Recent advances and challenges in the recovery and purification of cellular exosomes

Exosomes are nanovesicles secreted by most cellular types that carry important biochemical compounds throughout the body with different purposes, playing a preponderant role in cellular communication. Because of their structure, physicochemical properties and stability, recent studies are focusing in their use as nanocarriers for different therapeutic compounds for the treatment of different diseases ranging from cancer to Parkinson's disease. However, current bioseparation protocols and methodologies are selected based on the final exosome application or intended use and present both advantages and disadvantages when compared among them. In this context, this review aims to present the most important technologies available for exosome isolation while discussing their advantages and disadvantages and the possibilities of being combined with other strategies. This is critical since the development of novel exosome‐based therapeutic strategies will be constrained to the effectiveness and yield of the selected downstream purification methodologies for which a thorough understanding of the available technological resources is needed.     

Acoustic Analysis of Pathological Voices Compressedwith MPEG System

The MPEG-1 Layer 3 compression schema of audio signal, commonly known as mp3, has caused a great impact in recent years as it has reached high compression rates while conserving a high sound quality. Music and speech samples compressed at high bitrates are perceptually indistinguishable from the original samples, but very little was known about how compression acoustically affects the voice signal. A previous work with normal voices showed a high fidelity at high-bitrate compressions both in voice parameters and the amplitude-frequency spectrum. In the present work, dysphonic voices were tested through two studies. In the first study, spectrograms, long-term average spectra (LTAS), and fast Fourier transform (FFT) spectra of compressed and original samples of running speech were compared. In the second study, intensities, formant frequencies, formant bandwidths, and a multidimensional set of voice parameters were tested in a set of sustained phonations. Results showed that compression at high bitrates (96 and 128 kbps) preserved the relevant acoustic properties of the pathological voices. With compressions at lower bitrates, fidelity decreases, introducing some important alterations. Results from both works, Gonzalez and Cervera and this paper, open up the possibility of using MPEG-compression at high bitrates to store or transmit high-quality speech recordings, without altering their acoustic properties.     

Self-Interactions of Strands and Sheets

Physical strands or sheets that can be modelled as curves or surfaces embedded in three dimensions are ubiquitous in nature, and are of fundamental importance in mathematics, physics, biology, and engineering. Often the physical interpretation dictates that self-avoidance should be enforced in the continuum model, i.e., finite energy configurations should not self-intersect. Current continuum models with self-avoidance frequently employ pairwise repulsive potentials, which are of necessity singular. Moreover the potentials do not have an intrinsic length scale appropriate for modelling the finite thickness of the physical systems. Here we develop a framework for modelling self-avoiding strands and sheets which avoids singularities, and which provides a way to introduce a thickness length scale. In our approach pairwise interaction potentials are replaced by many-body potentials involving three or more points, and the radii of certain associated circles or spheres. Self-interaction energies based on these many-body potentials can be used to describe the statistical mechanics of self-interacting strands and sheets of finite thickness.     

Renormalized loop expansion to compute finite size effects of the constraint effective potential

In latticeφ ⁴ close to the critical line, finite size effects can be computed by renormalized loop expansions. In order to do so, the constraint effective potential is computed to two loop order. Using this expression, we are able to extract results for renormalized masses and coupling constants from Multigrid Monte Carlo data of Mack and Meyer for the constraint effective potential close to the critical line, and compare them with the analytical results ofLüscher and Weisz. Perfect agreement is found.     

Approximation of stochastic equations driven by predictable processes

Summary A theory of stochastic differential equations driven by predictable processes in Stratonovich sense is developed. These driving processes include a large class of discontinuous semimartingales. The theory of stochastic differential equations driven by continuous semimartingales in Stratonovich sense is extended without involving Lebesgue-Stieltjes integrals as done by Meyer. Moreover, a change of variables formula without extra terms involving the jumps of the processes holds for this theory. Results on approximation of driving processes are preserved.Research partially supported by the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA; by the AFOSR under contract #AFOSR-85-0315, the ARO under contract #DAAG 29-84-K-0082, and #DAAL 03-86-K-0171.     

Degrevlex Gröbner bases of generic complete intersections

In this paper, we study the Hilbert–Samuel function of a generic standard graded K-algebra

K[X₁,…,X_n]/(g₁,…,g_m)

when refined by an (ℓ)-adic filtration, ℓ being a linear form. From this we obtain a structure theorem which describes the stairs of a generic complete intersection for the degree-reverse-lexicographic order. We show what this means for generic standard (or Gröbner) bases for this order; in particular, we consider an “orderly filling up” conjecture, and we propose a strategy for the standard basis algorithm which could be useful in generic-like cases.     

Pfaffian systems and Radon transforms on affine Grassmann manifolds

Mathematische Annalen -     

Optimal Domains for <Emphasis Type="Italic">L</Emphasis><Superscript>0</Superscript>-valued Operators Via Stochastic Measures

We study extension of operators T: E→ L⁰([0, 1]), where E is an F–function space and L⁰([0, 1]) the space of measurable functions with the topology of convergence in measure, to domains larger than E, and we study the properties of such domains. The main tool is the integration of scalar functions with respect to stochastic measures and the corresponding spaces of integrable functions. Partially supported by D.G.I. #MTM2006-13000-C03-01 (Spain).