Determination of 5-aminolaevulinic acid dehydratase activity in erythrocytes and porphobilinogen in urine by micellar electrokinetic capillary chromatography

A micellar electrokinetic capillary chromatographic (MECC) method has been developed and optimised for the separation of 5-aminolaevulinic acid (ALA) and porphobilinogen (PBG). The running buffer consisted of a mixture of 20 mM sodium phosphate and 20 mM sodium borate containing 50 mM sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS) adjusted to pH 9.5 with 1 M NaOH. The running voltage and temperature were 20-25 kV and 30 degrees C, respectively. The MECC method for the analysis of PBG is fast and simple and is useful for the screening of PBG in the urine of patients suspected to have acute intermittent porphyria (AIP), and for the confirmation of lead exposure by measuring red-cell ALA-dehydratase (ALA-D) activity with ALA as the enzyme substrate.     

Fast and one-step folding of closely and distantly related homologous proteins of a four-helix bundle family

Bovine acyl-coenzyme A binding protein is a four-helix bundle protein belonging to a group of homologous eukaryote proteins that binds medium and long-chain acyl-coenzyme A esters with a very high affinity. The three-dimensional structure of both the free and the ligated protein together with the folding kinetics have been described in detail for the bovine protein and with four new sequences reported here, a total of 16 closely related sequences ranging from yeasts and plants to human are known. The kinetics of folding and unfolding in different concentrations of guanidine hydrochloride together with equilibrium unfolding have been measured for bovine, rat and yeast acyl-coenzyme A binding protein. The bovine and rat sequences are closely related whereas the yeast is more distantly related to these. In addition to the three natural variants, kinetics of a bovine mutant protein, Tyr31 --> Asn, have been studied. Both the folding and unfolding rates in water of the yeast protein are 15 times faster than those of bovine. The folding rates in water of the two mammalian forms, rat and bovine, are similar, though still significantly different. A faster unfolding rate both for rat and the bovine mutant protein results from a lower stability of the native states of these. These hydrophobic regions, mini cores, have been identified in the three-dimensional structure of the bovine protein and found to be formed primarily by residues that have been conserved throughout the entire eukaryote evolution from yeasts to both plants and mammals as seen in the sample of 16 sequences. The conserved residues are found to stabilize helix-helix interactions and serve specific functional purposes for ligand binding. The fast one-step folding mechanism of ACBP has been shown to be a feature that seems to be maintained throughout evolution despite numerous differences in sequence and even dramatic differences in folding kinetics and protein stability. The protein study raises the question to what extent does the conserved hydrophobic residues provide a scaffold for an efficient one-step folding mechanism.     

Effect of vibration on eye,head and helmet movements while wearing a helmet‐mounted display

Previous research has demonstrated a loss of helmet‐mounted display (HMD) legibility for users exposed to whole body vibration. A pair of human factors studies was conducted to evaluate the effect of whole body vibration on eye, head, and helmet movements for seated users of a HMD while conducting simple fixation and smooth pursuit tracking tasks. These experiments confirmed that vertical eye motion can be demonstrated, that is consistent with the human visual systems' response to the vestibular–ocular reflex (VOR). Helmet slippage was also shown to occur, which could exacerbate loss of display legibility. The largest amplitudes in eye movements were observed during exposure to sinusoidal vibration in the 4–6 Hz range, which is consistent with the frequencies that past research has associated with whole‐body resonance and the largest decrease in display legibility. Further, the measured eye movements appeared to be correlated with both the angular acceleration of the user's head and the angular slippage of the user's helmet. This research demonstrates that the loss of legibility while wearing HMDs likely results from a combination of VOR‐triggered eye movements and movement of the display. Future compensation algorithms should consider adjusting the display in response to both VOR‐triggered eye and HMD motion.     

Chemical reaction optimization with greedy strategy for the 0–1 knapsack problem

The 0–1 knapsack problem (KP01) is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem. It is an NP-hard problem which plays important roles in computing theory and in many real life applications. Chemical reaction optimization (CRO) is a new optimization framework, inspired by the nature of chemical reactions. CRO has demonstrated excellent performance in solving many engineering problems such as the quadratic assignment problem, neural network training, multimodal continuous problems, etc. This paper proposes a new chemical reaction optimization with greedy strategy algorithm (CROG) to solve KP01. The paper also explains the operator design and parameter turning methods for CROG. A new repair function integrating a greedy strategy and random selection is used to repair the infeasible solutions. The experimental results have proven the superior performance of CROG compared to genetic algorithm (GA), ant colony optimization (ACO) and quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm (QEA).     

Mosaic organization of DNA nucleotides

Long-range power-law correlations have been reported recently for DNA sequences containing noncoding regions. We address the question of whether such correlations may be a trivial consequence of the known mosaic structure ("patchiness") of DNA. We analyze two classes of controls consisting of patchy nucleotide sequences generated by different algorithms--one without and one with long-range power-law correlations. Although both types of sequences are highly heterogenous, they are quantitatively distinguishable by an alternative fluctuation analysis method that differentiates local patchiness from long-range correlations. Application of this analysis to selected DNA sequences demonstrates that patchiness is not sufficient to account for long-range correlation properties.     

Long-range correlation properties of coding and noncoding DNA sequences: GenBank analysis

An open question in computational molecular biology is whether long-range correlations are present in both coding and noncoding DNA or only in the latter. To answer this question, we consider all 33301 coding and all 29453 noncoding eukaryotic sequences--each of length larger than 512 base pairs (bp)--in the present release of the GenBank to dtermine whether there is any statistically significant distinction in their long-range correlation properties. Standard fast Fourier transform (FFT) analysis indicates that coding sequences have practically no correlations in the range from 10 bp to 100 bp (spectral exponent beta=0.00 +/- 0.04, where the uncertainty is two standard deviations). In contrast, for noncoding sequences, the average value of the spectral exponent beta is positive (0.16 +/- 0.05) which unambiguously shows the presence of long-range correlations. We also separately analyze the 874 coding and the 1157 noncoding sequences that have more than 4096 bp and find a larger region of power-law behavior. We calculate the probability that these two data sets (coding and noncoding) were drawn from the same distribution and we find that it is less than 10(-10). We obtain independent confirmation of these findings using the method of detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA), which is designed to treat sequences with statistical heterogeneity, such as DNA's known mosaic structure ("patchiness") arising from the nonstationarity of nucleotide concentration. The near-perfect agreement between the two independent analysis methods, FFT and DFA, increases the confidence in the reliability of our conclusion.     

Accuracy verification of a simple local three-dimensional displacement measurement method of DIC with two images coordinates

There are two methods applied for three-dimensional digital image correlation method to measure three-dimensional displacement. One is to measure the spatial coordinates of measuring points by analyzing the images. Then, the displacement vectors of these points can be calculated using the spatial coordinates of these points obtained at different stages. The other is to calibrate the parameters for individual measuring points locally. Then, the local displacements of these points can be measured directly. This study proposes a simple local three-dimensional displacement measurement method. Without any complicated distortion correction processes, this method can be used to measure small displacement in the three-dimensional space through a simple calibration process. A laboratory experiment and field experiment are carried out to prove the accuracy of this proposed method. Laboratory test errors of one-dimensional experiment are similar to the accuracy of the XYZ table; the error in Z-direction is only 0.0025% of the object distance. The measurement error of laboratory test is about 0.0033% of the object distance for local three-dimensional displacement measurement test. Test and analysis results of field test display that in-plane displacement error is only 0.12 mm, and the out-of-plane error is 1.1 mm for 20 m × 30 m measuring range. The out-of-plane error is only about 10 PPM of the object distance. These test and analysis results show that this proposed method can achieve very high accuracy under small displacement for both of laboratory and field tests.     

Smart Utilization of Carbon Dots in Semiconductor Photocatalysis

Efficient capture of solar energy will be critical to meeting the energy needs of the future. Semiconductor photocatalysis is expected to make an important contribution in this regard, delivering both energy carriers (especially H₂) and valuable chemical feedstocks under direct sunlight. Over the past few years, carbon dots (CDs) have emerged as a promising new class of metal‐free photocatalyst, displaying semiconductor‐like photoelectric properties and showing excellent performance in a wide variety of photoelectrochemical and photocatalytic applications owing to their ease of synthesis, unique structure, adjustable composition, ease of surface functionalization, outstanding electron‐transfer efficiency and tunable light‐harvesting range (from deep UV to the near‐infrared). Here, recent advances in the rational design of CDs‐based photocatalysts are highlighted and their applications in photocatalytic environmental remediation, water splitting into hydrogen, CO₂ reduction, and organic synthesis are discussed.