Structurally Diverse Histone Deacetylase Photoreactive Probes: Design,Synthesis, and Photolabeling Studies in Live Cells and Tissue

Histone deacetylase (HDAC) activity is modulated in vivo by post-translational modifications and formation of multiprotein complexes. Novel chemical tools to study how these factors affect engagement of HDAC isoforms by HDAC inhibitors (HDACi) in cells and tissues are needed. In this study, a synthetic strategy to access chemically diverse photoreactive probes (PRPs) was developed and used to prepare seven novel HDAC PRPs 9 – 15 . The class I HDAC isoform engagement by PRPs was determined in biochemical assays and photolabeling experiments in live SET-2, HepG2, HuH7, and HEK293T cell lines and in mouse liver tissue. Unlike the HDAC protein abundance and biochemical activity against recombinant HDACs, the chemotype of the PRPs and the type of cells were key in defining the engagement of HDAC isoforms in live cells. Our findings suggest that engagement of HDAC isoforms by HDACi in vivo may be substantially modulated in a cell- and tissue-type-dependent manner.     

Multiobjective car relocation problem in one-way carsharing system

Railway Engineering Science - In this paper, we present a multiobjective approach for solving the one-way car relocation problem. We fix three objectives that include the number of remaining...     

Biocatalytic electrode improvement strategies in microbial fuel cell systems

Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) produce electricity as a result of the microbial metabolism of organic substrates, hence they represent a sustainable approach for energy production and waste treatment. If the technology is to be implemented in industry, low cost and sustainable bioelectrodes must be developed to increase power output, increase waste treatment capacity, and improve service intervals. Although the current application of abiotic electrode catalysts, such as platinum and electrode binders such as Nafion leads to greater MFC performance, their use is cost prohibitive. Novel bioelectrodes which use cost effective and sustainable materials are being developed. These electrodes are developed with the intention to reduce start-up time, reduce costs, extend life-span and improve core MFC performance metrics (i.e. power density, current density, chemical oxygen demand (COD) reduction and Coulombic efficiency (CE)). Comparison of different MFC systems is not an easy task. This is due to variations in MFC design, construction, operation, and different inocula (in the case of mixed-culture MFCs). This high intra-system variability should be considered when assessing MFC data, operation and performance. This review article examines the major issues surrounding bioanode and biocathode improvement in different MFC systems, with the ultimate goal of streamlining and standardising improvement processes. © 2018 Society of Chemical Industry     

The optimization performance of cross‐linked sodium alginate polymer electrolyte bio‐membranes in passive direct methanol/ethanol fuel cells

Consumption of methanol and ethanol as a fuel in the passive direct fuel cells technologies is suitable and more useful for the portable application compared with hydrogen as a preliminary fuel due to the ease of management, including design of cell, transportation, and storage. However, the cost production of commercial membrane is still far from the acceptable commercialization stage. Based to our previous works, the low cost of cross‐linked sodium alginate (SA) polymer electrolyte bio‐membrane shown the virtuous chemical, mechanical, and thermal characterization as polymer electrolyte membrane in the direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs). This study will further the investigation of cross‐linked SA polymer electrolyte bio‐membrane performance in the passive DMFCs and the passive direct ethanol fuel cells (DEFCs). The experimental study investigates the influence of the membrane thickness, loading of catalysts, temperature, type of fuel, and fuel concentration in order to achieve the optimal working operation performances. The passive DMFCs is improved from 1.45 up to 13.5 mW cm^?2 for the maximum peak of power density, which is obtained by using 0.16 mm as an optimum thick of SA bio‐membrane that shown the highest selectivity 6.31 10⁴ S s cm^?3, 4 mg cm^?2 of Pt‐Ru as an optimum of anode catalyst loading, 2 mg cm^?2 of Pt at the cathode, 2M of methanol as an optimum fuel concentration, and an optimum temperature at 90°C. Under the same conditions of cells, the passive DEFCs are shown to be 10.2 mW cm^?2 in the maximum peak of power density with 2M ethanol. Based on our knowledge, this is the first work that reports the optimization works of performance SA‐based membrane in the passive DMFCs via experimental studies of single cells and the primary performance of passive DEFCs using the SA‐based membrane as polymer electrolyte membrane.     

The influence of Ohmic-vacuum heating on phenol,ascorbic acid and engineering factors of kiwifruit juice concentration process

The antioxidant, phenol, ascorbic acid, electrode corrosion and engineering factors of concentration process of kiwifruit juice by ohmic heating-vacuum conditions (OHVC) were evaluated and compared with ohmic heating under atmospheric conditions (OHAC). Results showed that the total phenol content was decreased with an increasing voltage gradient for both heating modes. The OHVC can better save the antioxidant capacity and ascorbic acid of concentrated samples than the OHAC. The processing time of OHVC was significantly higher than the OHAC at the same voltage gradient (P < 0.05). The electrode corrosion rate at the vacuum mode was 7- to 40-fold higher than the atmospheric mode. The energy efficiency at OHAC was lower than the OHVC. The energy consumption was found in the range of 3.37 to 3.75 MJ kg⁻¹ water for OHAC and 4.08 to 11.09 MJ kg⁻¹ water for OHVC. The electrical conductivity under the vacuum mode was lower than the atmospheric mode.     

Joint QoE-based user association and efficient cell–carrier distribution for enabling fully hybrid spectrum sharing approach in 5G mmWave cellular networks

Densifying the network by adding more minicell towers or relays throughout a hot spot area while extensively reusing the available spectrum is an essential choice to improve QoS. Unfortunately, this approach can be prohibitively costly. One possible solution to reduce the capital and operating expenditure in such overdensified networks is the adoption of the spectrum-sharing approach. However, both approaches would complicate the interference phenomenon either among inter- or intraoperators, which may cause serious performance degradation. In this paper, a fully hybrid spectrum-sharing (FHSS) approach aided by an efficient cell–carrier distribution was proposed with consideration to the interference dilemma. Moreover, an adaptive hybrid QoE-based mmWave user association (mUA) scheme was presented to assign a typical user to the serving mmWave base station (mBS), which offers the highest achievable data rate. The proposed FHSS approach (with the presented QoE-based mUA) was compared with recent works and with both FHSS approach using the conventional max-SINR-based mUA, which assigns a typical user to the tagged mBS carrying the highest signal-to-interference-plus noise ratio and the baseline scenario (licensed spectrum access). In particular, three spectrum access methods (licensed, semipooled, and fully pooled) were integrated in a hybrid manner to engage improved data rates to users. Numerical results show that the joint cell–carrier distribution and FHSS approach with QoE-based mUA outperform both baselines FHSS with the max-SINR mUA scheme and the licensed spectrum access. Furthermore, results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of both operators’ independence and fairness.

     

ECRP: an energy-aware cluster-based routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Energy conservation is the main issue in wireless sensor networks. Many existing clustering protocols have been proposed to balance the energy consumption and maximize the battery lifetime of sensor nodes. However, these protocols suffer from the excessive overhead due to repetitive clustering resulting in high-energy consumption. In this paper, we propose energy-aware cluster-based routing protocol (ECRP) in which not only the cluster head (CH) role rotates based on energy around all cluster members until the end of network functioning to avoid frequent re-clustering, but also it can adapt the network topology change. Further, ECRP introduces a multi-hop routing algorithm so that the energy consumption is minimized and balanced. As well, a fault-tolerant mechanism is proposed to cope up with the failure of CHs and relay nodes. We perform extensive simulations on the proposed protocol using different network scenarios. The simulation results demonstrate the superiority of ECRP compared with recent and relevant existing protocols in terms of main performance metrics.

     

Fabrication and simulation studies on D-shaped optical fiber sensor via surface plasmon resonance

This paper describes simulation and experimental methods for designing a D-shaped surface plasmon resonance (SPR) fibre sensor. The sensor consists of two set-up approaches. Finite element method is used in simulation on the fibre sensor device. Two experimental methods for detecting relative intensity are used by varying the wavelength of the optical signal sources and the thickness of gold layer coated on the D-shaped fibre. In the first method, the sensor device works by detecting the relative intensity of two optical signal sources having different wavelengths. In the second set-up, the relative intensity between two D-shaped fibres coated with different thicknesses of gold is measured when a single signal source is launched at the input. The difference in intensities of the signal outputs is used to estimate the refractive index at the sensing region. A prototype SPR D-shaped fibre sensor has been fabricated and the experimental results show good agreement with simulation.     

Super Compact UWB Monopole Antenna for Small IoT Devices

This article introduces a novel, ultrawideband (UWB) planar monopole antenna printed on Roger RT/5880 substrate in a compact size for small Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The total electrical dimensions of the proposed compact UWB antenna are 0.19 λ_o × 0.215 λ_o × 0.0196 λ_o with the overall physical sizes of 15 mm × 17 mm × 1.548 mm at the lower resonance frequency of 3.8 GHz. The planar monopole antenna is fed through the linearly tapered microstrip line on a partially structured ground plane to achieve optimum impedance matching for UWB operation. The proposed compact UWB antenna has an operation bandwidth of 9.53 GHz from 3.026 GHz up to 12.556 GHz at −10 dB return loss with a fractional bandwidth (FBW) of about 122%. The numerically computed and experimentally measured results agree well in between. A detailed time-domain analysis is additionally accomplished to verify the radiation efficiency of the proposed antenna design for the ultra-wideband signal propagation. The fabricated prototype of a compact UWB antenna exhibits an omnidirectional radiation pattern with the low peak measured gain required of 2.55 dBi at 10 GHz and promising radiation efficiency of 90%. The proposed compact planar antenna has technical potential to be utilized in UWB and IoT applications.     

Influence of the structural matrix on the attenuation parameters of some iron-borophosphate glasses

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics - A set of glasses composed of seven samples was prepared using the fast cooling mechanism for glass preparation. The synthesis processes...