Design of Trehalose-Based Amide/Sulfonamide C-type Lectin Receptor Signaling Compounds

Mincle agonists have been shown to induce inflammatory cytokine production, such as tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF) and promote the development of a Th1/Th17 immune response that might be crucial to development of effective vaccination against pathogens such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis. As an expansion of our previous work, a library of 6,6′-amide and sulfonamide α,α-d -trehalose compounds with various substituents on the aromatic ring was synthesized efficiently in good to excellent yields. These compounds were evaluated for their ability to activate the human C-type lectin receptor Mincle by the induction of cytokines from human peripheral blood mononuclear cells. A preliminary structure–activity relationship (SAR) of these novel trehalose diamides and sulfonamides revealed that aryl amide-linked trehalose compounds demonstrated improved activity and relatively high potency cytokine production compared to the Mincle ligand trehalose dibehenate adjuvant (TDB) and the natural ligand trehalose dimycolate (TDM) inducing dose-dependent and human-Mincle-specific stimulation in a HEK reporter cell line.     

E-Government-Initiative BundOnline 2005 — Gesellschaftlicher Mehrwert oder unwirtschaftliche Geldverschwendung?

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Scalable semantic brokering over dynamic heterogeneous data sources in InfoSleuth/spl trade/

InfoSleuth is an agent-based system for information discovery and retrieval in a dynamic, open environment. Brokering in InfoSleuth is a matchmaking process, recommending agents that provide services to agents requesting services. This paper discusses InfoSleuth's distributed multibroker design and implementation. InfoSleuth's brokering function combines reasoning over both the syntax and semantics of agents in the domain. This means the broker must reason over explicitly advertised information about agent capabilities to determine which agent can best provide the requested services. Robustness and scalability issues dictate that brokering must be distributable across collaborating agents. Our multibroker design is a peer-to-peer system that requires brokers to advertise to and receive advertisements from other brokers. Brokers collaborate during matchmaking to give a collective response to requests initiated by nonbroker agents. This results in a robust, scalable brokering system.     

Penalty interference of nonlinear intra-channel effects and PMD inultra high-speed TDM systems

Penalty interference of nonlinear propagation impairments and polarisation mode dispersion (PMD) caused signal distortions is experimentally investigated     

Simple method for mitigation of polarization crosstalk in silica planar lightwave circuit directional couplers

Polarization crosstalk in planar lightwave circuit directional couplers can cause significant polarization-dependence in interferometers that use them. We show a simple way to mitigate the polarization crosstalk without incurring a performance penalty or requiring extra fabrication steps. We demonstrate it on a 23-ps Mach-Zehnder delay interferometer.     

Dealuminated Y Zeolite for Water-Driven Adsorption Heat Pumps: Hydrothermal Stability

Silica gel or zeolites AlPO-5 and SAPO-34 are recommended as adsorbents in water-driven heat pumps because of their selective water uptake. Secondary energy, like solar energy, can be used for regeneration of loaded adsorbers. In case of the availability of only low energy levels, the use of dealuminated Y zeolite (DAY) is the better choice because of the infinitely variation of its hydrophilic properties by tailoring of the framework Si/Al ratio. Actual data on the hydrothermal stability of DAY are lacking. Thus, we report on the long-term behavior of DAY zeolites with different Si/Al ratios.     

Utilizing endoscopic technology to reveal real-time proteomic alterations in response to chemoprevention

Cancer chemoprevention approaches use either pharmacological or dietary agents to impede, arrest or reverse the carcinogenic process. Although several agents have shown effectiveness against colon cancer, present intervention strategies provide only partial reduction. In this study, we utilized high-resolution endoscopy to obtain colon tumor biopsy specimens from Apc mutant mice before and after 2-wk sulindac intervention. To acquire information beyond genomics, proteome analysis using the ProteomeLab PF2D platform was implemented to generate 2-D protein expression maps from biopsies. Chromatograms produced common signature profiles between sulindac and nonsulindac treated samples, and contrasting profiles termed "fingerprints". We selected a double peak that appeared in tumor biopsies from sulindac-treated mice. Further analyses using MS sequencing identified this protein as histone H2B. The location of H2B in the 1(st) dimension strongly suggested PTM, consistent with identification of two oxidized methionines. While further studies on sulindac proteomic fingerprints are underway, this study demonstrates the feasibility and advantages of "real-time" proteomic analysis for obtaining information on biomarker discovery and drug activity that would not be revealed by a genetic assay. This approach should be broadly applicable for assessing lesion responsiveness in a wide range of translational and human clinical studies.     

Lieferantenportfolio-Management für IT-Services unter Berücksichtigung von Diversifikationseffekten

By means of service-oriented architectures the IT support of processes can be designed as a portfolio of individual IT services provided by different suppliers. The processes are designed based on selection decisions between IT services that potentially have to be included. Many companies formulate a multitude of requirements for investments in IT services at ever shorter intervals. However, the scope of the desired investments usually exceeds the available budget. Thus, companies face the challenge of allocating the limited budget to investments in the most promising combination of IT services. This is hardly possible without methodical support. In addition, the allocation is often done intuitively and subject to the decision-makers?? affinity with IT. Therefore, this paper develops a quantitative, multi-period procedure model for the purpose of maximizing the enterprise value in accordance with value based management, which considers the dependencies of the periodical selection decisions. In the following, a decision logic for the heuristic solution to the selection problem is presented and its application is demonstrated by means of an illustrative case example.     

Equations to predict female manual arm strength based on hand location relative to the shoulder

The purpose of this study was to develop regression equations to predict manual arm strength for a wide variety of hand locations within the reach envelope. Maximum voluntary manual arm strength was determined from 71 female participants in six exertion directions (superior, inferior, anterior, posterior, medial and lateral), in a total of 28 hand locations. Forces ranged from 51.3 to 164.4 N, and had a pooled coefficient of variation of 29.9%. Across all 168 combinations of hand locations and exertion directions, the multivariate regression equations explained 92.5% of the variance and had a root mean square error (RMSE) of only 6.4 N, using only the anterior, lateral and vertical location of the hand relative to the active shoulder joint as inputs. These equations provide a proof-of-principle for our novel regression approach, and represent a first step towards a more comprehensive equation to estimate maximum acceptable forces for occupational tasks.