Characterisation of flucloxacillin and 5-hydroxymethyl flucloxacillin haptenated HSA in vitro and in vivo

Flucloxacillin is a synthetic penicillin used in the treatment of Staphylococcal infections. Adverse reactions to the drug are believed to arise through covalent modification of proteins, with tissue damage occurring secondary to an immune reaction. Serum proteins have been shown by adduct-specific antibodies to be modified by flucloxacillin, but the nature and sites of modification have not been characterised. Here, in vitro studies on HSA have shown by MS that the modification of protein lysine residues occurs in a dose-, time- and site-dependent manner. Affinity, cation exchange and reversed phase chromatography prior to MS revealed in vivo modification of HSA with flucloxacillin in tolerant patients, with up to nine modified lysine residues being detected in each patient, and with modification of Lys190 and Lys212 being detected in 8/8 patients. It was also revealed for the first time that plasma proteins could be modified with the 5-hydroxymethyl metabolite of flucloxacillin, and that essentially the same Lys residues were targeted by both the parent drug and its metabolite. This study provides a detailed characterisation of sites of chemical modification of an endogenous target and reveals candidate peptides for T-cell and antibody assays of flucloxacillin hypersensitivity.     

Mediating Power: Distance Learning Interfaces, Classroom Epistemology, and the Gaze

Distance learning's interfaces—from corresponding through the postal service to the televised talking head—have traditionally been designed from the top down, supporting banking models of learning or, in writing instruction, current-traditional rhetoric pedagogies. Due to temporal and spatial constraints, these interface designs often support (or encourage) one-way communication from the instructor to the student. Students mostly interact with the instructor by asking questions or submitting work, and they tend to have little correspondence with other peers. These methods clearly privilege the instructor's knowledge and evaluation. Furthermore, these interface designs empower the instructor to gaze upon the students and assess them—often not as a corporeal body but as a corpus of texts. Thus, each interface adopted for distance learning sets up a power dynamic in which the capability to share the roles of creating knowledge is juxtaposed with the instructor's capability to normalize the students and reify their own authority through their gaze. In this article we examine the traditional classroom interface through the correspondence course interface, the simulated classroom interface, and the synchronous video interface to raise questions about the infrastructures of distance learning and their implications for student learning.     

Structural study of titanium oxide films synthesized by ion beam-assisted deposition

The application of titanium dioxide (TiO(2)) films as surgical implant coatings for antibiotic attachment depends crucially on their available surface area and thus their surface morphology and crystallinity. Here, we report our fabrication of high Wenzel ratio TiO(2) films targeted to increase the film surface area using the ion beam-assisted deposition (IBAD) technique at high-deposition temperatures (approximately 610 degrees C). The modulation of the films' surface morphology was accomplished by varying the chemical identity of the concurrent ion beams bombarded on the films during the e-beam evaporation process. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) were employed to investigate the surface morphology of the as-deposited films. X-ray diffractometry (XRD) revealed that these nanocrystalline films primarily consist of anatase phase TiO(2). Wenzel ratio, the ratio of the actual surface area to the projected area, of IBAD films prepared with argon, oxygen, and nitrogen ion beams was measured to be 1.52, 1.31 and 1.49, respectively. The effect of the differences in chemical reactivity and ion size of these three type ion beams are discussed to explain the present results.     

灵活高效的模块化系统

更换整机上模块的能力,可以在保证系统整体功能不变的基础上增减部分功能,以节约成本。随着半导体产业成本不断上涨,竞争日趋激烈,生产商们在保证产量最大化的同时,也绞尽脑汁提高产品质量。因此,他们需要灵活的设备以满足其快速升级和降低成本的要求。提高产出通常以每单元小     

Energy Efficient Hardware Loop Based Optimization for CGRAs

Journal of Signal Processing Systems - Research interest and industry investment in edge computing solutions have increased dramatically in recent years. Consequent quest for balanced performance,...     

Lossless,Passive Transportation of Low Surface Tension Liquids Induced by Patterned Omniphobic Liquidlike Polymer Brushes

Surfaces enabling directional liquid transportation are of great interest for a wide range of applications such as water collection, microfluidics, and heat transfer systems. Surfaces capable of lossless, long-range passive transportation of low surface tension (LST) liquids using wettability patterned, liquidlike coatings with minimal contact angle hysteresis are reported. Lossless LST droplet travel distances over 150 mm are achieved, enabled by a two-phase transportation mechanism: morphological transformation from a bulge to a channel shape, followed by directional transportation along the asymmetrical wedge-shaped channel. The developed surfaces can split, merge, and precisely transport various low-surface tension liquids, including alcohols, alkanes, and solvents. The developed transportation strategy can also enhance LST liquid dropwise condensation through continuous removal of the condensate, even on horizontally positioned surfaces without the assistance of gravity.     

Legal information retrieval for understanding statutory terms

In this work we study, design, and evaluate computational methods to support interpretation of statutory terms. We propose a novel task of discovering sentences for argumentation about the meaning of statutory terms. The task models the analysis of past treatment of statutory terms, an exercise lawyers routinely perform using a combination of manual and computational approaches. We treat the discovery of sentences as a special case of ad hoc document retrieval. The specifics include retrieval of short texts (sentences), specialized document types (legal case texts), and, above all, the unique definition of document relevance provided in detailed annotation guidelines. To support our experiments we assembled a data set comprising 42 queries (26,959 sentences) which we plan to release to the public in the near future in order to support further research. Most importantly, we investigate the feasibility of developing a system that responds to a query with a list of sentences that mention the term in a way that is useful for understanding and elaborating its meaning. This is accomplished by a systematic assessment of different features that model the sentences’ usefulness for interpretation. We combine features into a compound measure that accounts for multiple aspects. The definition of the task, the assembly of the data set, and the detailed task analysis provide a solid foundation for employing a learning-to-rank approach.