A tandem duplication in Drosophila melanogaster shows enhanced expression beyond the gene copy number

Tandem duplicated genes are common features of genomes, but the phenotypic consequences of their origins are not well understood. It is not known whether a simple doubling of gene expression should be expected, or else some other expression outcome. This study describes an experimental framework using engineered deletions to assess any contribution of locally-acting cis- and globally-acting trans-regulatory factors to expression interactions of particular tandem duplicated genes. Acsx1L (CG6300) and Acsx1R (CG11659) are tandem duplicates of a putative acyl-CoA synthetase gene found in D. melanogaster. Experimental deletions of the duplicated segments were used to investigate whether the presence of one tandem duplicated block influences the expression of its neighbor. Acsx1L, the gene in the left block, shows much higher expression than either its duplicate Acsx1R or the single Acsx1 in D. simulans. Acsx1L expression decreases drastically upon deleting the right-hand duplicated block. Crosses among wildtype and deletion strains show that high tandem expression is primarily due to cis-acting interactions between the duplicated blocks. No effect of these genes on cuticular hydrocarbons was detected. Sequence and phylogenetic analysis suggest that the duplication rose to fixation in D. melanogaster and has been subject to extensive gene conversion. Some strains actually carry three tandem copies, yet strains with three Acsx1s do not have higher expression levels than strains with two. Surveys of tandem duplicate expression have typically not found the expected twofold increase in expression. This study suggests that cis-regulatory interactions between duplicated blocks could be responsible for this trend.

A Fuzzy-Based Analytic Hierarchy Process for Mechanical Noise Source Identification of a Diesel Engine

In this paper, a novel fuzzy-based analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) is proposed for identifying noise sources of diesel engine and sorting their contributions. The hierarchy tree consists of 5 levels including the component level, the frequency band level, the test point level, the operating condition level, and the overall noise level. The variational mode decomposition (VMD) is employed to decompose the overall noise into several frequency bands. The factor weights between levels are determined by the partial coherence analysis (PCA) to consider the correlation of component vibration and radiated noise in different frequency bands. A fuzzy consistency matrix is then constructed to order the corresponding factors level by level that can avoid the consistence problem of the traditional AHP. Based on the rig test of a diesel engine, the proposed approach is implemented to weight the noise sources identified. It is shown the overall weighting order of the six major noise sources is (in descending order) the oil pan, the left block, the valve cover, the flywheel housing, and the right block.

An Efficient Schema of a Special Permutation Inside of Each Pixel of an Image for its Encryption

<p>The developments of communications and digital transmissions have pushed the data encryption to grow quickly to protect the information, against any hacking or digital plagiarisms. Many encryption algorithms are available on the Internet, but it's still illegal to use a number of them. Therefore, the search for new the encryption algorithms is still current. In this work, we will provide a preprocessing of the securisation of the data, which will significantly enhance the crypto-systems. Firstly, we divide the pixel into two blocks of 4 bits, a left block that contains the most significant bit and another a right block which contains the least significant bits and to permute them mutually. Then make another permutation for each of group. This pretreatment is very effective, it is fast and is easy to implement and, only consumes little resource.</p>

Polarisation in political Twitter conversations

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyse relationships and communication between Twitter actors in Swedish political conversations. More specifically, the paper aims to identify the most prominent actors, among these actors identify the sub-groups of actors with similar political affiliations, and describe and analyse the relationships and communication between these sub-groups. Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected during four weeks in September 2012, using Twitter API. The material included 77,436 tweets from 10,294 Twitter actors containing the hashtag #svpol. In total, 916 prominent actors were identified and categorised according to the main political blocks, using information from their profiles. Social network analysis was utilised to map the relationships and the communication between these actors. Findings – There was a marked dominance of the three main political blocks among the 916 most prominent actors: left block, centre-right block, and right-wing block. The results from the social network analysis suggest that while polarisation exists in both followership and re-tweet networks, actors follow and re-tweet actors from other groups. The mention network did not show any signs of polarisation. The blocks differed from each other with the right-wingers being tighter and far more active, but also more distant from the others in the followership network. Originality/value – While a few papers have studied political polarisation on Twitter, this is the first to study the phenomenon using followership data, mention data, and re-tweet data.

An Efficient Hardware-Oriented Algorithm of Spatial Motion Vector Prediction for AVS HD Video Encoder

Motion Vector Prediction (MVP) plays an important role in improving coding efficiency in HEVC, H.264/AVC and AVS video coding standard. MVP is implemented by exploiting redundancy of adjacent-block optimal coding information under the constraint that MVP must be performed in a serial way. The constraint prevents parallel processing and MB pipeline based on LevelC+. In multi-stage pipeline, to some extent, adjacent-block best mode-decision information can hardly be obtained. In this paper, we propose a new hardware-oriented method to improve the coding performance at a cost of few hardware resources. When adjacent block is not available, spatial motion vector prediction (SMVP) for integer motion estimation (IME) and fraction motion estimation (FME) will take the IME best mode information and FME best mode information of left block as best information to derive PMV (Predicted Motion Vector) for current macro-block or block. Experimental results shows that the method we propose can achieve a better performance than the existing methods by 0.1db for the cases with intense movement and a non-degrading performance for flat cases.

Completing a2×2Block Matrix of Real Quaternions with a Partial Specified Inverse

This paper considers a completion problem of a nonsingular2×2block matrix over the real quaternion algebraℍ: Letm1, m2, n1, n2be nonnegative integers,m1+m2=n1+n2=n>0, andA12∈ℍm1×n2, A21∈ℍm2×n1, A22∈ℍm2×n2, B11∈ℍn1×m1be given. We determine necessary and sufficient conditions so that there exists a variant block entry matrixA11∈ℍm1×n1such thatA=(A11A12A21A22)∈ℍn×nis nonsingular, andB11is the upper left block of a partitioning ofA-1. The general expression forA11is also obtained. Finally, a numerical example is presented to verify the theoretical findings.