Extracorporeal shock wave accelerates consolidation in distraction osteogenesis of the rat mandible.

Background: One of major limitations of applying distraction osteogenesis for craniofacial skeleton hypoplasia is the long duration for bony consolidation. This study investigated whether extracorporeal shock wave therapy (ESWT) could accelerate bony consolidation in distraction osteogenesis of the rat mandible.

Methods And Materials: An L-shape osteotomy was performed unilaterally in the hemimandible of Sprague-Dawley rats.

CSAM: using clustering-hashing-signal anchoring method to explore human novel genes.

The expression of genes in mammalian cells can be constitutive, transient, or inducible. Transcripts of transient and inducible genes are difficult to discover using the EST approach. Transiently expressed genes, however, are crucial to embryo development and the pathogenesis of disease because they determine the outcome of disease.

Alignment using genetic programming with causal trees for identification of protein functions.

A hybrid evolutionary model is used to propose a hierarchical homology of protein sequences to identify protein functions systematically. The proposed model offers considerable potentials, considering the inconsistency of existing methods for predicting novel proteins. Because some novel proteins might align without meaningful conserved domains, maximizing the score of sequence alignment is not the best criterion for predicting protein functions.