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Abstracl. Consider a collection of disjoint polygons in the plane containing a total of n edges. We show how to build, in O(n 2 ) time and space, a data structure from which in O(n) time we can compute the visibility polygon of a given point with respect to the polygon collection. As an application of this structure, the visibility graph of the given polygons can be constructed in O(n 2) time and space. This implies that the shortest path that connects two points in the plane and avoids the polygons in our collection can be computed in 00l 2) time, improving earlier O(n 2 log n) results.

These results suggest that LSFG measurements of waveform changes in ONH BF can differentiate healthy eyes from eyes with NTG, particularly those with mild NTG.

These results suggest that RFV values obtained with LSFG can be considered an accurate and reliable index of relative blood flow in the human retina. Thus, RFV, a novel LSFG-derived variable, has potential for assessing retinal blood flow alterations in ocular disease.

Facultative heterochromatin is reversibly established and disrupted during differentiation, but its regulation remains mechanistically unclear. Here, we show that two meiotic gene loci in fission yeast, mei4 and ssm4, comprise facultative heterochromatin that is regulated in a developmental stage-dependent manner. This heterochromatin coordinates expression levels by associating with a chromodomain protein Chp1 and an antisilencing factor Epe1. It has been recently shown that an RNA surveillance machinery for eliminating meiotic gene transcripts, which involves a cis-element called the determinant of selective removal (DSR) and transacting factors, Mmi1 and Red1, also participates in heterochromatin formation at the meiotic genes, but the molecular mechanism underlying the process is largely unknown. By dissecting the mei4 gene, we identified a region that promotes DSR-dependent methylation of histone H3 lysine 9 (H3K9). Integration of this mei4 region together with DSR into an unrelated gene results in ectopic H3K9 methylation. Moreover, our results suggest that transcription of these elements induces chromatin association of Mmi1, which, in turn, recruits Red1 interacting with Clr4/Suv39h H3K9 methyltransferase. Mmi1 remains associated in cells lacking Red1, suggesting that the recruitment of Red1 follows the chromatin association of Mmi1. Overall, we provide detailed insights into the facultative heterochromatin regulation in fission yeast.

Myoblasts can be differentiated into multinucleated myotubes, which provide a well-established and reproducible muscle cell model for skeletal myogenesis in vitro. However, under conventional differentiation conditions, each myotube rarely exhibits robust contraction as well as sarcomere arrangement. Here, we applied trains of optical stimulation (OS) to C2C12 myotubes, which were genetically engineered to express a channelrhodopsin variant, channelrhodopsin-green receiver (ChRGR), to investigate whether membrane depolarization facilitates the maturation of myotubes. We found that light pulses induced membrane depolarization and evoked action potentials in ChRGR-expressing myotubes. Regular alignments of sarcomeric proteins were patterned periodically after OS training. In contrast, untrained control myotubes rarely exhibited the striated patterns. OS-trained and untrained myotubes also differed in terms of their resting potential. OS training significantly increased the number of contractile myotubes. Treatment with nifedipine during OS training significantly decreased the fraction of contractile myotubes, whereas tetrodotoxin was less effective. These results suggest that oscillations of membrane potential and intracellular Ca2+ accompanied by OS promoted sarcomere assembly and the development of contractility during the myogenic process. These results also suggest that optogenetic techniques could be used to manipulate the activity-dependent process during myogenic development.

In this paper, we show that many graph search problems can be solved quite efficiently for a geometric intersection graph ofhorizontal and vertical line segments. We first extract several basic operations for depth first search and breadth first search on a graph. Then we present data structures for the intersection graph in terms of which those operations can be implemented in an efficient manner. The data structures enable us to solve various graph search problems besides depth first search and breadth first search. Specifying the results obtained in this paper for an intersection graph of n horizontal and vertical segments with m pairs of intersecting segments, we obtain algorithms with the following complexity, where N= min m, n log n}. (i) Depth first search and breadth first search can be executed in O(n log n) time and O(N) space. (ii) The biconnected components can be found in O(n log n) time and O(N) space. (iii) A maximum matching and a maximum independent set can be found in O(x/ N) time and O(N) space when no two horizontal (vertical) segments intersect. (iv) The connectivity k can be found in O(kn3/2N) time and O(N) space. Our algorithms can be applied to various practical problems such as the problem of finding a minimum dissection of a rectilinear region, which arises in the manipulation of VLSI artwork data, and the problem of determining whether there is a Manhattan wiring on a single layer, which arises in the design automation of digital systems.

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