Over-production of 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase in Escherichia coli: use of the T7 promoter

5-Enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate (EPSP) synthase, the productof the Escherichia coli aroA gene, has been overproduced inE.coli BL21(DE3) under the control of the T7 gene 10 promoterand ribosome binding site, to a level of {small tilde}50% oftotal cell protein. EPSP synthase is the primary target of thepost-emergence herbicide, glyphosate, commonly known as Roundup^TM.A simple two step purification is described, which results in99% pure homogeneous protein (as determined by PAGE). The integrityof the protein has been compared with previously characterizedprotein from .E.coli AB2829(pKD501) by determination of itskinetic parameters, N-terminal protein and DNA sequences, aminoacid analysis and ¹³C-NMR spectroscopy. This new overproducingstrain readily provides the gram quantities of highly pure proteinrequired for NMR studies of the active site and the developmentof novel time-resolved solid-state NMR techniques currentlyunderway in this laboratory.     

The Effects of Experience and Strategy on Visual Attention Allocation in an Automated Multiple-Task Environment

Operators and users interacting with computer environments often have to deal with multiple tasks at once, responding to each in series. Diagnostic automation, that is, automation that alerts users when and where to look, has been suggested to support the unique challenges of multiple task environments: activating tasks, switching between tasks, and tasks interfering with each other. Automation is not always reliable, however. Because of the common interaction with novel systems and the importance of training, the Simultaneous Task Environment Platform program—a multiple-task environment—was developed to understand the effects of experience on interaction with these automation-supported systems, as well as what strategies were developed. It was found that participants became more efficient with experience only when they interacted with higher reliability automation. Furthermore, the strategies participants developed focused on the differences between tasks and patterns across those tasks. Automated systems training should be sure to employ these findings.     

Electroantennographic and behavioral responses of the sphinx moth Manduca sexta to host plant headspace volatiles

Coupled gas chromatography with electroantennographic detection (GC-EAD) using antennae of adult female Manduca sexta was employed to screen for olfactory stimulants present in headspace collections from four species of larval host plants belonging to two families: Solanaceae—Lycopersicon esculentum (tomato), Capiscum annuum (bell pepper), and Datura wrightii; and Martyniaceae—Proboscidea parviflora. Headspace volatiles were collected from undamaged foliage of potted, living plants. GC–EAD revealed 23 EAD-active compounds, of which 15 were identified by GC-mass spectrometry. Identified compounds included aliphatic, aromatic, and terpenoid compounds bearing a range of functional groups. Nine EAD-active compounds were common to all four host plant species: (Z)-3-hexenyl acetate, nonanal, decanal, phenylacetaldehyde, methyl salicylate, benzyl alcohol, geranyl acetone, (E)-nerolidol, and one unidentified compound. Behavioral responses of female moths to an eight-component synthetic blend of selected tomato headspace volatiles were tested in a laboratory wind tunnel. Females were attracted to the blend. A comparison of responses from antennae of males and females to bell pepper headspace volatiles revealed that males responded to the same suite of volatiles as females, except for (Z)-3-hexenyl benzoate. EAD responses of males also were lower for (Z)- and (E)-nerolidol and one unidentified compound. Electroantennogram EAG dose–response curves for the 15 identified EAD-active volatiles were recorded. At the higher test doses (10–100 g), female antennae yielded larger EAG responses to terpenoids and to aliphatic and aromatic esters. Male antennae did respond to the higher doses of (Z)-3-hexenyl benzoate, indicating that they can detect this compound. On the basis of ubiquity of the EAD-active volatiles identified to date in host plant headspace collections, we suggest that M. sexta uses a suite of volatiles to locate and identify appropriate host plants.     

Studying single nanocrystals under high pressure using an x-ray nanoprobe

In this report, we demonstrate the feasibility of applying a 250-nm focused x-ray beam to study a single crystalline NbSe(3) nanobelt under high-pressure conditions in a diamond anvil cell. With such a small probe, we not only resolved the distribution and morphology of each individual nanobelt in the x-ray fluorescence maps but also obtained the diffraction patterns from individual crystalline nanobelts with thicknesses of less than 50 nm. Single crystalline diffraction measurements on NbSe(3) nanobelts were performed at pressures up to 20 GPa.     

Energy-efficient design of a presbyopia correction wearable powered by mobile GPUs and FPGAs

The Journal of Supercomputing - This paper presents an energy-efficient design and evaluation of a novel portable device for the automatic correction of presbyopia in human eyes driven by the use...     

NHS Analyzer决策辅助系统

美国NHS公司2000年创建于美国矽谷,借助创建人在商业智能技术(BI)方面的丰富经验及知识,一直致力于商业智能技术(BI)的研究与开发。NHS公司于2002年进入中国市场以来,以成熟稳定的商业智能软件为国内用户的信息化建设做出了突出贡献。     

Exploiting address compression and heterogeneous interconnects for efficient message management in tiled CMPs

High performance processor designs have evolved toward architectures that integrate multiple processing cores on the same chip. As the number of cores inside a Chip MultiProcessor (CMP) increases, the interconnection network will have significant impact on both overall performance and energy consumption as previous studies have shown. Moreover, wires used in such interconnect can be designed with varying latency, bandwidth and power characteristics. In this work, we show how messages can be efficiently managed in tiled CMP, from the point of view of both performance and energy, by combining both address compression with a heterogeneous interconnect. In particular, our proposal is based on applying an address compression scheme that dynamically compresses the addresses within coherence messages allowing for a significant area slack. The arising area is exploited for wire latency improvement by using a heterogeneous interconnection network comprised of a small set of very-low-latency wires for critical short-messages in addition to baseline wires. Detailed simulations of a 16-core CMP show that our proposal obtains average improvements of 10% in execution time and 38% in the energy-delay² product of the interconnect. Additionally, the sensitivity analysis shows that our proposal performs well when either OoO cores or caches with higher latencies are considered.     

Building language resources for a Multi-Engine English-Filipino machine translation system

In this paper, we present the building of various language resources for a multi-engine bi-directional English-Filipino Machine Translation (MT) system. Since linguistics information on Philippine languages are available, but as of yet, the focus has been on theoretical linguistics and little is done on the computational aspects of these languages, attempts are reported here on the manual construction of these language resources such as the grammar, lexicon, morphological information, and the corpora which were literally built from almost non-existent digital forms. Due to the inherent difficulties of manual construction, we also discuss our experiments on various technologies for automatic extraction of these resources to handle the intricacies of the Filipino language, designed with the intention of using them for the MT system. To implement the different MT engines and to ensure the improvement of translation quality, other language tools (such as the morphological analyzer and generator, and the part of speech tagger) were developed.     

Reading in the dark: effects of age and contrast on reading speed and comprehension

OBJECTIVE: To explore the effects of contrast reduction on younger and older adults' reading behavior and to examine whether readers rely on word predictability to compensate for poor contrast. BACKGROUND: Poor contrast can degrade text and may influence reading behavior. Readers may compensate for visual degradation of text by taking advantage of word predictability. METHOD: In Experiment 1, 5 younger and 5 older adults read sentences presented with 10 levels of contrast. In Experiment 2, 40 younger and 40 older adults read high-, medium-, and low-contrast sentences that varied in target word predictability (high vs. low). RESULTS: Relative to those of younger adults, older adults' reading rates were more slowed by low contrast; comprehension was less influenced by contrast (i.e., not significantly). Older adults read high-predictability words faster and comprehended them better than low-predictability words, significantly so for high- and medium-contrast sentences. Younger adults comprehended high-predictability words significantly better than low-predictability words for high- and low-contrast sentences. CONCLUSION: Low contrast was more detrimental for older adults. High-predictability words benefited older adults by significantly reducing their reading times and benefited all readers by significantly increasing their comprehension. APPLICATION: The current findings demonstrate the benefit of adequate contrast and word predictability for optimal text design to facilitate both reading times and reading comprehension.