Background: The neuronal ceroid lipofuscinoses (NCLs) are a group of inherited neurodegenerative disorders characterized by accumulation of autofluorescent material in many tissues, especially in neurons. Mutations in the CLN8 gene, encoding an endoplasmic reticulum ( ER) transmembrane protein of unknown function, underlie NCL phenotypes in humans and mice. The human phenotype is characterized by

The article tries to give a solution to a key problem for modern religious man and modern theology: what kind of reality is at stake in religious language and religious belief? Questions of how reality is related to concepts and social contexts are discussed particularly with respect to children's make-believe play, and a distinction is introduced between reality as conceptualized by us, as constr

Protein kinase B (PKB) is involved in signaling to a multitude of important cellular events and is activated by insulin and growth factors, including insulin-like growth factor I (IGF-I). We show here expression of PKB in pancreatic islets and in the beta cell lines HIT-T15, INS-1, and RINm5F. Expression of PKB mRNA and the presence of PKB isoforms (alpha, beta, and gamma) were assessed by Norther

Many issues in computational vision can be understood from the interplay between camera geometry and the structure of images and objects. Typically, the image structure is available and the goal is to reconstruct object structure and camera geometry. This is often difficult due to the complex interdependence between these three entities. The theme of this thesis is to use invariants to solve these

Helicobacter species are fastidious bacterial pathogens that are difficult to culture by standard methods. A PCR-denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (PCR-DGGE) technique for detection and identification of different Helicobacter species was developed and evaluated. The method involves PCR detection of Helicobacter DNA by genus-specific primers that target 16S rDNA and subsequent differentiatio

The immunodeficiency, centromeric region instability, facial anomalies (ICF) syndrome is a rare autosomal recessive disease. Usually, it is caused by mutations in the DNA methyltransferase 3B gene, which result in decreased methylation of satellite DNA in the juxtacentromeric heterochromatin at 1qh, 16qh, and 9qh. Satellite II-rich 1qh and 16qh display high frequencies of abnormalities in mitogen-

Hans Rott has argued, most recently in his book Change, Choice and Inference, that certain formal correspondences between belief revision and rational choice have important philosophical implications, claiming that the former strongly indicate the unity of practical and theoretical reason as well as the primacy of practical reason. In this paper, I confront Rott's argument with three serious chall

In this short note, some experimental results are presented on the diffraction of a spherical way by a hard half-plane. This study was conducted with the aim to give evidence to the existence of the edge-diffracted wave. The sound source used in this experimental study is a condenser microphone operating in a reverse way. The wave emitted by a sound source propagates in space and hits a thin alumi

A newly isolated, purified, and characterized PQQ-dependent alcohol dehydrogenase (a bacterial membrane-bound protein) was recently found to display a surprisingly large linear range and high selectivity towards ethanol when integrated into a conducting polymer network on a platinum electrode. These findings motivated us to study the enzyme when simply immobilized onto carbonaceous surfaces in ord

Biological pathways represent the relationships (reactions and interactions) between biological molecules in the context of normal cellular functions and disease mechanisms. Understanding the roles of proteins and signaling pathways expressed within disease, and their link to drug discovery and drug development are central in today's target-driven pharmaceutical processes. This article gives an ov

The idea of dynamic programming is general and very simple, but the "curse of dimensionality" is often prohibitive and restricts the fields of application. This paper introduces a method to reduce the complexity by relaxing the demand for optimality. The distance from optimality is kept within prespecified bounds and the size of the bounds determines the computational complexity. Several computati

Many vehicle manufacturers have lately introduced advance driver support in some of their automobiles. One of those new features is Adaptive Cruise Control DACCE, which extends the conventional cruise control system to control of relative speed and distance to other vehicles. In order to design an ACC controller it is suitable to have a model of driver behavior. The approach in the thesis is to us

Two-components cycle-resolved Laser Doppler Velocimetry (LDV) measurements were performed with high data rate to resolve the flow in a spark ignition engine. The velocity measurements were then processed with both a frequency and a time domain filtering technique to obtain the level of turbulence at different frequencies. Simultaneous cylinder pressure measurements gave information of the duration