Mechanistic understanding of nucleation dependent polymerization by α-synuclein (α-Syn) into toxic oligomers and amyloids is important for the drug development against Parkinson's disease. However the structural and morphological characterization during nucleation and subsequent fibrillation process of α-Syn is not clearly understood. Using a variety of complementary biophysical techniques moni...

Recently, chromogranins were reported to interact specifically with mutant forms of superoxide dismutase that are linked to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This interaction led us to analyze the frequencies of sequence variants of the CHGB gene in ALS patients and matched controls from three different countries. Of particular interest was the finding of the P413L CHGB variant present in 10...

Dopamine beta-hydroxylase, the enzyme which converts dopamine to norepinephrine, is expressed in a cell type-restricted pattern in neuroendocrine tissue. A segment of the rat gene containing 395 bases of 5'-flanking sequence regulates expression of a reporter gene in a cell type-selective pattern in mammalian cell cultures. Using deletion mutants of the 5'-flanking sequence, we have identified ...

Aluminium (Al) is a ubiquitously distributed environmental toxicant that lacks biological functions; however, its accumulation in the brain has been demonstrated to be linked to several neuropathological conditions particularly Alzheimer's disease (AD). Asiatic acid (AA), a triterpene extracted from Centella asiatica, has been reported to cross the blood brain barrier and also displayed antioxi...

HEADINGS Partial hepatectomy. Hepatic metastases. Colorectal cancer. Radiofrequency. Embolization. ABSTRACT – Introduction: Nowadays, liver resections can be performed with acceptable morbi-mortality rates. In specialized centers, mortality as low as 1% can be achieved, even with the advent of new hepatotoxic chemotherapy regimens. In order to reduce morbidity and mortality, newer strategies ca...

Inverses and determinants of matrices are closely related and come up in many different contexts. In these notes we will develop some basics of the theory of these ideas. Our initial motivation is the solution of systems of linear equations, such as 2x − 5y + 4z = −3 x − 2y + z = 5 x − 4y + 6z = 10. To solve the system, we want to manipulate these equations to get new equations which only conta...

We study various generalizations of reversal-bounded multicounter machines and show that they have decidable emptiness, infiniteness, disjointness, containment, and equivalence problems. The extensions include allowing the machines to perform linear-relation tests among the counters and parameterized constants (e.g., “Is 3x 5y 2D1+9D2 < 12?”, where x; y are counters, and D1; D2 are parameterize...

Different statistical multifragmentation models have been used to study isoscaling, i.e., the factorization of the isotope ratios from two reactions, into fugacity terms of proton and neutron number, R21(N ,Z) 5Y 2(N ,Z)/Y 1(N ,Z)5C exp(aN1bZ). Even though the primary isotope distributions are quite different from the final distributions due to evaporation from the excited fragments, the values...

We study various generalizations of reversal-bounded multicounter machines and show that they have decidable emptiness, in#niteness, disjointness, containment, and equivalence problems. The extensions include allowing the machines to perform linear-relation tests among the counters and parameterized constants (e.g., “Is 3x− 5y− 2D1 + 9D2 ¡ 12?”, where x; y are counters, and D1; D2 are parameter...