Structural Basis for Carbapenem-Hydrolyzing Mechanisms of Carbapenemases Conferring Antibiotic Resistance

Carbapenems (imipenem, meropenem, biapenem, ertapenem, and doripenem) are β-lactam antimicrobial agents. Because carbapenems have the broadest spectra among all β-lactams and are primarily used to treat infections by multi-resistant Gram-negative bacteria, the emergence and spread of carbapenemases became a major public health concern. Carbapenemases are the most versatile family of β-lactamases that are able to hydrolyze carbapenems and many other β-lactams. According to the dependency of divalent cations for enzyme activation, carbapenemases can be divided into metallo-carbapenemases (zinc-dependent class B) and non-metallo-carbapenemases (zinc-independent classes A, C, and D). Many studies have provided various carbapenemase structures. Here we present a comprehensive and systematic review of three-dimensional structures of carbapenemase-carbapenem complexes as well as those of carbapenemases. We update recent studies in understanding the enzymatic mechanism of each class of carbapenemase, and summarize structural insights about regions and residues that are important in acquiring the carbapenemase activity.     

Image based rainfall amount estimation for auto-wiping of vehicles

Neural Computing and Applications - With rapid development of deep learning, a lot of computer vision tasks, such as object detection and semantic segmentation, have been applied to various...     

Combined task and motion planning system for the service robot using hierarchical action decomposition

Intelligent Service Robotics - A service robot needs integration of symbolic reasoning for high-level task planning and geometric computation for low-level motion planning to provide services in an...     

Characterization of a novel glutamate decarboxylase (GAD) from Latilactobacillus curvatus K285 isolated from Gat -Kimchi

Food Science and Biotechnology - A lactic acid bacteria (LAB) producing γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) was isolated from Gat-Kimchi, a Korean vegetable food. The isolate, K285, was identified as...     

Object panorama construction using large-parallax images

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Conventional panorama techniques create a wide-angle image by stitching images taken from the same viewpoint. In contrast, the method proposed in this work...     

Network Functions Virtualization for Mobile Core and Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Wireless Personal Communications - Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a network architecture concept to improve network performance. This concept empowers the network capacities and reduces...     

Thermo-Responsive Microcapsules with Tunable Molecular Permeability for Controlled Encapsulation and Release

Microcapsules with regulated transmembrane transport are of great importance for various applications. The membranes with a tunable cut-off threshold of permeation provide advanced functionality. Here, thermo-responsive microcapsules are designed, whose hydrogel membrane shows a tunable cut-off threshold of permeation with temperature. To produce the microcapsules, water-in-oil-in-water (W/O/W) double-emulsion droplets are microfluidically produced, whose oil shell contains oil-soluble hydrogel precursor of poly(N, N-diethylacrylamide) copolymerized with benzophenone (PDEAM-BP). The PDEAM hydrogels, crosslinked by BP, show volume-phase transition around 34 °C, which makes the microcapsules with the PDEAM hydrogel membrane thermo-responsive. The microcapsules show temperature-dependent changes in radius and membrane thickness. More importantly, the cut-off threshold of permeation can be reversibly adjusted by temperature control as the degree of swelling decreases with temperature. This enables the molecule-selective encapsulation and the controlled release of the encapsulants in a programmed manner by adjusting the temperature. The microcapsules can be rendered to be photo-responsive by encapsulating photothermal polydopamine nanoparticles during the microfluidic operation, which allows the control of the degree of swelling with near-infrared (NIR) irradiation. The thermo- and photo-responsive microcapsules with a tunable cut-off threshold are appealing as a new platform for drug carriers, microreactors, and microsensors.     

Lightweight refined networks for single image super-resolution

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Recently, software architectures applied to physical agents have become a boost from the emerging Artificial Intelligence(AI). In these smart physical agents,...     

QRS detection of ECG signal using U-Net and DBSCAN

Multimedia Tools and Applications - QRS detection is a crucial task for ECG signal analysis, which is the preliminary and essential step to further recognition and diagnosis. This paper proposes a...