Unfavorable Ones Research Articles

Editorial

Editorial

Design principles for self-assembly with short-range interactions

Recent experimental advances have opened up the possibility of equilibrium self-assembly of functionalized nanoblocks with a high degree of controllable specific interactions. Here, we propose design principles for selecting the short-range interactions between self-assembling components to maximize yield. We illustrate the approach with an example from colloidal engineering. We construct an optimal set of local interactions for eight colloidal particles (coated, e.g., with DNA strands) to assemble into a particular polytetrahedral cluster. Maximum yield is attained when the interactions between the colloids follow the design rules: All energetically favorable interactions have the same strength, as do all unfavorable ones, and the number of components and energies fall within the proposed range. In general, it might be necessary to use more component than strictly required for enforcing the ground state configuration. The results motivate design strategies for engineering components that can reliably self-assemble.

Negative Design in Protein Coils

The classic folding paradigm, established by Anfinsen and others, has been interpreted to mean that under folding conditions, the native fold is selected from an astronomical number of conceivable alternatives by the constellation of favorable interactions among its amino acid sidechains. This plausible idea is entirely consistent with the characteristic close-packing seen in protein crystal structures, where it is apparent that residues distant in sequence are brought together in space, presumably providing both topological specificity and structural stability. Accordingly, organizing interactions are believed to persist into the native state. This supposition is the basis for knowledge-based potentials, Go models, and the like. Contrary to this view, we present evidence from simulations coupled with an analysis of the protein coil library (http://www.roselab.jhu.edu/coil/) that the overall fold is established prior to eventual sidechain close-packing. In this process, chain organization depends not only on selecting favorable interactions but also on rejecting unfavorable ones. Eliminating those interactions that result in steric clashes or unsatisfied hydrogen bonds winnows fold space substantially. Accordingly, such interactions play a crucial role in determining the native state, but given their mode of action, they are not visible in solved structures (like the dog that didn't bark in the night∗). ∗Gregory ( Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

Strategic Ignorance in Bargaining

In his classic article An Essay on Bargaining Schelling (1956) argues that ignorance might actually be strength rather than weakness. We test and confirm Schelling's conjecture in a simple take-it-or-leave bargaining experiment where the proposer can choose between two possible offers. Option A always gives the proposer a higher payoff than option B. The payoff of the responder depends on the (randomly determined) state of nature, i.e., in state s2 payoffs of the two players are aligned while they are not in state s1. The responder is always informed about the actual state. The proposer knows the actual state in our first treatment but not in the second. We find that proposers indeed benefit from ignorance because the responders accept almost all offers (even the unfavorable ones) if the payoffs of the responder have not been transparent for the proposer. In additional treatments we investigate situations where the proposer can deliberately remain ignorant. One could assume that remaining ignorant on purpose would be punished by the responder at least if an unfavorable outcome results. Surprisingly, we find that strategically remaining ignorant tends to be beneficial for the proposer particularly if the responder does not know with certainty whether it was the proposer's intention to remain ignorant or whether it was not her intention.

Propuesta de un sistema neuro-DBR y su aplicación en la predicción de la serie de tiempo de Lorenz

<p><span>Este artículo propone la predicción de la serie de tiempo Lorenz usando un nuevo método conocido como sistema Neuro-DBR y su comparación, con un diseño Neurodifuso convencional. La técnica Neuro-DBR es el resultado de la unión de las redes neuronales y la metodología de Defuzificación basada en relaciones booleanas (DBR). La teoría DBR pretende facilitar la implementación de una inferencia difusa y mejorar el tiempo de procesamiento de los sistemas difusos, para obtener a su vez, un buen desempeño. Los sistemas Neuro-DBR tratan de explotar la complementariedad que existe entre ambas técnicas, aprovechando las ventajas y eludiendo las desventajas de cada una de ellas. En una primera parte, se presenta el algoritmo de entrenamiento Neuro-DBR propuesto para identificar sistemas no lineales. Después, se presenta el diseño del identificador para las Ecuaciones de Lorenz, usando un sistema Neuro-DBR y comparándolo con un diseño Neurodifuso convencional mediante la raíz del error cuadrático medio (RMSE), y el coeficiente de correlación (IC), como índices de desempeño. Los resultados obtenidos con el sistema propuesto, muestran la reducción del tiempo de entrenamiento y cálculo computacional. La teoría relacionada con lógica y conjuntos booleanos es una buena herramienta para diseñar de automatismos y sistemas digitales; una variación con la cual se busca mejorar los sistemas basados en automatismos consiste en emplear conjuntos difusos en lugar de booleanos. Lo anterior se realiza con el objetivo de tener una acción continua en el actuador del automatismo. Al realizar esta variación y aplicar la metodología de diseño de los sistemas de automatismos, aparecen los sistemas de inferencia difusa basados en relaciones booleanas.</span></p>

Money Under Sunshine: An Empirical Study of Trust Contracts of Chinese Hedge Funds

This article conducts the very first empirical study exploring the contractual arrangements of Chinese hedge funds, which are organized not as limited partnerships but as trusts. Using 139 trust contracts collected by hand, this article sheds light on the structure, covenants, and compensation mechanisms used by “sunshine funds,” the local name for hedge funds in China. It shows that, while sunshine funds do have similar contractual arrangements as typical LP-organized hedge funds, they also possess many undeniable differences due to the jurisdiction-specific characteristics of China. In particular, because of the direct involvement of trust companies, sunshine funds include certain covenants and terms that could both narrow the decision-making power and dampen the incentives of investment advisers. New, but rapidly developing, sunshine funds have been frequently targeted by regulatory efforts, which, however, come at a low level of consistency and sometimes lack in-depth consideration. Growing out of gray regulatory areas, Chinese sunshine fund managers have demonstrated remarkable competence in positioning themselves by taking advantage of favorable regulations and mitigating the impact of unfavorable ones. Looking ahead, it is of key importance that a proper balance is reached in terms of what role regulators should play in dealing with the Chinese hedge fund industry.

Negative changes in the scientific publication process in ecology: potential causes and consequences

Summary1. Increasingly viewed to have societal impact and value, science is affected by complex changes such as globalisation and the increasing dominance of commercial interest. As a result, technical advancements, financial concerns, institutional prestige and journal proliferation have created challenges for ecological and other scientific journals and affected the perception of both researchers and the public about the science that they publish.2. Journals are now used for more than dissemination of scientific research. Institutions use journal rankings for a variety of purposes and often require a pre‐established number of articles in hiring and budgetary decisions. Consequently, journal impact factors have achieved greater importance, and the splitting of articles into smaller parcels of information (‘salami‐slicing’) to increase numbers of publications has become more frequent.3. Journals may prescribe upper limits to article length, even though the average length of articles for several ecological journals examined has increased over time. There are clear signs, however, that journals without length limits for articles will become rarer. In contrast to ecological journals, taxonomic journals are not following this trend.4. Two case histories demonstrate how splitting longer ecological articles into a series of shorter ones results in both redundancy of information and actually increases the journal space used overall. Furthermore, with current rejection rates of ecological journals (often ∼80%), many thin salami‐sliced articles jam the peer‐review system much longer (through resubmission after rejection) than unsliced articles previously did (e.g. when rejection rates were ∼50%). In our experience, the increased pressure to publish many articles in ‘high‐impact’ journals also may decrease the attractiveness of a future scientific career in ecology to young people.5. ‘Gatekeeping’ of journal quality has shifted from editors to reviewers, and several recent trends are apparent including: bias about appropriate statistical methods; reviewers being more rigid overall; non‐native English writers being criticised for poor communications skills; and favourable reviews being signed more often than unfavourable ones. In terms of production, outsourcing of copy editing has increased the final error rate of published material.6. We supplemented our perceptions with those of older colleagues (∼100 experienced ecologists) that responded to an informal survey on this topic (response rate: 81%). In the opinion of almost 90% of our respondents, the overall review process has changed and for 20% among them the professional quality of reviews has declined.7. We, and many older colleagues, are convinced there have been some negative changes in the scientific publication process. If younger colleagues share this concern, we can collectively counter this deteriorating situation, because we are the key to the publishing and evaluation process.

On the behavior of piles in non-cohesive soil under combined horizontal and vertical loading

In many fields of application, piles are used for the transfer of both axial and lateral loads into the ground. This combined loading leads to interaction of the horizontal and vertical load-bearing behavior. However, in current engineering practice these effects are usually neglected, since a clear description of the interactions and of their quantitative importance dependent on system parameters is lacking. A numerical simulation model was therefore established to identify and quantify the effects of combined loading of piles in sand soil. The model is validated by comparison with the results of published model tests. The model results are of good quality. Moreover, deficiencies of the model tests and their assessment with respect to interaction approaches were identified. The results of the numerical study show that with combined compression loading mostly favorable effects arise, with combined tension loading mostly unfavorable ones. However, the interaction behavior is very complex, and, depending on loading conditions, opposite effects on system stiffness and ultimate load can occur. An interaction diagram is presented, which gives a good impression of the importance of interaction effects. A parametric study shows that compact piles with a small length-to-diameter ratio and piles with almost rigid behavior show particularly strong interaction effects.

An Approach to Open Access Author Payment

There have been hundreds of articles in recent years exhorting the strengths and warning of the weaknesses of Open Access through author payment. This article discusses a few of the favorable and unfavorable issues and proposes an approach that takes advantage of the favorable aspects and overcomes some of the unfavorable ones. It requires extensive government support, which may or may not be feasible, but the approach is presented here nevertheless. Some evidence is given for the potential savings that would be achieved by scientists, publishers and libraries in the US.

Global grape aroma potential and its individual analysis by SBSE–GC–MS

Abstract Among the aroma compounds present within grapes, a significant part is assumed to come from specific odourless precursors found mainly as glycosidic compounds which are known as bound fraction. In this paper, the individual composition of non-aromatic red grape bound fraction has been assayed for first time by SBSE–GC–MS and compared with the global total aroma potential measured spectrophotometrically at the wineries, in which the anthocyanins interferences have been removed. Glycosidic aroma compounds have been extracted by macerating grapes with different extractants (EtOHaq or SO2) at different times and subjected to acidic hydrolysis at 70 °C for 2 h. The best extraction condition, expressed as the higher aroma compounds concentration (terpenes + C13 norisoprenoids + 2-phenylethanol + C6 compounds), was the ethanolic aqueous extraction carried out for 2 h, reducing considerably the extraction times proposed in the literature. The method was successfully used to discriminate non-aromatic red grape varieties, (Petit-Verdot, Merlot and Monastrell) being limonene, linalool, 2-hexen-1-ol, TDN and 2-phenylethanol the aromas that contributed most to the differentiation. An aromatic white table grape such as Early sugar was also assayed to check its higher volatile composition in comparison with the other red varieties. The percentage of favourable aromas (terpenes + C13 norisoprensoids + bencene derivates) is always higher than the unfavourable ones (C6) for all tested varieties, especially Early Sugar. It has also been observe that the spectrophotometric measurements are overestimated when compared with SBSE–GC–MS, probably due to the free sugar content and other glycosidic compounds.

Discriminant Subspace Analysis: An Adaptive Approach for Image Classification

Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and biased discriminant analysis (BDA) are two effective techniques for dimension reduction, which pay attention to different roles of the positive and negative samples in finding discriminating subspace. However, the drawbacks of these two methods are obvious: LDA has limited efficiency in classifying sample data from subclasses with different distributions, and BDA does not account for the underlying distribution of negative samples. In order to effectively exploit favorable attributes of both BDA and LDA and avoid their unfavorable ones, we propose a novel adaptive discriminant analysis (ADA) for image classification. ADA can find an optimal discriminative subspace with adaptation to different sample distributions. In addition, three novel variants and extensions of ADA are further proposed: 1) integrated boosting (i.Boosting), which enhances and combines a set of ADA classifiers into a more powerful one. i.Boosting integrates feature re-weighting, relevance feedback, and AdaBoost into one framework. With affordable computational cost, i.Boosting can provide a unified and stable solution to ADA prediction result. 2) Fast adaptive discriminant analysis (FADA). Instead of searching parameters, FADA can directly find a close-to-optimal projection very fast based on different sample distributions. 3) Two-dimensional adaptive discriminant analysis (2DADA). As opposed to ADA, 2DADA is based on 2-D image matrix representation rather than 1-D vector. So it is simpler, more straightforward, and has lower time complexity to use for image feature extraction. Extensive experiments on synthetic data, UCI benchmark data sets, hand-digit data set, four facial image data sets, and COREL color image data sets show the superior performance of our proposed approaches.

MAPEAMENTO DE CARACTERÍSTICAS FÍSICAS DO RELEVO DA CIDADE DE GUARAPUAVA-PR UTILIZANDO TÉCNICAS DE GEOPROCESSAMENTO

O relevo é o principal agente físico que interfere a ocupação urbana. Normalmente, essa se inicia em áreas mais favoráveis e, somente depois, com a expansão urbana acabam ocupando áreas impróprias. É neste viés que se insere a presente pesquisa, visando elaborar um estudo integrado das características físicas do relevo no perímetro urbano da cidade de Guarapuava-PR. Para isso utilizou-se de três procedimentos metodológicos: pesquisa bibliográfica; trabalhos de campo e de laboratório/gabinete. Com o auxílio de técnicas de geoprocessamento e utilização do software SPRING versão 4.3.3, foram realizados mapeamentos para cada variável (hidrografia e bacias hidrográficas urbanas, hipsometria, declividade, exposição de vertentes, solos e formas de relevo). Conhecer as características físicas do espaço urbano, as limitações e as potencialidades torna-se de grande valia para o estabelecimento de práticas mais racionais de uso do solo e de um planejamento urbano mais condizente com tais especificidades.

A constraint-guided method with evolutionary algorithms for economic problems

This paper presents an evolutionary algorithms based constrain-guided method (CGM) that is capable of handling both hard and soft constraints in optimization problems. While searching for constraint-satisfied solutions, the method differentiates candidate solutions by assigning them with different fitness values, enabling favorite solutions to be distinguished more likely and more effectively from unfavored ones. We illustrate the use of CGM in solving two economic problems with optimization involved: (1) searching equilibriums for bargaining problems; (2) reducing the rate of failure in financial prediction problems. The efficacy of the proposed CGM is analyzed and compared with some other computational techniques, including a repair method and a penalty method for the problem (1), a linear classifier and three neural networks for the problem (2), respectively. Our studies here suggest that the evolutionary algorithms based CGM compares favorably against those computational approaches.

1930년대 모더니즘과 도시시학

This essay intends to explain the meaning of Korean modernism poetry and the poetics focusing on the urban space in which the modern age and modernity are realized and exhibited concrete place. This discussion generally has two subjects which are the poetic perception for urban and of the issue of the expression. The main point of Intellectualism, a branch of Korean modernism, is having a scientific and intellectual attitude for understanding the modern society. This has a positive meaning. Because of aiming the modern attitude of understanding the world and more definitely functioning a instrumental tool for perception and criticism of urban civilization which develops complicatedly. This is significant to understand the life-style of the urbanites objectively, considering city dwellers feel at over-sensitiveness that makes intellectualization of urban life eventually by reason of the own doublefaced character of urban and its complex artificial mechanism. But, on occasion that the attitude of perception changes to the issue of the expression the limit is revealed clearly. Because the liberated practice of intellectualized life is obtained in the opposite factor of it instead. In that respect Kywang-Kyun Kim‘s poetic art of formation attracts an attention. He was good at forming the urban image and lyric. The favorable comments for his commanding the image and unfavorable ones for his expressing the excessive feeling were the dominant existing criticisms. But, in relation to urban life, the lyric of his poems doesn't melted into the images fully call forth tragic beauty that stimulate alienation and sorrow of urbanite more strongly. For this reason Kywang-Kyun Kim's poem should be newly evaluated. And the synesthesia expressions reveal a new respect in connection with segmentalized and fragmental urban life-style. After all, his poem helps to recover man's totality through the integration of sense.

ERAP140/Nbla10993 is a novel favorable prognostic indicator for neuroblastoma induced in response to retinoic acid

In the present study, we identified a gene termed Nbla10993 whose expression levels are higher in favorable neuroblastomas versus unfavorable ones. Structural analysis showed that Nbla10993 is a novel splicing variant of the ER-associated protein of 140 kDa (ERAP140), which lacks the central acidic as well as the COOH-terminal Cys/His-rich domain. Similarly, ERAP140 was preferentially expressed in favorable neuroblastomas relative to unfavorable ones. During the all-trans-retinoic acid (ATRA)-mediated neuronal differentiation in neuroblastoma-derived RTBM1 cells, the expression levels of ERAP140/Nbla10993 increased at the mRNA level. Consistent with these observations, the luciferase reporter analysis demonstrated that the ERAP140/Nbla10993 promoter responds to ATRA. In addition, the immunoprecipitation/immunoblotting experiments showed that ERAP140 forms a stable complex with RARalpha but not with RXRalpha in cells, suggesting that ERAP140 is involved in RAR-mediated transcriptional regulation. Furthermore, the quantitative real-time PCR analysis using 109 primary neuroblastoma samples demonstrated that the expression levels of ERAP140/Nbla10993 significantly correlate with a better clinical outcome of neuroblastomas. Taken together, our present findings indicate that ERAP140/Nbla10993 plays an important role in the regulation of ATRA-mediated neuronal differentiation, and is a novel member of prognostic indicators for neuroblastoma.

Semiochemicals produced by tomato varieties and their role in parasitism of Corcyra cephalonica (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae) by the egg parasitoid Trichogramma chilonis (Hymenoptera: Trichogrammatidae)

Hexane extracts of 10 different varieties of tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum Mill) obtained in the vegetative and flowering periods were studied for synomonal response of the egg parasitoid Trichogramma chilonis Ishii. Gas chromatography of leaf extracts revealed the presence of saturated hydrocarbons ranging from C14 to C29 in varying numbers and concentrations. These hydrocarbons elicited varied synomonal responses from the parasitoid. The quantity of individual hydrocarbons varied from 72 to 34,940 ppm in the vegetative period and from 4 to 46,170 ppm in the flowering period. Hexane extracts obtained during the flowering period showed a greater synomonal response compared with those obtained during the vegetative period. A better response observed for certain varieties of tomato at a particular period could be due to the presence of higher concentrations of favourable hydrocarbons relative to unfavourable ones. Synomonal activity seems to be associated mainly with tricosane, heneicosane, pentacosane and hexacosane during the vegetative period and with heneicosane and hexacosane during the flowering period. In the vegetative period, the tomato variety To-Pant-T4 elicited the highest activity as well as parasitism at the lowest concentration of 25,000 ppm, which was higher than other varieties at all concentrations. Varieties To-BT-116-32, To-BT-20-2-1 and To-Pant-T3 in the vegetative period and To-Selection-15, To-Selection-32 and To-BT-22-2-1 in the flowering period elicited higher responses than the other varieties. To-BT-20-2-1 elicited a maximum response in the flowering period, which may be due to the presence of higher relative quantities of tricosane, heneicosane and hexacosane. In view of these findings, tomato varieties with favourable semiochemicals could be exploited in an integrated pest management programme to enhance the effectiveness of the egg parasitoid T. chilonis against the fruit borer Helicoverpa armigera (Hb).

Evaluation of sunflower cultivars for central Brazil

Despite a large availability of areas suitable for sunflower cropping in Central Brazil, few adapted cultivars are available in the market. The objective of this work was to select sunflower cultivars adapted to this important production region. Experimental data from 2000 to 2004 were obtained by the National Sunflower Trials, coordinated by Embrapa Soja. The evaluated traits were grain and oil yields. Two criteria were used for selection of cultivars: i) the general mean obtained from different environments; ii) partitioning of general mean in favorable and unfavorable environments. Partitioning of the general mean allowed to detect the specific environment indicated for each cultivar. For grain yield, the cultivar Helio 251 presented general indication, Milênio and CF 17 could be indicated for favorable environments and ACA 884, ACA 885 and ACA 872 for the unfavorable ones. For oil yield, CF 13, Milênio, DK 4030, Helio 250 and ACA 872 had general indication; AG 966, GH 12, GV 26043, CF 17 and VDH 93 could be indicated for favorable environments, while VDH 488, Helio 251, ACA 884 and ACA 885 for the unfavorable conditions. In 2002, the partition of the general mean was not carried out. In this year, general mean of cultivars Exp 37, AG 962, GV 26048 and AG 967 were overweight the controls for grain yield and the cultivars AG 962, AG 967, GV 26048, AG 972, BRS 191, Guarani were overweight the controls for oil yield.

Adaptive discriminant analysis for microarray-based classification

Microarray technology has generated enormous amounts of high-dimensional gene expression data, providing a unique platform for exploring gene regulatory networks. However, the curse of dimensionality plagues effort to analyze these high throughput data. Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and Biased Discriminant Analysis (BDA) are two popular techniques for dimension reduction, which pay attention to different roles of the positive and negative samples in finding discriminating subspace. However, the drawbacks of these two methods are obvious: LDA has limited efficiency in classifying sample data from subclasses with different distributions, and BDA does not account for the underlying distribution of negative samples. In this paper, we propose a novel dimension reduction technique for microarray analysis: Adaptive Discriminant Analysis (ADA), which effectively exploits favorable attributes of both BDA and LDA and avoids their unfavorable ones. ADA can find a good discriminative subspace with adaptation to different sample distributions. It not only alleviates the problem of high dimensionality, but also enhances the classification performance in the subspace with naïve Bayes classifier. To learn the best model fitting the real scenario, boosted Adaptive Discriminant Analysis is further proposed. Extensive experiments on the yeast cell cycle regulation data set, and the expression data of the red blood cell cycle in malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum demonstrate the superior performance of ADA and boosted ADA. We also present some putative genes of specific functional classes predicted by boosted ADA. Their potential functionality is confirmed by independent predictions based on Gene Ontology, demonstrating that ADA and boosted ADA are effective dimension reduction methods for microarray-based classification.

Monosomy of Chromosome 3 and an Inflammatory Phenotype Occur Together in Uveal Melanoma

In uveal melanoma, different predictors of poor prognosis have been identified, including monosomy of chromosome 3, HLA expression, and the presence of infiltrating leukocytes and macrophages. Each of these parameters can be used to differentiate prognostically the favorable tumors from the unfavorable ones, and thus the hypothesis for the present study was that they are related, and that monosomy of chromosome 3 occurs in the same tumors as the unfavorable inflammatory phenotype. Tumor tissue was obtained from 50 cases of uveal melanoma treated between 1999 and 2004. After enucleation, nuclei were isolated from paraffin-embedded tissue for fluorescence in situ hybridization, to determine the chromosome 3 copy number. Each tumor-containing globe was further processed for conventional histopathologic examination and for immunohistochemical analysis with HLA class I and II-specific antibodies and with macrophage marker CD68. Of 50 uveal melanomas, 62% (31/50) were categorized as having monosomy of chromosome 3. Monosomy 3 was associated with the presence of epithelioid cells, an increased density of tumor-infiltrating macrophages, and a higher HLA class I and II expression. Survival analyses showed a correlation between monosomy 3 and decreased survival and identified monosomy 3, ciliary body involvement, and largest basal tumor diameter as the best prognostic markers. Monosomy 3 in uveal melanoma is associated with the presence of an inflammatory phenotype, consisting of a high HLA class I and II expression as well as an increased number of tumor-infiltrating macrophages. In a multivariate Cox regression analysis, the presence of monosomy 3 was one of the best prognostic markers of metastatic disease and survival, although the follow-up time was short.

A novel HECT-type E3 ubiquitin protein ligase NEDL1 enhances the p53-mediated apoptotic cell death in its catalytic activity-independent manner

NEDL1 (NEDD4-like ubiquitin protein ligase-1) is a newly identified HECT-type E3 ubiquitin protein ligase highly expressed in favorable neuroblastomas as compared with unfavorable ones. In this study, we found that NEDL1 cooperates with p53 to induce apoptosis. During cisplatin (CDDP)-mediated apoptosis in neuroblastoma SH-SY5Y cells, p53 was induced to accumulate in association with an increase in expression levels of NEDL1. Enforced expression of NEDL1 resulted in a decrease in number of G418-resistant colonies in SH-SY5Y and U2OS cells bearing wild-type p53, whereas NEDL1 had undetectable effect on p53-deficient H1299 and SAOS-2 cells. Similarly, enforced expression of NEDL1 increased number of U2OS cells with sub-G1 DNA content. Co-immunoprecipitation and in vitro binding assays revealed that NEDL1 binds to the COOH-terminal region of p53. Luciferase reporter assay showed that NEDL1 has an ability to enhance the transcriptional activity of p53. Small interfering RNA-mediated knockdown of the endogenous NEDL1 conferred the resistance of U2OS cells to adriamycin. It is noteworthy that NEDL1 enhanced pro-apoptotic activity of p53 in its catalytic activity-independent manner. Taken together, our present findings suggest that functional interaction of NEDL1 with p53 might contribute to the induction of apoptosis in cancerous cells bearing wild-type p53.