The mechanism of action of theophylline in the frog heart

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Relationship between the tissue-specificity of mouse gene expression and the evolutionary origin and function of the proteins.

BACKGROUND: The combination of complete genome sequence information with expression data enables us to characterize the relationship between a protein's evolutionary origin or functional category and its expression pattern. In this study, mouse proteins were assigned into functional and phyletic groups and the gene expression patterns of the different protein groupings were examined by microarray analysis in various mouse tissues. RESULTS: Our results suggest that the proteins that are universally distributed in all tissues are predominantly enzymes and transporters. In contrast, the tissue-specific set is dominated by regulatory proteins (signal transduction and transcription factors). An increased tendency to tissue-specificity is observed for metazoan-specific proteins. As the composition of the phyletic groups highly correlates with that of the functional groups, the data were tested in order to determine which of the two factors -- function or phyletic age -- is dominant in shaping the expression profile of a protein. The observed differences in expression patterns of genes between functional groups were found mainly to reflect their different phyletic origin. The connection between tissue specificity and phyletic age cannot be explained by the recent rate of evolution. Finally, although metazoan-specific proteins tend to be tissue-specific compared with phyletically conserved proteins present in all domains of life, many such 'universal' proteins are also tissue-specific. CONCLUSION: The minimal cellular transcriptome of the metazoan cell differs from that of the ancestral unicellular eukaryote: new functions were added (metazoan-specific proteins), whilst other functions became specialized and no longer took place in all cells (tissue-specific pre-metazoan proteins).RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

Second Track Processes: A Research Agenda

Knowledge management expert Dr Peter Massingham proposes a fresh direction for Second Track research in terms of being a unique type of complex adaptive social system tackling complex problem solving. This approach will open new ways to explore and test their operation and demonstrate their practical utility

A Blueprint for Innovation Collaboration: Implementing the Coffee House Concept

The seeds of modern economic development and international trade were sown in the coffee houses of 17th century London. Dr Peter Massingham revisits their development to explore new models of collaboration between business and academia to boost Australia’s innovation performance

The essence of marketing: a cross-cultural inquiry into prevailing beliefs and practices

This doctoral research constituted a cross-cultural inquiry into the contribution of professional marketing education to marketing practice. The essence of marketing, as a collective term, contains the essential ingredients to enable marketing to become a viable system for business; namely, marketing orientation, marketing planning and marketing training connected by the management of change. The Chartered Institute of Marketing Diploma programme was selected as the educational vehicle through which sample surveys were conducted at pre-course, pre-examination and post- qualified stages of respondents' career development. Cross-cultural distinctions and symmetries were examined and accounted for by national culture, experience base and by size of employing organisation in the countries of the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong, so that an insightful understanding could be achieved between belief and practice. Perceptual gaps were discovered and proposals through the research surveys made to help to bridge the gap between the ambitions of the individual for change and the adoption of integrated marketing by the respective employing organisations. The research is distinguished by the use of innovative techniques for perceptual mapping to enable cross-cultural positions to be visualised and thereby to be more fully appreciated

Sentence-in-noise perception in Monolinguals and Multilinguals: The effect of contextual meaning, and linguistic and cognitive load.

This study proposes a framework by which grammatically and syntactically sound sentences are classified through the perceptual measurement in noise of multilinguals and monolinguals, using an objective measure called SPERI and an interpretivist measure called SPIn, with results evaluated using Shortlist models and the BLINCS model. Hereby filling a knowledge gap on the perception of sentences that combine in varying levels of contextual meaning, linguistic load and cognitive load, this study used sentence clustering methods to find limitations of the proposed framework in determining an absolute and accurate prediction of performance between sentences in the proposed different categories, with factors such as sentence predictability and word frequency taking precedence. There were unintended findings including a relationship between the number of languages spoken and performance, proficiency in other languages decreasing performance despite being an English Native, and how mistakes by multilinguals were more semantically and phonetically influenced than monolinguals