Quantitative polarity scales have been of great value in advancing our understanding of chemical and physical processes in bulk solvents. However, an understanding of the polarity at liquid interfaces has been more elusive and no scale of interface polarity currently exists. Following our demonstration that second harmonic spectroscopy can be used to measure interface polarity, we have determin...

The spatiotemporal control of cell polarity is crucial for the development of multicellular organisms and for reliable polarity switches during cell cycle progression in unicellular systems. A tight control of cell polarity is especially important in haploid budding yeast, where the new polarity site (bud site) is established next to the cell division site after cell separation. How cells coord...

BACKGROUND Establishment and maintenance of epithelial cell polarity is regulated in part by signaling from adhesion receptors. Loss of cell polarity is associated with multiple pathologies including the initiation and progression of various cancers. The β1-integrin adhesion receptor plays a role in the regulation of cell polarity; however, the identity of the signaling pathways that modulate β...

A key element of any sentiment analysis system is the ability to assign a polarity strength value to words appearing within the documents. In this paper we present a novel approach to polarity strength assignment. The approach is knowledge based in that it uses WordNet to build an adjective graph which is used to measure semantic distance between words of known polarity (reference or seed words...

The asymmetric distribution of various proteins and RNAs is essential for all stages of animal development, and establishment and maintenance of this cellular polarity are regulated by a group of conserved polarity determinants. Studies over the last 10 years highlight important functions for polarity proteins, including apical-basal polarity and planar cell polarity regulators, in dendritic sp...

The current endeavour focuses on the notion of positive versus negative polarity preference of verbs for their direct objects. This preference has to be distinguished from a verb’s own prior polarity for the same verb, these two properties might even be inverse. Polarity preferences of verbs are extracted on the basis of a large and dependencyparsed corpus by means of statistical measures. We o...

Drosophila neuroblasts are a model system for studying stem cell self-renewal and the establishment of cortical polarity. Larval neuroblasts generate a large apical self-renewing neuroblast, and a small basal cell that differentiates. We performed a genetic screen to identify regulators of neuroblast self-renewal, and identified a mutation in sgt1 (suppressor-of-G2-allele-of-skp1) that had fewe...

Epithelial cells are polarized along their apical-basal axis. Much of the cellular machinery that goes into establishing and maintaining epithelial cell polarity is evolutionarily conserved. Model organisms, including the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, are thus particularly useful for the study of cell polarity. Work in Drosophila has identified several important components of the polarity...