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X-linked hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia (XLHED) is a rare congenital genetic disorder caused by mutations in the ectodysplasin A gene, resulting in dysplasia or complete absence of teeth, hair, and sweat glands. XLHED is rarely diagnosed prenatally. We describe a case of XLHED diagnosed with prenatal sonography and umbilical cord blood gene testing.

Summary This paper deals with the equivalent resistance for the m × n resistor network in both finite and infinite cases. Firstly, we build a difference equation driven by a tridiagonal matrix to model the network; then by performing the diagonalizing transformation on the driving matrix, and using the auxiliary function tz(x,n), we derive two formulae of the equivalent resistance between two corner nodes on a common edge of the network. By comparing two different formulae, we also obtain a new trigonometric identity here. Our framework can be effectively applied in complex impedance networks. As in applications in the LC network, we find that our formulation leads to the occurrence of resonances at frequencies associated with (n + 1)ϕt = kπ. This somewhat curious result suggests the possibility of practical applications of our formulae to resonant circuits. At the end of the paper, two other formulae of an m × n resistor network are proposed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Electroacupuncture (EA) has been clinically applied for treating different medical conditions, such as pain, strain, and immune diseases. Low- and high-frequency EAs have distinct therapeutic effects in clinical practice and experimental studies. However, the molecular mechanism of this difference remains obscure. The arcuate nucleus (Arc) is a critical region of the hypothalamus and is responsible for the effect of EA stimulation to remote acupoints. Gene expression profiling provides a powerful tool with which to explore the basis of physiopathological responses to external stimulus. In this study, using cDNA microarray, we investigated gene expressions in the rat Arc region induced by low-frequency (2-Hz) and high-frequency (100-Hz) EAs to two remote acupoints, zusanli (ST36) and sanyinjiao (SP6). We have found that more genes were differentially regulated by 2-Hz EA than 100-Hz EA (154 vs. 66 regulated genes/ESTs) in Arc, especially those related to neurogenesis, which was confirmed by qRT-PCR. These results demonstrate that the expression level of genes in the Arc region could be effectively regulated by low-frequency EA, compared with high-frequency EA, helping to uncover the mechanisms of the therapeutic effects of the low-frequency EA. Our results also indicate different-frequency EAs are spatially specific.

Protein–protein docking is usually exploited with a two-step strategy, i.e., conformational sampling and decoy scoring. In this work, a new filter enhanced sampling scheme was proposed and added into the RosettaDock algorithm to improve the conformational sampling efficiency. The filter term is based on the statistical result that backbone hydrogen bonds in the native protein structures are wrapped by more than nine hydrophobic groups to shield them from attacks of water molecules (Fernandez and Scheraga, Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2003;100:113–118). A combinatorial scoring function, ComScore, specially designed for the other-type protein–protein complexes was also adopted to select the near native docked modes. ComScore was composed of the atomic contact energy, van der Waals, and electrostatic interaction energies, and the weight of each item was fit through the multiple linear regression approach. To analyze our docking results, the filter enhanced sampling scheme was applied to targets T12, T20, and T21 after the CAPRI blind test, and improvements were obtained. The ligand least root mean square deviations (L_rmsds) were reduced and the hit numbers were increased. ComScore was used in the scoring test for CAPRI rounds 9–12 with good success in rounds 9 and 11. Proteins 2007. © 2007 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Sn–aniline complex was prepared by a simple procedure. Cyclic and acyclic ketones were oxidized into lactones or esters with very high selectivity and yield with 30% hydrogen peroxide in the presence of Sn–aniline complex.