Further characterization of rat dihydroceramide desaturase: Tissue distribution, subcellular localization, and substrate specificity

The introduction of the double bond in the sphingoid backbone of sphingolipids occurs at the level of dihydroceramide via an NADPH-dependent desaturase, as discovered in permeabilized rat hepatocytes. In the rat, the enzyme activity, which has now been further characterized, appeared to be mostly enriched in liver and Harderian gland. By means of subcellular fractionation of rat liver homogenates and density gradient separation of microsomal fractions, the desaturase was localized to the endoplasmic reticulum. Various detergents were inhibitory to the enzyme, and maximal activities were obtained in the presence of NADPH and when the substrate was complexed to albumin. In the presence of albumin, the chain length of the fatty acid of the truncated dihydroceramides hardly affected the activity. Finally, in view of a likely evolutionary relationship between desaturases and hydroxylases, the formation of hydroxylated intermediates was analyzed. No evidence for their presence was found under our assay conditions. In part presented at the Conférence Jacques Monod “Cell lipids: Topology, transport and signalling functions”, Aussois, May 1997 (France); Van Veldhoven, P.P. “Ceramide biosynthesis: Characterisation of the conversion of dihydroceramide to ceramide”. Contributed equally to this study.     

Dynamic viscosity of olive oil as a function of composition and temperature: A first approach

Knowledge of the viscosity of virgin olive oils (VOOs) is of great importance for the design of pilot plants, to determine the time required for the settling of particles at the end of the production chain and from a sensory view point. The dynamic viscosities of French VOOs from four different cultivars (‘Aglandau’, ‘Bouteillan’, ‘Salonenque’ and ‘Tanche’) were studied as a function of their fatty acid and TAG compositions and of the temperature [10–50°C]. These four VOOs had different TAG and fatty acid compositions representative of the range of compositional variations in the main French oils. Their viscosities were similar, although small but measurable differences that depended on their compositions were apparent. All the VOO samples exhibited the same dynamic viscosity pattern over temperature. For a given temperature, the viscosity difference was the greatest between Aglandau and Salonenque oils, Aglandau being the oil with the highest viscosity. The correlation between temperature and viscosity was highlighted by an Arrhenius model for this Newtonian fluid. The Arrhenius activation energy was correlated (R² = 0.993) with the percentage of triolein, the main TAG in olive oil.     

减少引起不和谐的问题

三菱电器的Guy Kennett说:“为了节能而安装的变速驱动器会引入不协调的问题,这是不能根除的。但是,它就好像广告电邮和垃圾邮件一样是可以减少的。”     

Interfacial models in viscoplastic composites materials

The aim of the present work is to extend the concept of interphase and equivalent imperfect interface in the context of viscoplasticity. The interphase takes the form of a thin curved layer of constant thickness, made up of a rigid viscoplastic material located between two other surrounding materials. We aim at representing this interphase by an interface with appropriately devised interface conditions. To reach this objective, a Taylor expansion of the relevant physical fields in the thin region is used. It is shown that, depending of the degree of stiffness of the layer with respect to the neighboring media, this interphase can be replaced by an idealized imperfect interface involving the jump of the velocity field or the traction vector. The first kind of interface model, applicable to soft interphases, is the “spring-type” interface across which the traction are continuous but the velocity field exhibits a discontinuity which is given in term of the traction by a power-law type relation. Moreover, it is shown that the constant of the model can be expressed in terms of the material parameters of the interphase. When the interphase is stiffer than the two surrounding media, it can be replaced by an imperfect interface described by a generalization of the so-called Young Laplace model to viscoplastic solids.     

Influence of chemical composition on mechanical properties of spark plasma sintered boron carbide monoliths

Fully dense boron carbide monoliths exhibiting fine microstructure (i.e., submicrometric grain size) are sintered by Spark Plasma Sintering. Two different commercial powder batches, exhibiting different stoichiometries (i.e., B/C ratio and oxygen content) and various amounts of secondary phases (i.e., boric acid and free carbon), are used. Their chemical composition is well‐defined by coupling different methods (Transmission Electron Microscopy associated with XRD analyses, and Instrumental Gas Analysis), and are correlated with their mechanical properties, characterized from meso‐ to macro‐scopic scales by nano‐indentation and ultrasonic pulse echography. The presence of secondary phases (graphite and boric acid) is evidenced in various proportions in each powder batch. If the boric acid disappears during sintering, the graphite remains. However, for the considered amounts of graphite (lower than 1 wt%), the low variations in graphite content have no significant effect on hardness and elasticity values. At the opposite, the presence of oxygen in boron carbide lattice, leading to a boron oxycarbide phase, induces a decrease in both hardness and elasticity properties.     

Scoring binding affinity of multiple ligands using implicit solvent and a single molecular dynamics trajectory: application to influenza neuraminidase

We explore a perturbative approach to calculation of binding free energy of multiple ligands, based on a single molecular dynamics simulation of a reference ligand-receptor complex and analysis via a hybrid force field/continuum model potential. The methodology is applied to prediction of relative binding free energies of 10 Influenza neuraminidase inhibitors, using Poisson-Boltzmann and generalised Born models of implicit solvent. These single-step MM-PB/SA and MM-GB/SA approaches predict the experimentally most potent ligand as first- or second-ranked according to total binding free energy. Ranking of inhibitors displays only moderate sensitivity to the choice of reference trajectory and ligand partial charge scheme. When ranked according to total electrostatic binding free energy, correlation with experiment improves (r(2) of 0.72); this may be related to underestimated first solvation shell effects by the implicit water models. Therefore, to increase the generality of this single-step approach as part of a potential computational compound optimisation strategy, further development of the treatment of short-range solvent interactions is warranted.     

Massively parallel Lucas Kanade optical flow for real-time video processing applications

This paper deals with dense optical flow estimation from the perspective of the trade-off between quality of the estimated flow and computational cost which is required by real-world applications. We propose a fast and robust local method, denoted by eFOLKI, and describe its implementation on GPU. It leads to very high performance even on large image formats such as 4 K (3,840 × 2,160) resolution. In order to assess the interest of eFOLKI, we first present a comparative study with currently available GPU codes, including local and global methods, on a large set of data with ground truth. eFOLKI appears significantly faster while providing quite accurate and highly robust estimated flows. We then show, on four real-time video processing applications based on optical flow, that eFOLKI reaches the requirements both in terms of estimated flows quality and of processing rate.     

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