Toshiya Tanaka

Enhanced Coexpression of Thioredoxin and High Mobility Group Protein 1 Genes in Human Hepatocellular Carcinoma and the Possible Association with Decreased Sensitivity to Cisplatin

Abstract Thioredoxin (TRX), a disulfide-reducing intracellular protein, functions as a cellular defense mechanism against oxidative stress. In this study, we asked whether expression of TRX , glutathione-thiol transferase π, and high mobility group protein 1 ( HMG-1 ) genes is enhanced in human hepatocellular carcinoma and whether expression of these genes is associated with sensitivity to cisplatin. Both TRX and HMG-1 were co-overexpressed in almost all cancerous lesions in comparison to normal tissue in surgically resected hepatocellular carcinomas of 20 patients. Tumor sensitivity to cisplatin [ cis -diamminedichloroplatinum (II)], but not to mitomycin C or doxorubicin, correlated with mRNA levels of TRX in cancer tissue. TRX and HMG-1 may be useful tumor markers, and TRX might be also a useful marker for sensitivity to cisplatin in human hepatocellular carcinomas.

Isolation and expression of a gene (CGR1) regulated during the yeast-hyphal transition in Candida albicans.

We used RNA fingerprinting of arbitrarily primed PCR to isolate genes upregulated during the yeast-hyphal transition in Candida albicans. The sequence and expression of one of these genes (CGR1, Candida growth regulation) are presented. Our results suggest that CGR1 expression is associated with a growth cessation of yeast cells, a prerequisite for germination in this organism.

Computing Convolution on Grammar-Compressed Text

The convolution between a text string S of length N and a pattern string P of length m can be computed in O(N log m) time by FFT. It is known that various types of approximate string matching problems are reducible to convolution. In this paper, we assume that the input text string is given in a compressed form, as a straight-line program (SLP), which is a context free grammar in the Chomsky normal form that derives a single string. Given an SLP S of size n describing a text S of length N, and an uncompressed pattern P of length m, we present a simple O(nm log m)-time algorithm to compute the convolution between S and P. We then show that this can be improved to O(min{nm, N - α} log m) time, where α ≥ 0 is a value that represents the amount of redundancy that the SLP captures with respect to the length-m substrings. The key of the improvement is our new algorithm that computes the convolution between a trie of size r and a pattern string P of length m in O(r log m) time.

Mental Representations in Developing Modals: A Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Cultural Review

Abstract The aim of this chapter is to point out that there is a cross-linguistic regularity in the pattern according to which modals develop out or non-modal verbs, and to elucidate the inner or mental process of these developments. Three types of modals are taken into consideration. Two are related to “possibility”. The other is related to “necessity”. The fact that verbs from several different languages, etymologically unrelated but put in similar uses, show the same pattern or developments leads us to conjecture that there is a common psycholinguistic process in the human mind beyond language and culture. The type of mental process which is concerned with these developments is specified in terms of some abstract semantic representation.