ester (PCDTBT:PCBM70) and showed a high power conversion efficiency of about 5%. In order to improve the visibility of the Solar-LCD, between the TN-LC and the PV cells we inserted a reflective polariser of a giant birefringent optical (GBO) film. The reflectivity from the Solar-LCD was observed to be considerably increased by more than 13–15% under illumination by visible light. The Solar-LCD also exhibited a significantly improved contrast ratio of more than 17–19. We believe there is a clear case for using such Solar-LCDs in new power-generating reflective-type displays; taken as a whole these results also demonstrate the possibility of their application in a number of energy-harvesting opto-electrical display devices.
Unsupervised segmentation of low-contrast multichannel images: discrimination of tissue components in microscopic images of unstained specimens
Authors: Kopriva Ivica , Popović Hadžija Marijana , Hadžija Mirko , Aralica Gorana 
Published: June 2015

AbstractLow-contrast images, such as color microscopic images of unstained histological specimens, are composed of objects with highly correlated spectral profiles. Such images are very hard to segment. Here, we present a method that nonlinearly maps low-contrast color image into an image with an increased number of non-physical channels and a decreased correlation between spectral profiles. The method is a proof-of-concept validated on the unsupervised segmentation of color images of unstained specimens, in which case the tissue components appear colorless when viewed under the light microscope. Specimens of human hepatocellular carcinoma, human liver with metastasis from colon and gastric cancer and mouse fatty liver were used for validation. The average correlation between the spectral profiles of the tissue components was greater than 0.9985 and the worst case correlation was greater than 0.9997. The proposed method can potentially be applied to the segmentation of low-contrast multichannel images with high spatial resolution that arise in other imaging modalities.
Temperature-induced shifts in hibernation behavior in experimental amphibian populations
Authors: Gao Xu , Jin Changnan , Llusia Diego , Li Yiming 
Published: June 2015

AbstractPhenological shifts are primary responses of species to recent climate change. Such changes might lead to temporal mismatches in food webs and exacerbate species vulnerability. Yet insights into this phenomenon through experimental approaches are still scarce, especially in amphibians, which are particularly sensitive to changing thermal environments. Here, under controlled warming conditions, we report a critical, but poorly studied, life-cycle stage (i.e., hibernation) in frogs inhabiting subtropical latitudes. Using outdoor mesocosm experiments, we examined the effects of temperature (ambient vs. + ~2.2/2.4 °C of pre-/post-hibernation warming) and food availability (normal vs. 1/3 food) on the date of entrance into/emergence from hibernation in Pelophylax nigromaculatus. We found temperature was the major factor determining the hibernation period, which showed a significant shortening under experimental warming (6–8 days), with delays in autumn and advances in spring. Moreover, the timing of hibernation was not affected by food availability, whereas sex and, particularly, age were key factors in the species’ phenological responses. Specifically, male individuals emerged from hibernation earlier, while older individuals also entered and emerged from hibernation earlier. We believe that this study provides some of the first experimental evidence for the effect of climate warming on the timing of amphibian hibernation.
Modelling radio refractive index in the atmospheric surface layer
Authors: Salamon S.J. , Hansen H.J. , Abbott D. 
Published: June 2015

Knowledge of the refractive index profile at radio frequencies in the surface layer of the atmosphere is required to predict the performance of terrestrial radio systems, and although a constant gradient of refractivity with height is often assumed, both measurements and theory suggest that gradients in the lowest 20 m of the atmosphere may often be greater than those above this level. For the special case of evaporation ducts over water in a neutral atmosphere, a logarithmic refractivity profile is normally assumed, but a general model that includes both this case and the linear profile as special cases is proposed, which may also be used to approximately model stable and unstable surface atmospheres. This new model may be particularly suited to predicting sub‐refractive fading.
RNA ligation in neurons by RtcB inhibits axon regeneration
Authors: Kosmaczewski Sara Guckian , Han Sung Min , Han Bingjie , Irving Meyer Benjamin , Baig Huma S. , Athar Wardah , Lin-Moore Alexander T. , Koelle Michael R. , Hammarlund Marc 
Published: June 2015

Significance
Neurons use RNA modification to control specific functions by generating increased complexity and dynamism relative to the static genome. Known mechanisms of neuronal RNA modification include neuron-specific regulation of alternative splicing and mRNA editing by adenosine deaminases. Here, we identify a previously unidentified mechanism for RNA modification in neurons that is mediated by the RNA ligase RtcB. RtcB activity acts in neurons to regulate axon regeneration, and this neuronal function is independent of RtcB’s previously identified roles in tRNA and XBP1 mRNA ligation. RtcB’s function in axon regeneration is also independent of its cofactor archease, and RtcB translocates from the cell body of neurons to the stumps of injured axons. Taken together, these data establish a new function and mechanism for RtcB in inhibiting axon regeneration.
A critical review of the literature on the pest
Erionota
spp. (Lepidoptera, Hesperiidae): taxonomy, distribution, food plants, early stages, natural enemies and biological control.
Authors: Cock M. J. W. 
Published: June 2015

Abstract

The classification, taxonomy, distribution, spread, food plants, early stages, natural enemies and biological control of South-East Asian
Erionota
spp. (Hesperiidae, Hesperiinae,
incertae sedis
) are reviewed with specific attention to
Erionota thrax
(Linnaeus),
Erionota torus
Evans and
Erionota acroleuca
(Wood-Mason and de Nicéville) (=
E. hiraca
(Moore)).
Erionota thrax
and
E. torus
are shown to be pests of
Musa
spp. but not palms, while
E. acroleuca
is a pest of various palms. Where they overlap in distribution in mainland South-East Asia and the Southern Philippines,
E. thrax
and
E. torus
have not been distinguished in the economic literature. The species which became established in Mauritius around 1968 and subsequently the target of a successful biological control programme is shown to be
E. torus
, and not
E. thrax
as hitherto reported. Research gaps are identified, including the need to find diagnostic features or tools to separate the immature stages of the three species in order to confirm these conclusions, and clarify the ecology and pest status of the pest species.
Orientation and Position of Fish Affects Recovery Time from Electrosedation
Authors: Rous Andrew M. , Forrest Alexandra , McKittrick Elisabeth Hart , Letterio George , Roszell Jordan , Wright Taylor , Cooke Steven J. 
Published: June 2015

AbstractCommercially available electrosedation apparatuses (e.g., the Smith‐Root Portable Electroanesthesia System [PES]) are growing in popularity within the fisheries research community. This technology can be used to immobilize fish rapidly and does not require a withdrawal period before fish are released. A number of studies examined how various settings (e.g., duration, frequency, voltage) influence the performance of the PES for fish sedation, but comparatively less is known about the role of fish orientation and position on the efficacy of electrosedation within the PES. We compared recovery times of Bluegill Lepomis macrochirus upon manipulation of three variables: orientation of fish, electric field size (i.e., spacing between the anode and cathode), and fish proximity relative to the anode. Fish were individually exposed to pulsed DC with a standardized frequency (100 Hz), voltage (90 V), and shock duration (3 s). Full recovery time was significantly longer for fish oriented at horizontal angles (0° and 180°) than at acute angles (45° and 135°). Significant interactions were found between orientation and electrode spacing, as well as between orientation and fish proximity. These findings are pertinent to researchers in the field looking to optimize recovery time for a quick release after surgery, tagging, or any other time fish sedation is required.