In recent years, much effort has been made in identifying microRNA (miRNA) genes from mammals, insects, worms, plants, and viruses. Continuing the search for more miRNA genes is still important but difficult. This paper presents a computational strategy based on comparative genomics analysis. The algorithm was used to scan four invertebrate genomes, Drosophila melangoster, Bombyx mori, Apis mellifera, and Anopheles gambiae, which are either model organisms or ...

A multi-epitope-vaccine MEV^ABC consisting of two linear neutralizing determinants (BC1: aa693–716; A6: aa844–865) located on antigenic unit B/C and unit A of glycoprotein E2 was prepared to evaluate whether a combination strategy is effective in the design of peptide vaccines. After immunization, pig sera collected every one to two weeks were evaluated by enzyme linked immunosorbent assay. C-strain-induced anti-sera and hyper-immune sera cannot recognize overlapping peptid...

Plasma membrane calcium ATPase (PMCA) plays a critical role in transporting Ca²⁺ out of the cytosol across the plasma membrane which is essential both in keeping intracellular Ca²⁺ homeostasis and in biomineralization. In this paper we cloned and localized a gene encoding PMCA from the pearl oyster Pinctada fucata. This PMCA shares similarity with other published PMCAs within the functional domains. Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction analysis shows tha...

The cytotoxicity and apoptotic effect of phytoceramide IV (N-palmitoyl-phytospingosine) were investigated by preparaing the ceramide containing liposomes using cholesteryl hemisuccinate (CHEMS) and methoxypolyethylene glycol (2000) cholesteryl succinate (PEGCHS). The ceramide-containing liposomes prepared using ultrasonication contained CHEMS and the phytoceramide IV at a molar ratio of 1:1. Gel chromatography and high performance liquid chromatography equipped with an evaporative light...

The effect of dextran on the conformation (or secondary structure) and thermal stability of creatine kinase (CK) was studied using the far-ultraviolet (UV) circular dichroism (CD) spectra. The results showed that lower concentrations of dextran (less than 60 g/L) induced formation of the secondary CK structures. However, the secondary structure content of CK decreased when the dextran concentrations exceeded 60 g/L. Thermally induced transition curves were measured for CK in the presence of diff...

Ellagic acid (EA) has aroused great interest worldwide owing to its antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and anticarcinogenetic properties. The EA content in pomegranate leaf was measured in this study using high performance liquid chromatography to investigate the effects of season, variety, and processing method on the EA level. The results show that the EA content in 11 varieties of pomegranate from the Zaozhuang region in China range from 1.30 mg · g⁻¹ to 6.46 mg · ...

Calreticulin is a unique calcium-binding protein with multiple functions mostly located in the sarcoplasmic/endoplasmic reticulum. A large amount of calcium is absorbed from the medium and transported to mineralization sites during biomineralization in pearl oyster. This paper describes the cloning of the full-length cDNA of calreticulin from Pinctada fucata, namely PCRT. PCRT encodes a deduced 414-amino acid protein, which includes a predicted 17-amino acid signal peptide and an endopl...

Antioxidant activities of the 95% ethanol extract from Caesalpinia sappan heartwood (ECS), protosappanin A, protosappanin B, and brazilein were studied in vitro. The inhibition of the formation of malondialdehyde (MDA) and the scavenging of superoxide anions, hydrogen peroxide, and hydroxyl radicals were assayed. The experimental results show that all four substances had antioxidant activity in vitro but their capabilities differed for the different indicators. ECS, pr...

This study investigated the extraction of 5′-phosphodiesterase from malt root and the degradation of nucleic acids by this enzyme. The extraction used grade precipitation with ammonium sulfate and enzymatic hydrolysis. Samples were assayed using the modified Bradford method and high performance liquid chromatography. The results show that 5′-phosphodiesterase is isolated by grade precipitation with 30% and 80% saturation of ammonium sulfate and can be utilized to degrade deoxyribonuc...

Previous studies have shown that mice experiencing cerebral ischemia reperfusion (CIR) and stress can serve as a model of post stroke depression (PSD). The present study verified the acute antidepressant effects of radix puerariae extract (PE) on PSD mice through behavior and gene expression experiments. CIR was found to reduce the sucrose consumption and tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) gene expression. PE administration after CIR surgery was observed to significantly enhance the mRNA expression of TH...

Adiponectin is one of the hormones secreted exclusively by the adipose tissue with anti-diabetic, anti-inflammatory, anti-atherogenic, anti-atherosclerotic, and insulin-sensitizing effects. Adiponectin has structural features including a signal peptide at the N terminus, a short variable region, a collagenous domain, and a C-terminal globular domain homologous to C1q. The family of proteins containing this globular domain is called the C1q/tumor necrosis factor-α-related proteins (CTRP). Among a...

This study presents evidence from analyses of the acoustic parameters of fluent continuous speech to show that within-paragraph prosodic phrase boundaries are related more to contrasts of neighborhood prosodic states rather than between-phrase pause durations; prosodic states receive more constraints from higher level discourse information. By revising a modular acoustic model by Tseng's hierarchical prosodic phrase grouping framework and examining the much varied prosodic phrase (PPh) boundary ...

This paper proposes a novel voice conversion method by frequency warping. The frequency warping function is generated based on mapping formants of the source speaker and the target speaker. In addition to frequency warping, fundamental frequency adjustment, spectral envelope equalization, breathiness addition, and duration modification are also used to improve the similarity to the target speaker. The proposed voice conversion method needs only a very small amount of training data for generating...

The employment of non-uniform processes assists greatly in the corpus-based text-to-speech (TTS) system to synthesize natural speech. However, tailoring a TTS voice font, or pruning redundant synthesis instances, usually results in loss of non-uniform synthesis instances. In order to solve this problem, we propose the concept of virtual non-uniform instances. According to this concept and the synthesis frequency of each instance, the algorithm named StaRp-VPA is constructed to make up for the lo...

For text-independent speaker verification, the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) using a universal background model strategy and the GMM using support vector machines are the two most commonly used methodologies. Recently, a new SVM-based speaker verification method using GMM super vectors has been proposed. This paper describes the construction of a new speaker verification system and investigates the use of nuisance attribute projection and test normalization to further enhance performance. Experim...

Unseen handset mismatch is the major source of performance degradation in speaker identification in telecommunication environments. To alleviate the problem, a maximum likelihood a priori knowledge interpolation (ML-AKI)-based handset mismatch compensation approach is proposed. It first collects a set of handset characteristics of seen handsets to use as the a priori knowledge for representing the space of handsets. During evaluation the characteristics of an unknown test hands...

To investigate how a low tone (tone-3, T3) syllable in Chinese can be perceived to be focal accented or not, a total of 156 sentences containing tone-3 words were synthesized and used as stimuli in a perceptual study. The sentences differed in the falling value between the two high pitches, and in the duration and phonation types of the T3 syllables. Thirty-nine subjects were asked to judge where the focus or accent was for each sentence. The results show that at least three degrees of pitch dro...

This paper describes the latest version of the Chinese-Japanese-English handheld speech-to-speech translation system developed by NICT/ATR, which is now ready to be deployed for travelers. With the entire speech-to-speech translation function being implemented into one terminal, it realizes real-time, location-free speech-to-speech translation. A new noise-suppression technique notably improves the speech recognition performance. Corpus-based approaches of speech recognition, machine translation...

This paper introduces several important features of the Chinese large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system in the NICT/ATR multi-lingual speech-to-speech translation system. The features include: (1) a flexible way to derive an information rich phoneme set based on mutual information between a text corpus and its phoneme set; (2) a hidden Markov network acoustic model and a successive state splitting algorithm to generate its model topology based on a minimum description length criter...

Most change-point models assume that the response is continuous or cross sectional binary. However, in many public health problems, the data is longitudinal binary. There are few studies of change-point problems for longitudinal outcomes. This paper describes a flexible change-point model which includes random-effects and takes into account the difference between various individuals in longitudinal binary data. A transition function is used to make the linear-linear logistic model differentiable...

This paper studies the existence, semiclassical limit, and long-time behavior of weak solutions to the unipolar isentropic quantum drift-diffusion model, a fourth order parabolic system. Semi-discretization in time and entropy estimates give the global existence and semiclassical limit of nonnegative weak solutions to the one-dimensional model with a nonnegative large initial value and a Dirichlet-Neumann boundary condition. Furthermore, the weak solutions are proven to exponentially approach co...

This research examines how to use an option contract to coordinate a retailer-led supply chain where the market information can be updated. Based on Stackelberg game theory, we build a mode with one supplier and one retailer in which the retailer designs contracts to coordinate the supplier's production in a two-mode production environment. This focuses on an option contract that consists of two option prices and one exercise price. By theoretical analysis and numerical example, we find that suc...