A New Approach for Characterizing the Intermediate Feature of α-Chymotrypsin Refolding by Hydrophobic Interaction Chromatography

A new approach for characterizing the intermediate of urea-denatured α-chymotrypsin (α-Chy) by hydrophobic interaction chromatography (HIC) is presented. The contact surface region (Z, S), affinity (logI), and the character of interaction force (j) of the α-Chy to the stationary phase of HIC (STHIC) between the intermediate (M) and native (N) states were found to be quite different as urea concentration (Curea) changes. With the changes in Curea, a linear relationship between logI and Z was found to exist only for its N state, not for M state, indicating the interaction force between α-Chy in N state to the STHIC to be non-selective, but selective one for its M state. Also, the measured magnitude of both logI and Z in M state is only a fifth of that in N state. All three parameters were employed to distinguish protein in the N state from that in the M state. It would be expected that this result could be employed to distinguish any kind of non-functional protein having correct three-, or four-dimensional molecular structure from their stable M state of any kinds of proteins, and/or other proteins in proteome investigation, separation process of protein, and intensively understanding the intrinsic rule of protein folding in molecular biology

Implementation-Friendly and Energy-Efficient Symbol-by-Symbol Detection Scheme for IEEE 802.15.4 O-QPSK Receivers

In this article, the noncoherent detection scheme for the receiver in wireless sensor nodes is discussed. That is, an implementation-friendly and energy-efficient symbol-by-symbol detection scheme for IEEE 802.15.4 offset-quadrature phase shift keying (O-QPSK) receivers is investigated under both pure additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and fading channel. Specifically, the residual carrier frequency offset (CFO) of the chip sample is estimated and compensated with the aid of the preamble; then, the standard noncoherent detection scheme with perfectly known CFO is directly configured. The corresponding simulation results show that only 4 preamble symbols is sufficient for accurate CFO estimation. Compared with the conventional noncoherent detector, the average running time per data packet of our enhanced detector is only 0.17 times of the former; meanwhile, at the packet error rate of 1 × 10-3, our enhanced detector can obtain 2.2 dB gains in the (32, 4) direct sequence spread spectrum system. A more reasonable trade-off between complexity and reliability is thus achieved for energy-saving and maximum service life in wireless sensor networks (WSNs)

Multiple-Symbol Detection Scheme for IEEE 802.15.4c MPSK Receivers over Slow Rayleigh Fading Channels

Although the full multiple-symbol detection (MSD) for IEEE 802.15.4c multiple phase shift keying (MPSK) receivers gives much better performance than the symbol-by-symbol detection (SBSD), its implementation complexity is extremely heavy. We propose a simple MSD scheme based on two implementation-friendly but powerful strategies. First, we find the best and second-best decisions in each symbol position with the standard SBSD procedure, and the global best decision is frozen. Second, for the remaining symbol positions, only the best and second-best symbol decisions, not all the candidates, are jointly searched by the standard MSD procedure. The simulation results indicate that the packet error rate (PER) performance of the simplified MSD scheme is almost the same as that of the full scheme. In particular, at PER of 1×10−3, no more than 0.2 dB performance gap is observed if we just increase the observation window length N to 2. However, the number of decision metrics needed to be calculated is reduced from 256 to 2. Thus, much balance gain between implementation complexity and detection performance is achieved

Reduced-Complexity Multiple-Symbol Detection of O-QPSK Signals in Smart Metering Utility Networks

In this work, an implementation-friendly multiple-symbol detection (MSD) scheme is proposed for the IEEE 802.15.4g offset quadrature phase shift keying (O-QPSK) receivers over the slow fading channel. The full MSD scheme presents better detection performance than the symbol-by-symbol detection (SBSD) scheme, yet its complexity increases exponentially as the observation window length increases. We introduce a simplified MSD scheme based on two powerful strategies. We first seek the optimal and suboptimal decisions in each symbol position with the standard SBSD procedure. Then, the aforementioned optimal and suboptimal decisions instead of all candidates are jointly searched with the standard MSD procedure. That is, only the most and second most reliable candidates in each symbol position are selected to participate in the final detection. The simulation results demonstrate that the new MSD scheme can achieve more encouraging energy gain than the SBSD scheme, while the high complexity of full MSD is also effectively reduced. A more legitimate compromise between detection performance and complexity is thus accomplished, which enables smart metering utility networks (SUN) nodes to achieve energy saving and maximum service life