Purine salvage as metabolite and energy saving mechanism in Camelus dromedarius: the recovery of guanine

The preservation of purine ring as purine bases appears to be a common feature of camel liver. Hepatic guanine appears to be actively converted into GMP in the camel rather than further degraded. The limiting step of guanine degradation appears to be the lack of hepatic guanase activity. Higher purine bases over uric acid ratios were found in camel urine with respect to those of zebu.     

Creating a Fit Between BPR and IT Infrastructure: A Proposed Framework for Effective Implementation

As business imperatives change and new high-capability information technologies (IT) appear, organizations recognize the need to remain at the forefront of change by reengineering their business processes and implementing enabling responsive IT infrastructures. However, experience in this context indicates a lack of comprehension of essential elements and their mutual relationships that can contribute to the success of business-process change-implementation efforts. This article proposes a framework for managing IT for effective business-process redesign (BPR) implementation. After establishing BPR principles, components, and the relationship of BPR to some organizational and technological approaches, it presents the role and benefits of IT in BPR. The article then discusses in detail the core elements of the framework. Its theme is that an IT infrastructure that covers issues of BPR strategy development, IT strategic alignment, IT infrastructure development, IT sourcing, legacy systems reengineering, IS integration, and IS function competence is essential and critical for effective implementation.     

Perspective Texture Synthesis Based on Improved Energy Optimization

Perspective texture synthesis has great significance in many fields like video editing, scene capturing etc., due to its ability to read and control global feature information. In this paper, we present a novel example-based, specifically energy optimization-based algorithm, to synthesize perspective textures. Energy optimization technique is a pixel-based approach, so it’s time-consuming. We improve it from two aspects with the purpose of achieving faster synthesis and high quality. Firstly, we change this pixel-based technique by replacing the pixel computation with a little patch. Secondly, we present a novel technique to accelerate searching nearest neighborhoods in energy optimization. Using k- means clustering technique to build a search tree to accelerate the search. Hence, we make use of principal component analysis (PCA) technique to reduce dimensions of input vectors. The high quality results prove that our approach is feasible. Besides, our proposed algorithm needs shorter time relative to other similar methods.     

An antigenic HIV-1 peptide sequence engineered into the surface structure of transferrin does not elicit an antibody response.

One novel approach for the biological delivery of peptide drugs is to incorporate the sequence of the peptide into the structure of a natural transport protein such as human serum transferrin (HST). However, a potential drawback is that the HST may increase the immunoreactivity of the peptide, in the same way that carrier proteins can be used to generate highly immunogenic peptide hapten conjugates. In this study we have generated a recombinant HST carrier protein that contains a peptide substrate of HIV-1 protease (VSQNYPIVL). The protein retained native HST function, and the peptide was surface exposed since it was immunoreactive in native dot blots, and was cleaved by HIV-1 protease. Immunisation of rabbits with the recombinant protein elicited only a very poor anti-peptide immune response. In contrast, strong anti-peptide immune responses were raised against both the peptide alone, and a chemical conjugate of the peptide with HST. These data demonstrate that it is possible to attenuate the immune response normally directed against an immunogenic peptide sequence by engineering into a surface exposed loop of HST. These findings may have an important impact on the future design of peptide delivery systems.     

Sex ratios and sex-biased infection behaviour in the entomopathogenic nematode genus Steinernema

In experimentally infected insects, the sex ratio of first generation nematodes of five species of Steinernema was female-biased (male proportion 0.35-0.47). There was a similar female bias when the worms developed in vitro (0.37-0.44), indicating that the bias in these species is not due to a lower rate of infection by male infective juveniles (IJs). Experimental conditions influenced the proportion of males establishing in insects, indicating that male and female IJs differ in their behaviour. However, there was no evidence that males are the colonising sex in any species, contrary to what has previously been proposed. Time of emergence from the host in which the nematodes had developed influenced sex ratios in experimental infections. In three species (Steinernema longicaudum, Steinernema glaseri and Steinernema kraussei), early emerged nematodes had a higher proportion of males than those that emerged later, with the reverse trend for Steinernema carpocapsae and Steinernema feltiae. In a more detailed in vitro study of S. longicaudum, the proportion of males was similar whether or not the nematodes passed through the developmentally arrested IJ stage, indicating that the female bias is not due to failure of males to exit this stage. The sex ratio in vitro was independent of survival rate from juvenile to adult, and was female-biased even when all juveniles developed, indicating that the bias is not explained by failure of males to develop to adults. The female-biased sex ratio characteristic of Steinernema populations appears to be present from at least the early juvenile stage. We hypothesise that the observed female bias is the population optimal sex ratio, a response to cycles of local mate competition experienced by nematodes reproducing within insect hosts interspersed with periods of outbreeding with less closely related worms following dispersal.