The tetraspanins are a superfamily of four-transmembrane proteins, which regulate the trafficking, lateral diffusion and clustering of the transmembrane proteins with which they interact. We have previously shown that tetraspanin Tspan9 is expressed on platelets. Here we have characterised gene-trap mice lacking Tspan9. The mice were viable with normal platelet numbers and size. Tspan9-deficien...

Postsynaptic receptor trafficking plays an essential role in tuning neurotransmission and signal plasticity and has emerged as a potential therapeutic target in neuropsychiatric disease. Using a novel application of fluorescence recovery after photobleaching in rat hippocampal neurons, we examined transport from the soma to dendrites of seven G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) implicated in mo...

Active force generation by outer hair cells (OHCs) underlies amplification and frequency tuning in the mammalian cochlea but whether such a process exists in nonmammals is unclear. Here, we demonstrate that hair cells of the chicken auditory papilla possess an electromechanical force generator in addition to active hair bundle motion due to mechanotransducer channel gating. The properties of th...

To gain new insight into the effects of monocular deprivation, we studied the visual cortex of adult cats deprived of vision in one eye. Local field potentials were recorded in response to contrast reversal of square-wave gratings modulated in time either by pseudorandom, m-sequences or periodically. We have found that: (1) stimulation of the retinotopic locus of the recording site elicits resp...

This modeling study examines the short-term synaptic plasticity properties of the electrosensory lateral lobe (ELL) afferent pathway in the weakly electric fish, Apteronotus leptorhynchus. We studied the possible functional consequences of a simple phenomenological model of synaptic depression by taking into consideration the available in vivo and in vitro results [N. Berman, L. Maler, Inhibiti...

Dynamic Matrix Control (DMC) is a widely used model predictive controller (MPC) in industrial plants. The successful implementation of DMC in practical applications requires a proper tuning of the controller. The available tuning procedures are mainly based on experience and empirical results. This paper develops an analytical tool for DMC tuning. It is based on the application of Analysis of V...

The origin of orientation selectivity in primary visual cortex (V1) is a model problem for understanding cerebral cortical circuitry. A key constraint is that orientation tuning width is invariant under changes in stimulus contrast. We have previously shown that this can arise from the combination of feedforward lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) input and an orientation-untuned component of feed...

We present results on the development of a novel micromachined parallel-plate tunable capacitor with a wide tuning range. Different from conventional two-parallel-plate tunable capacitors, this novel tunable capacitor consists of one suspended top plate and two fixed bottom plates. One of the two fixed plates and the top plate form a variable capacitor, where as the other fixed plate and the to...

finding a representative fluid in a hydrocarbon reservoir is crucial for integrated reservoir management. in this study, a systematic approach for screening and selecting consistent fluid samples in a reservoir was developed. the model integrated quality control (qc) of well conditioning before sampling, qc of pvt data, thermodynamic modeling and compositional gradient within a reservoir. well ...