About 10% of patients with a genetic disease carry a nonsense mutation causing their pathology. A strategy for correcting nonsense mutations is premature termination codon (PTC) readthrough, i.e. incorporation of an amino acid at the PTC position during translation. PTC-readthrough-activating molecules appear as promising therapeutic tools for these patients. Unfortunately, the molecules shown ...

Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay, the accelerated turnover of mRNAs transcribed from genes containing early nonsense mutations, is dependent on the product of the UPF1 gene in yeast. Mutations that inactivate UPF1 lead to the selective stabilization of mRNAs containing early nonsense mutations but have no effect on the half-lives of almost all other mRNAs. Since the transcripts of nonsense alleles ...

The ultimate goal of the poetry assistant currently under development in our lab is an application to be used either as a poetry game or as a teaching tool for both poetry and grammar, including the complex relationships between sound and meaning. Until now we focused on the automatic classification of poems and the suggestion of the ending word for a verse. The classification module is based o...

The central purpose of science is to explain. However, who is that explanation for, and how is this explanation communicated once it has been deduced? Scientific research is typically communicated via papers in journals, with an abstract presented as a summary of that explanation. However, in many instances they may be written in a manner which is non-communicatory to a lay reader. This study b...

We present a framework for summarizing digital media based on structural analysis. Though these methods are applicable to general media, we concentrate here on characterizing repetitive structure in popular music. In the first step, a similarity matrix is calculated from inter-frame spectral similarity. Segment boundaries, such as verse-chorus transitions, are found by correlating a kernel alon...

All languages,tone languages or non-tone languages, have their prosodic features. The metrical patterns in the classical works of Chinese, verse and prose, represented the prosodic features of the language in a certain historical period. They have been preserved, more or less, in a tradition of “literary reading”. Being divorced to some degree from the ordinary, relatively simple, metrical patt...

We propose a new meta-heuristic algorithm named Levy flights multi-verse optimizer (LFMVO), which incorporates Levy flights into multi-verse optimizer (MVO) algorithm to solve numerical and engineering optimization problems. The Original MVO easily falls into stagnation when wormholes stochastically re-span a number of universes (solutions) around the best universe achieved over the course of i...