Anti-PNOC monoclonal antibody, clone 5G7

Photonic networks-on-chip (PNoCs) promise significant advantages over their electronic counterparts. In particular, they offer a potentially disruptive technology solution with fundamentally low power dissipation that remains independent of capacity while providing ultra-high throughput and minimal access latency. In conventional hybrid-PNoC systems, several electrical control functions, such as path setup, acknowledgment and Tear-down are necessary for the end-to-end optical transfer. However, the circuit-switched nature of photonic interconnect directly affects the performance and power characteristics of on-chip communication. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient and high-throughput hybrid silicon-photonic network-on-chip, named PHENIC, targeted for future generations of high-performance many-core systems. PHENIC is based on a smart contention-aware path-configuration algorithm and an energy-efficient non-blocking optical switch to further exploit the low energy proprieties of the PNoC systems. Through detailed simulation, we demonstrate that the proposed system has a better performance and low energy dissipation compared to conventional hybrid-PNoCs.

Recent studies in animal models have shown that the nociceptin system, comprising nociceptin (or OFQ/N, encoded by PNOC) and the nociceptin receptor (an opioid receptor-like protein encoded by OPRL1), may be involved in alcohol and other drug reward pathways. To determine whether the nociceptin system is associated with alcohol or illicit drug dependence in humans, we analyzed 10 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in OPRL1 and 15 SNPs in PNOC in a sample of 1923 European Americans from 219 multiplex alcohol dependent families ascertained by the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism. The SNPs spanned both genes and several kb of their flanking sequences, and were in high linkage disequilibrium. Neither gene was associated with alcohol or illicit drug dependence, although two SNPs in PNOC showed marginal association with alcoholism and one with illicit drug dependence (P = 0.04-0.05). Secondary analyses suggested that two adjacent SNPs in intron 1 of OPRL1 were marginally associated with opioid dependence (P = 0.05); none of the SNPs in PNOC were associated with opioid dependence.