Fu Jen Catholic University

About: Fu Jen Catholic University is a education organization based out in Taipei, Taiwan. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Medicine. The organization has 6842 authors who have published 9512 publications receiving 171005 citations. The organization is also known as: FJU & Fu Jen.

SEPT12 mutations cause male infertility with defective sperm annulus

Abstract: Septins are members of the GTPase superfamily, which has been implicated in diverse cellular functions including cytokinesis and morphogenesis. Septin 12 (SEPT12) is a testis-specific gene critical for the terminal differentiation of male germ cells. We report the identification of two missense SEPT12 mutations, c.266C>T/p.Thr89Met and c.589G>A/p.Asp197Asn, in infertile men. Both mutations are located inside the GTPase domain and may alter the protein structure as suggested by in silico modeling. The p.Thr89Met mutation significantly reduced guanosine-5'-triphosphate (GTP) hydrolytic activity, and the p.Asp197Asn mutation (SEPT12(D197N)) interfered with GTP binding. Both mutant SEPT12 proteins restricted the filament formation of the wild-type SEPT12 in a dose-dependent manner. The patient carrying SEPT12(D197N) presented with oligoasthenozoospermia, whereas the SEPT12(T89M) patient had asthenoteratozoospermia. The characteristic sperm pathology of the SEPT12(D197N) patient included defective annulus with bent tail and loss of SEPT12 from the annulus of abnormal sperm. Our finding suggests loss-of-function mutations in SEPT12 disrupted sperm structural integrity by perturbing septin filament formation.

Efficient built-in redundancy analysis for embedded memories with 2-D redundancy

Abstract: A novel redundant mechanism is proposed for embedded memories in this paper. Redundant rows and columns are added into the memory array as in the conventional approaches. However, the redundant rows and columns are divided into row blocks and column blocks, respectively. The reconfiguration is performed at the row (column) block level instead of the conventional row (column) level. Based on the proposed redundant mechanism, we first show that the complexity of the redundancy allocation problem is NP-complete. Thereafter, an extended local repair-most (ELRM) algorithm suitable for built-in implementation is proposed. The complexity of the ELRM algorithm is O(N), where N denotes the number of memory cells. According to the simulation results, the hardware overhead for implementing this algorithm is below 0.17% for a 1024/spl times/2048-b SRAM. Due to the efficient usage of the redundant elements, the manufacturing yield, repair rate, and reliability can be improved significantly.