We have investigated the development of the schistosome egg and its secretions in order to understand how it migrates through gut tissues and also initiates pathology in the liver. We show by electron microscopy that the subshell envelope is absent in the newly deposited egg, but appears very early and differentiates as development progresses. In the mature egg, this nucleated envelope contains...

We describe work that addresses the cortical basis for the analysis of auditory objects using ‘generic’ sounds that do not correspond to any particular events or sources (like vowels or voices) that have semantic association. The experiments involve the manipulation of synthetic sounds to produce systematic changes of stimulus features, such as spectral envelope. Conventional analyses of normal...

Continuous speech evokes electrophysiological brain activity phase-locked to the speech envelope (ENV), resembling the N100 responses to single acoustic events. Using magnetoencophalography (MEG), the present study investigated further MEG components that directly reflect acoustic properties of continuous speech signals, i.e., a derivate of the envelope that can be taken as a physical marker of...

We describe work that addresses the cortical basis for the analysis of auditory objects using 'generic' sounds that do not correspond to any particular events or sources (like vowels or voices) that have semantic association. The experiments involve the manipulation of synthetic sounds to produce systematic changes of stimulus features, such as spectral envelope. Conventional analyses of normal...

The arabinosyltransferases responsible for the biosynthesis of the arabinan domains of two abundant heteropolysaccharides of the cell envelope of all mycobacterial species, lipoarabinomannan and arabinogalactan, are validated drug targets. Using a cell envelope preparation from Mycobacterium smegmatis as the enzyme source and di- and trimannoside synthetic acceptors, we uncovered a previously u...

The great advantage of using a glottal source model in parametric speech synthesis is the degree of parametric flexibility it gives to transform and model aspects of voice quality and speaker identity. However, few studies have addressed how the glottal source affects the quality of synthetic speech. Here, we have developed the Glottal Spectral Separation (GSS) method which consists of separati...

A protein of 110 kDa (termed VP110) from the envelope fraction of White spot syndrome virus (WSSV) was identified by SDS-PAGE and mass spectrometry. The resulting amino acid sequence matched an open reading frame (wsv035) containing an Arg-Gly-Asp (RGD) motif in the WSSV genome database. To validate the mass-spectrometry result, the C-terminal segment of the wsv035 open reading frame was expres...

The envelope glycoprotein of small ruminant lentiviruses (SRLV) is a major target of the humoral immune response and contains several linear B-cell epitopes. We amplified and sequenced the genomic segment encoding the SU5 antigenic site of the envelope glycoprotein of several SRLV field isolates. With synthetic peptides based on the deduced amino acid sequences of SU5 in an enzyme-linked immuno...

The compact representation of harmonic amplitudes in the sinusoidal coding of speech is an important problem in low bit rate speech compression. A widely used method to achieve this is by the all-pole modeling of the spectral envelope. Often a perceptually warped frequency scale is applied in the all-pole modeling to improve perceived accuracy at low model orders. In this work, an attempt is ma...