The clinical, neuroradiographic, and endocrinologic profile of patients with bilateral optic nerve hypoplasia

Deficiencies in glycosylphosphatidyl-inositol (GPI)-linked proteins on erythrocytes and leucocytes in patients with paroxysmal nocturnal haemoglobinuria (PNH) are well known; however, expression on platelets in these patients is less well documented. We have studied CD55 and CD59 on the platelets of PNH and aplastic anaemia (AA) patients using flow cytometry. In all cases of PNH, CD55 and CD59 negative populations of platelets were detected with single or bimodal distribution and these results showed close correlation with the CD55 and CD59 patterns of neutrophils. Previous published studies have not demonstrated this distribution. We suggest that our findings may be due to the methodology used.     

Influence of individual aggressiveness on the dynamics of competitive populations

Two populations are subdivided into two categories of individuals (hawks and lows). Individuals fight to have access to a resource which is necessary for their survival. Conflicts occur between individuals belonging to the same population and to different populations. We investigate the long term effects of the conflicts on the stability of the community. The model is a set of ODE's with four variables corresponding to hawk and dove individuals of the two populations. Two time scales are considered. A fast time scale is used to describe frequent encounters and fightings between individuals trying to monopolize the resource. A slow time scale is used for the demography and the long term effects of encounters. We use aggregation methods in order to reduce this model into a system of two ODE's only for the total densities of the two populations which is found to be a classical Lotka-Volterra competition model. We study different cases of proportions of hawks and doves in both populations on the global coexistence and the mutual exclusion of the two populations. Pure dove tactics in both populations are unstable. In cases of mixed hawk and dove in both populations, there is coexistence. Pure dove or mixed hawk-dove tactics in one population can coexist with pure hawks in the other one when the costs of fightings between hawks are large enough.     

Interpreting spatial and temporal neural activity through a recurrent neural network brain-machine interface.

We propose the use of optimized brain-machine interface (BMI) models for interpreting the spatial and temporal neural activity generated in motor tasks. In this study, a nonlinear dynamical neural network is trained to predict the hand position of primates from neural recordings in a reaching task paradigm. We first develop a method to reveal the role attributed by the model to the sampled motor, premotor, and parietal cortices in generating hand movements. Next, using the trained model weights, we derive a temporal sensitivity measure to asses how the model utilized the sampled cortices and neurons in real-time during BMI testing.     

Analysis of the variability of chloride threshold values in the literature

Efforts are being devoted in standards and construction codes in order to give rules and guidelines for designing durable structures. Also efforts are focused in developing the models in a more accurate approach to the calculation of the service life of concrete structures. Service life models consider that reinforced concrete exposed to chloride polluted environments initiate corrosion when a certain amount of chlorides arrives to the rebar surface. The so‐called chloride threshold level is considered as an essential parameter for assessing the probability of reinforcement corrosion, and becomes one of the key parameters needed for service life prediction, being of interest to have testing methods and expressions to introduce in the models. Numerous studies have been carried out to establish a critical chloride level for the onset of corrosion, but a wide range of chloride threshold values has been suggested which makes not feasible to define a single value. Present paper includes the analysis of the variability of the chloride threshold values published in the literature. Data from mortar and concrete and from laboratory and field exposure are compiled and included in the analysis. The influence of the testing method used for determination and several variables are considered.     

Study of PEMFC ionomers through model molecules mimicking the ionomer repeat units

The thermal and electrochemical behaviours of PEMFC ionomers based on an aromatic backbone i.e., sulfonated polysulfones, sulfonated polyetheretherketones and sulfonated polybenzimidazoles, were investigated through their model molecules. Thermal degradation was characterized by weight losses and allowed inferring ionomer thermal degradations by chain breakings that cannot be detected by thermogravimetric analysis. In addition, cyclic voltammetry was used to characterize the electroactivity of some ionomers, related to their backbone and their ionic moieties. The use of model molecules is thus a useful tool for assessing both the thermal and electrochemical stability of ionomers. Lastly, due to the high concentrations used in liquid electrolytes as compared with an electrode/membrane interface it may be considered as an electrochemical aging test.     

Computer simulation of gas generation and transport in landfills. III: Development of lanfills’ optimal model

In Parts I and II of this series a 3D model was developed for transport and reaction of gaseous mixtures in landfills, and was utilized, through computer simulations, to investigate the effect of various factors on the gases’ concentrations and the landfill's total pressure, under quasi-steady state and dynamic conditions. A fundamental problem with modelling of landfills is the severe shortage of publicly available experimental data for their static and dynamical properties, which hinders the development of accurate models for them. In the present paper we address this problem by formulating it as one of optimization, whereby the optimal spatial distributions of the porosity, permeability, tortuosity factor, and the total potential of various types of wastes for producing the gases in a landfill are determined, given some limited experimental data for a property of the landfill, such as the amount of methane which is extracted from it over a period of time. The numerical simulator developed previously is coupled to the Genetic algorithm in order to optimize the parameter space that characterizes the landfill's morphology and the reaction properties of the wastes. Since the parameter space can be very large, containing thousands of parameters to be optimized, we utilize massively parallel computations with message-passing interface technique in order to develop the optimal model. It is shown that, not only does the optimization technique reproduce accurately the data based on which the optimal model is developed, but also provides accurate predictions for the future behavior of the landfill's properties.     

Different strategies to recover the activity of monomeric triosephosphate isomerase by directed evolution

A monomeric version of triosephosphate isomerase from Trypanosomabrucei, MonoTIM, has very low activity, and the same is truefor all of the additional monomeric variants so far constructed.Here, we subjected MonoTIM to directed evolution schemes toachieve an activity improvement. The construction of a suitablestrain for genetic selection provided an effective way to obtainactive catalysts from a diverse population of protein variants.We used this tool to identify active mutants from two differentstrategies of mutagenesis: random mutagenesis of the whole geneand randomization of loop 2. Both strategies converged in theisolation of mutations Ala43 to Pro and Thr44 to either Alaor Ser, when randomizing the entire gene or to Arg in the caseof randomization of loop 2. The kinetic characterization ofthe two more active mutants showed an increase of 11-fold ink_cat and a reduction of 4-fold in K_m for both of them, demonstratingthe sensitivity of the selection method. A small differencein growth rate is observed when both mutant genes are compared,which seems to be attributable to a difference in solubilityof the expressed proteins.