Risk Assessment Overview

Risk assessment is used in many industries to identify and manage risks. Initially developed for use on aeronautical and nuclear systems, risk assessment has been applied to transportation, chemical, computer, financial, and security systems among others. It is used to gain an understanding of the weaknesses or vulnerabilities in a system so modification can be made to increase operability, efficiency, and safety and to reduce failure and down-time. Risk assessment results are primary inputs to risk-informed decision making; where risk information including uncertainty is used along with other pertinent information to assist management in the decision-making process. Therefore, to be useful, a risk assessment must be directed at specific objectives. As the world embraces the globalization of trade and manufacturing, understanding the associated risk become important to decision making. Applying risk assessment techniques to a global system of development, manufacturing, and transportation can provide insight into how the system can fail, the likelihood of system failure and the consequences of system failure. The risk assessment can identify those elements that contribute most to risk and identify measures to prevent and mitigate failures, disruptions, and damaging outcomes. In addition, risk associated with public and environment impact can be identified. The risk insights gained can be applied to making decisions concerning suitable development and manufacturing locations, supply chains, and transportation strategies. While risk assessment has been mostly applied to mechanical and electrical systems, the concepts and techniques can be applied across other systems and activities. This paper provides a basic overview of the development of a risk assessment

Chemical cleavage reactions of DNA on solid support: application in mutation detection

BACKGROUND: The conventional solution-phase Chemical Cleavage of Mismatch (CCM) method is time-consuming, as the protocol requires purification of DNA after each reaction step. This paper describes a new version of CCM to overcome this problem by immobilizing DNA on silica solid supports. RESULTS: DNA test samples were loaded on to silica beads and the DNA bound to the solid supports underwent chemical modification reactions with KMnO(4 )(potassium permanganate) and hydroxylamine in 3M TEAC (tetraethylammonium chloride) solution. The resulting modified DNA was then simultaneously cleaved by piperidine and removed from the solid supports to afford DNA fragments without the requirement of DNA purification between reaction steps. CONCLUSIONS: The new solid-phase version of CCM is a fast, cost-effective and sensitive method for detection of mismatches and mutations

International Space Station Active Thermal Control Sub-System On-Orbit Pump Performance and Reliability Using Liquid Ammonia as a Coolant

The International Space Station (ISS) contains two Active Thermal Control Sub-systems (ATCS) that function by using a liquid ammonia cooling system collecting waste heat and rejecting it using radiators. These subsystems consist of a number of heat exchangers, cold plates, radiators, the Pump and Flow Control Subassembly (PFCS), and the Pump Module (PM), all of which are Orbital Replaceable Units (ORU's). The PFCS provides the motive force to circulate the ammonia coolant in the Photovoltaic Thermal Control Subsystem (PVTCS) and has been in operation since December, 2000. The Pump Module (PM) circulates liquid ammonia coolant within the External Active Thermal Control Subsystem (EATCS) cooling the ISS internal coolant (water) loops collecting waste heat and rejecting it through the ISS radiators. These PM loops have been in operation since December, 2006. This paper will discuss the original reliability analysis approach of the PFCS and Pump Module, comparing them against the current operational performance data for the ISS External Thermal Control Loops

Extracting causal relations on HIV drug resistance from literature

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In HIV treatment it is critical to have up-to-date resistance data of applicable drugs since HIV has a very high rate of mutation. These data are made available through scientific publications and must be extracted manually by experts in order to be used by virologists and medical doctors. Therefore there is an urgent need for a tool that partially automates this process and is able to retrieve relations between drugs and virus mutations from literature.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this work we present a novel method to extract and combine relationships between HIV drugs and mutations in viral genomes. Our extraction method is based on natural language processing (NLP) which produces grammatical relations and applies a set of rules to these relations. We applied our method to a relevant set of PubMed abstracts and obtained 2,434 extracted relations with an estimated performance of 84% for F-score. We then combined the extracted relations using logistic regression to generate resistance values for each <drug, mutation> pair. The results of this relation combination show more than 85% agreement with the Stanford HIVDB for the ten most frequently occurring mutations. The system is used in 5 hospitals from the Virolab project <url>http://www.virolab.org</url> to preselect the most relevant novel resistance data from literature and present those to virologists and medical doctors for further evaluation.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The proposed relation extraction and combination method has a good performance on extracting HIV drug resistance data. It can be used in large-scale relation extraction experiments. The developed methods can also be applied to extract other type of relations such as gene-protein, gene-disease, and disease-mutation.</p

One-Pot Microwave-Assisted Synthesis of 3,4-Disubstituted 2-Quinolinones

<div><p></p><p>An improved one-pot synthesis of 3,4-disubstituted 2-quinolinones is described. The condensation of substituted 2-aminobenzophenone (or 2-aminophenyl alkyl ketone) with acid chlorides was carried out in the presence of triethylamine (or NaH) under microwave reaction conditions (150oC, 200 psi). The reactions were completed within minutes to produce 2-quinolinones in moderate to excellent yields and good purities.</p> <p>[Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of <i>Synthetic Communications</i>® for the following free supplemental resource(s): Full experimental and spectral details.]</p> </div

Challenges for protein chemical synthesis in the 21st century: Bridging genomics and proteomics

The Human Genome Project and other major sequencing projects have rapidly provided a vast array of new protein sequences. In the postgenomic era, the physical form of many of these gene-encoded sequences will be vital for biomedical research and drug development. In the epoch, the advantages of protein chemical synthesis will complement recombinant-DNA methods, and will be used to provide rapid access to small proteins or functional receptor domains. In this review the key methodological advances that have made the synthesis of long peptides and small proteins more effective will be presented. Focus is given to the issues and goals of contemporary chemical protein synthesis, including (1) the rapid chain assembly of tailored peptide segments for use in ligation strategies, and (2) development of highly efficient and universal chemoselective ligation strategies. (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc

Characterization and implication of phytolith-associated potassium in rice straw and paddy soils

Rice straw contains up to 2.3% K in dry matter, including potassium (K) subcompartmented in phytoliths, complex siliceous structures formed in plant tissue via precipitation of Si. Rice straw is usually returned to the soil as a conventional practice to sustain soil nutrients, and therefore, the K pool accompanied with rice straw phytoliths is also cycled. Based on phytoliths obtained by ashing of rice straw at 400 °C and dissolution experiments using batch extraction in combination with physical separation of phytoliths by heavy liquid, this study evaluated the phytolith K(phytK) pool in rice straw and aged phytoliths in paddy soils. Entrapped organic matter containing K within phytolith silica cells was visualized by X-ray tomographic microscopy, and releases of this phytK pool accompanying phytolith dissolution were quantified. A 1% Na2CO3 solution, which has been commonly used to extract amorphous Si and to quantify soil phytoliths, showed obvious responses for K derived from phytolith dissolution, indicating that the Na2CO3 method can be developed for measurement of phytK. In 13 soil samples, Na2CO3-dissolvable K content assignable to phytK was 0.55 ± 0.39 g kg−1 in the puddled horizon, suggesting the phytK pool is of high significance for the management of K in paddy soils.</p