Reliability and mechanical durability tests of flexible OLED with ALD coating

To improve the reliability and mechanical durability of a flexible organic light‐emitting diode display, the entire flexible display is coated with an aluminum oxide film by atomic layer deposition (ALD). Because the step coverage of ALD is excellent, the AlO_x film was deposited not only on the front and back surfaces but also on the side surfaces of the display. A high‐temperature and high‐humidity preservation test, repetitive bending tests, and a pencil hardness test were conducted on the flexible display with ALD‐AlO_x coating. The display survived 500 h of a 65°C, 95% preservation test, endured a 100,000‐time repetitive bending test with a curvature radius of 4 mm, and was found to have a pencil hardness of 4H.     

Enzyme structure with two catalytic sites for double-sieve selection of substrate

High-fidelity transfers of genetic information in the central dogma can be achieved by a reaction called editing. The crystal structure of an enzyme with editing activity in translation is presented here at 2.5 angstroms resolution. The enzyme, isoleucyl-transfer RNA synthetase, activates not only the cognate substrate L-isoleucine but also the minimally distinct L-valine in the first, aminoacylation step. Then, in a second, "editing" step, the synthetase itself rapidly hydrolyzes only the valylated products. For this two-step substrate selection, a "double-sieve" mechanism has already been proposed. The present crystal structures of the synthetase in complexes with L-isoleucine and L-valine demonstrate that the first sieve is on the aminoacylation domain containing the Rossmann fold, whereas the second, editing sieve exists on a globular beta-barrel domain that protrudes from the aminoacylation domain.     

New dissimilarity measure for recognizing noisy subsequence trees

Tree is a data structure used to express various objects such as semistructured data and genes. When objects are represented as trees, computing tree similarity is essential for pattern recognition and retrieval. This paper considers the noisy subsequence tree recognition problem whose purpose is to recognize the original tree, given its noisy subsequence tree. Previous research on this problem relied on constrained tree edit distance to measure the dissimilarity. However, the number of relabelings must be predetermined to compute it. This paper proposes a new dissimilarity measure for this problem. Our dissimilarity measure is obtained by counting the node edit operations included in the unit‐cost tree edit distance that contribute to the matching of node labels. The number of relabelings need not be specified to compute our dissimilarity measure. Moreover, our measure achieves more accurate recognition performance and faster execution speed than the constrained tree edit distance. Our measure is also useful to solve the tree inclusion problem which is the problem of deciding whether a tree includes another tree and shows the extent of approximate tree inclusion when a tree incompletely includes another tree. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Parametric polynomial spectral factorization using the sum of roots and its application to a control design problem

This paper presents an algebraic approach to polynomial spectral factorization, an important mathematical tool in signal processing and control. The approach exploits an intriguing relationship between the theory of Gröbner bases and polynomial spectral factorization which can be observed through the sum of roots, and allows us to perform polynomial spectral factorization in the presence of real parameters. It is discussed that parametric polynomial spectral factorization enables us to express quantities such as the optimal cost in terms of parameters and the sum of roots. Furthermore an optimization method over parameters is suggested that makes use of the results from parametric polynomial spectral factorization and also employs two quantifier elimination techniques. This proposed approach is demonstrated in a numerical example of a particular control problem.     

Viscosity of Gaseous Mixtures of HFC-125 + Propane from 298.15 to 423.15 K at Pressures to 6.7 MPa

This paper reports experimental results for the viscosity of gaseous mixtures of HFC-125 (pentafluoroethane) + propane. The measurements were carried out with an oscillating-disk viscometer of the Maxwell type at temperatures from 298.15 to 423.15 K. The viscosity was measured for two mixtures containing 50.11 and 75.03 mol% HFC-125 in propane. The viscosity at normal pressure was analyzed with the extended law of corresponding states developed by Kestin et al., and the scaling parameters were obtained for unlike-pair interactions between HFC-125 and propane. The modified Enskog theory developed by Vesovic and Wakeham was applied to predict the viscosity for the binary gaseous mixtures under pressure. From comparisons between experimental results and calculated values of the HFC-125 + propane system, it should be concluded that the Vesovic-Wakeham method gives reliable predictions for the viscosity of a gaseous mixture containing both polar and nonpolar compounds.     

Viscosity of Alternative Refrigerants R407C and R407E in the Vapor Phase from 298.15 to 423.15 K

This paper presents new measurements of the viscosity of gaseous R407C (23 mass% HFC-32, 25 mass% HFC-125, 52 mass% HFC-143a) and R407E (25 mass% HFC-32, 15 mass% HFC-125, 60 mass% HFC-143a). The measurements were carried out with an oscillating-disk viscometer of the Maxwell type at temperatures from 298.15 to 423.15 K. The densities of these two fluid mixtures were calculated with the equation-of-state model in REFPROP. The viscosity at normal pressures was analyzed with the extended law of corresponding states developed by Kestin et al., and the scaling parameters needed in the analysis were obtained from our previous studies for the viscosity of the binary mixtures consisting of HFC-32, HFC-125, and HFC-134a. The modified Enskog theory developed by Vesovic and Wakeham (V-W method) was applied to predict the viscosity for the ternary gaseous HFC mixtures under pressure. As for the calculation of pseudo-radial distribution functions in mixtures, a method based on the equation of state for hard-sphere fluid mixtures proposed by Carnahan-Starling was applied. It was found that the V-W method can predict the viscosity of R407C and R407E without any additional parameters for the ternary mixture.     

Viscosity of Gaseous Mixtures of HFC-134a (1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane)+HFC-32 (Difluoromethane)

This paper reports experimental results for the viscosity of gaseous mixtures of HFC-134a (1,1,1,2-tetrafluoroethane)+HFC-32 (difluoromethane). The measurements were carried out with an oscillating-disk viscometer of the Maxwell type at temperatures from 298.15 to 423.15 K. The viscosity was measured for three mixtures containing 25.00, 52.40, and 74.98 mole% HFC-134a in HFC-32. Experimental results for the viscosity at normal pressures show a minimum as plotted against mole fraction in the higher temperature region, which may be the first experimental observation of the minima for dilute binary gaseous mixtures of HFCs. The viscosity at normal pressures was analyzed with the extended law of corresponding states developed by Kestin et al., and the scaling parameters were obtained for unlike-pair interactions between HFC-32 and HFC-134a. The modified Enskog theory developed by Vesovic and Wakeham was applied to predict the viscosity for the binary gaseous mixtures under pressure. As for the calculation of pseudo-radial distribution functions in mixtures, a method based on the equation of state for hard-sphere fluid mixtures proposed by Carnahan–Starling was applied.     

Genome Editing Using Cas9 Ribonucleoprotein Is Effective for Introducing PDGFRA Variant in Cultured Human Glioblastoma Cell Lines

Many variants of uncertain significance (VUS) have been detected in clinical cancer cases using next-generation sequencing-based cancer gene panel analysis. One strategy for the elucidation of VUS is the functional analysis of cultured cancer cell lines that harbor targeted gene variants using genome editing. Genome editing is a powerful tool for creating desired gene alterations in cultured cancer cell lines. However, the efficiency of genome editing varies substantially among cell lines of interest. We performed comparative studies to determine the optimal editing conditions for the introduction of platelet-derived growth factor receptor alpha (PDGFRA) variants in human glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) cell lines. After monitoring the copy numbers of PDGFRA and the expression level of the PDGFRα protein, four GBM cell lines (U-251 MG, KNS-42, SF126, and YKG-1 cells) were selected for the study. To compare the editing efficiency in these GBM cell lines, the modes of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)-associated protein 9 (Cas9) delivery (plasmid vs. ribonucleoprotein (RNP)), methods of transfection (lipofection vs. electroporation), and usefulness of cell sorting were then evaluated. Herein, we demonstrated that electroporation-mediated transfer of Cas9 with single-guide RNA (Cas9 RNP complex) could sufficiently edit a target nucleotide substitution, irrespective of cell sorting. As the Cas9 RNP complex method showed a higher editing efficiency than the Cas9 plasmid lipofection method, it was the optimal method for single-nucleotide editing in human GBM cell lines under our experimental conditions.