Molecular modeling study of CodX reveals importance of N-terminal and C-terminal domain in the CodWX complex structure of Bacillus subtilis

In Bacillus subtilis, CodW peptidase and CodX ATPase function together as a distinctive ATP-dependent protease called CodWX, which participates in protein degradation and regulates cell division. The molecular structure of CodX and the assembly structure of CodW-CodX have not yet been resolved. Here we present the first three-dimensional structure of CodX N-terminal (N) and C-terminal (C) domain including possible structure of intermediate (I) domain based on the crystal structure of homologous Escherichia coli HslU ATPase. Moreover, the biologically relevant CodWX (W(6)W(6)X(6)) octadecamer complex structure was constructed using the recently identified CodW-HslU hybrid crystal structure. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation shows a reasonably stable structure of modeled CodWX and explicit behavior of key segments in CodX N and C domain: nucleotide binding residues, GYVG pore motif and CodW-CodX interface. Predicted structure of the possible I domain is flexible in nature with highly coiled hydrophobic region (M153-M206) that could favor substrate binding and entry. Electrostatic surface potential observation unveiled charge complementarity based CodW-CodX interaction pattern could be a possible native interaction pattern in the interface of CodWX. CodX GYVG pore motif structural features, flexible nature of glycine (G92 and G95) residues and aromatic ring conformation preserved Y93 indicated that it may follow the similar mode during the proteolysis mechanism as in the HslU closed state. This molecular modeling study uncovers the significance of CodX N and C domain in CodWX complex and provides possible explanations which would be helpful to understand the CodWX-dependent proteolysis mechanism of B. subtilis.     

Real-time building of a thinning-based topological map

An accurate and compact map is essential to an autonomous mobile robot system. A topological map, one of the most popular map types, can be used to represent the environment in terms of discrete nodes with edges connecting them. It is usually constructed by Voronoi-like graphs, but in this paper the topological map is incrementally built based on the local grid map by using a thinning algorithm. This algorithm, when combined with the application of the C-obstacle, can easily extract only the meaningful topological information in real-time and is robust to environment change, because this map is extracted from a local grid map generated based on the Bayesian update formula. In this paper, position probability is defined to evaluate the quantitative reliability of the end node extracted by the thinning process. Since the thinning process builds only local topological maps, a global topological map should be constructed by merging local topological maps according to nodes with high position probability. For real and complex environments, experiments showed that the proposed map building method based on the thinning process can accurately build a local topological map in real-time, with which an accurate global topological map can be incrementally constructed.     

Evaluation of the critical stroke of an earthworm-like robot for capsule endoscopes

Recently, the capsule endoscope has been highlighted for the patient's convenience and the possibility of application in the small intestine. However, the capsule endoscope has some limitations in obtaining an image of the digestive organ because its movement depends only on the peristaltic motion. In order to solve these problems, it is necessary to determine the locomotive mechanism of the capsule endoscope. Therefore, the present authors have already proposed an earthworm-like robot, which has a locomotive mechanism. However, this mechanism should be designed so that the earthworm-like robot has a larger stroke than the critical stroke required to perform motion inside the small intestine. In this study, therefore, not only is the modelling of the locomotive process based on a biomechanical study presented but also the movement of the earthworm-like robot in the small intestine is simulated. Through the simulation process, the variation in the critical stroke with regard to the elastic modulus of the mesentery is investigated. Finally, from an in vitro test of the proposed robot, it is found that the experimental result is very similar to that of the simulation. Consequently, the present work will provide guidelines for designing an earthworm-like robot for diagnosis of the small intestine.     

A multi-agent intelligent system for efficient ERP maintenance

The Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is an enterprise-wide integrated software package designed to uphold the highest quality standards of business process. However, for the time being, when the business condition has been changed, the system may not guarantee that the process embedded in ERP is still best. Moreover, since the ERP system is very complex, maintaining the system by trial and error is very costly. Hence, this paper aims to construct a support system that adjusts ERP system to environmental changes. To do so, we adopt multi-agent intelligent technology that enables autonomous cooperation with one another to monitor ERP databases and to find any exceptional changes and then analyze how the changes will affect ERP performance. Moreover, Petri net is applied to manage the complexity and dynamics of agents’ behavior. To show the feasibility of the idea, a prototype agent system, ERP/PN, is proposed and an experiment is conducted.     

Response to ‘Comments on: A cohesion measure for object‐oriented classes’

Indicating that CBMC does not satisfy the monotonic property in terms of the number of interactions, Xu and Zhou proposed an augmented definition of CBMC by adopting cut set instead of glue methods. The augmented CBMC clearly satisfies the monotonic property. However, CBMC is designed to overcome the problem with respect to the number of interactions and, therefore, focuses on the interaction pattern, especially, member connectivity. Consequently, it does not make sense to mention the monotonic property of CBMC with respect to interaction number. Moreover, the notion of glue methods allows several interpretations on the design quality of a class. However, that meaningful interpretation is not possible for the augmented definition due to the removal of the notion of glue methods. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Numerical assessment of turbulent models at a critical regime on unstructured meshes

The present study mainly aims to investigate the performances of different turbulent models for the flow simulation around a circular cylinder at a critical Reynolds number regime (Re = 8.5×10⁵, Tu = 0.7%). A hybrid RANS/LES model (SAS model), a correlation-based transition model ( $\gamma - \widetilde{\operatorname{Re} }_{\theta t} $ model), and a fully turbulent RANS model (SST model) were used to simulate various flow features, such as laminar-turbulence transition inside the boundary layer and the unsteady vortex shedding in the wake region, and their feasibilities for the flow simulation at a critical Reynolds number regime were demonstrated. A vertex-centered finite-volume method was used to discretize the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, and an unstructured mesh technique was used to discretize the computational domain. The inviscid fluxes were evaluated using 2^nd-order Roe??s flux difference splitting, and the viscous fluxes were computed based on central differencing. A dual time-stepping method and the Gauss-Seidel iteration were used for unsteady time integration. The parallelization strategy using METIS and MPI libraries was used to reduce computational costs. The unsteady characteristics and the time-averaged quantities of the flow fields were compared between turbulent models. The numerical results were also compared with experimental results. The turbulent models showed quite different results at the critical regime because of the different abilities of each model to predict various flow features, such as laminar-turbulence transition and unsteady vortex shedding.     

A Stylized Approach for Pencil Drawing from Photographs

We present a stylized scheme that produces pencil drawings in a range of styles from an image. To produce controllable pencil drawing effects and remedy the problems of existing convolution‐based schemes, we develop a swing bilateral LIC (SBL) filter. Our first approach to express the styled pencil drawings is to control the directions of pencil strokes that depicts both shapes and smooth tone. Another approach is to produce colors of pencil drawings by sampling colors from real color pencils. The third approach is to mimic the artistic technique that increases the details of drawings in a progressive manner. We present drawings in several styles and compare some of them directly with illustrations taken from an artists' work.     

Counting clicks and beeps: Exploring numerosity based haptic and audio PIN entry

Haptic and audio cues now appear commonly in computer interfaces, partially due to inherent advantages such as their support for eyes-free interaction. Their invisible, unobservable nature also makes them ideal candidates for security interfaces in which users have to enter secret information such as passwords. In particular, researchers have explored this idea through the design of PIN entry authentication systems based on multi-modal combinations of visual and non-visual content or on the recognition of small sets of unimodal haptic or audio stimuli. This paper highlights the benefits and performance limitations of these approaches and introduces an alternative based on unimodal audio or haptic temporal numerosity – the ability to accurately and rapidly determine the number of cues presented in rapid temporal succession. In essence, in a numerosity interface, rather than recognizing distinct cues, users must count the number of times that a single cue occurs. In an iterative process of design and evaluation, three prototypes implementing this concept are presented and studies of their use reported. The results show the fastest PIN entry times and lowest error rates to be 8 s and 2%, figures that improve substantially on previous research. These results are attained while maintaining low levels of workload and substantial resistance to observation attack (as determined via camera attack security studies). In sum, this paper argues that unimodal audio and haptic numerosity is a valuable and relatively unexplored metaphor for non-visual input and demonstrates the validity of this claim in the demanding task of unobservable authentication systems.