Genome wide association study of Arabidopsis seed mucilage layers at a regional scale.

The myxospermous species Arabidopsis thaliana extrudes a polysaccharidic mucilage from the seed coat epidermis during imbibition. The whole seed mucilage can be divided into a seed-adherent layer and a fully soluble layer, both layers presenting natural genetic variations. The adherent mucilage is variable in size and composition, while the soluble mucilage is variable in composition and physical properties.

RNA biomarkers from proximal liquid biopsy for diagnosis of ovarian cancer.

Background: Most ovarian cancer patients are diagnosed at an advanced stage and have a high mortality rate. Current screening strategies fail to improve prognosis because markers that are sensitive for early stage disease are lacking. This medical need justifies the search for novel approaches using utero-tubal lavage as a proximal liquid biopsy.

Pooled variable scaling for cluster analysis.

Motivation: Many popular clustering methods are not scale-invariant because they are based on Euclidean distances. Even methods using scale-invariant distances, such as the Mahalanobis distance, lose their scale invariance when combined with regularization and/or variable selection. Therefore, the results from these methods are very sensitive to the measurement units of the clustering variables.

Exploiting Multiple Descriptor Sets in QSAR Studies.

A quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) is a model relating a specific biological response to the chemical structures of compounds. There are many descriptor sets available to characterize chemical structure, raising the question of how to choose among them or how to use all of them for training a QSAR model. Making efficient use of all sets of descriptors is particularly problematic when active compounds are rare among the assay response data.

Quantum irreversible decoherence behaviour in open quantum systems with few degrees of freedom: application to 1H NMR reversion experiments in nematic liquid crystals.

An experimental study of NMR spin decoherence in nematic liquid crystals is presented. Decoherence dynamics can be put in evidence by means of refocusing experiments of the dipolar interactions. The experimental technique used in this work is based on the MREV8 pulse sequence.