Focal dystonias are dystonias that affect one part of the body, and are sometimes task-specific. Brain imaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation techniques have been valuable in defining the pathophysiology of dystonias in general, and are particularly amenable to studying focal dystonias. Over the past few years, several common themes have emerged in the imaging literature, and this review...

Retinoblastoma is a rare childhood cancer of the developing retina. Most retinoblastomas initiate with biallelic inactivation of the RB1 gene through diverse mechanisms including point mutations, nucleotide insertions, deletions, loss of heterozygosity and promoter hypermethylation. Recently, a novel mechanism of retinoblastoma initiation was proposed. Gallie and colleagues discovered that a sm...

Focal adhesions are an elaborate network of interconnecting proteins linking actin stress fibers to the extracellular matrix substrate. Modulation of the focal adhesion plaque provides a mechanism for the regulation of cellular adhesive strength. Using interference reflection microscopy, we found that activation of phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI 3-kinase) by PDGF induces the dissipation of focal...

The formation of focal adhesions that mediate alterations of cell shape and movement is controlled by a mechanochemical mechanism in which cytoskeletal tensional forces drive changes in molecular assembly; however, little is known about the molecular biophysical basis of this response. Here, we describe a method to measure the unbinding rate constant k(OFF) of individual GFP-labeled focal adhes...

The research may be categorized as work on: earthquake focal mechanisms, earthquake and explosion magnitude and energy determinations, spectral properties of earthquakes and explosions, model studies of strain release and coupling and continued study of regional seismicity. The principal results reported are: (l) an improved technique for determining the best-fitting focal mechanism relation by...

kinematic synthesis of a trailing six-member mechanism has been carried out to achieve five precision points of an automotive steering mechanism. the inner wheel can be rotated up to forty five degrees with fair accuracy. results show that the divergent end behavior of ackermann steering mechanism has been overcome by the present mechanism. the work is similar to earlier work by the present aut...

In this paper the special case of reconstruction from image sequences taken by cameras with skew equal to 0 and aspect ratio equal to 1 has been treated. These type of cameras, here called cameras with Euclidean image planes, represent rigid projections where neither the principal point nor the focal length is known. It will be shown that it is possible to reconstruct an unknown object from ima...

Two recent papers provide the first evidence for a common mechanism of targeting and activation of an enzyme that is important in the rapid regulation of both focal adhesion assembly during cell migration and synaptic vesicle recycling at nerve terminals.

The contractile system of nonmuscle cells consists of interconnected actomyosin networks and bundles anchored to focal adhesions. The initiation of the contractile system assembly is poorly understood structurally and mechanistically, whereas system's maturation heavily depends on nonmuscle myosin II (NMII). Using platinum replica electron microscopy in combination with fluorescence microscopy,...

a storke is the sudden onset of focal neurologic deficit from a vascular mechanism and is the 3 rd cause of death in developed countries. this study was carried out to evaluate the known risk factors of stroke and their effect on the onset of it in shahid behesti hospital in kashan in 1998. the descriptive strategy of this study was conducted on 300 patients with cva, that their illness was doc...