Objective(s): The use of antisense oligonucleotides (AOs) to restore normal splicing by blocking the recognition of aberrant splice sites by the spliceosome represents an innovative means of potentially controlling certain inherited disorders affected by aberrant splicing. Selection of the appropriate target site is essential in the success of an AO therapy. In this study, in search for a splic...

BACKGROUND The use of silica coated magnetic nanoparticles as contrast agents has resulted in the production of highly stable, non-toxic solutions that can be manipulated via an external magnetic field. As a result, the interaction of these nanocomposites with cells is of vital importance in understanding their behaviour and biocompatibility. Here we report the preparation, characterisation and...

Members of the Importin-β family recognize nuclear localization signals (NLS) and nuclear export signals (NES). These proteins play important roles in various nucleocytoplasmic transport processes in cells. Here, we examined the expression patterns of 21 identified Importin-β genes in mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs), mouse embryonic fibroblast (MEF) and mESCs differentiated into neural ectod...

I would like to take the opportunity to thank the members of the dissertation committee: First and foremost, my deepest thanks go to Professor Manfred Schedlowski for giving me the opportunity to conduct the research for my dissertation in his laboratory. I am very thankful for the daily supervision, guidance and support under awkward circumstances, as well as for his trust in me throughout the...

This paper describes algorithms for nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) with the β-divergence (β-NMF). The β-divergence is a family of cost functions parametrized by a single shape parameter β that takes the Euclidean distance, the Kullback-Leibler divergence and the Itakura-Saito divergence as special cases (β = 2, 1, 0 respectively). The proposed algorithms are based on a surrogate auxilia...

It is somewhat ironic that although youth today are saturated in media, no standardized instrument exists to measure individual differences in exposure to specific media content. Therefore, we developed and validated a scale to measure both the frequency and content of adolescents’ media exposure, which measures media exposure regardless of media channel: the Content-based Media Exposure Scale ...

The solubility of trihexyphenidyl (Thp) was improved by its combination with β-cyclodextrin (β-CD) and modified β-CDs. The solubility of Thp was found to be increased in the presence of β-CD, hydroxypropyl-β-cyclodextrin (HP-β-CD), methyl-β-cyclodextrin (Me-β-CD) and sulfobutylether-β-cyclodextrin (SBE-β-CD). In particular, the solubility of Thp in conjunction with SBE-β-CD was increased by a f...

Monovalent group 13 diyls are versatile reagents in oxidative addition reactions. We report here [1,4]-cycloaddition reactions of β-diketiminate-substituted LM (M = Al, Ga, In, Tl; L HC[C(Me)NDipp]2, Dipp 2,6-iPr2C6H3) with various 1,2-diketones to give 5-metalla-spiro[4.5]heterodecenes 1, 4–6, and 8–10, respectively. In contrast, the reaction LTl acenaphthenequinone gave [2,3]-cycloaddition pr...

This letter describes algorithms for nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) with the β-divergence (β-NMF). The β-divergence is a family of cost functions parameterized by a single shape parameter β that takes the Euclidean distance, the Kullback-Leibler divergence, and the Itakura-Saito divergence as special cases (β = 2, 1, 0 respectively). The proposed algorithms are based on a surrogate auxi...