Method for identification of mutant glutathione S-transferases conferring enhanced resistance to the anti-cancer drug chlorambucil

We screened library of mutant glutathione S-transferases (GSTs) in Escherichia coli by successive treatments with anti-cancer drug chlorambucil and identified mutant GSTs that conferred enhanced resistance to host against chlorambucil compared with wild-type GST. This study provides a method to develop enzymes with improved efficiency of detoxification against cytotoxic substances.     

Asymptotic stabilization with locally semiconcave control Lyapunov functions on general manifolds

Asymptotic stabilization on noncontractible manifolds is a difficult control problem. If a configuration space is not a contractible manifold, we need to design a time-varying or discontinuous state feedback control for asymptotic stabilization at the desired equilibrium.     

Life sciences and cyberinfrastructure: Dual and interacting revolutions that will drive future science

Over the past quarter century, two revolutions, one in biomedicine, the other in computing and information technology leading to cyberinfrastructure, have made the largest advances and the most significant impacts on science, technology, and society. The interface between these areas is rich with opportunity for major advances. The Life Sciences Grid Research Group (LSG-RG) of the Global Grid Forum recognized the opportunities and needs to bring the communities together to ensure the cyberinfrastructure will be constructed for the benefit of science. This article gives an overview of the area, the activities of the LSG-RG, and the minisymposium organized by LSG-RG, and introduces the papers in this Special Issue of New Generation Computing. Peter Arzberger, Ph.D.: He is the Director of Life Sciences Initiatives, University of California San Diego; Director of the National Biomedical Computation Resource (http://nbcr.ucsd.edu), funded by the National Center of Research Resource of NIH; and the Chair of the Pacific Rim Application and Grid Middleware Assembly (http://www.pragma-grid.edu), an organization of 20 institutions around the pacific rim whose mission is to establish sustained collaborations and to advance the use of grid technologies in applications. He serves on the US National CODATA Committee and the National Advisory Board of the US Long Term Ecological Research. His hobby is working on Lloyds. Abbas Farazdel, Ph.D.: He is a Senior Scientist and an IT Solution Strategist in the Advanced Technologies unit at the IBM Life Sciences. Previously, Dr. Farazdel worked at several positions in IBM including Cluster System Strategist; Data Warehousing and Data Mining Solutions Implementation Manager; and High Performance Computing Consultant. Abbas is the co-chair of the Global Grid Forum (GGF) Life Sciences Grids Research Group. He serves on the Scientific Board of the European Health Grid and the Mid Hudson Technology Council of New York. Abbas received his Ph.D. in Quantum Chemistry and M.Sc. in Computational Physics from the University of Massachusetts concurrently. Akihiko Konagaya, Dr. Eng.: He is Project Director of Bioinformatics Group, RIKEN Genomic Sciences Center. He received his B.S. and M.S. from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1978 and 1980 in Informatics Science, and joined NEC Corporation in 1980, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in 1997, RIKEN GSC in 2003. His research covers wide area from computer architectures to bioinformatics. He has been much involved into the Open Bioinformatics Grid project since 2002. Larry Ang: As the Project Director in the Bioinformatics Institute (BII), he is in charge of major international collaborative projects on biomedical grids between BII and other research organizations (http://web.bii.a-star.edu.sg/ larry/). In particular, he works actively with bodies such as Pragma where he serves on the Steering Committee. He is also the Secretary of the Life Sciences Grid Research Group of GGF (Global Grid Forum) He serves on the Gelato Federation; Gelato was started by HP Labs and pushes open source software on linux platforms. Shinji Shimojo, Ph.D.: He received his M.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Osaka University in 1983 and 1986, respectively. He was an Assistant Professor with the Department of Information and Computer Sciences, Faculty of Engineering Science at Osaka University from 1986, and an Associate Professor with Computation Center from 1991 to 1998. During the period, he also worked as a visiting researcher at the University of California, Irvine for a year. He has been a Professor with Cybermedia Center (then Computation Center) at Osaka University since 1998. His current research work is focusing on a wide variety of multimedia applications, peer-to-peer communication networks, ubiquitous network systems and Grid technologies. He is a member of ACM, IEEE and IEICE. Rick L. Stevens, Ph.D.: He is Professor, University of Chicago; director, Mathematics and Computer Science Division/Argonne National Laboratory; director, ANL/UC Computation Institute; project director for National Science Foundation supported TeraGrid project; head of the Argonne/Chicago Futures Lab. He is interested in the development of innovative tools and techniques that enable computational scientists to solve important large-scale problems effectively on advanced scientific computers. His research focuses on three principal areas: advanced collaboration and visualization environments, high-performance computer architectures (including Grids), and computational problems in life sciences and systems biology. He teaches courses on computer architecture, collaboration technology, virtual reality, parallel computing, and computational science.     

Distributed Telerobotics System Based on Common Object Request Broker Architecture

This paper proposes using CORBA as communication architecture to integrate network-distributed software and robotic systems in support systems for the aged or disabled. The proposed method keeps system costs low and expands availability. Its high scaling and inter-operating ability allows clients and server objects that are written in different languages, run in different operating systems, and connected to different networks to inter-operate. It also enables the system to be extended and integrated with other technologies and applications distributed over the Internet. Based on CORBA, we developed hardware base including a robot arm and an omnidirectional mobile robot and application servers including a task-level robot arm control server, live feedback image server, mobile robot control server and iGPS server. By remotely controlling mobile robot to cooperate with the robot arm, the caregivers or family member can use the developed system for some basic services to the aged or disabled.     

A challenge towards next-generation research infrastructure for advanced life science

Recently, life scientists have expressed a strong need for computational power sufficient to complete their analyses within a realistic time as well as for a computational power capable of seamlessly retrieving biological data of interest from multiple and diverse bio-related databases for their research infrastructure. This need implies that life science strongly requires the benefits of advanced IT. In Japan, the Biogrid project has been promoted since 2002 toward the establishment of a next-generation research infrastructure for advanced life science. In this paper, the Biogrid strategy toward these ends is detailed along with the role and mission imposed on the Biogrid project. In addition, we present the current status of the development of the project as well as the future issues to be tackled. Haruki Nakamura, Ph.D.: He is Professor of Protein Informatics at Institute for Protein Research, Osaka University. He received his B.S., M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 1975, 1977 and 1980 respectively. His research field is Biophysics and Bioinformatics, and has so far developed several original algorithms in the computational analyses of protein electrostatic features and folding dynamics. He is also a head of PDBj (Protein Data Bank Japan) to manage and develop the protein structure database, collaborating with RCSB (Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics) in USA and MSD-EBI (Macromolecular Structure Database at the European Bioinformatics Institute) in EU. Susumu Date, Ph.D.: He is Assistant Professor of the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University. He received his B.E., M.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Osaka University in 1997, 2000 and 2002, respectively. His research field is computer science and his current research interests include application of Grid computing and related information technologies to life sciences. He is a member of IEEE CS and IPSJ. Hideo Matsuda, Ph.D.: He is Professor of the Department of Bioinformatic Engineering, the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University. He received his B.S., M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees from Kobe University in 1982, 1984 and 1987 respectively. For M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees, he majored in computer science. His research interests include computational analysis of genomic sequences. He has been involved in the FANTOM (Functional Annotation of Mouse) Project for the functional annotation of RIKEN mouse full-length cDNA sequences. He is a member of ISCB, IEEE CS and ACM. Shinji Shimojo, Ph.D.: He received M.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Osaka University in 1983 and 1986 respectively. He was an Assistant Professor with the Department of Information and Computer Sciences, Faculty of Engineering Science at Osaka University from 1986, and an Associate Professor with Computation Center from 1991 to 1998. During the period, he also worked as a visiting researcher at the University of California, Irvine for a year. He has been Professor with Cybermedia Center (then Computation Center) at Osaka University since 1998. His current research work focus on a wide variety of multimedia applications, peer-to-peer communication networks, ubiquitous network systems and Grid technologies. He is a member of ACM, IEEE and IEICE.     

Facilitated transport of ethyl docosahexaenoate through solution-cast perfluorosulfonated ionomer membranes

The facilitated transport of ethyl docosahexaenoate (DHA-Et) through the thin solution-cast perfluorosulfonated ionomer membranes has been studied. The carrier of DHA-Et was silver ion and was immobilized in the support ionomer membrane by electrostatic forces. In this system, the feed phase, membrane phase, and receiving phase had the same solvent. This system was already proved to be highly stable in our previous work. When ethanol/water (85/15) was used as the solvent, the DHA-Et permeance in the cast membrane was about four times higher than that in the commercial Nafion® 117 membrane, due to the smaller membrane thickness. In the case of acetone solvent, a high selectivity of DHA-Et to ethyl oleate of 42 and a high facilitation factor of 153 were obtained. These membrane performances were superior to those of the Nafion® 117 membrane. The effects of membrane preparation conditions, such as annealing temperature and kinds of polar solvents added to the ionomer solution before annealing, on the membrane performance was investigated in detail. Furthermore, small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) measurement was carried out to study the membrane structure. The experimental result suggests higher crystallinity in the cast membrane annealed at higher temperature. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 73: 961–968, 1999     

Catalytic dehydrochlorination of 1,2-dichloroethane into vinyl chloride over polyacrylonitrile-based active carbon fiber

Dehydrochlorination of 1,2-dichloroethane (1,2-DCE) into vinyl chloride (VC) was carried out over polyacrylonitrile-based active carbon fibers (PAN-ACFs). PAN-ACFs showed excellent catalytic activity, although the lifetime was not sufficiently long enough for practical application. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) revealed that the active site was pyridinic nitrogen and that chlorine stayed on the surface after the reaction. Coke was also produced in the pores, as suggested by the weight increase. The heat-treatment after the reaction released hydrogen chloride from the ACF, but no catalytic activity was restored. The preheat-treatment was found to shorten the catalytic lifetime.

An optimum temperature and uniform distribution in the catalyst bed achieved by this fluidized bed may provide a practical process of sufficient life.     

Preparation and properties of bio‐based epoxy montomorillonite nanocomposites derived from polyglycerol polyglycidyl ether and ε‐polylysine

Glycerol polyglycidyl ether (GPE) and polyglycerol polyglycidyl ether (PGPE) were cured with ε‐poly(L ‐lysine) (PL) using epoxy/amine ratios of 1 : 1 and 2 : 1 to create bio‐based epoxy cross‐linked resins. When PGPE was used as an epoxy resin and the epoxy/amine ratio was 1 : 1, the cured neat resin showed the greatest glass transition temperature (T_g), as measured by differential scanning calorimetry. Next, the mixture of PGPE, PL, and montomorillonite (MMT) at an epoxy/amine ratio of 1 : 1 in water was dried and cured finally at 110°C to create PGPE‐PL/MMT composites. The X‐ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy measurements revealed that the composites with MMT content 7–15 wt % were exfoliated nanocomposites and the composite with MMT content 20 wt % was an intercalated nanocomposite. The T_g and storage modulus at 50–100°C for the PGPE‐PL/MMT composites measured by DMA increased with increasing MMT content until 15 wt % and decreased at 20 wt %. The tensile strength and modulus of the PGPE‐PL/MMT composites (MMT content 15 wt %: 42 and 5300 MPa) were much greater than those of the cured PGPE‐PL resin (4 and 6 MPa). Aerobic biodegradability of the PGPE‐PL in an aqueous medium was ～ 4% after 90 days, and the PGPE‐PL/MMT nanocomposites with MMT content 7–15 wt % showed lower biodegradability. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2009     

Long-chain fatty acids containing ether linkage. I. The antibacterial and fungicidal activities of some new β-alkyloxypropionic acids and their methyl esters

β-Alkoxypropionic acids and their methyl esters were made with alkoxy groups ranging from C₄H₉O to C₁₈H₃₅O: R-O-CH₂CH₂COOH (CH₃). Methyl esters and acids were also made with one and with two oxyethylene groups between the alkoxy group and the propionic acid group: RO (CH₂ CH₂ O) n-CH₂CH₂ COOH(CH₃). The compounds were tested againstStaphylococcus aureus and againstPenicillium for growth inhibition. The optimum size of the alkoxy group appears to be R=C₁₂H₂₅. Oxyethylene groups enhanced the activity againstS. aureus, but had relatively little effect againstPenicillium.