Deletion of IRC19 Causes Defects in DNA Double-Strand Break Repair Pathways in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

DNA double-strand break (DSB) repair is a fundamental cellular process crucial for maintaining genome stability, with homologous recombination and non-homologous end joining as the primary mechanisms, and various alternative pathways such as single-strand annealing (SSA) and microhomology-mediated end joining also playing significant roles under specific conditions. IRC genes were previously identified as part of a group of genes associated with increased levels of Rad52 foci in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. In this study, we investigated the effects of IRC gene mutations on DSB repair, focusing on uncharacterized IRC10, 19, 21, 22, 23, and 24.

Effects of Capsule Type on the Characteristics of Cement Mortars Containing Powder Compacted Capsules.

Several studies have been reported on self-healing concrete using bacteria, admixtures, and microcapsules. Among these self-healing techniques, encapsulating cement-based materials is advantageous in that large amounts of self-healing material can be contained in a capsule and released at the cracked site for a targeted reaction. This study produced a powder compacted capsule (PCC) using the droplet and blended manufacturing methods to encapsulate cementitious materials.

Effect of Bio-Inspired Polymer Types on Engineering Characteristics of Cement Composites.

Cement concrete is the most commonly used building and construction material worldwide because of its many advantages. Over time, however, it develops cracks due to shrinkage and tension, which may lead to premature failure of the entire structure. Recently, the incorporation of polymers has been explored to improve the overall strength and durability of cement concrete.

Effect of Cementitious Materials on the Engineering Properties of Lightweight Aggregate Mortars Containing Recycled Water.

With the trend toward taller and larger structures, the demand for high-strength and lightweight cement concrete has increased in the construction industry. Equipment for transporting ready-mixed concrete is frequently used to bring concrete to construction sites, and washing this equipment generates a large amount of recycled water, which is an industrial by-product. In this study, we recycled this water as the pre-wetting water for lightweight aggregate and as mixing water, and we substituted blast furnace slag powder (BS) and fly ash (FA) as cementitious materials (Cm).

Engineering Characteristics of Cement Composites Containing a Chitosan-Based Polymer and Steel Slag Aggregates.

Recently, sustainable development has attracted significant global attention. Toward this, several studies have been performed on the development of alternative aggregates for mortar or concrete to prevent environmental damage and rapid depletion of natural aggregates. In this study, we investigated the applicability of a chitosan-based polymer (CBP), a biomimetic polymer, to cement mortar using steel slag as a fine aggregate.

Strength, Carbonation Resistance, and Chloride-Ion Penetrability of Cement Mortars Containing Catechol-Functionalized Chitosan Polymer.

There have been numerous recent studies on improving the mechanical properties and durability of cement composites by mixing them with functional polymers. However, research into applying modified biopolymer such as catechol-functionalized chitosan to cement mortar or concrete is rare to the best of our knowledge. In this study, catechol-functionalized chitosan (Cat-Chit), a well-known bioinspired polymer that imitates the basic structures and functions of living organisms and biological materials in nature, was synthesized and combined with cement mortar in various proportions.

Characteristics of Mortars with Blast Furnace Slag Powder and Mixed Fine Aggregates Containing Ferronickel-Slag Aggregate.

Recently, interest in environmentally friendly development has increased worldwide, especially in the construction industry. In this study, blast furnace slag powder (BFSP) and mixed steel fine aggregates were applied to cement mortars to reduce the environmental damage caused by the extraction of natural aggregate and to increase the recycling rate of steel by-products in the construction industry. We investigated the fluidity, compressive strength, tensile strength, accelerated carbonation depth, and chloride ion penetration resistance of mortars with steel slag aggregate and their dependence on the presence or absence of BFSP.

Effect of Amorphous Metallic Fibers on Strength and Drying Shrinkage of Mortars with Steel Slag Aggregate.

Recently, with increasingly stringent environmental regulations and the depletion of natural aggregate resources, high-quality aggregates have become scarce. Therefore, significant efforts have been devoted by the construction industry to improve the quality of concrete and achieve sustainable development by utilizing industrial by-products and developing alternative aggregates. In this study, we use amorphous metallic fibers (AMFs) to enhance the performance of mortar with steel slag aggregate.

Strength and Durability Characteristics of Cement Composites with Recycled Water and Blast Furnace Slag Aggregate.

Recently, interest in sustainable development has been increased. In this regard, efforts have been made to prevent environmental pollution, and research on the recycling of construction industry byproducts has been actively conducted in the construction industry. In South Korea, about 20 million tons of waste wash water from the ready-mixed concrete production process are generated, and some of them are recycled using recycling facilities in a ready-mixed concrete plant, but a significant portion of them is discharged or landfilled without permission, causing environmental problems.

Effects of the loss of mismatch repair genes on single-strand annealing between divergent sequences in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Eukaryotic genomes contain many duplicated genes closely located with each other, such as the hexose transporter (HXT) genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. They can potentially recombine via single-strand annealing (SSA) pathway. SSA between highly divergent sequences generates heteroduplex DNA intermediates with many mismatches, which can be corrected by mismatch repair (MMR), resulting in recombinant sequences with a single junction point.

Convolutional Network With Twofold Feature Augmentation for Diabetic Retinopathy Recognition From Multi-Modal Images.

Objective: With the scenario of limited labeled dataset, this paper introduces a deep learning-based approach that leverages Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) severity recognition performance using fundus images combined with wide-field swept-source optical coherence tomography angiography (SS-OCTA).

Methods: The proposed architecture comprises a backbone convolutional network associated with a Twofold Feature Augmentation mechanism, namely TFA-Net. The former includes multiple convolution blocks extracting representational features at various scales.

Analyses of DNA double-strand break repair pathways in tandem arrays of HXT genes of Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Eukaryotic genomes contain numerous homologous repeat sequences including redundant genes with divergent homology that can be potential recombination targets. Recombination between divergent sequences is rare but poses a substantial threat to genome stability. The hexose transporter (HXT) gene family shares high sequence similarities at both protein and DNA levels, and some members are placed close together in tandem arrays.

Revisiting Internal Covariate Shift for Batch Normalization.

Despite the success of batch normalization (BatchNorm) and a plethora of its variants, the exact reasons for its success are still shady. The original BatchNorm article explained it as a mechanism that reduces the internal covariate shift (ICS), i.e.

Strength, Drying Shrinkage, and Carbonation Characteristic of Amorphous Metallic Fiber-Reinforced Mortar with Artificial Lightweight Aggregate.

This paper investigates the strength, drying shrinkage, and carbonation characteristic of amorphous metallic fiber-reinforced mortar with natural and artificial lightweight aggregates. The use of artificial lightweight aggregates has the advantage of reducing the unit weight of the mortar or concrete, but there is a concern that mechanical properties of concrete such as compressive strength and tensile strength may deteriorate due to the porous properties of lightweight aggregates. In order to improve the mechanical properties of lightweight aggregate mortar, we added 0, 10, 20, and 30 kg/m of amorphous metallic fibers to the samples with lightweight aggregate; the same amount of fiber was applied to the samples with natural aggregate for comparison.

Bimodal learning via trilogy of skip-connection deep networks for diabetic retinopathy risk progression identification.

Background: Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is considered a pathology of retinal vascular complications, which stays in the top causes of vision impairment and blindness. Therefore, precisely inspecting its progression enables the ophthalmologists to set up appropriate next-visit schedule and cost-effective treatment plans. In the literature, existing work only makes use of numerical attributes in Electronic Medical Records (EMR) for acquiring such kind of DR-oriented knowledge through conventional machine learning techniques, which require an exhaustive job of engineering most impactful risk factors.

Display in the Wild (DIW): An Adaptive Projection-Imaging System to Screen Geometry in Real Time.

TVs and monitors are among the most widely used displays in various environments. However, they have limitations in their physical display conditions, such as a fixed size/position and a rigid/flat space. In this paper, we suggest a new "Display in the Wild" (DIW) concept to overcome the aforementioned problems.

Learning-Based Just-Noticeable-Quantization- Distortion Modeling for Perceptual Video Coding.

Conventional predictive video coding-based approaches are reaching the limit of their potential coding efficiency improvements, because of severely increasing computation complexity. As an alternative approach, perceptual video coding (PVC) has attempted to achieve high coding efficiency by eliminating perceptual redundancy, using just-noticeable-distortion (JND) directed PVC. The previous JNDs were modeled by adding white Gaussian noise or specific signal patterns into the original images, which were not appropriate in finding JND thresholds due to distortion with energy reduction.

Tear progression of symptomatic full-thickness and partial-thickness rotator cuff tears as measured by repeated MRI.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to analyse the natural course of symptomatic full-thickness and partial-thickness rotator cuff tears treated non-operatively and to identify risk factors affecting tear enlargement.

Methods: One hundred and twenty-two patients who received non-surgical treatment for a partial- or full-thickness supraspinatus tear were included in this study. All rotator cuff tears were diagnosed with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and the same modality was used for follow-up studies.

HEVC-Based Perceptually Adaptive Video Coding Using a DCT-Based Local Distortion Detection Probability Model.

Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT)-based just noticeable difference (JND) profiles have widely been applied into human perception-based video coding in order to reduce perceptual redundancy, which is one of the main goals of perceptual video coding (PVC). However, there are two problems for this approach: 1) the JND value of each transform coefficient is estimated for a fixed-sized DCT kernel (e.g.

A Novel Image Quality Assessment With Globally and Locally Consilient Visual Quality Perception.

Computational models for image quality assessment (IQA) have been developed by exploring effective features that are consistent with the characteristics of a human visual system (HVS) for visual quality perception. In this paper, we first reveal that many existing features used in computational IQA methods can hardly characterize visual quality perception for local image characteristics and various distortion types. To solve this problem, we propose a new IQA method, called the structural contrast-quality index (SC-QI), by adopting a structural contrast index (SCI), which can well characterize local and global visual quality perceptions for various image characteristics with structural-distortion types.

Evaluation of the Effusion within Biceps Long Head Tendon Sheath Using Ultrasonography.

Background: Many shoulder diseases are related to glenohumeral joint synovitis and effusion. The purpose of the present study is to detect effusion within the biceps long head tendon sheath as the sign of glenohumeral joint synovitis using ultrasonography, and to evaluate the clinical meaning of effusion within the biceps long head tendon sheath.

Methods: A consecutive series of 569 patients who underwent ultrasonography for shoulder pain were reviewed retrospectively and ultimately, 303 patients were included.

Outcome Comparison Between in Situ Repair Versus Tear Completion Repair for Partial Thickness Rotator Cuff Tears.

Purpose: To compare the clinical outcomes of arthroscopic in situ repair with the tear completion repair technique for partial-thickness rotator cuff tears (PT-RCTs).

Methods: We prospectively enrolled 100 cases with articular-sided and bursal-sided PT-RCTs exceeding 50% of tendon thickness and allocated them randomly. An in situ repair was performed in group 1 (n = 50).

Which shoulder motions cause subacromial impingement? Evaluating the vertical displacement and peak strain of the coracoacromial ligament by ultrasound speckle tracking imaging.

Background: Subacromial impingement is a common cause of shoulder pain and one cause of rotator cuff disease. We aimed to identify which shoulder motions cause subacromial impingement by measuring the vertical displacement and peak strain of the coracoacromial ligament using ultrasound speckle tracking imaging.

Methods: Sixteen shoulders without shoulder disability were enrolled.