Search results for "junctions"
showing 10 items of 155 documents
From non-excitable single-cell to multicellular bioelectrical states supported by ion channels and gap junction proteins: Electrical potentials as di…
2019
Endogenous bioelectric patterns within tissues are an important driver of morphogenesis and a tractable component of a number of disease states. Developing system-level understanding of the dynamics by which non-neural bioelectric circuits regulate complex downstream cascades is a key step towards both, an evolutionary understanding of ion channel genes, and novel strategies in regenerative medicine. An important capability gap is deriving rational modulation strategies targeting individual cells' bioelectric states to achieve global (tissue- or organ-level) outcomes. Here, we develop an ion channel-based model that describes multicellular states on the basis of spatio-temporal patterns of …
Dysbiosis and zonulin upregulation alter gut epithelial and vascular barriers in patients with ankylosing spondylitis
2017
BackgroundDysbiosis has been recently demonstrated in patients with ankylosing spondylitis (AS) but its implications in the modulation of intestinal immune responses have never been studied. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of ileal bacteria in modulating local and systemic immune responses in AS.MethodsIleal biopsies were obtained from 50 HLA-B27+ patients with AS and 20 normal subjects. Silver stain was used to visualise bacteria. Ileal expression of tight and adherens junction proteins was investigated by TaqMan real-time (RT)-PCR and immunohistochemistry. Serum levels of lipopolysaccharide (LPS), LPS-binding protein (LPS-BP), intestinal fatty acid-BP (iFABP) and zonulin…
Comparing DNA sequence collections by direct comparison of compressed text indexes
2012
Popular sequence alignment tools such as BWA convert a reference genome to an indexing data structure based on the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT), from which matches to individual query sequences can be rapidly determined. However the utility of also indexing the query sequences themselves remains relatively unexplored. Here we show that an all-against-all comparison of two sequence collections can be computed from the BWT of each collection with the BWTs held entirely in external memory, i.e. on disk and not in RAM. As an application of this technique, we show that BWTs of transcriptomic and genomic reads can be compared to obtain reference-free predictions of splice junctions that have h…
Enhanced efficiency in plastic planar heterojunction solar cells by AuNPs positioned at donor-acceptor interfaces
2018
A new class of copolymers containing oligothiophene moieties with different length and fullerene units have been designed and prepared by an easy and inexpensive one-step synthetic approach. The incorporation of small quantities of these copolymers into bulk heterojunction (BHJ) solar cells with donor regioregular polythiophene (P3HT) and acceptor fullerene derivate (PCBM) results in a good control of the phase separation process without further affecting the BHJ optoelectronic properties. Indeed, these copolymers allow modulating under thermal annealing the growth of domains whose size depends on the length of the copolymer repetitive units. Domain size on the same length scale of the P3HT…
The importance of tight junctions in the blood-brain barrier
2021
There are two barriers in the central nervous system (CNS) responsible for maintaining the homeostatic balance of the human body’s internal environment in relation to external conditions: the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and the blood-cerebrospinal fluid barrier (BCSFB). The blood-brain barrier is a physical barrier with a fixed location between the blood and the nervous tissue. Its basic structural elements include endothelial cells of the brain capillaries, astrocytes and pericytes. The blood-brain barrier is the barrier between the blood and neurons which isolates the central nervous system from the rest of the body in a unique manner. The blood-brain barrier is formed by astrocytes and per…
Cyclic adenosine monophosphate is a key component of regulatory T cell–mediated suppression
2007
Naturally occurring regulatory T cells (T reg cells) are a thymus-derived subset of T cells, which are crucial for the maintenance of peripheral tolerance by controlling potentially autoreactive T cells. However, the underlying molecular mechanisms of this strictly cell contact–dependent process are still elusive. Here we show that naturally occurring T reg cells harbor high levels of cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP). This second messenger is known to be a potent inhibitor of proliferation and interleukin 2 synthesis in T cells. Upon coactivation with naturally occurring T reg cells the cAMP content of responder T cells is also strongly increased. Furthermore, we demonstrate that natur…
Josephson-based Threshold Detector for Lévy-Distributed Current Fluctuations
2019
We propose a threshold detector for Lévy-distributed fluctuations based on a Josephson junction. The Lévy-noise current added to a linearly ramped bias current results in clear changes in the distribution of switching currents out of the zero-voltage state of the junction. We observe that the analysis of the cumulative distribution function of the switching currents supplies information on both the characteristics' shape parameter α of the Lévy statistics. Moreover, we discuss a theoretical model, which allows characteristic features of the Lévy fluctuations to be extracted from a measured distribution of switching currents. In view of these results, this system can effectively find an appl…
Progress towards innovative and energy efficient logic circuits
2020
Abstract The integration of superconductive nanowire logic memories and energy efficient computing Josephson logic is explored. Nanowire memories are based on the integration of switchable superconducting nanowires with a suitable magnetic material. These memories exploit the electro-thermal operation of the nanowires to efficiently store and read a magnetic state. In order to achieve proper memory operation a careful design of the nanowire assembly is necessary, as well as a proper choice of the magnetic material to be employed. At present several new superconducting logic families have been proposed, all tending to minimize the effect of losses in the digital Josephson circuits replacing …
Very large thermophase in ferromagnetic josephson junctions
2014
Under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0 (CC-BY).
θ0 thermal Josephson junction
2017
We predict the thermal counterpart of the anomalous Josephson effect in superconductor/ferromagnet/superconductor junctions with noncoplanar magnetic texture. The heat current through the junction is shown to have the phase-sensitive interference component proportional to cos(θ−θ0), where θ is the Josephson phase difference and θ0 is the texture-dependent phase shift. In the generic trilayer magnetic structure with the spin-filtering tunnel barrier θ0 is determined by the spin chirality of magnetic configuration and can be considered as the direct manifestation of the energy transport with participation of spin-triplet Cooper pairs. In case of the ideal spin filter the phase shift is shown …