Reading is a key skill for university students. The Author Recognition Test (ART) and the Title Recognition Test (TRT) have both been used for decades to measure print exposure which correlates with reading and other linguistic skills. Given the available evidence for interindividual differences in reading skills, this study addresses three open issues.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs resident innate immune cells of the CNS, microglia play important essential roles during physiological and pathological situations. Recent reports have described the expression of in disease-associated and aged microglia. Here, we characterized the expression of in microglia in vitro and in vivo in comparison with bone marrow-derived monocytes and peritoneal macrophages in mice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCytoplasmic lipid droplets (LDs) are evolutionarily conserved organelles that store neutral lipids and play critical roles in plant growth, development, and stress responses. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying their biogenesis at the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) remain obscure. Here we show that a recently identified protein termed LD-associated protein [LDAP]-interacting protein (LDIP) works together with both endoplasmic reticulum-localized SEIPIN and the LD-coat protein LDAP to facilitate LD formation in Arabidopsis thaliana.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSEIPIN proteins are localized to endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-lipid droplet (LD) junctions where they mediate the directional formation of LDs into the cytoplasm in eukaryotic cells. Unlike in animal and yeast cells, which have single SEIPIN genes, plants have three distinct SEIPIN isoforms encoded by separate genes. The mechanism of SEIPIN action remains poorly understood, and here we demonstrate that part of the function of two SEIPIN isoforms in Arabidopsis (), AtSEIPIN2 and AtSEIPIN3, may depend on their interaction with the vesicle-associated membrane protein (VAMP)-associated protein (VAP) family member AtVAP27-1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe developmental program of seed formation, germination, and early seedling growth requires not only tight regulation of cell division and metabolism, but also concerted control of the structure and function of organelles, which relies on specific changes in their protein composition. Of particular interest is the switch from heterotrophic to photoautotrophic seedling growth, for which cytoplasmic lipid droplets (LDs) play a critical role as depots for energy-rich storage lipids. Here, we present the results of a bottom-up proteomics study analyzing the total protein fractions and LD-enriched fractions in eight different developmental phases during silique (seed) development, seed germination, and seedling establishment in Arabidopsis ().
View Article and Find Full Text PDFErythrina speciosa Andrews (Fabaceae) is a native tree of Atlantic forest from Southern and Southeastern Brazil. Although this species is found in flooded areas, it produces highly desiccation tolerant seeds. Here, we investigated the physiological and metabolic events occurring during seed maturation of E.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough the N400 was originally discovered in a paradigm designed to elicit a P300 (Kutas and Hillyard, 1980), its relationship with the P300 and how both overlapping event-related potentials (ERPs) determine behavioral profiles is still elusive. Here we conducted an ERP ( = 20) and a multiple-response speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) experiment ( = 16) on distinct participant samples using an antonym paradigm ( with acceptability judgment). We hypothesized that SAT profiles incorporate processes of task-related decision-making (P300) and stimulus-related expectation violation (N400).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe number of known proteins associated with plant lipid droplets (LDs) is small compared with other organelles. Many aspects of LD biosynthesis and degradation are unknown, and identifying and characterizing candidate LD proteins could help elucidate these processes. Here, we analyzed the proteome of LD-enriched fractions isolated from tobacco () pollen tubes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present an event-related potentials (ERP) study that addresses the question of how pieces of information pertaining to semantic roles and event structure interact with each other and with the verb's meaning. Specifically, our study investigates German verb-final clauses with verbs of motion such as 'fly' and 'float, hover,' which are indeterminate with respect to agentivity and event structure. Agentivity was tested by manipulating the animacy of the subject noun phrase and event structure by selecting a goal adverbial, which makes the event telic, or a locative adverbial, which leads to an atelic reading.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCytoplasmic lipid droplets (LDs) are found in all types of plant cells; they are derived from the endoplasmic reticulum and function as a repository for neutral lipids, as well as serving in lipid remodelling and signalling. However, the mechanisms underlying the formation, steady-state maintenance and turnover of plant LDs, particularly in non-seed tissues, are relatively unknown. Previously, we showed that the LD-associated proteins (LDAPs) are a family of plant-specific, LD surface-associated coat proteins that are required for proper biogenesis of LDs and neutral lipid homeostasis in vegetative tissues.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSeveral studies have examined effects of explicit task demands on eye movements in reading. However, there is relatively little prior research investigating the influence of implicit processing demands. In the present study, processing demands were manipulated by means of a between-subject manipulation of comprehension question difficulty.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHierarchical predictive coding has been identified as a possible unifying principle of brain function, and recent work in cognitive neuroscience has examined how it may be affected by age-related changes. Using language comprehension as a test case, the present study aimed to dissociate age-related changes in prediction generation versus internal model adaptation following a prediction error. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were measured in a group of older adults (60-81 years; n = 40) as they read sentences of the form "The opposite of black is white/yellow/nice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIdentifying enzymes that, once introduced in cancer cells, lead to an increased efficiency of treatment constitutes an important goal for biomedical applications. Using an original procedure whereby mutant genes are generated based on the use of conditional lentivector genome mobilisation, we recently described, for the first time, the identification of a human deoxycytidine kinase (dCK) mutant (G12) that sensitises a panel of cancer cell lines to treatment with the dCK analogue gemcitabine. Here, starting from the G12 variant itself, we generated a new library and identified a mutant (M36) that triggers even greater sensitisation to gemcitabine than G12.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn
November 2015
Two very reliable influences on eye fixation durations in reading are word frequency, as measured by corpus counts, and word predictability, as measured by cloze norming. Several studies have reported strictly additive effects of these 2 variables. Predictability also reliably influences the amplitude of the N400 component in event-related potential studies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe show that electronic Raman scattering affords a window into the essential properties of the pairing potential V(k,k') of iron-based superconductors. In Ba0.6K0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the rapidly changing circumstances of our increasingly digital world, reading is also becoming an increasingly digital experience: electronic books (e-books) are now outselling print books in the United States and the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, many readers still view e-books as less readable than print books. The present study thus used combined EEG and eyetracking measures in order to test whether reading from digital media requires higher cognitive effort than reading conventional books.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper demonstrates systematic cross-linguistic differences in the electrophysiological correlates of conflicts between form and meaning ("semantic reversal anomalies"). These engender P600 effects in English and Dutch (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUsing concurrent electroencephalogram and eye movement measures to track natural reading, this study shows that N400 effects reflecting predictability are dissociable from those owing to spreading activation. In comparing predicted sentence endings with related and unrelated unpredicted endings in antonym constructions ('the opposite of black is white/yellow/nice'), fixation-related potentials at the critical word revealed a predictability-based N400 effect (unpredicted vs. predicted words).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSesbania virgata (Cav.) Pers (wand riverhemp) is a fast-growing tropical legume species that has been used for revegetation of riparian forests and rehabilitation of degraded areas and that exhibits an invasive behavior in certain regions of Brazil. Preliminary studies have shown that seed leachates inhibit the germination and development of seedlings of some crop species.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDtsch Z Verdau Stoffwechselkr
July 1987
1013 ALAT-attacks--in addition to the frequent asymptomatic onset of the disease and the high tendency of chronicity a typical symptom of the non-A, non-B hepatitis--were statistically analysed on 333 patients (of these 216 with uniform parenteral source of infection). 52% of the patients showed a multiphasic course. The aim of the analysis was the exact mathematical description of the attack-behaviour and the discovery of presumed regularities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF