Although extensively studied, it has proved difficult to describe in detail how potassium ion channels conduct cations and water. We present a computational study that, by using stratified umbrella sampling, examines nearly an entire conduction event of the Kv1.2/2.1 paddle chimera and thereby identifies the expected stable configurations of ions and waters in the selectivity filter of the chan...

We explore practical methods of carrying out Lagrange Multiplier tests for variance components in two models in which the derivatives needed for the test are identically zero at the restricted estimates, the random effects probit model and the stochastic frontier model. The techniques are illustrated with two applications.

Stent struts protruding into ostial side branch called "jailed strut" at bifurcation lesions is a likely cause of thrombus formation. We aimed to investigate the influences of multiple kissing balloon inflation (KBI) for stent expansion, and stent platform design, respectively, on the reduction of incomplete stent apposition area (ISA area) caused by jailed struts at a side-branch ostium, using...

Biological rapid sand filters are often used to remove ammonium from groundwater for drinking water supply. They often operate under dynamic substrate and hydraulic loading conditions, which can lead to increased levels of ammonium and nitrite in the effluent. To determine the maximum nitrification rates and safe operating windows of rapid sand filters, a pilot scale rapid sand filter was used ...

Multipotent mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) are well known for their tri-lineage potential and ability to differentiate in vitro into osteogenic, chondrogenic or adipogenic lineages. By selecting appropriate conditions MSCs can also be differentiated in vitro into the myogenic lineage and are therefore a promising option for cell-based regeneration of muscle tissue such as an aged or damaged s...

BACKGROUND Although a range of pharmacotherapeutical options are available for the treatment of bipolar disorder, patient non-adherence to prescribed treatment regimens and early treatment discontinuation remain among the primary obstacles to effective treatment. Therefore, this observational study assessed time on mood stabilizing medication and retention rates in patients with bipolar disorde...

Morphological and immuno/histochemical studies were performed on the vestibular lamina (VL) of gestational day 13 murine fetuses, using light microscopy (LM), confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM), in an effort to elucidate the early development of the oral vestibule. Histochemistry employing LM demonstrated some PAS-positive glycogen particles in ...

Recently, minimum perfect hashing (MPH)-based language model (LM) lookup methods have been proposed for fast access of N-gram LM scores in lexical-tree based LVCSR (large vocabulary continuous speech recognition) decoding. Methods of node-based LM cache and LM context pre-computing (LMCP) have also been proposed to combine with MPH for further reduction of LM lookup time. Although these methods...

The acid hydrolysis of lignocellulosic material (LM) is one of the most widely studied and important subprocess in the LM biorefinery. After acid hydrolysis, LM can be converted to various biofuels, biochemicals, and biomaterials through chemical or biochemical methods. However, conventional LM acid hydrolysis is not regarded as a cost-effective and environmentally-friendly process because it h...