Molecular modeling of antibody-antigen complexes between the Brucella abortus O-chain polysaccharide and a specific monoclonal antibody

A molecular model of the binding site of an anti-carbohydrateantibody (YsT9.1) has been developed using computer-assistedmodeling techniques and molecular dynamics calculations. Sequencehomologies among YsT9.1 and the Fv regions of McPC603, J539and human Bence-Jones protein REI, all of which have solvedcrystal structures, provided the basis for the modeling. Thegroove-type combining site model had a topography which wascomplementary to low energy confonners of the polysaccharide,a Brucella O-antigen, and the site could be almost completelyfilled by a pentasaccharide epitope in either of two dockingmodes. Putative interactions between this epitope and the antibodyare consistent with the known structural requirements for bindingand lead to the design of oligosaccharide inhibitors that probethe veracity of the modeled docked complex. Ultimately boththe Fv model and the docked complex will be compared with independentcrystal structures of YsT9.1 Fab with and without pentasaccharideinhibitor, currently at the stage of refinement.     

Spinning viscose technical yarn into a bicomponent precipitation bath

Conclusions -- The possibility has been demonstrated of preparing viscose yarn by the centrifugal method from a viscose containing additions of urea by spinning into a bicomponent precipitation bath containing sulfuric acid and sodium sulfate.-- Optimum conditions for spinning viscose yarn have been established: a sulfuric acid content of 115 g/l in the precipitation bath, a urea content of 2.5% based on weight of -cellulose in the viscose, and an orientation stretch of 22%.-- Specimens of viscose yarn having a linear density of 13.3 tex have been prepared with a relative breaking load of up to 19 cN/tex, an elongation at break of 17–19%, and a mean squared deviation in dyeing nonuniformity of 0.8–1.0.Translated from Khimicheskie Volokna, No. 4, pp. 33–34, July–August, 1990.     

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.     

Galvanic coupling effect on corrosion behavior of Al alloy-matrix composites

Galvanic coupling effect on the corrosion of SiC-reinforced aluminum alloy-matrix composites was investigated in a sodium chloride solution. The potentiodynamic polarization measurement indicated that pitting potentials of metal matrix composites (MMCs) and AA2124 matrix alloy were similar, and pitting potential of MMCs was almost same as corrosion potential, while pitting susceptibility of MMCs was higher than that of AA2124 alloy. Galvanic current by formation of galvanic couple between SiCw and matrix reveals very low value because of large cathodic polarization of SiC. However, by increasing potential of matrix to pitting potential by this galvanic couple and thus, forming pits easily at the weak passive film near SiC reinforcing phase preferentially, it is concluded that pitting susceptibility of MMCs increases highly than AA2124 alloy of matrix composition.     

Corrosion resistance of austenitic stainless steel separator for molten carbonate fuel cell

STS310S and SC-STS310S (simultaneously co-deposited chromium and aluminum onto 310S austenitic stainless steel substrate by pack-cementation process) were used as separator materials on the cathode side of a molten carbonate fuel cell. With the STS310S, corrosion proceeded via three steps; a formation step of unstable corrosion product, a protection step against corrosion until breakaway, and an advance step of corrosion after breakaway. The final corrosion product was LiFeO₂ and the loss of mass was 6.5 mg/cm² after a corrosion test of 480 hr at 650°C. The SC-STS310S showed more effective corrosion resistance, however, than did common STS310S. There was especially no corrosion loss on the SC-STS310S after the 480 hr corrosion test. It is anticipated that it will be very useful as an alternative separator on the cathode side off the MCFC in the future.     

Interference impacts on 60 ghz real-time online video streaming in wireless smart tv platforms

In this paper we provide a method for computing and estimating the impact of interference on real-time online 1080p@30Hz and 1080p@60Hz high-definition video streaming in 60 GHz wireless smart TV platforms. The analysis involves two different interference scenarios: 1) downlink interference from deployed 60 GHz access points to the associated mobile ad-hoc devices, and 2) uplink interference from randomly deployed 60 GHz ad-hoc mobile devices to their associated access points. With these interference scenarios, the interference impact on the quality of main 1080p@30Hz and 1080p@60Hz wireless high-definition video streaming with various simulation settings are measured and estimated in terms of signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio.     

A novel part-based approach to mean-shift algorithm for visual tracking

Visual tracking is one of the most important problems considered in computer vision. To improve the performance of the visual tracking, a part-based approach will be a good solution. In this paper, a novel method of visual tracking algorithm named part-based mean-shift (PBMS) algorithm is presented. In the proposed PBMS, unlike the standard mean-shift (MS), the target object is divided into multiple parts and the target is tracked by tracking each individual part and combining the results. For the part-based visual tracking, the objective function in the MS is modified such that the target object is represented as a combination of the parts and iterative optimization solution is presented. Further, the proposed PBMS provides a systematic and analytic way to determine the scale of the bounding box for the target from the perspective of the objective function optimization. Simulation is conducted with several benchmark problems and the result shows that the proposed PBMS outperforms the standard MS.

     

Note: Interpolation for evaluation of a two-dimensional spatial profile of plasma densities at low gas pressures

An interpolation algorithm for the evaluation of the spatial profile of plasma densities in a cylindrical reactor was developed for low gas pressures. The algorithm is based on a collisionless two-dimensional fluid model. Contrary to the collisional case, i.e., diffusion fluid model, the fitting algorithm depends on the aspect ratio of the cylindrical reactor. The spatial density profile of the collisionless fitting algorithm is presented in two-dimensional images and compared with the results of the diffusion fluid model.     

A high performance parallel DCT with OpenCL on heterogeneous computing environment

A noteworthy thing in desktop PCs is that they can provide a great opportunity to increase the performance of processing multimedia data by exploiting task- and data-parallelism with multi-core CPU and many-core GPU. This paper presents a high performance parallel implementation of 2D DCT on this heterogeneous computing environment. For this purpose, Intel TBB (threading building blocks) and OpenCL (Open Compute Language) are utilized for task- and data-parallelism, respectively. The simulation result shows that the parallel DCT implementations far the serial ones in processing speed. Especially, OpenCL implementation shows a linear speedup, a typical SIMD characteristic as the increase of 2D data sets.