Refine
Year of publication
- 2013 (36) (remove)
Document Type
- Doctoral Thesis (36) (remove)
Language
- English (36) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (36)
Keywords
- IR-MPD (2)
- cobalt (2)
- dipeptide (2)
- metal (2)
- Ahr Knockout Model (1)
- Analytical method (1)
- Aryl hydrocarbon Receptor (1)
- Baeocyte (1)
- Biogeographie (1)
- Biogeography (1)
Faculty / Organisational entity
- Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Mathematik (12)
- Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Informatik (10)
- Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Chemie (5)
- Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Maschinenbau und Verfahrenstechnik (5)
- Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Sozialwissenschaften (2)
- Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Biologie (1)
- Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik (1)
The automatic analysis and retrieval of technical line drawings is hindered by many challenges such as: the large amount of contextual clutter around the symbols within the drawings, degradation, transformations on the symbols in drawings, large databases of drawings
and large alphabets of symbols. The core tasks required for the analysis of technical line
drawings are: symbol recognition, spotting and retrieval. The current systems for performing these tasks have poor performance due to the mentioned challenges. This dissertation
presents a number of methods that address these challenges. These methods achieve both
accurate and efficient symbol spotting and retrieval in technical line drawings, and perform
significantly better than state-of-the-art methods on the same problems. An overview of
the key contributions of this dissertation is given in the following.
First, this dissertation presents a geometric matching-based method for symbol recognition
and spotting. The method performs recognition in the presence of large amounts of contextual clutter, and provides precise localization of the recognized symbols. On standard
databases such as GREC-2005 and GREC-2011, the method achieves up to 10% higher
recall and up to 28% higher precision than state-of-the-art methods on the spotting task,
and achieves up to 7% higher recognition accuracy on the isolated recognition task. The
method is based on a geometric matching approach, which is flexible enough to incorporate
improvements on the matching strategy, feature types and information on the features. The
method also includes an adaptive preprocessing algorithm that deals with a wide variety
of noise types.
In order to improve the performance of the spotting method when dealing with degraded
drawings, two novel methods are presented in this dissertation. Both methods are based on
combining geometric matching with machine learning techniques. The geometric matching
is used to automatically generate training data that contain information on how well the
features of the queries are matched in both the true and the false matches found by the
spotting method. The first method learns the feature weights of the different query symbols
by linear discriminant analysis (LDA). The weighted query features are used in the spotting
method and result in 27% higher average precision than the original method, with a speedup
factor of 2. The second method uses SVM classification as a post-spotting step to distinguish
the true from the false matches in the spotting method. The use of the classification step
further improves the average precision of the spotting method by 20.6%.
This dissertation also presents methods for content analysis of line drawings. First, a
method for accurate and consistent detection (95.8%) of regions of interest (ROIs) is presented. The method is based on statistical feature grouping. The ROI-finding method is
identified as an important part of a symbol retrieval system: the better the detected ROIs,the higher the performance of a retrieval system. The ROI-finding method is also used to
improve the performance of the geometric-based spotting system.
Second, a symbol clustering method for building a compact and accurate representation of
a large database of technical drawings is presented. This method uses the output from the
ROI-finding method as input, and uses geometric matching as a similarity measure. The
method achieves high accuracy (90.1% recall, 94.3% precision) in forming clusters of symbols. The representatives of the clusters (34 symbols) are used as key entries to a symbol
index, which is identified as the outcome of an off-line stage of a symbol retrieval system.
Finally, an efficient and high performing large scale symbol retrieval system is presented
in this dissertation. The system follows the bag of visual words (BoVW) model, but with
using methods that are suitable to line drawings. The system uses the symbol index to
represent a database of drawings. During the on-line query retrieval stage, the query is
analyzed by the ROI-finding method, matched with the key entries of the symbol index via
geometric matching, and finally, a spatial verification step is performed on the retrieved
matches. The system achieves a query lookup time that is independent of the size of the
database, and is instead dependent on the size of the symbol index. The system achieves up
to 10% higher recall and up to 28% higher precision than state-of-the-art spotting systems
on similar databases.
Overall, these contributions are major advancements in the research of graphics recognition.
The hope is that, such contributions provide the basis for the development of reliable and
accurate performing applications for browsing, querying or classification of line drawings
for the benefit of end users.
Many real life problems have multiple spatial scales. In addition to the multiscale nature one has to take uncertainty into account. In this work we consider multiscale problems with stochastic coefficients.
We combine multiscale methods, e.g., mixed multiscale finite elements or homogenization, which are used for deterministic problems with stochastic methods, such as multi-level Monte Carlo or polynomial chaos methods.
The work is divided into three parts.
In the first two parts we study homogenization with different stochastic methods. Therefore we consider elliptic stationary diffusion equations with stochastic coefficients.
The last part is devoted to the study of mixed multiscale finite elements in combination with multi-level Monte Carlo methods. In the third part we consider multi-phase flow and transport equations.
This thesis is separated into three main parts: Development of Gaussian and White Noise Analysis, Hamiltonian Path Integrals as White Noise Distributions, Numerical methods for polymers driven by fractional Brownian motion.
Throughout this thesis the Donsker's delta function plays a key role. We investigate this generalized function also in Chapter 2. Moreover we show by giving a counterexample, that the general definition for complex kernels is not true.
In Chapter 3 we take a closer look to generalized Gauss kernels and generalize these concepts to the case of vector-valued White Noise. These results are the basis for Hamiltonian path integrals of quadratic type. The core result of this chapter gives conditions under which pointwise products of generalized Gauss kernels and certain Hida distributions have a mathematical rigorous meaning as distributions in the Hida space.
In Chapter 4 we discuss operators which are related to applications for Feynman Integrals as differential operators, scaling, translation and projection. We show the relation of these operators to differential operators, which leads to the well-known notion of so called convolution operators. We generalize the central homomorphy theorem to regular generalized functions.
We generalize the concept of complex scaling to scaling with bounded operators and discuss the relation to generalized Radon-Nikodym derivatives. With the help of this we consider products of generalized functions in chapter 5. We show that the projection operator from the Wick formula for products with Donsker's deltais not closable on the square-integrable functions..
In Chapter 5 we discuss products of generalized functions. Moreover the Wick formula is revisited. We investigate under which conditions and on which spaces the Wick formula can be generalized to. At the end of the chapter we consider the products of Donsker's delta function with a generalized function with help of a measure transformation. Here also problems as measurability are concerned.
In Chapter 6 we characterize Hamiltonian path integrands for the free particle, the harmonic oscillator and the charged particle in a constant magnetic field as Hida distributions. This is done in terms of the T-transform and with the help of the results from chapter 3. For the free particle and the harmonic oscillator we also investigate the momentum space propagators. At the same time, the $T$-transform of the constructed Feynman integrands provides us with their generating functional. In Chapter 7, we can show that the generalized expectation (generating functional at zero) gives the Greens function to the corresponding Schrödinger equation.
Moreover, with help of the generating functional we can show that the canonical commutation relations for the free particle and the harmonic oscillator in phase space are fulfilled. This confirms on a mathematical rigorous level the heuristics developed by Feynman and Hibbs.
In Chapter 8 we give an outlook, how the scaling approach which is successfully applied in the Feynman integral setting can be transferred to the phase space setting. We give a mathematical rigorous meaning to an analogue construction to the scaled Feynman-Kac kernel. It is open if the expression solves the Schrödinger equation. At least for quadratic potentials we can get the right physics.
In the last chapter, we focus on the numerical analysis of polymer chains driven by fractional Brownian motion. Instead of complicated lattice algorithms, our discretization is based on the correlation matrix. Using fBm one can achieve a long-range dependence of the interaction of the monomers inside a polymer chain. Here a Metropolis algorithm is used to create the paths of a polymer driven by fBm taking the excluded volume effect in account.
Efficient time integration and nonlinear model reduction for incompressible hyperelastic materials
(2013)
This thesis deals with the time integration and nonlinear model reduction of nearly incompressible materials that have been discretized in space by mixed finite elements. We analyze the structure of the equations of motion and show that a differential-algebraic system of index 1 with a singular perturbation term needs to be solved. In the limit case the index may jump to index 3 and thus renders the time integration into a difficult problem. For the time integration we apply Rosenbrock methods and study their convergence behavior for a test problem, which highlights the importance of the well-known Scholz conditions for this problem class. Numerical tests demonstrate that such linear-implicit methods are an attractive alternative to established time integration methods in structural dynamics. In the second part we combine the simulation of nonlinear materials with a model reduction step. We use the method of proper orthogonal decomposition and apply it to the discretized system of second order. For a nonlinear model reduction to be efficient we approximate the nonlinearity by following the lookup approach. In a practical example we show that large CPU time savings can achieved. This work is in order to prepare the ground for including such finite element structures as components in complex vehicle dynamics applications.
Fluid extraction is a typical chemical process where two types of fluids are mixed together. The high complexity of this process which involves droplet coalescence, breakup, mass transfer, and counter-current flow often makes design difficult. The industrial design of these processes is still based on expensive mini-plant and pilot plant experiments. Therefore, there is a strong need for research into the stimulation of fluid-fluid interaction processes using computational fluid dynamics (CFD).
Previous multi-phase fluid simulations have focused on the development of models that couple mass and momentum using the Navier-Stokes equation. Recent population balance models (PBM) have proved to be important methods for analyzing droplet breakage and collisions. A combination of CFD and PBM facilitates the simulation of flow property by solving coupling equations, and the calculation of the droplet size and numbers. In our study, we successfully coupled an Euler-Euler CFD model with the breakup and coalescence models proposed by Luo and Svendsen (59).
The simulation output of extraction columns provides a mathematical understand- ing of how fluids are mixed inside a mixing device. This mixing process shows that the dispersed phase of a flow generates large blobs and bubbles. Current mathemati- cal simulation results often fail to provide an intuitive representation of how well two different types of fluid interact, so intuitive and physically plausible visualization tech- niques are in high demand to help chemical engineers to explore and analyze bubble column simulation data. In chapter 3, we present the visualization tools we developed for extraction column data.
Fluid interfaces and free surfaces are topics of growing interest in the field of multi- phase computational fluid dynamics. However, the analysis of the flow field relative to the material interface shape and topology is a challenging task. In chapter 5, we present a technique that facilitates the visualization and analysis of complex material interface behaviors over time. To achieve this, we track the surface parameterization of time-varying material interfaces and identify locations where there are interactions between the material interfaces and fluid particles. Splatting and surface visualization techniques produce an intuitive representation of the derived interface stability. Our results demonstrate that the interaction of a flow field with a material interface can be understood using appropriate extraction and visualization techniques, and that our techniques can help the analysis of mixing and material interface consistency.
In addition to texture-based methods for surface analysis, the interface of two- phase fluid can be considered as an implicit function of the density or volume fraction values. High-level visualization techniques such as topology-based methods can re- veal the hidden structure underlying simple simulation data, which will enhance and advance our understanding of multi-fluid simulation data. Recent feature-based vi- sualization approaches have explored the possibility of using Reeb graphs to analyze scalar field topologies(19, 107). In chapter 6, we present a novel interpolation scheme for interpolating point-based volume fraction data and we further explore the implicit fluid interface using a topology-based method.
Cyanobacteria are the only prokaryotes with the ability to conduct oxygenic photosynthesis,
therefore having major influence on the evolution of life on earth. Their diverse morphology
was traditionally the basis for taxonomy and classification. For example, the genus
Chroococcidiopsis has been classified within the order Pleurocapsales, based on a unique
reproduction modus by baeocytes. Recent phylogenetic results suggested a closer
relationship of this genus to the order Nostocales. However, these studies were based
mostly on the highly conserved 16S rRNA and a small selection of Chroococcidiopsis
strains. One aim of this present thesis was to investigate the evolutionary relationships of
the genus Chroococcidiopsis, the Pleurocapsales and remaining cyanobacteria using
16S rRNA, rpoC1 and gyrB gene. Including the single gene, as the multigene analyses of
97 strains clearly showed a separation of the genus Chroococcidiopsis from the
Pleurocapsales. Furthermore, a sister relationship between the genus Chroococcidiopsis
and the order Nostocales was confirmed. Consequently, the monogeneric family
Chroococcidiopsidaceae Geitler ex. Büdel, Donner & Kauff familia nova is justified. The
phylogenetic analyses also revealed the polyphyly of the remaining Pleurocapsales, due to
the fact that the strain Pleurocapsa PCC 7327 was always separated from other strains.
This is supported by differences in their metabolism, ecology and physiology.
A second aim of this study was to investigate the thylakoid arrangement of
Chroococcidiopsis and a selection of cyanobacterial strains. The investigation of 13 strains
with Low Temperature Scanning Electron Microscopy revealed two unknown thylakoidal
arrangements within Chroococcidiopsis (parietal and stacked). This result revised the
knowledge of the thylakoid arrangement in this genus. Previously, only a coiled
arrangement was known for three strains. Based on the data of 66 strains, the feature
thylakoid arrangement was tested as a potential feature for morphological identification of
cyanobacteria. The results showed a strong relationship between the group assignment of
cyanobacteria and their thylakoid arrangements. Hence, it is in general possible to
conclude from this certain phenotypic character the affiliation to a particular family, order
or genus.
The third aim of this study was to investigate biogeographical patterns of the worldwide
distributed genus Chroococcidiopsis. The phylogenetic analysis suggested that the genus do not have biogeographical patterns, which is in contrast with a recent study on hypolithic
living Chroococcidiopsis strains and the majority of phylogeographic analysis of
microorganisms. Further analysis showed no separation of different life-strategies within
the genus. These results could be related to the genetic markers utilized, which may not
contain biogeographical information. Hence the present study can neither exclude nor
prove the possibility of biogeographic and life-strategy patterns in the genus
Chroococcidiopsis.
Future research should be focused on finding appropriate genetic markers investigate of
evolutionary relationships and biogeographical patterns within Chroococcidiopsis.
The use of trading stops is a common practice in financial markets for a variety of reasons: it provides a simple way to control losses on a given trade, while also ensuring that profit-taking is not deferred indefinitely; and it allows opportunities to consider reallocating resources to other investments. In this thesis, it is explained why the use of stops may be desirable in certain cases.
This is done by proposing a simple objective to be optimized. Some simple and commonly-used rules for the placing and use of stops are investigated; consisting of fixed or moving barriers, with fixed transaction costs. It is shown how to identify optimal levels at which to set stops, and the performances of different rules and strategies are compared. Thereby, uncertainty and altering of the drift parameter of the investment are incorporated.
Recent progresses and advances in the field of consumer electronics, driven by display
technologies and also the sector of mobile, hand-held devices, enable new ways in
presenting information to users, as well as new ways of user interaction, therefore
providing a basis for user-centered applications and work environments.
My thesis focuses on how arbitrary display environments can be utilized to improve
both the user experience, regarding perception of information, and also to provide
intuitive interaction possibilities. On the one hand advances in display technologies
provide the basis for new ways of visualizing content and collaborative work, on the
other hand forward-pressing developments in the consumer market, especially the
market of smart phones, offer potential to enhance usability in terms of interaction
and therefore can provide additional benefit for users.
Tiled display setups, combining both large screen real estate and high resolution,
provide new possibilities and chances to visualize large datasets and to facilitate col-
laboration in front of a large screen area. Furthermore these display setups present
several advantages over the traditional single-user-workspace environments: con-
trary to single-user-workspaces, multiple users are able to explore a dataset displayed
on a tiled display system, at the same time, thus allowing new forms of collabora-
tive work. Based on that, face-to-face discussions are enabled, an additional value
is added. Large displays also allow the utilization of the user’s spatial memory, al-
lowing physical navigation without the need of switching between different windows
to explore information.
With Tiled++ I contributed a versatile approach to address the bezel problem. The
bezel problem is one of the Top Ten research challenges in the research field of LCD-
based tiled wall setups. By applying the Tiled++ approach a large high resolution
Focus & Context screen is created, combining high resolution focus areas with low
resolution context information, projected onto the bezel area.
Additionally the field of user interaction poses an important challenge, especially
regarding the utilization of large tiled displays, since traditional keyboard & mouse
interaction devices reached their limits. My focus in this thesis is on Mobile HCI.Devices like mobile phones are utilized to interact with large displays, since they
feature various interaction modalities and preserve user mobility.
Large public displays, as a modernized form of traditional bulletin boards, also en-
able new ways of handling information, displaying content, and user interaction.
Utilized in hot spots, Digital Interactive Public Pinboards can provide an adequate
answer to questions like how to approach pressing issues like disaster and crisis man-
agement for both responders as well as citizens and also new ways of how to handle
information flow (contribution & distribution & accession). My contribution to the
research field of public display environments was the conception and implementa-
tion of an easy-to-use and easy-to-set-up architecture to overcome shortcomings of
current approaches and to cover the needs of aid personnel.
Although being a niche, Virtual Reality (VR) environments can provide additional
value for visualizing specific content. Disciplines like earth sciences & geology, me-
chanical engineering, design, and architecture can benefit from VR environments. In
order to consider the variety of users, I introduce a more intuitive and user friendly
interaction metaphor, the ARC metaphor.
Visualization challenges base on being able to cope with more and more complex
datasets and to bridge the gap between comprehensibility and loss of information.
Furthermore the visualization approach has to be reasonable, which is a crucial
factor when working in interdisciplinary teams, where the standard of knowledge
is diverse. Users have to be able to conceive the visualized content in a fast and
reliable way. My contribution are visualization approaches in the field of supportive
visualization.
Finally, my work illuminates how the synthesis of visualization, interaction and dis-
play technologies enhance the user experience. I promote a holistic view. The user
is brought back into the focus of attention, provided with a tool-set to support him,
without overextending the abilities of, for example, non-expert users, a crucial factor
in the more and more interdisciplinary field of computer science.
This thesis provides a fully automatic translation from synchronous programs to parallel software for different architectures, in particular, shared memory processing (SMP) and distributed memory systems. Thereby, we exploit characteristics of the synchronous model of computation (MoC) to reduce communication and to improve available parallelism and load-balancing by out-of-order (OOO) execution and data speculation.
Manual programming of parallel software requires the developers to partition a system into tasks and to add synchronization and communication. The model-based approach of development abstracts from details of the target architecture and allows to make decisions about the target architecture as late as possible. The synchronous MoC supports this approach by abstracting from time and providing implicit parallelism and synchronization. Existing compilation techniques translate synchronous programs into synchronous guarded actions (SGAs) which are an intermediate format abstracting from semantic problems in synchronous languages. Compilers for SGAs analyze causality problems, ensure logical correctness and the absence of schizophrenia problems. Hence, SGAs are a simplified and general starting point and keep the synchronous MoC at the same time. The instantaneous feedback in the synchronous MoC makes the mapping of these systems to parallel software a non-trivial task. In contrast, other MoCs such as data-flow processing networks (DPNs) directly match with parallel architectures. We translate the SGAs into DPNs,which represent a commonly used model to create parallel software. DPNs have been proposed as a programming model for distributed parallel systems that have communication paths with unpredictable latencies. The purely data-driven execution of DPNs does not require a global coordination and therefore DPNs can be easily mapped to parallel software for architectures with distributed memory. The generation of efficient parallel code from DPNs challenges compiler design with two issues: To perfectly utilize a parallel system, the communication and synchronization has to be kept low, and the utilization of the computational units has to be balanced. The variety of hardware architectures and dynamic execution techniques in processing units of these systems make a statically balanced distributed execution impossible.
The synchronous MoC is still reflected in our generated DPNs, which exhibits characteristics that allow optimizations concerning the previously mentioned issues. In particular, we apply a general communication reduction and OOO execution to achieve a dynamically balanced execution which is inspired from hardware design.
Polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins, dibenzofurans, and polychlorinated biphenyls are persistent environmental pollutants which ubiquitously occur as complex mixtures and accumulate in the food and feed chain due to their high lipophilic properties. Of the 419 possible congeners, only 29 share a common mechanism of action and cause similar effects, the so called dioxin-like compounds. Dioxin-like compounds evoke a broad spectrum of biochemical and toxic responses, i.e. enzyme induction, dermal toxicity, hepatotoxicity, immunotoxicity, carcinogenicity as well as adverse effects on reproduction, development, and the endocrine system in laboratory animals and in humans. Most, if not all, of the aforementioned responses, are mediated by the aryl hydrocarbon receptor. In the present work, the elicited biochemical effects of a selection of dioxin-like compounds and the non dioxin-like PCB 153 were examined in mouse (in vivo) and in human liver cell models (in vitro). Emphasis was given to the main contributors to the total toxic equivalents in human blood and tissues TCDD, 1-PnCDD, 4-PnCDF, PCB 118, PCB 126, and PCB 156, which likewise contribute about 90 % to the dioxin-like activity in the human food chain.
Three mouse in vivo studies were carried out aiming to characterize the alterations in hepatic gene expression as well as the induction of hepatic xenobiotic metabolizing enzymes after single oral dose. Based on the results obtained from mouse 3-day and 14-day studies, the seven test compounds can be categorized into three classes; the ones which are 'pure' AhR ligands (TCDD, 1-PnCDD, 4-PnCDF, and PCB 126) or solely CAR inducers (PCB 153), and the ones which are AhR/CAR mixed-type inducers (PCB 118, PCB 156). Moreover, the analysis of hepatic gene expression patterns after a single oral dose of either TCDD or PCB 153 revealed that the altered genes fundamentally differed. Profiling of significantly altered genes led to the conclusion that changes in gene expression were associated with different signalling pathways, in fact by AhR and CAR.
For investigating the role of the AhR in mediating biological responses, several experimental approaches were carried out, such as the analysis of blood plasma metabolites in Ahr knockout and wild-type mice. Genotype specifics and similarities were determined by HPLC-MS/MS analysis. Several plasma metabolites could be identified in both genotypes, but also differences were detected. Furthermore, an in vivo experiment was performed aiming to characterize AhR-dependent and -independent effects in female Ahr knockout and wild-type mice. For this purpose, mice received a single oral dose of TCDD and were killed 96 h later. Microarray analysis of mouse livers revealed that although the Ahr gene was knocked out in Ahr-/- mice, the quantity of affected genes were in the same order of magnitude as for Ahr+/+ mice, but the pattern of altered genes distinctly differed. In addition, the relative liver weights of TCDD-treated Ahr+/+ mice were significantly increased which led to the conclusion, that TCDD induced the development of hepatic steatosis in female Ahr wild-type.
The performed in vitro experiments aimed to characterize the effects elicited by selected DLCs and PCB 153 in human liver cell models by the use of HepG2 cells and primary human hepatocytes. In general, primary human hepatocytes were less responsive than HepG2 cells. This was not only observed in EC values derived from EROD assay, but also regarding microarray analysis in terms of differently regulated genes. In vitro REPs gained from both liver cell models widely confirmed the current TEFs, but some deviations occurred. The comparison of the TCDD-altered genes in both human cell types revealed that only a considerably small number of genes was in common up regulated by both human liver cell models, such as the established AhR-regulated highly inducible cytochrome P450s 1A1, 1A2, and 1B1 as well as other AhR target genes. Although the overlap was rather small, the TCDD-induced genes could be consistently associated with the broad spectrum of established dioxin-related biological responses. The gene expression pattern in primary human hepatocytes after treatment with selected DLCs (TCDD, 1-PnCDD, 4-PnCDF, and PCB 126) and PCB 153 was additionally characterized by microarray analysis. The highest response in terms of significantly altered genes was determined for TCDD, followed by 4-PnCDF, 1-PnCDD, and PCB 126, whereas exposure to PCB 153 did not evoke any significant changes in gene expression. The pattern of significantly altered genes was very homogenous among the four congeners. Genes associated with well-established DLC-related biological responses as well as novel dioxin-inducible target genes were identified, whereby an extensive overlap in terms of up regulated genes by all four DLCs occurred. In conclusion, the results from the in vitro experiments performed in primary human hepatocytes provided fundamental insight into the congeners' potencies and caused alterations in gene expression patterns. The obtained findings implicate that although the extent of enzyme inducibilities varied, the gene expression patterns are coincidental. Microarray analysis identified species-specific (mouse vs. human) as well as model-specific (in vitro vs. in vivo and transformed cells vs. untransformed cells) differences. In order to identify novel biomarkers for AhR activation due to treatment with dioxin-like compounds, five candidates were selected based on the microarray results i.e. ALDH3A1, TIPARP, HSD17B2, CD36, and AhRR. Eventually, ALDH3A1 turned out to be the most reliable and suitable marker for exposure to DLCs in both human liver cell models eliciting the highest mRNA inducibility among the five chosen candidates. In which way these species- and cell type-specific markers are involved in the dioxin-elicited toxic responses should be further characterized in vivo and in vitro.