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Drawing from the social-functional perspective, this research explored the differences in consumers’ responses to two types of spokesperson’s smile: broad and slight. The authors identified two boundary conditions: consumer self-construal (independent versus interdependent) and relationship norm (communal versus exchange). The results from two studies show that a spokesperson’s broad smile is more persuasive for consumers with interdependent self-construal in the communal relationship. By contrast, a spokesperson’s slight smile is more persuasive for consumers with independent self-construal in the exchange relationship. Processing fluency serves as the underlying mechanism. The results provide implications for marketers regarding how to use a spokesperson’s smile effectively.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how quality dimensions in independently owned online brand communities influence purchase intentions via uncertainty reduction and the role of involvement. Design/methodology/approach This work validates the model and hypotheses through non-probabilistic sampling. The online questionnaire was made on the website of MySurvey and an invitation letter was posted to the forums. The respondents received the questionnaire items translated into Chinese. The final survey sample consisted of 235 respondents. Findings Empirical results confirm that as for independently owned online brand communities, their information quality and relationship quality are effective tools for influencing purchase intentions via uncertainty reduction. In addition, the authors demonstrate that involvement has a positively moderating influence on the relationship between uncertainty reduction and purchase intentions. Originality/value The current study moves beyond uncertainty reduction to demonstrate that information quality and relationship quality of forums influenced purchase intention via uncertainty reduction and the moderating variable such as involvement.

Recent research suggests that there are increasing opportunities for customer-firm co-production as a means to achieve competitive advantage. This study proposes a model of co-production and investigates the link between co-production and its antecedent factors in a financial services context. The model is empirically tested in a survey of 288 customers of banks (or financial holding companies). Support is found for a contingency model involving customer expertise, service provider expertise, communication and interpersonal relationships along with perceived importance of service and dependence. Theoretical and managerial implications of findings are discussed.

This paper applies a disaggregated approach to segment industrial markets under competitive structures taking the air-freight market for the high-technology product industry in Taiwan as a case study. Data from firms is used to examine the structure of the air freight industry and we find that carriers are clustered into two strategic groups, express and forwarder. Pricing is a leading strategy recognized by customers for forwarders, whereas service punctuality and freight security are the winning strategies for express. The high-tech freight market is classifiable by shipment destination and size.

TiO2 thin films when irradiated by UV light with a wavelength of 365 nm is investigated. The results indicate that the annealed samples have higher oxygen sensitivities than the as-deposited samples. The sensitivity of the non-annealed samples increases from 0.70 to 1.15 under UV irradiation, while the sensitivity of the annealed samples increases from 7.17 to 10.60. Therefore, it is clear that UV irradiation causes the sensitivity of the SnO2/TiO2 thin films to increase significantly. Finally, it is found that the oxygen sensitivity of the SnO2/TiO2 thin films increases as the SnO2/TiO2 ratio is reduced.

Motivation: Genome-wide gene expression programs have been monitored and analyzed in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, but how cells regulate global gene expression programs in response to environmental changes is still far from being understood. We present a systematic approach to quantitatively characterize the transcriptional regulatory network of the yeast cell cycle. For the interpretative purpose, 20 target genes were selected because their expression patterns fluctuated in a periodic manner concurrent with the cell cycle and peaked at different phases. In addition to the most significant five possible regulators of each specific target gene, the expression pattern of each target gene affected by synergy of the regulators during the cell cycle was characterized. Our first step includes modeling the dynamics of gene expression and extracting the transcription rate from a time-course microarray data. The second step embraces finding the regulators that possess a high correlation with the transcription rate of the target gene, and quantifying the regulatory abilities of the identified regulators. Results: Our network discerns not only the role of the activator or repressor for each specific regulator, but also the regulatory ability of the regulator to the transcription rate of the target gene. The highly coordinated regulatory network has identified a group of significant regulators responsible for the gene expression program through the cell cycle progress. This approach may be useful for computing the regulatory ability of the transcriptional regulatory networks in more diverse conditions and in more complex eukaryotes. Supplementary information: Matlab code and test data are available at http://www.ee.nthu.edu.tw/~bschen/quantitative/regulatory_network.htm

This study investigates the sources of the comovement of the Taiwan and U.S. stock market. The empirical evidence shows that both economic fundamentals and equity risk premiums can act as transmission mechanisms of both markets. In the meantime, the financial integration is much stronger than real economic integration. Moreover, the deregulation of foreign investments in Taiwan and the Southeast Asian financial crisis in 1997 did not alter the transmission mechanisms of real economic and equity risk premium factors.

Nuclear DNA contents were estimated by flow cytometry in 18 Phalaenopsis Blume species and Doritis pulcherrima Lindl. DNA amounts differed 6.07-fold, from 2.74 pg/diploid nuclear DNA content (2C) in P. sanderiana Rchb.f. to 16.61 pg/2C in P. parishii Rchb.f. Nuclear DNA contents of P. aphrodite Rchb.f. clones, W01-38 (2n = 2x = 38), W01-41 (2n = 3x = 57), and W01-22 (2n = 4x = 76), displayed a linear relationship with their chromosome numbers, indicating the accuracy of flow cytometry. Our results also suggest that the 2C-values of the Phalaenopsis sp. correlate with their chromosome sizes. The comparative analyses of DNA contents may provide information to molecular geneticists and systematists for genome analysis in Phalaenopsis. Endoreduplication was found in various tissues of P. equestris at different levels. The highest degree of endoreduplication in P. equestris was detected in leaves.

The linear pentanuclear chromium complexes [CrII5(μ5-tpda)4Cl2] (1), [CrII5(μ5-tpda)4(NCS)2] (2), [CrIIICrII4(μ5-tpda)4F2](BF4) (3), and [CrIIICrII4(μ5-tpda)4F(OTf)](OTf) (4), with four all-syn tri(α-pyridyl)diamido dianion (tpda2–) ligands, have been prepared and structurally characterized. Compounds 1 and 2 possess a delocalized Cr(II)–Cr(II)–Cr(II)–Cr(II)–Cr(II) five-centred metal–metal bond of order 1.5. In both 1 and 2 two values for CrII–CrII bond lengths are found both; the outer ones connected with axial ligands are 2.284(1) and 2.285(2) A, and the inner ones are 2.2405(8) and 2.246(1) A, for 1 and 2, respectively. When compound 1 reacts with 2 equiv. of AgBF4 or Ag(OTf), a oxidation reaction takes place and one of the terminal chromium(II) ions is oxidized to produce [CrIIICrII4(μ5-tpda)4F2]BF4 (3) or [CrIIICrII4(μ5-tpda)4F(OTf)](OTf) (4). Two short Cr–Cr distances [1.969(2) and 2.138(2) A for 3, 1.846(1) and 1.922(1) A for 4] are found, with the presence of two quadruple bonds among four adjacent CrII ions. The fifth CrIII ion, which is separated from the neighboring CrII ion by 2.487(2) A for 3 and 2.610(1) A for 4, is simply a square pyramidal unit with no metal–metal bonding interaction.

Motivation: Synthetic biology aims to develop the artificial gene networks with desirable behaviors using systematic method. These networks with desired behaviors could be constructed using diverse biological parts, which may limit the development to complex synthetic gene networks. Fortunately, some well-characterized promoter libraries for engineering gene networks are widely available. Thus, a synthetic gene network can be constructed by selecting adequate promoters from promoter libraries to achieve the desired behaviors. However, the present promoter libraries cannot be directly applied to engineer a synthetic gene network. In order to efficiently select adequate promoters from promoter libraries for a synthetic gene network, promoter libraries are needed to be redefined based on the dynamic gene regulation. Results: Based on four design specifications, a library-based search method is proposed to efficiently select the most adequate promoter set from the redefined promoter libraries by a genetic algorithm (GA) to achieve optimal reference tracking design. As the number and size of promoter libraries increase, the proposed method can play an important role in the systematic design of synthetic biology. Contact: g883743@alumni.nthu.edu.tw; bschen@ee.nthu.edu.tw Supplementary Information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Motivation: Synthetic biology is to engineer artificial biological systems to investigate natural biological phenomena and for a variety of applications. However, the development of synthetic gene networks is still difficult and most newly created gene networks are non-functioning due to uncertain initial conditions and disturbances of extra-cellular environments on the host cell. At present, how to design a robust synthetic gene network to work properly under these uncertain factors is the most important topic of synthetic biology. Results: A robust regulation design is proposed for a stochastic synthetic gene network to achieve the prescribed steady states under these uncertain factors from the minimax regulation perspective. This minimax regulation design problem can be transformed to an equivalent stochastic game problem. Since it is not easy to solve the robust regulation design problem of synthetic gene networks by non-linear stochastic game method directly, the Takagi–Sugeno (T–S) fuzzy model is proposed to approximate the non-linear synthetic gene network via the linear matrix inequality (LMI) technique through the Robust Control Toolbox in Matlab. Finally, an in silico example is given to illustrate the design procedure and to confirm the efficiency and efficacy of the proposed robust gene design method. Availability: http://www.ee.nthu.edu.tw/bschen/SyntheticBioDesign_supplement.pdf Contact: bschen@ee.nthu.edu.tw Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Background Gene expression programs depend on recognition of cis elements in promoter region of target genes by transcription factors (TFs), but how TFs regulate gene expression via recognition of cis elements is still not clear. To study this issue, we define the cis-regulatory circuit of a gene as a system that consists of its cis elements and the interactions among their recognizing TFs and develop a dynamic model to study the functional architecture and dynamics of the circuit. This is in contrast to traditional approaches where a cis-regulatory circuit is constructed by a mutagenesis or motif-deletion scheme. We estimate the regulatory functions of cis-regulatory circuits using microarray data. Results A novel cross-gene identification scheme is proposed to infer how multiple TFs coordinate to regulate gene transcription in the yeast cell cycle and to uncover hidden regulatory functions of a cis-regulatory circuit. Some advantages of this approach over most current methods are that it is based on data obtained from intact cis-regulatory circuits and that a dynamic model can quantitatively characterize the regulatory function of each TF and the interactions among the TFs. Our method may also be applicable to other genes if their expression profiles have been examined for a sufficiently long time. Conclusion In this study, we have developed a dynamic model to reconstruct cis-regulatory circuits and a cross-gene identification scheme to estimate the regulatory functions of the TFs that control the regulation of the genes under study. We have applied this method to cell cycle genes because the available expression profiles for these genes are long enough. Our method not only can quantify the regulatory strengths and synergy of the TFs but also can predict the expression profile of any gene having a subset of the cis elements studied.

Three novel oligo-α-pyridylamino ligands, tripyridyldi-amine (H2tpda), tetrapyridyltriamine (H3teptra), pentapyridyltetramine (H4peptea) are synthesized; the crystal structures of their metal complexes with the all-anti configuration of the chelating ligands are reported.

Background Eukaryotic cells have developed mechanisms to respond to external environmental or physiological changes (stresses). In order to increase the activities of stress-protection functions in response to an environmental change, the internal cell mechanisms need to induce certain specific gene expression patterns and pathways by changing the expression levels of specific transcription factors (TFs). The conventional methods to find these specific TFs and their interactivities are slow and laborious. In this study, a novel efficient method is proposed to detect the TFs and their interactivities that regulate yeast genes that respond to any specific environment change. Results For each gene expressed in a specific environmental condition, a dynamic regulatory model is constructed in which the coefficients of the model represent the transcriptional activities and interactivities of the corresponding TFs. The proposed method requires only microarray data and information of all TFs that bind to the gene but it has superior resolution than the current methods. Our method not only can find stress-specific TFs but also can predict their regulatory strengths and interactivities. Moreover, TFs can be ranked, so that we can identify the major TFs to a stress. Similarly, it can rank the interactions between TFs and identify the major cooperative TF pairs. In addition, the cross-talks and interactivities among different stress-induced pathways are specified by the proposed scheme to gain much insight into protective mechanisms of yeast under different environmental stresses. Conclusion In this study, we find significant stress-specific and cell cycle-controlled TFs via constructing a transcriptional dynamic model to regulate the expression profiles of genes under different environmental conditions through microarray data. We have applied this TF activity and interactivity detection method to many stress conditions, including hyper- and hypo- osmotic shock, heat shock, hydrogen peroxide and cell cycle, because the available expression time profiles for these conditions are long enough. Especially, we find significant TFs and cooperative TFs responding to environmental changes. Our method may also be applicable to other stresses if the gene expression profiles have been examined for a sufficiently long time.