Improving Lipid Production of Yarrowia lipolytica by the Aldehyde Dehydrogenase-Mediated Furfural Detoxification

Yarrowia lipolytica, the non-conventional yeast capable of high lipogenesis, is a microbial chassis for producing lipid-based biofuels and chemicals from renewable resources such as lignocellulosic biomass. However, the low tolerance of Y. lipolytica against furfural, a major inhibitory furan aldehyde derived from the pretreatment processes of lignocellulosic biomass, has restricted the efficient conversion of lignocellulosic hydrolysates. In this study, the furfural tolerance of Y. lipolytica has been improved by supporting its endogenous detoxification mechanism. Specifically, the endogenous genes encoding the aldehyde dehydrogenase family proteins were overexpressed in Y. lipolytica to support the conversion of furfural to furoic acid. Among them, YALI0E15400p (FALDH2) has shown the highest conversion rate of furfural to furoic acid and resulted in two-fold increased cell growth and lipid production in the presence of 0.4 g/L of furfural. To our knowledge, this is the first report to identify the native furfural detoxification mechanism and increase furfural resistance through rational engineering in Y. lipolytica. Overall, these results will improve the potential of Y. lipolytica to produce lipids and other value-added chemicals from a carbon-neutral feedstock of lignocellulosic biomass.     

Integrity and cell-monolayer permeability of chitosan nanoparticles in simulated gastrointestinal fluids

The objective of this study was to assess the integrity and intestinal permeability of chitosan nanoparticles (CNPs) in simulated gastrointestinal fluids (SGIF). The cell-associated and transported chitosan was quantified and visualized after incubation of the CNPs with Caco-2 cell monolayer with/without SGIF treatment. In order to establish the role of proteins in the SGIF, CNPs were incubated with 4 proteins having different isoelectric points (pI). CNPs incubated with the fluids did not attach to the cell monolayer in contrast to the intact CNPs. Negatively-charged protein formed the complex with CNPs leading to particle size increase, but protected CNPs from disintegration. In contrary, positively-charged protein interacted with cross-linker causing disintegration of CNPs. CNPs incubated with the fluids did not attach to the cell monolayer in contrast to the intact CNPs. The results suggested that the surface charges of CNPs and proteins play a critical role in structural changes of CNPs in biological environment.     

A study on the optimization of KCI-based index (Kor-Factor) in evaluating Korean journals

This study describes the development process of Kor-Factor, which is a novel composite evaluation index that was developed to promote Korean domestic academic journals. As more data accumulate, the Kor-Factor’s optimization process was modified in an attempt to address possible drawbacks of the original form; the result is presented in this study. This study compares Kor-Factor with the Impact Factor, which is the most well-known single element evaluation index. We found that Kor-Factor demonstrates a better power of differentiation and a greater capacity to reflect the reputability of key journals. The modified Kor-Factor, which has been developed through an optimization process, reveals a greater power of differentiation than the original Kor-Factor; however, the modified version has less capacity to reflect reputability. The evaluation elements of the modified Kor-Factor are better and are more evenly reflected on the index value than those of the original version. Finally, we propose the establishment of an appropriate data measurement period for the actual application of the index.     

Synthesis and electrochemical,in situ spectroelectrochemical,electrical and gas sensing properties of ball-type homo- and hetero-dinuclear phthalocyanines with four [1a,8b-dihydronaphtho[b]naphthofuro[3,2-d]furan-7,10-diyl] bridges

The new mono-nuclear Fe^II 2 and ball-type homo-dinuclear Fe^II–Fe^II 3 phthalocyanines have been synthesized from the corresponding 4,4′-(1a,8b-dihydronaphtho[b]naphthofuro[3,2-d]-furan-7,10-diyl)bis(oxy)diphthalonitrile 1 while ball-type hetero-dinuclear Fe^II–Co^II phthalocyanine 4 was synthesized from 2. The compounds have been characterized by elemental analysis, UV–vis, IR and MALDI-TOF-mass spectroscopies. The redox behaviours of the complexes were identified by controlled-potential coulometry, cyclic voltammetry and differential pulse voltammetry measurements on Pt in dimethylsulfoxide containing tetrabutylammonium perchlorate. The assignments of the redox processes and the understanding of the interactions between the metal phthalocyanine units in 3 and 4 were achieved by the combined evaluation of the voltammetric and in situ spectroelectrochemical outcomes. Complex 3 showed ring-based mixed-valence behaviour as a result of the considerable interaction between the phthalocyanine rings. On the other hand, the interactions between the two metal phthalocyanine units of 4 were found to be much weaker than those in 3. The potential application of molecular organic semiconductors needs the control adjustment of conductivity. Ac and dc conductivity measurements were performed with the applied external electric filed. At high frequency, the conduction follows the universal power law and conduction mechanism can be explained by classical hopping barriers mechanism for the system.     

Image Resolution Enhancement Using Spatially Invariant Point Spread Function

<正>This paper presents an image resolution enhancement algorithm using spatially invariant point spread function.Point spread function is used to constrain the solution space.This parameter is computed at each iteration step using partially restored image at each iteration,and High pass filter is used to impose the degree of edge smoothness on the solution.The resulting iterative algorithm exhibits the increased PSNR better than Bicubic interpolation approach.     

Dynamic RSVP protocol

RSVP is a resource reservation setup protocol that can be used by a host to request specific QoS for multicast multimedia flows on the Internet. Multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) architecture also needs RSVP. The fact that the resolutions of the display system used in different receiver nodes might have different, multi-resolution characteristics is supported in the MPEG-4 standard, and the EZW compression algorithm can cease decoding at any point in the bitstream. However, RSVP does not provide a more flexible mechanism. In this article we propose an extension of RSVP to provide the needed mechanism, coined dynamic RSVP (DRSVP), to dynamically adjust reserved resources on nodes without much effort. It provides different video resolutions to different receiver nodes with different needed reserved resources. Therefore, it does not waste precious Internet resources to transmit unnecessary multimedia packets.     

Effect of noise imbalance on dual-MRC over Rayleigh fading channels

The performance analysis of dual (two-branch) maximal ratio combining (MRC) under imperfect weight, named imperfect MRC, due to the noise imbalance is derived over independent but non-identical Rayleigh fading channels. Considering the system (or channel) conditions that the noise level of each branch is different, we present the accurate performance analysis of imperfect dual MRC in terms of average combined signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), outage probability and average symbol error rate for a large class of modulations in closed-form and compare them with the performance of the perfect MRC and the perfect selection combining (SC) over non-identical but independent Rayleigh fading channels based on the interesting statistical results on the combined SNR. From the performance results we provide the criterion in choosing the imperfect MRC, perfect MRC, or SC depending on the degree of the difference of the noise level between branches.     

Performance analysis of channel estimation for OFDM systems with residual timing offset

The authors present an analysis of the effect of timing offset on channel estimation for comb-type pilot-aided orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Residual timing offset does not negatively affect the channel estimation of the pilot subcarrier, but does corrupt the channel information obtained via interpolation. This paper provides the mean square error (MSE) channel estimation performance when a linear interpolation technique is used in a comb-type pilot-aided OFDM system. Analysis shows that the performance degradation of the channel estimator due to imperfect frame synchronization is dependent on the frequency correlation of the channels and the amount of timing offset     

Multiple feedback algorithm for RFID MAC protocols

This letter introduces a new tree-based anti-collision scheme using multiple feedbacks for uplink tag random access in a single-cell scenario. We examine MAC efficiency improvements that result from the proposed scheme in terms of uplink (UL) throughput for emerging radio frequency identification (RFID) networks, and compare it with the conventional tree based RFID MAC in ISO 18000-6 Type B standard.