Polycrystalline diamond based detector for Z-pinch plasma diagnosis.

A detector setup based on polycrystalline chemical-vapor-deposition diamond film is developed with great characteristics: low dark current (lower than 60 pA within 3 V/mum), fast pulsed response time (rise time: 2-3 ns), flat spectral response (3-5 keV), easy acquisition, low cost, and relative large sensitive area. The characterizing data on Qiangguang-I accelerator show that this detector can satisfy the practical requirements in Z-pinch plasma diagnosis very well, which offers a promising prototype for the x-ray detection in Z-pinch diagnosis.

Comparative pathway annotation with protein-DNA interaction and operon information via graph tree decomposition.

Template-based comparative analysis is a viable approach to the prediction and annotation of pathways in genomes. Methods based solely on sequence similarity may not be effective enough; functional and structural information such as protein-DNA interactions and operons can prove useful in improving the prediction accuracy. In this paper, we present a novel approach to predicting pathways by seeking high overall sequence similarity, functional and structural consistency between the predicted pathways and their templates.

Rapid ab initio prediction of RNA pseudoknots via graph tree decomposition.

The prediction of RNA secondary structure including pseudoknots remains a challenge due to the intractable computation of the sequence conformation from nucleotide interactions under free energy models. Optimal algorithms often assume a restricted class for the predicted RNA structures and yet still require a high-degree polynomial time complexity, which is too expensive to use. Heuristic methods may yield time-efficient algorithms but they do not guarantee optimality of the predicted structure.