Validation of the Chinese Sound Test: Auditory Performance of Hearing Aid Users.

Purpose: The Chinese Sound Test (Hung, Lin, Tsai, & Lee, 2016) has been recently developed as a modified version of the Ling Six-Sound Test (Ling, 2012). By incorporating Chinese speech sounds, this test should be able to estimate whether the listener can hear across the Chinese speech spectrum. To establish the clinical validity of the test, this study examined the relationship between the aided audiometric thresholds and the distance thresholds.

Vowel production of Mandarin-speaking hearing aid users with different types of hearing loss.

In contrast with previous research focusing on cochlear implants, this study examined the speech performance of hearing aid users with conductive (n = 11), mixed (n = 10), and sensorineural hearing loss (n = 7) and compared it with the speech of hearing control. Speech intelligibility was evaluated by computing the vowel space area defined by the Mandarin Chinese corner vowels /a, u, i/. The acoustic differences between the vowels were assessed using the Euclidean distance.

Multidimensional Approach to the Development of a Mandarin Chinese-Oriented Sound Test.

Purpose: Because the Ling six-sound test is based on American English phonemes, it can yield unreliable results when administered to non-English speakers. In this study, we aimed to improve specifically the diagnostic palette for Mandarin Chinese users by developing an adapted version of the Ling six-sound test.

Method: To determine the set of testing sounds, we performed an exhaustive acoustic and statistical analysis in which we considered not only the general acoustic properties but also the order of acquisition and the inter- and intraspeaker variability.

A HA2-Fusion tag limits the endosomal release of its protein cargo despite causing endosomal lysis.

Background: Protein transduction domains (PTDs) can be fused to a protein to render it cell-permeable. The delivery efficiencies of PTDs are, however, often poor because PTD-protein conjugates cannot escape from endosomes. A potential solution to this problem consists in adding HA2 analogs to the PTD-protein construct as these peptides can cause endosomal lysis upon acidification of the endosomal lumen.

Generation of endosomolytic reagents by branching of cell-penetrating peptides: tools for the delivery of bioactive compounds to live cells in cis or trans.

We describe the synthesis and cellular delivery properties of multivalent and branched delivery systems consisting of cell-penetrating peptides assembled onto a peptide scaffold using native chemical ligation. A trimeric delivery system presenting three copies of the prototypical cell-penetrating peptide TAT shows an endosomolytic activity much higher than its monomeric and dimeric counterparts. This novel reagent promotes the endosomal release of macromolecules internalized into cells by endocytosis, and as a result, it can be used to achieve cytosolic delivery of bioactive but cell-impermeable macromolecules in either cis (covalent conjugation) or trans (simple coincubation).

Modeling of the endosomolytic activity of HA2-TAT peptides with red blood cells and ghosts.

HA2-TAT is a peptide-based delivery agent that combines the pH-sensitive HA2 fusion peptide from influenza and the cell-penetrating peptide TAT from HIV. This chimeric peptide is engineered to induce the cellular uptake of macromolecules into endosomes via the TAT moiety and to respond to the acidifying lumen of endosomes to cause membrane leakage and release of macromolecules into cells via the HA2 moiety. The question of how HA2 and TAT affect the properties of one another remains, however, unanswered, and the behavior of the peptide inside endosomes is mostly uncharacterized.

Quantitative proteomic and genomic profiling reveals metastasis-related protein expression patterns in gastric cancer cells.

Gastric cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide, and patients have an overall 5-year survival rate of less than 10%. Using quantitative proteomic techniques together with microarray chips, we have established comprehensive proteome and transcriptome profiles of the metastatic gastric cancer TMC-1 cells and the noninvasive gastric cancer SC-M1 cell. Our qualitative protein profiling strategy offers the first comprehensive analysis of the gastric cancer cell proteome, identifying 926 and 909 proteins from SC-M1 and TMC-1 cells, respectively.