Activity of Endogenous Muscle Proteases from 4 Australian Underutilized Fish Species as Affected by Ionic Strength,pH, and Temperature

Storage conditions may influence the hydrolytic activity of endogenous muscle enzymes postmortem, rate of autolysis of myofibrillar proteins, and biological properties of hydrolyzed end products. This study investigated the effect of ionic strength, pH, and temperature on the activity of endogenous calpain‐like, cathepsins B and B+L measured in crude extract obtained from deepwater flathead, silver warehou, ribaldo, and ribbonfish muscles. Activity of calpain‐like enzymes in 3 examined species was significantly higher at pH 6.5 than pH 6.0 or 5.5. Raising the reaction temperature increased (P < 0.05) calpain‐like activity in ribaldo. Endogenous activity of cathepsin B in ribbonfish and silver warehou declined significantly with increasing ionic strength at pH 6.5 to 6.0. The obtained results will further expand our understanding of the impact that postmortem storage conditions have on the activity of endogenous fish proteases with respect to quality and bioactivity of fish proteins and potentially diversify utilization of underutilized fish species.     

The AutoI approach for the orchestration of autonomic networks

Existing services require assurable end-to-end quality of service, security and reliability constraints. Therefore, the networks involved in the transport of the data must cooperate to satisfy those constraints. In a next generation Internet, each of those networks may be managed by different entities. Furthermore, their policies and service level agreements (SLAs) will differ, as well as the autonomic management systems controlling them. In this context, we in the Autonomic Internet (AutoI) consortium propose the Orchestration Plane (OP), which promotes the interaction among different Autonomic Management Systems (AMSs). The OP mediates the communication and negotiation among AMSs, ensuring that their SLAs and policies meet the requirements needed for the provisioning of the services. It also simplifies the federation of domains and the distribution of new services in virtualised network environments.     

Adhesion characteristics of Staphylococcus aureus bacterial cells on funnel-shaped palladium–cobalt alloy nanostructures

The adhesion properties of Staphylococcus aureus on palladium–cobalt (Pd–Co) alloy nanostructures with various cross-sectional geometries have been characterised. They include solid core, hollow, c-shaped, and x-shaped pillars. These pillars have unique funnel-shaped geometric features on the top surfaces with average included angles between ～142^o and ～149^o. The success rates of cell attachment on these pillar tops were quantified by using field emission scanning electron microscopy techniques. Results show the Staphylococcus aureus attachment rates of Pd–Co solid core, hollow, and x-shaped pillars are statistically indistinguishable with success rate up to 82%. X-shaped pillars have the lowest attachment rate among the four geometries of 46 ± 5%.     

A high-linearity SiGe RF power amplifier for 3 G and 4 G small basestations

This article presents the design and evaluation of a linear 3.3?V SiGe power amplifier for 3?G and 4?G femtocells with 18?dBm modulated output power at 2140?MHz. Different biasing schemes to achieve high linearity with low standby current were studied. The adjacent channel power ratio linearity performance with wide-band code division multiple access (3?G) and long term evolution (4?G) downlink signals were compared and differences analysed and explained.     

Optimum Coverage/Capacity in MIMO Indoor Channel with Minimum Transmitters

In this paper, we consider a transmitter location finding problem for the best coverage and capacity in an indoor Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) channel. Hence, a multi-objective optimization problem is solved in order to achieve the above targets. A weighted combination of Receive Signal Strength (RSS) and channel capacity is defined as fitness function for this optimization problem. The proposed optimization method contains a jointly designed Ray Tracing Engine (RTE) and Genetic Algorithm (GA). The algorithm is applied on a sample environment which is fully simulated with RTE. The results show that the proposed method perfectly finds the best locations of the minimum number of MIMO transmitters at different weights for RSS and channel capacity.     

Adhesion promotion of thick polyphosphate-poly(allylamine) films onto polyolefin substrates by plasma polymers

The adhesion of thick poly(allylamine)-polyphosphate layers (1 μm) deposited by the wet-chemical layer-by-layer (LbL) technique onto polyethylene or polystyrene (each 100 μm) was very low. To promote the adhesion of these LbL deposited layers, the polyolefin substrates were oxidized at the surface by short exposure to the oxygen plasma (2 or 5 s) and subsequently coated with an interlayer of plasma-deposited poly(allylamine) or poly(allyl alcohol) (100 nm). The plasma polymer interlayers have improved strongly the adhesion between polyolefin substrates and polyphosphate coatings. Such phosphate coatings are interesting for life sciences (nucleotide formation) but also for fire retardancy in combination with N-rich compounds such as melamine. The intention was to prefer chemical hydrogen bonds for adhesion promoting because of their high binding energy. Therefore the introduced oxygen-containing groups at the polyolefin surface could interact with the OH or NH₂ groups of the adhesion-promoting plasma polymer interlayer. These groups were also able to interact strongly with the poly(allylamine)-polyphosphate topcoating. The coated polyolefins were investigated using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy in attenuated total reflectance mode (FTIR-ATR), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analyses and atomic force spectroscopy, and 90° peel test.