The use of role-play games in teaching: The International Climate Negotiation Game

This paper presents a role-play game designed by the authors, which focuses on international climate negotiations. The game has been used at a university with students all drawn from the same course and at summer schools with students from different levels (undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers) and different knowledge areas (economics, law, engineering, architecture, biology and others). We discuss how the game fits into the process of competence-based learning, and what benefits games, and role-play games in particular, have for teaching. In the game, students take on the role of representatives of national institutions and experience at first hand a detailed process of international negotiation concerned with climate change.

The Homology and Relationship of Human (Homo sapiens) Chromosomes 1, 19 and Dusky Langur (Trachypithacus obscurus) Chromosomes 6, 8 Demonstrated with Chromosome Painting

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Construction of a BAC library for Chinese amphioxus Branchiostoma belcheri and identification of clones containing Amphi-pax genes

Amphioxus is a crucial organism for the study of vertebrate evolution. Although a genomic BAC library of Branchiostoma floridae has been constructed, we report here another BAC library construction of its distant relative species Branchiostoma belcheri. The amphioxus BAC library established in present study consists of 45,312 clones arrayed in one hundred and eighteen 384-well plates. The average insert fragment size was 120 kb estimated by Pulsed Field Gel Electrophoresis (PFGE) analysis of 318 randomly selected clones. The representation of the library is about 12 equivalent to the genome, allowing a 99.9995% probability of recovering any specific sequence of interest. We further screened the library with 4 single copied Amphi-Pax genes and identified total of 26 positive clones with average of 6.5 clones for each gene. The result indicates this library is well suited for many applications and should also serve as a useful complemental resource for the scientific community.

Antimicrobial peptides from skin secretions of Chinese red belly toad Bombina maxima

Two groups of antimicrobial peptides have been isolated from skin secretions of Bombina maxima. Peptides in the first group, named maximins 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, are structurally related to bombinin-like peptides (BLPs). Unlike BLPs, sequence variations in maximins occurred all through the molecules. In addition to the potent antimicrobial activity, cytotoxicity against tumor cells and spermicidal action of maximins, maximin 3 possessed a significant anti-HIV activity. Maximins 1 and 3 were toxic to mice with LD50 values of 8.2 and 4.3 mg/kg, respectively. Peptides in the second group, termed maximins H1, H2, H3 and H4, are homologous with bombinin H peptides. cDNA sequences revealed that one maximin peptide plus one maximin H peptide derived from a common larger protein. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.

Identification and cloning of a trypsin inhibitor from skin secretions of Chinese red-belly toad Bombina maxima

A novel trypsin inhibitor was identified and purified from skin secretions of Chinese red-belly toad Bombina maxima. The partial N-terminal 29 amino acid residues of the peptide, named BMTI, were determined by automated Edman degradation. This allowed the cloning of a full-length cDNA encoding BMTI from a cDNA library prepared from the toad skin. The deduced complete amino acid sequence of BMTI indicates that mature BMTI is composed of 60 amino acids. A FASTA search in the databanks revealed that BMTI exhibits 81.7% sequence identity with BSTI, a trypsin/thrombin inhibitor from European toad Bombina bombina skin secretions. Sequence differences between BMTI and BSTI were due to 11 substitutions at positions 2, 9, 25, 27, 36-37, 39, 41-42, 50 and 56. BMTI potently inhibited trypsin with a K-i value of 0.06 muM, similar to that of BSTI. However, unlike BSTI, which also inhibited thrombin with a K-i value of 1 muM, no inhibitory effect of BMTI on thrombin was observed under the assay conditions. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.

Characterization of three fibrinogenolytic enzymes from Chinese green tree viper (Trimeresurus stejnegeri) venom

Rong Gao, Yun Zhang, Qing-Xiong Meng, Wen-Hui Lee, Dong-Sheng Li, Yu-liang Xiong and Wan-Yu Wang. Characterization of three fibrinogenolytic enzymes from Chinese green tree viper (Trimeresurus stejneger ) venom. Toxicon 36, 457-467, 1998.-From the venom of Chinese green tree viper (Trimeresurus stejnegeri), three distinct fibrinogenolytic enzymes: stejnefibrase-l, stejnefibrase-2 and stejnefibrase-3, were purified by gel filtration, ion-exchange chromatography and reverse-phase high-performance chromatograghy (HPLC). SDS-PAGE analysis of those three enzymes showed that they consisted of a single polypeptide chain with mel. wt of -50 000, 31 000 and 32 000, respectively. Like TSV-PA (a specific plasminogen activator) and stejnobin (a fibrinogen-clotting enzyme) purified from the same venom, stejnfibrase-1, -2 and -3 were able to hydrolyze several chromogenic substrate. On the other hand, different from TSV-PA. and stejnobin, stejnefibrase-l, -2 and -3 did not activate plasminogen and did not possess fibrinogen-clotting activity. The three purified enzymes directly degraded fibrinogen to small fragments and rendered it unclottable by thrombin. Stejnefibrase-2 degraded preferentially BE-chain while stejnefibrase-l and -3 cleaved concomitantly Ax and B beta-chains of fibrinogen. None of these proteases degraded the gamma-chain of fibrinogen. When correlated with the loss of clottability of fibrinogen, the most active enzyme was stejnefibrase-l. The activities of the three enzymes were inhibited by phenylmethylsulfonyl fluoride (PMSF) and p-nitrophenyl-p-guanidinobenzoate (NPGB), indicating that like TSV-PA and stejnobin, they are venom serine proteases. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Two Immunoregulatory Peptides with Antioxidant Activity from Tick Salivary Glands

Ticks are blood-feeding arthropods that may secrete immunosuppressant molecules, which inhibit host inflammatory and immune responses and provide survival advantages to pathogens at tick bleeding sites in hosts. In the current work, two families of immunoregulatory peptides, hyalomin-A and -B, were first identified from salivary glands of hard tick Hyalomma asiaticum asiaticum. Three copies of hyalomin-A are encoded by an identical gene and released from the same protein precursor. Both hyalomin-A and -B can exert significant anti-inflammatory functions, either by directly inhibiting host secretion of inflammatory factors such as tumor necrosis factor-alpha, monocyte chemotectic protein-1, and interferon-gamma or by indirectly increasing the secretion of immunosuppressant cytokine of interleukin-10. Hyalomin-A and -B were both found to potently scavenge free radical in vitro in a rapid manner and inhibited adjuvant-induced inflammation in mouse models in vivo. The JNK/SAPK subgroup of the MAPK signaling pathway was involved in such immunoregulatory functions of hyalomin-A and -B. These results showed that immunoregulatory peptides of tick salivary glands suppress host inflammatory response by modulating cytokine secretion and detoxifying reactive oxygen species.

Structured precision modelling with Cholesky basis superposition for speech recognition

Structured precision modelling is an important approach to improve the intra-frame correlation modelling of the standard HMM, where Gaussian mixture model with diagonal covariance are used. Previous work has all been focused on direct structured representation of the precision matrices. In this paper, a new framework is proposed, where the structure of the Cholesky square root of the precision matrix is investigated, referred to as Cholesky Basis Superposition (CBS). Each Cholesky matrix associated with a particular Gaussian distribution is represented as a linear combination of a set of Gaussian independent basis upper-triangular matrices. Efficient optimization methods are derived for both combination weights and basis matrices. Experiments on a Chinese dictation task showed that the proposed approach can significantly outperformed the direct structured precision modelling with similar number of parameters as well as full covariance modelling. © 2011 IEEE.

GPIb is involved in platelet aggregation induced by mucetin, a snake C-type lectin protein from Chinese habu (Trimeresurus mucrosquamatus) venom

Mucetin (Trimeresurus mucrosquamatus venom activator, TMVA) is a potent platelet activator purified from Chinese habu (Trimeresurus mucrosquamatus) venom. It belongs to the snake venom heterodimeric C-type lectin family and exists in several multimeric forms. We now show that binding to platelet glycoprotein (GP) lb is involved in mucetin-induced platelet aggregation. Antibodies against GPIb as well as the GPIb-blocking C-type lectin echicetin inhibited mucetin-induced platelet aggregation. Binding of GPIb was confirmed by affinity chromatography and Western blotting. Antibodies against GPVI inhibited convulxin- but not mucetin-induced aggregation. Signalling by mucetin involved rapid tyrosine phosphorylation of a number of proteins including Syk, Src, LAT and PLCgamma2. Mucetininduced phosphorylation of the Fcgamma chain of platelet was greatly promoted by inhibition of alpha(llb)beta(3) by the peptidomimetic EMD 132338, suggesting that phosphatases downstream Of alpha(llb)beta(3) activation are involved in dephosphorylation of Fcgamma. Unlike other multimeric snake C-type lectins that act via GPIb and only agglutinate platelets, mucetin activates alpha(llb)beta(3). Inhibition Of alpha(llb)beta(3) strongly reduced the aggregation response to mucetin, indicating that activation Of alpha(llb)beta(3) and binding of fibrinogen are involved in mucetin-induced platelet aggregation. Apyrase and aspirin also inhibit platelet aggregation induced by mucetin, suggesting that ADP and thromboxaneA(2) are involved in autocrine feedback. Sequence and structural comparison with closely related members of this protein family point to features that may be responsible for the functional differences.