Acknowledgments I would like to thank both my promoters Peter van Roy and Sabri Skhiri for their insightful comments, critics and advices about my work during the whole academic year. I also want to thank Boris Mejias for his continuous support and for pushing me to make a talk at FOSDEM 2011. This talk really helped moved forward my work by making it more public and brought back a lot of inter...

Metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluRs) are important drug targets because of their involvement in several neurological diseases. Among mGluRs, mGlu5 is a particularly high-profile target because its positive or negative allosteric modulation can potentially treat schizophrenia or anxiety and chronic pain, respectively. Here, we computationally and experimentally probe the functional binding ...

The wintertime northern annular mode (NAM) at the surface is known to undergo slow intraseasonal variations in association with stratospheric variability, which leads the surface signal by up to several weeks. The relative contributions, however, of potentially relevant stratosphere–troposphere coupling mechanisms are not yet fully understood. In this study the relative roles of (i) the downwar...

The histone deacetylase activity of Sir2p is dependent on NAD(+) and inhibited by nicotinamide (NAM). As a result, Sir2p-regulated processes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae such as silencing and replicative aging are susceptible to alterations in cellular NAD(+) and NAM levels. We have determined that high concentrations of NAM in the growth medium elevate the intracellular NAD(+) concentration thr...

In this paper we study two generalizations of the well known unrelated parallel machines scheduling problem under makespan (Cmax) minimization. First, a situation in which not every available parallel machine should be used and it is desirable to employ only a subset of the parallel machines. This is referred to as “Not all Machines” or NAM in short. This environment applies frequently in produ...

Viet Nam is a country with the highest rate of adult male smokers in the world. In 2010, the percentage of adult male smokers was 47.4%. Each year in Viet Nam, there are 40,000 lives lost from tobacco-related diseases. The Global Tobacco Youth Survey is an international standardized survey that has been conducted in more than 140 countries. To provide evidence for tobacco control, Viet Nam alre...

Ozone is an important pollutant and greenhouse gas, and tropospheric ozone variations are generally associated with both 15 natural and anthropogenic processes. As one of the most pristine and inaccessible regions in the world, the Tibetan Plateau has been considered as an ideal region for studying processes of the background atmosphere. Due to the vast area of the Tibetan Plateau, sites in the...

Speech is the most natural form of communication for human beings and is often described as a unimodal communication channel. However, it is well known that speech is multimodal in nature and includes the auditive, visual, and tactile modalities. Other less natural modalities such as electromyographic signal, invisible articulator display, or brain electrical activity or electromagnetic activit...

Silent mating-type information regulation 2, homolog 1 (SIRT1) represents an NAD+-dependent deacetylase that regulates the processes of stress response and cell survival. However, the functions of SIRT1 in stress- and drug-induced apoptosis remain elusive. The present study was designed to determine the effects of SIRT1 in tumor cells subjected to antitumor agent treatment and to identify the u...