BACKGROUND The incidence of cerebrovascular accidents following aortic valve surgery remains a devastating complication. The aim of this study was to determine the number of potential embolic material arising during aortic valve replacement and to examine the efficacy of using ribbon gauze in the left ventricle during removal of the native valve and decalcification of the aortic annulus. METH...

Ribbon synapses of photoreceptor cells and bipolar neurons in the retina signal graded changes in light intensity via sustained release of neurotransmitter. One molecular specialization of retinal ribbon synapses is the expression of complexin protein subtypes Cplx3 and Cplx4, whereas conventional synapses express Cplx1 and Cplx2. Because complexins bind to the molecular machinery for synaptic ...

Ribbon synapses of tonically releasing sensory neurons must provide a large pool of releasable vesicles for sustained release, while minimizing spontaneous release in the absence of stimulation. Complexins are presynaptic proteins that may accomplish this dual task at conventional synapses by interacting with the molecular machinery of synaptic vesicle fusion at the active zone to retard sponta...

We analyze the optical bistability and the entanglement of two movable mirrors coupled to a two-mode laser in a doubly resonant cavity. We show that in stark contrast to the usual red-detuned condition for observing bistability in single-mode optomechanics, the optical intensities exhibit bistability for all values of cavity laser detuning due to intermode coupling induced by two-photon atomic ...

The RSK correspondence generalises the Robinson-Schensted correspondence by replacing permutation matrices by matrices with entries in N, and standard Young tableaux by semistandard ones. For r ∈ N>0, the Robinson-Schensted correspondence can be trivially extended, using the r-quotient map, to one between r-coloured permutations and pairs of standard r-ribbon tableaux built on a fixed r-core (t...

Motivated by a diversity of the shape instability phenomena in condensed-matter physics, we study the formation of elastic ribbon structures and transformation into helicoidal structures. Using the multipulse laser-matter interaction with the Co-coated surface, a one-dimensional high-density vortex-filament array has been created. Increasing the number of pulses, the oscillatory strain field ca...

Hearing depends on reliable and temporally precise neurotransmission by cochlear hair cells. The wide dynamic range and high sensitivity with which these cells encode acoustic stimuli are associated with a presynaptic specialization termed the presynaptic dense body or synaptic ribbon. Apposed to the presynaptic density, this spherical or flattened structure tethers a layer of synaptic vesicles...

During gene transcription, the RNA polymerase (Pol) active center can catalyze RNA cleavage. This intrinsic cleavage activity is strong for Pol I and Pol III but very weak for Pol II. The reason for this difference is unclear because the active centers of the polymerases are virtually identical. Here we show that Pol II gains strong cleavage activity when the C-terminal zinc ribbon domain (C-ri...

Narrow, inextensible, and naturally flat ribbons have some special and interesting phenomena under isometric deformations. Although a ribbon has a shape between rod and shell, directly applying the geometric representation designed for them imposes a challenge to faithfully reproduce interesting behaviors. We thus parameterize the ribbon surface as a developable ruled surface along its centerli...

Munc13 proteins are essential regulators of exocytosis. In hippocampal glutamatergic neurons, the genetic deletion of Munc13s results in the complete loss of primed synaptic vesicles (SVs) in direct contact with the presynaptic active zone membrane, and in a total block of neurotransmitter release. Similarly drastic consequences of Munc13 loss are detectable in hippocampal and striatal GABAergi...