Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz

About: Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz is a education organization based out in Bydgoszcz, Poland. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Luminescence. The organization has 1109 authors who have published 2923 publications receiving 19548 citations. The organization is also known as: Casimir the Great University & Uniwersytet Kazimierza Wielkiego w Bydgoszczy.

Integrated IT environment for people with disabilities: a new concept

Abstract: This article evaluates the authors’ own concept of integrated IT environments for people with disabilities. Increasing numbers of disabled people and elderly people are affected by shortages of medical specialists and limited funding for medical care. Integrated IT environments for people with disabilities — through integration of various technical and medical solutions into one flexible system — are one way to provide increased independence and improved quality of life for disabled, elderly and severely ill people. The aim of this paper is to assess the extent to which the available possibilities in this area are being utilized, including the authors’ own concept. The implications of technological developments are discussed to lay the groundwork for further research.

Thin filament dysfunctions caused by mutations in tropomyosin Tpm3.12 and Tpm1.1.

Abstract: Tropomyosin is the major regulator of the thin filament. In striated muscle its function is to bind troponin complex and control the access of myosin heads to actin in a Ca2+-dependent manner. It also participates in the maintenance of thin filament length by regulation of tropomodulin and leiomodin, the pointed end-binding proteins. Because the size of the overlap between actin and myosin filaments affects the number of myosin heads which interact with actin, the filament length is one of the determinants of force development. Numerous point mutations in genes encoding tropomyosin lead to single amino acid substitutions along the entire length of the coiled coil that are associated with various types of cardiomyopathy and skeletal muscle disease. Specific regions of tropomyosin interact with different binding partners; therefore, the mutations affect diverse tropomyosin functions. In this review, results of studies on mutations in the genes TPM1 and TPM3, encoding Tpm1.1 and Tpm3.12, are described. The paper is particularly focused on mutation-dependent alterations in the mechanisms of actin-myosin interactions and dynamics of the thin filament at the pointed end.

Mutual information and redundancy in spontaneous communication between cortical neurons

Abstract: An important question in neural information processing is how neurons cooperate to transmit information. To study this question, we resort to the concept of redundancy in the information transmitted by a group of neurons and, at the same time, we introduce a novel concept for measuring cooperation between pairs of neurons called relative mutual information (RMI). Specifically, we studied these two parameters for spike trains generated by neighboring neurons from the primary visual cortex in the awake, freely moving rat. The spike trains studied here were spontaneously generated in the cortical network, in the absence of visual stimulation. Under these conditions, our analysis revealed that while the value of RMI oscillated slightly around an average value, the redundancy exhibited a behavior characterized by a higher variability. We conjecture that this combination of approximately constant RMI and greater variable redundancy makes information transmission more resistant to noise disturbances. Furthermore, the redundancy values suggest that neurons can cooperate in a flexible way during information transmission. This mostly occurs via a leading neuron with higher transmission rate or, less frequently, through the information rate of the whole group being higher than the sum of the individual information rates—in other words in a synergetic manner. The proposed method applies not only to the stationary, but also to locally stationary neural signals.