Performance Measurement of Revolving Vane Compressor

Over the years, rotary compressors have gained popularity and widely used in household and automotive air-conditioning applications because of the compact nature and silent characteristics. By engaging a revolutionary concept to elevate the rotary compressor efficiency, a novel compressor mechanism, named the Revolving Vane compressor is invented. The prototype R134a compressor was designed, fabricated, instrumented and tested. Compressor tests were conducted for varying suction pressures, superheats, discharge pressures and oil circulation ratio. For each test, refrigerant mass flow rate, power consumption, suction and discharge temperatures and pressures were recorded. The new compressor mechanism has been proven for its compression ability and the preliminary measurements show comparable volumetric and mechanical efficiencies to the other existing compressors. In addition, the novel compressor design is outstanding for its cost competitiveness due to mechanism simplicity. It is foreseen that this new compressor will be a great candidate in future air-conditioning and refrigeration market

Clinical features and mutational analysis of X-linked agammaglobulinemia patients in Malaysia

BackgroundBruton’s tyrosine kinase (BTK) is a cytoplasmic protein involved in the B cell development. X-linked agammaglobulinemia (XLA) is caused by mutation in the BTK gene, which results in very low or absent B cells. Affected males have markedly reduced immunoglobulin levels, which render them susceptible to recurrent and severe bacterial infections. Methods: Patients suspected with X-linked agammaglobulinemia were enrolled during the period of 2010-2018. Clinical summary, and immunological profiles of these patients were recorded. Peripheral blood samples were collected for monocyte BTK protein expression detection and BTK genetic analysis. The medical records between January 2020 and June 2023 were reviewed to investigate COVID-19 in XLA.ResultsTwenty-two patients (from 16 unrelated families) were molecularly diagnosed as XLA. Genetic testing revealed fifteen distinct mutations, including four splicing mutations, four missense mutations, three nonsense mutations, three short deletions, and one large indel mutation. These mutations scattered throughout the BTK gene and mostly affected the kinase domain. All mutations including five novel mutations were predicted to be pathogenic or deleterious by in silico prediction tools. Genetic testing confirmed that eleven mothers and seven sisters were carriers for the disease, while three mutations were de novo. Flow cytometric analysis showed that thirteen patients had minimal BTK expression (0-15%) while eight patients had reduced BTK expression (16-64%). One patient was not tested for monocyte BTK expression due to insufficient sample. Pneumonia (n=13) was the most common manifestation, while Pseudomonas aeruginosa was the most frequently isolated pathogen from the patients (n=4). Mild or asymptomatic COVID-19 was reported in four patients.ConclusionThis report provides the first overview of demographic, clinical, immunological and genetic data of XLA in Malaysia. The combination of flow cytometric assessment and BTK genetic analysis provides a definitive diagnosis for XLA patients, especially with atypical clinical presentation. In addition, it may also allow carrier detection and assist in genetic counselling and prenatal diagnosis

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Retrospective evaluation of whole exome and genome mutation calls in 746 cancer samples

Funder: NCI U24CA211006Abstract: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) curated consensus somatic mutation calls using whole exome sequencing (WES) and whole genome sequencing (WGS), respectively. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, which aggregated whole genome sequencing data from 2,658 cancers across 38 tumour types, we compare WES and WGS side-by-side from 746 TCGA samples, finding that ~80% of mutations overlap in covered exonic regions. We estimate that low variant allele fraction (VAF < 15%) and clonal heterogeneity contribute up to 68% of private WGS mutations and 71% of private WES mutations. We observe that ~30% of private WGS mutations trace to mutations identified by a single variant caller in WES consensus efforts. WGS captures both ~50% more variation in exonic regions and un-observed mutations in loci with variable GC-content. Together, our analysis highlights technological divergences between two reproducible somatic variant detection efforts

Echovirus 19 associated with a case of acute flaccid paralysis

Acute flaccid paralysis can be caused by many members of the enterovirus genus, most notably the three poliviruses types 1 to 3. We report the case of acute flaccid paralysis caused by echovirus 19. The Western Pacific region has been declared polio free by the WHO since 2000. Australia is now using inactivated polio vaccine in the National Immunization Schedule. This vaccine does not carry the extremely rare risk of vaccine associated acute flaccid paralysis but it does leave our newly vaccinated population open gastrointestinal infection with polioviruses and the risk of circulation of the wild-type virus. Continued surveillance of cases of acute flaccid paralysis is to detect polioviruses is essential until poliovirus is completely eradicated. © 2012 The Authors. Journal of Paediatrics and Child Healt

Synergistic Field Crop Pest Management Properties of Plant-Derived Essential Oils in Combination with Synthetic Pesticides and Bioactive Molecules: A Review

The management of insect pests and fungal diseases that cause damage to crops has become challenging due to the rise of pesticide and fungicide resistance. The recent developments in studies related to plant-derived essential oil products has led to the discovery of a range of phytochemicals with the potential to combat pesticide and fungicide resistance. This review paper summarizes and interprets the findings of experimental work based on plant-based essential oils in combination with existing pesticidal and fungicidal agents and novel bioactive natural and synthetic molecules against the insect pests and fungi responsible for the damage of crops. The insect mortality rate and fractional inhibitory concentration were used to evaluate the insecticidal and fungicidal activities of essential oil synergists against crop-associated pests. A number of studies have revealed that plant-derived essential oils are capable of enhancing the insect mortality rate and reducing the minimum inhibitory concentration of commercially available pesticides, fungicides and other bioactive molecules. Considering these facts, plant-derived essential oils represent a valuable and novel source of bioactive compounds with potent synergism to modulate crop-associated insect pests and phytopathogenic fungi

Correction: Dassanayake et al. Synergistic Field Crop Pest Management Properties of Plant-Derived Essential Oils in Combination with Synthetic Pesticides and Bioactive Molecules: A Review. <i>Foods</i> 2021, <i>10</i>, 2016

In the original publication [...

Angiopoietin-like 4 induces a β-catenin-mediated upregulation of ID3 in fibroblasts to reduce scar collagen expression

In adult skin wounds, collagen expression rapidly re-establishes the skin barrier, although the resultant scar is aesthetically and functionally inferior to unwounded tissue. Although TGFβ signaling and fibroblasts are known to be responsible for scar-associated collagen production, there are currently no prophylactic treatments for scar management. Fibroblasts in crosstalk with wound keratinocytes orchestrate collagen expression, although the precise paracrine pathways involved remain poorly understood. Herein, we showed that the matricellular protein, angiopoietin-like 4 (ANGPTL4), accelerated wound closure and reduced collagen expression in diabetic and ANGPTL4-knockout mice. Similar observations were made in wild-type rat wounds. Using human fibroblasts as a preclinical model for mechanistic studies, we systematically elucidated that ANGPTL4 binds to cadherin-11, releasing membrane-bound β-catenin which translocate to the nucleus and transcriptionally upregulate the expression of Inhibitor of DNA-binding/differentiation protein 3 (ID3). ID3 interacts with scleraxis, a basic helix-loop-helix transcription factor, to inhibit scar-associated collagen types 1α2 and 3α1 production by fibroblasts. We also showed ANGPTL4 interaction with cadherin-11 in human scar tissue. Our findings highlight a central role for matricellular proteins such as ANGPTL4 in the attenuation of collagen expression and may have a broader implication for other fibrotic pathologies.ASTAR (Agency for Sci., Tech. and Research, S’pore)Published versio