Abstract. Equine chorionic gonadotropin (eCG), which consists of highly glycosylated α-and β-subunits, is a unique member of the gonadotropin family because it elicits response characteristics of both follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) and luteinizing hormone (LH) in species other than the horse. In this study, recombinant tethered-eCG as well as its deglycosylated mutants were produced to determine if α-and β-subunits can be synthesized as a single polypeptide chain (tethered-eCG) and display biological activity. We found that tethered-eCG (T-βα) had both LH-and FSH-like activities comparable to dimeric eCG. Luteinizing hormone-like activity of tethered-eCGs deglycosylated at Asn 56 (T-βα56) was decreased. In contrast, LH-like activity of eCG without O-glycosylated carboxylterminal peptide (CTP) (T-βcα) was slightly decreased but still similar to T-βα. Double mutation at Asn 56 and CTP (T-βcα56) caused marked decrease in the activity, indicating that both glycosylations at Asn 56 and CTP are involved in LH-like activity in the tethered form. Interestingly, FSH-like activity remained in all deglycosylated eCG mutants (T-βα56, T-βcα and T-βcα56) as well as T-βα. The biological roles of oligosaccharides at Asn 56 of eCG α-subunit and O-linked peptide of β-subunit appear to be different in LH-and FSH-like activities in tethered-eCG. Key words: Equine chorionic gonadotropin, Luteinizing hormone, Follicular stimulating hormone, Glycosylation, Tethered hormone (J. Reprod. Dev. 50: [297][298][299][300][301][302][303][304] 2004) quine chorionic gonadotropin (eCG) is a member of the glycoprotein hormone family which includes luteinizing hormone (LH), follicles t i m u l a t i n g h o r m o n e ( F S H ) a n d t h y r o i dstimulating hormone (TSH). This hormone family is characterized by a heterodimeric structure composed of a common α-subunit noncovalently linked to a hormone-specific β-subunit [1]. The β-subunits of eCG and eLH, translated from the same gene, have identical primary structures [2,3]. The difference between eCG and eLH lies in the structure of their carbohydrates, which are both sialylated and sulfated in LH and sialylated in CG [4,5]. Equine chorionic gonadotropin shows both LH-and FSH-like activities in many species but not the horse [6][7][8][9][10][11]. The LH-and FSH-like activities of eCG in vitro observed in heterologous species is of fundamental interest to the study of structurefunction relationships of gonadotropins and their receptors.We previously prepared recombinant eCG in CHO-K1 cells, and found that these recombinant

In this paper, a neuromorphic crossbar circuit with binary memristors is proposed for speech recognition. The binary memristors which are based on filamentary-switching mechanism can be found more popularly and are easy to be fabricated than analog memristors that are rare in materials and need a more complicated fabrication process. Thus, we develop a neuromorphic crossbar circuit using filamentary-switching binary memristors not using interface-switching analog memristors. The proposed binary memristor crossbar can recognize five vowels with 4-bit 64 input channels. The proposed crossbar is tested by 2,500 speech samples and verified to be able to recognize 89.2% of the tested samples. From the statistical simulation, the recognition rate of the binary memristor crossbar is estimated to be degraded very little from 89.2% to 80%, though the percentage variation in memristance is increased very much from 0% to 15%. In contrast, the analog memristor crossbar loses its recognition rate significantly from 96% to 9% for the same percentage variation in memristance.

Abstract-In this paper, we propose a new memristorbased crossbar array architecture, where a single memristor array and constant-term circuit are used to represent both plus-polarity and minus-polarity matrices. This is different from the previous crossbar array architecture which has two memristor arrays to represent plus-polarity and minus-polarity connection matrices, respectively. The proposed crossbar architecture is tested and verified to have the same performance with the previous crossbar architecture for applications of character recognition. For areal density, however, the proposed crossbar architecture is twice better than the previous architecture, because only single memristor array is used instead of two crossbar arrays. Moreover, the power consumption of the proposed architecture can be smaller by 48% than the previous one because the number of memristors in the proposed crossbar architecture is reduced to half compared to the previous crossbar architecture. From the high areal density and high energy efficiency, we can know that this newly proposed crossbar array architecture is very suitable to various applications of analog neuromorphic computing that demand high areal density and low energy consumption.

Abstract. Equine chorionic gonadotropin (eCG) consists of highly glycosylated a-and fl-subunits and belongs to the glycoprotein hormone family that includes LH and FSH. eCG is a unique member of the gonadotropin family because it elicits response characteristics of both FSH and LH in other species than the horse. To determine the biological role of the N-linked oligosaccharide at Asn 56 of the a-subunit and 0-linked oligosaccharides at the carboxyl-terminal peptide (CTP) of the fl-subunit, two mutant eCGs, in which Asn 56 of the a-subunit was replaced with Gln (eCGa56/fJ) or CTP was deleted (eCGa/ fl-CTP), were produced by site-directed mutagenesis and transfecting chinese hamster ovary (CHO-K1) cells. LH-and FSH-like activities were assayed in terms of testosterone production and aromatase activity in primary cultured rat Leydig cells and granulosa cells, respectively.The wild type eCG showed similar LH-and FSH-like activities to native eCG in the in vitro bioassays. The LH-like activity of eCGa56/fl was greatly reduced, whereas that of eCGa/f3-CTP was unaffected, demonstrating that the oligosaccharide at Asn 56 of the a-subunit of eCG plays an indispensable role in LH-like activity. Interestingly, the FSH-like activity of eCGa56/fl was increased markedly in comparison with the wild type, and that of eCGa/f3-CTP was also considerably increased. These data indicate that the dual activities of eCG, LH-and FSH-like activities, could be separated by removal of the N-linked oligosaccharide on the a-subunit Asn 56 or CTP-associated 0-linked oligosaccharides.