Interaction of CETP inhibitory peptide and lipoprotein substrates in cholesteryl ester transfer assay: relationship between association properties and inhibitory activities

In a previous study, CETP inhibitory peptide (3 kDa) was isolated from hog plasma. The peptide, synthesized chemically according to the amino acid sequence of the 3-kDa peptide (designated P₂₈), showed CETP inhibitory activity both in vitro and in vivo [Cho et al. (1998) Biochim. Biophys. Acta 1391, 133–144]. We report herein further unique features of P₂₈ when it was associated with the cholesteryl ester (CE)-donor and-acceptor lipoproteins. Lipoprotein substrates with P₂₈ present in both HDL (as a CE-donor) and LDL (as a CE-acceptor) served as poor substrates, with CE-transfer activity decreased up to 60% compared to normal substrates without P₂₈. P₂₈ was found to be located in HDL fractions of hog plasma and showed the same electromobility as that visualized by PAGE on 7% polyacrylamide gel under nondenaturing conditions. Addition of apolipoprotein A-1 (apoA-1) or apoB antibody to a normal CE-transfer mixture did not alter CE-transfer activity. However, addition of apoA-1 or −B antibody to a CETP-inhibition mixture decreased the inhibitory activity of P₂₈ by ca. 20%. Western blot analysis revealed that P₂₈ was associated only with human and hog HDL among several lipoproteins purified from human, hog, and rabbit. CFTP-inhibition assays with various lipoprotein substrates revealed that P₂₈ exhibited substrate-specific inhibitory activity. The inhibitory activity of P₂₈ was highly dependent on the type of lipoprotein substrate (whether CE-donor or-acceptor); P₂₈ inhibited CE transfer from HDL to LDL, but it did not inhibit CE transfer from HDL to HDL.     

Autoxidation of ethyl eicosapentaenoate and docosahexaenoate

The extent of oxidation of ethyl esters of eicosapentaenoic (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acids (DHA) was compared quantitatively with that of ethyl linoleate (Lo) and ethyl linolenate (Ln) by oxygen uptake and formation of conjugated diene, hydroperoxide and secondary oxidation products. EPA and DHA esters were oxidized rapidly even at 5 C in the dark after an induction period of 3–4 days, while the induction periods of Ln and Lo esters were 20 days and more than 60 days, respectively. Oxygen uptake of EPA and DHA esters after the induction period was 5.2 and 8.5 times faster than that of ethyl Ln, respectively. Hydroperoxides of EPA and DHA esters are much less stable than those of ethyl Lo. The peroxide value is not necessarily a good indication of oxidation in these polyenoic acids because a considerable amount of secondary products is formed at the early stage of oxidation. Polymers were found to be major secondary products in these polyenoic esters.     

Thermal runaway prevention in catalytic packed bed reactor by solid temperature measurement and Control

Magnetic crystallite thermometry has been used to measure the average nickel crystallite temperature in packed bed reactors during ethane hydrogenolysis, an exothermic reaction. The technique is based on the temperature dependence of the magnetic moment of dispersed nickel catalysts. Measurement of the average catalyst temperature is very useful for reactor control because of its shorter time constant compared with exit fluid temperature. Bed temperature control based on the exit fluid temperature, which has often been used as a control variable, is too slow to protect thermal runaway of the bed. The advantage of short time constant by measuring the average catalyst temperature has been incorporated with enhanced feedback control system to control the bed temperature and prevent the thermal runaway of the catalyst bed. An enhanced feedback control structure with supervisory action performed better than the classical proportional-integral control in runaway prevention when the two control schemes were compared with each other on the basis of the trippoint (incipient thermal runaway).     

Nitrogen removal using recycled polystyrene bottles as biofilm media

The performance of an attached growth wastewater treatment process was investigated in an effort to improve nitrogen removal efficiency. Recycled Yakult (lactic acid fermentation drink) bottles made of polystyrene were used as a biofilm media. The use of Yakult bottles as a biofilm media has been attempted by numerous researchers in Japan for the removal of solids and organics. However, these studies focused only on the removal of solids and organics. This study extended their application to the removal of nitrogen for domestic sewage treatment. Yakult media was placed in a reactor with 70% apparent reactor volume in a conventional A/O process. The bottom of the Yakult media was removed, and randomly filled Yakult media were effectively able to reduce the flow in tanks, resulting in an increase in the contact time between pollutants and microorganisms. With higher HRT, the nitrogen removal efficiency was increased by up to 83% with 12 hr of HRT. Nitrification appeared to be the limiting factor of nitrogen removal at an HRT that is less than 12 hr, indicating that the Yakult process requires more retention time to achieve nitrification compared to other biofilm processes. The removal efficiencies of organics and solids were high regardless of the change of operational parameters. This article is based on a presentation in “The 7th Korea-China Workshop On Advanced Materials” organized by the Korea-China Advanced Materials Cooperation Center and the China-Korea Advanced Materials Cooperation Center, held at Ramada Plaza Jeju Hotel, Jeju Island, Korea on August 24–27, 2003.     

Ergonomic Analysis of Mobile Cart–Assisted Stocking Activities Using Electromyography

Workers in grocery stores are exposed to numerous musculoskeletal risks that can be reduced using assistive devices while performing stocking tasks. A regional grocery store has recently deployed a mobile cart without comprehension of its ergonomic impact on workers, which this article investigates using normalized electromyography data (%MVC). This article studies not only ergonomic impact based on %MVC values but also work performance represented by a muscle force metric (MFM). The results from this study showed highest muscle groups in %MVC and MFM were the erector spinae and triceps. Interestingly, muscle activations on erector spinae were reduced when mobile cart is used. %MVC and MFM distribution for value‐added‐ and non‐value‐added subtasks were slightly different, with larger differences observed for non‐value‐added tasks. Video recordings revealed higher work performance when the mobile cart is used. In future research, the number of participants will be increased to further validate the results from this study.     

Pseudo-inversion: closure properties and decidability

We consider a pseudo-inversion operation inspired by biological events, such as DNA sequence transformations, where only parts of a string are reversed. We define the pseudo-inversion of a string \(w = uxv\) to be the set of all strings \(v^Rxu^R\), where \(uv \ne \lambda \) and consider the operation from a formal language theoretic viewpoint. We show that regular languages are closed under the pseudo-inversion operation whereas context-free languages are not. Furthermore, we study the iterated pseudo-inversion operation and show that the iterated pseudo-inversion of a context-free language is recognized by a nondeterministic reversal-bounded multicounter machine. Finally, we introduce the notion of pseudo-inversion-freeness and examine closure properties and decidability problems for regular and context-free languages. We demonstrate that pseudo-inversion-freeness is decidable in polynomial time for regular languages and undecidable for context-free languages.     

Nonparametric approach for uncertainty-based multidisciplinary design optimization considering limited data

Uncertainty-based multidisciplinary design optimization (UMDO) has been widely acknowledged as an advanced methodology to address competing objectives and reliable constraints of complex systems by coupling relationship of disciplines involved in the system. UMDO process consists of three parts. Two parts are to define the system with uncertainty and to formulate the design optimization problem. The third part is to quantitatively analyze the uncertainty of the system output considering the uncertainty propagation in the multidiscipline analysis. One of the major issues in the UMDO research is that the uncertainty propagation makes uncertainty analysis difficult in the complex system. The conventional methods are based on the parametric approach could possibly cause the error when the parametric approach has ill-estimated distribution because data is often insufficient or limited. Therefore, it is required to develop a nonparametric approach to directly use data. In this work, the nonparametric approach for uncertainty-based multidisciplinary design optimization considering limited data is proposed. To handle limited data, three processes are also adopted. To verify the performance of the proposed method, mathematical and engineering examples are illustrated.     

Instability of light illumination stress on amorphous In–Ga–Zn–O thin‐film transistors

Amorphous In–Ga–Zn–O thin‐film transistors (TFTs) have attracted increasing attention due to their electrical performance and their potential for use in transparent and flexible devices. Because TFTs are exposed to illumination through red, green, and blue color filters, wavelength‐varied light illumination tests are required to ensure stable TFT characteristics. In this paper, the effects of different light wavelengths under both positive and negative V_GS stresses on amorphous In–Ga–Zn–O TFTs are investigated. The TFT instability that is dependent on optical and electrical stresses can be explained by the charge trapping mechanism and interface modification.     

EM-GPA: Generalized Procrustes analysis with hidden variables for 3D shape modeling

Aligning shapes is essential in many computer vision problems and generalized Procrustes analysis (GPA) is one of the most popular algorithms to align shapes. However, if some of the shape data are missing, GPA cannot be applied. In this paper, we propose EM-GPA, which extends GPA to handle shapes with hidden (missing) variables by using the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. For example, 2D shapes can be considered as 3D shapes with missing depth information due to the projection of 3D shapes into the image plane. For a set of 2D shapes, EM-GPA finds scales, rotations and 3D shapes along with their mean and covariance matrix for 3D shape modeling. A distinctive characteristic of EM-GPA is that it does not enforce any rank constraint often appeared in other work and instead uses GPA constraints to resolve the ambiguity in finding scales, rotations, and 3D shapes. The experimental results show that EM-GPA can recover depth information accurately even when the noise level is high and there are a large number of missing variables. By using the images from the FRGC database, we show that EM-GPA can successfully align 2D shapes by taking the missing information into consideration. We also demonstrate that the 3D mean shape and its covariance matrix are accurately estimated. As an application of EM-GPA, we construct a 2D + 3D AAM (active appearance model) using the 3D shapes obtained by EM-GPA, and it gives a similar success rate in model fitting compared to the method using real 3D shapes. EM-GPA is not limited to the case of missing depth information, but it can be easily extended to more general cases.