-Catenins are conserved regulators of metazoan development that function with TCF DNA-binding proteins to activate transcription. In Caenorhabditis elegans, SYS-1/ -catenin and POP-1/TCF regulate several asymmetric divisions, including that of the somatic gonadal precursor cell (SGP). In the distal but not the proximal SGP daughter, SYS-1/ -catenin and POP-1/TCF transcriptionally activate ceh-2...

BACKGROUND Pelvic organ prolapse (POP) is a common gynecological condition that can affect quality of life (QOL) in women. In Nepal, the prevalence of POP is high, but many affected women are still deprived of treatment. Vaginal hysterectomy with pelvic floor repair is one of the common treatment options for advanced POP. However, QOL outcomes after surgery have not been reported in low-income ...

Pelvic organ prolapse (POP) remains a great therapeutic challenge with no optimal treatment available. Tissue maintenance and remodelling are performed by fibroblasts, therefore altered cellular functionality may influence tissue quality. In this study, we evaluated functional characteristics of fibroblastic cells from tissues involved in POP. To rule out normal ageing tissue degeneration, biop...

The Wnt signaling pathway plays a conserved role during animal development in transcriptional regulation of distinct targets in different developmental contexts but it remains unclear whether quantitative differences in the nuclear localization of effector proteins TCF and β-catenin contribute to context-specific regulation. We investigated this question in Caenorhabditis elegans embryos by qua...

We examine the significance of the first metal-free stars (Pop III) for the cosmological reionization of H I and He II. These stars have unusually hard spectra, with the integrated ionizing photon rates from a Pop III stellar cluster for H I and He II being 1.6 and 10 times stronger respectively than those from a Pop II cluster. For the currently favored cosmology, we find that Pop III stars al...

The priming of popout (PoP) (Maljkovic & Nakayama, 1994, 1996) increases the speed of attentional deployment to subsequent targets having the same feature characteristic and relative position, it lasts for approximately 5–8 trials, and is cumulative. Here we establish PoP as an example of short-term implicit memory by showing that it is qualitatively different from explicit memory. Using a post...

Pelvic organ prolapse (POP) is a common gynecological disorder; however, the genetic components remain largely unidentified. Exome sequencing has been widely used to identify pathogenic gene mutations of several diseases because of its high chromosomal coverage and accuracy. In this study, we performed whole exome sequencing (WES), for the first time, on 8 peripheral blood DNA samples from repr...

Java has become the most important language in the Internet area, but its execution performance is severely limited by the true data dependency inherited from the stack architecture defined by the Sun’s Java Virtual Machine (JVM). To enhance the performance of the JVM, a stack operations folding mechanism for the picoJava-II processor was proposed by Sun Microsystems to fold 42.3% stack push/po...

Prolyl oligopeptidase (POP) has emerged as a drug target for neurological diseases. A flexible loop structure comprising loop A (res. 189-209) and loop B (res. 577-608) at the domain interface is implicated in substrate entry to the active site. Here we determined kinetic and structural properties of POP with mutations in loop A, loop B, and in two additional flexible loops (the catalytic His l...

Evidence from cell studies indicates that persistent organic pollutants (POP) can induce insulin resistance, an essential component of the metabolic syndrome (MetS). We hypothesized that residential proximity to environmental sources of POP would be associated with the MetS in the population. The present study examined the association between residency in a zip code containing or abutting envir...