In vitro comparisons between Carica papaya and pancreatic lipases during test meal lipolysis: Potential use of CPL in enzyme replacement therapy

High levels of lipase activity are known to occur in Carica papaya latex, and this activity is being used in some biotechnological applications. The lipolytic activity of C. papaya lipase (CPL) on dietary triacylglycerols (TAG) has not yet been studied. Hence, the aim of this study was to characterise the specific activity of CPL on dietary TAG present in a crude preparation. Also, we have determined its stability during the lipolysis of a test meal at various pH values mimicking those occurring in the gastro-intestinal tract, with or without bile, and have compared these properties with those of porcine pancreatic extract (PPE) and human pancreatic lipase (HPL). CPL showed maximum stability at pH 6.0, both with and without bile. Some residual activity was still observed at pH 2 (20%), whereas the pancreatic lipases tested were immediately completely inactivated at this pH. In the absence of bile, the highest specific activities were measured at pH 6 in the case of CPL, PPE and HPL. Adding bile slightly decreased the CPL activity in the 4–6 pH range, thus shifting the optimum CPL activity to pH 7, where the presence of bile had no effect. Lipolysis levels decreased with the pH, but CPL was still more active than PPE at pH 5 on a relative basis. These results suggest that CPL might be a promising candidate for use as a therapeutic tool on patients with pancreatic exocrine insufficiency.     

A Probabilistic Multiperiod Simulation–Optimization Approach for Dynamic Coastal Aquifer Management

Combined simulation–optimization (CSO) schemes are common in the literature to solve different groundwater management problems, and CSO is particularly well-established in the coastal aquifer management literature. However, with a few exceptions, nearly all previous studies have employed the CSO approach to derive static groundwater management plans that remain unchanged during the entire management period, consequently overlooking the possible positive impacts of dynamic strategies. Dynamic strategies involve division of the planning time interval into several subintervals or periods, and adoption of revised decisions during each period based on the most recent knowledge of the groundwater system and its associated uncertainties. Problem structuring and computational challenges seem to be the main factors preventing the widespread implementation of dynamic strategies in groundwater applications. The objective of this study is to address these challenges by introducing a novel probabilistic Multiperiod CSO approach for dynamic groundwater management. This includes reformulation of the groundwater management problem so that it can be adapted to the multiperiod CSO approach, and subsequent employment of polynomial chaos expansion-based stochastic dynamic programming to obtain optimal dynamic strategies. The proposed approach is employed to provide sustainable solutions for a coastal aquifer storage and recovery facility in Oman, considering the effect of natural recharge uncertainty. It is revealed that the proposed dynamic approach results in an improved performance by taking advantage of system variations, allowing for increased groundwater abstraction, injection and hence monetary benefit compared to the commonly used static optimization approach.

     

An efficient image-mosaicing method based on multifeature matching

Mosaicing is connecting two or more images and making a new wide area image with no visible seam-lines. Several algorithms have been proposed to construct mosaics from image sequence where the camera motion is more or less complex. Most of these methods are based either on the interest points matching or on theoretical corner models. This paper describes a fully automated image-mosaicing method based on the regions and the Harris points primitives. Indeed, in order to limit the search window of potential homologous points, for each point of interest, regions segmentation and matching steps are being performed. This enables us to improve the reliability and the robustness of the Harris points matching process by estimating the camera motion. The main originality of the proposed system resides in the preliminary manipulation of regions matching, thus making it possible to estimate the rotation, the translation and the scale factor between two successive images of the input sequence. This estimation allows an initial alignment of the images along with the framing of the interest points search window, and therefore reducing considerably the complexity of the interest points matching algorithm. Then, the resolution of a minimization problem, altogether considering the couples of matched-points, permits us to perform the homography. In order to improve the mosaic continuity around junctions, radiometric corrections are applied. The validity of the herewith described method is illustrated by being tested on several sequences of complex and challenging images captured from real-world indoor and outdoor scenes. These simulations proved the validity of the proposed method against camera motions, illumination variations, acquirement conditions, moving objects and image noise. To determine the importance of the regions matching stage in motion estimation, as well as for the framing of the search window associated to a point of interest, we compared the matching points results of this described method with those produced using the zero-mean normalized cross correlation score (without regions matching). We made this comparison in the case of a simple motion (without the presence of a rotation around optical axis and/or a scale factor), in the case of a rotation and in the general case of an homothety. For justifying the effectiveness of this method, we proposed an objective assessment by defining a reconstruction error.

Nouveaux verres fluores transmetteurs dans l'infrarouge dans les systemes LnF3BaF2ZnF2

A new family of fluoride glasses have been isolated in the ternary systems LnF₃BaF₂ZnF₂ with Ln = rare earth and yttrium. The melt must be quenched to reduce the crystallization. These glasses have a good I.R. transmission: the absorption edge is in the 9 μ region.     

Confluence and Semantics of Constraint Simplification Rules

Constraint Simplification Rules (CSR) is a subset of the Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) language. CHR is a powerful special-purpose declarative programming language for writing constraint solvers. The CSR subset of CHR forms essentially a committed-choice language consisting of guarded rules with multiple heads that replace constraints by simpler ones until they are solved. This paper gives declarative and operational semantics as well as soundness and completeness results for CSR programs.We also introduce a notion of confluence for CSR programs. Confluence is an essential syntactical property of any constraint solver. It ensures that the solver will always compute the same result for a given set of constraints independent of which rules are applied. It also means that it does not matter for the result in which order the constraints arrive at the constraint solver.We give a decidable, sufficient and necessary syntactic condition for confluence of terminating CSR programs. Moreover, as shown in this paper, confluence of a program implies consistency of its logical meaning (under a mild restriction).     

A New Adaptive Neuro-sliding Mode Control for Gantry Crane

This paper presents a new adaptive neuro-sliding mode control for gantry crane as varying rope length. This control method derived from combining the sliding surfaces of three subsystem of the gantry crane (trolley position, rope length, anti-swing) to draw out two system sliding surfaces: the trolley position with the anti-swing and the rope length and the anti-swing. On the based of the sliding mode control principle, drawn out the equivalent controller and the switching controller for gantry crane. But due to the uncertain parameters-nonlinear model of gantry crane with the bound disturbances, combining the neural approximate method, defined the neural controller and the compensation controller for the difference between the equivalent controller and the neural controller for two system control inputs: trolley position and rope length. The adaptive control laws for these controllers were deduced from Lyapunov’s stable criteria to asymptotically stabilize the sliding surfaces. Simulation studies are performed to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control.     

Route Maintenance in IEEE 802.11 wireless mesh networks

In this paper, we propose a novel Route Maintenance scheme for IEEE 802.11 wireless mesh networks. Despite lack of mobility and energy constraints, reactive routing protocols such as AODV and DSR suffer from frequent route breakages in 802.11 based infrastructure wireless mesh networks. In these networks, if any intermediate node fails to successfully transmit a packet to the next hop node after a certain number of retransmissions, the link layer reports a transmission problem to the network layer. Reactive routing protocols systematically consider this as a link breakage (and therefore a route breakage). Transmission failures can be caused by a number of factors e.g. interference or noise and can be transient in nature. Frequent route breakages result in significant performance degradation. The proposed mechanism considers multiple factors to differentiate between links with transient transmission problems from those links which have permanent transmission problems and takes a coherent decision on link breakage. The proposed mechanism is implemented in AODV for single-radio single-channel mesh network and an extension is incorporated in multi-radio multi-channel scenarios. Simulation results show substantial performance improvement compared to classical AODV and local route repair schemes.