SPARC 2017 retrospect & prospects : Salford postgraduate annual research conference book of abstracts

Welcome to the Book of Abstracts for the 2017 SPARC conference. This year we not only celebrate the work of our PGRs but also the 50th anniversary of Salford as a University, which makes this year’s conference extra special. Once again we have received a tremendous contribution from our postgraduate research community; with over 130 presenters, the conference truly showcases a vibrant PGR community at Salford. These abstracts provide a taster of the research strengths of their works, and provide delegates with a reference point for networking and initiating critical debate. With such wide-ranging topics being showcased, we encourage you to exploit this great opportunity to engage with researchers working in different subject areas to your own. To meet global challenges, high impact research inevitably requires interdisciplinary collaboration. This is recognised by all major research funders. Therefore engaging with the work of others and forging collaborations across subject areas is an essential skill for the next generation of researchers

Functional differences between E. Coli and eskape pathogen groes/groel

As the GroES/GroEL chaperonin system is the only bacterial chaperone that is essential under all conditions, we have been interested in the development of GroES/GroEL inhibitors as potential antibiotics. Using Escherichia coli GroES/GroEL as a surrogate, we have discovered several classes of GroES/GroEL inhibitors that show potent antibacterial activity against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. However, it remains unknown if E. coli GroES/GroEL is functionally identical to other GroES/GroEL chaperonins and hence if our inhibitors will function against other chap-eronins. Herein we report our initial efforts to characterize the GroES/GroEL chapero-nins from clinically significant ESKAPE pathogens (Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Enterobacter species). We used complementation experiments in GroES/GroEL-deficient and-null E. coli strains to report on exogenous ESKAPE chaperone function. In GroES/ GroEL-deficient (but not knocked-out) E. coli, we found that only a subset of the ESKAPE GroES/GroEL chaperone systems could complement to produce a viable orga-nism. Surprisingly, GroES/GroEL chaperone systems from two of the ESKAPE pathogens were found to complement in E. coli, but only in the strict absence of either E. coli GroEL (P. aeruginosa) orbothE. coli GroES and GroEL (E. faecium). In addition, GroES/ GroEL from S. aureus was unable to complement E. coli GroES/GroEL under all condi-tions. The resulting viable strains, in which E. coli groESL was replaced with ESKAPE groESL, demonstrated similar growth kinetics to wild-type E. coli, butdisplayedan elongated phenotype (potentially indicating compromised GroEL function) at some temperatures. These results suggest functional differences between GroES/GroEL chaperonins despite high conservation of amino acid identity. IMPORTANCE The GroES/GroEL chaperonin from E. coli has long served as the model system for other chaperonins. This assumption seemed valid because of the high conservation between the chaperonins. It was, therefore, shocking to discover ESKAPE pathogen GroES/GroEL formed mixed-complex chaperonins in the presence of E. coli GroES/GroEL, leading to loss of organism viability in some cases. Complete replacement of E. coli groESL with ESKAPE groESL restored organism viability, but produced an elongated phenotype, suggesting differences in chaperonin function, including client specificity and/or refolding cycle rates. These data offer important mechanistic insight into these remarkable machines, and the new strains developed allow for the synthesis of homogeneous chaperonins for biochemical studies and to further our efforts to de-velop chaperonin-targeted antibiotics. © 2021 Sivinski et al.Open access journalThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Condition monitoring of wind turbine gearboxes through on-site measurement and vibration analysis techniques

Condition monitoring of gear-based mechanical systems undergoing non-stationary operation conditions is in general very challenging. In particular, this issue is remarkable as regards wind energy technology because most of the modern wind turbines are geared and gearbox damages account for at least the 20% of their unavailability time. In this work, a new method for the diagnosis of gearbox damages is proposed: the main idea is that vibrations are measured at the tower, instead that at the gearbox. This implies that measurements can be performed without impacting on the wind turbine operation, as desirable by the point of view of wind turbine practitioners. A test case study is discussed: it deals with a wind farm owned by Renvico, featuring 6 wind turbines with 2 MW of rated power each. The vibration measurements at a wind turbine suspected to be damaged and at reference wind turbines are processed through a multivariate Novelty Detection algorithm in the feature space. The application of this algorithm is justified by univariate statistical tests on the time-domain features selected and by a visual inspection of the data set via Principal Component Analysis. Finally, a novelty index based on the Mahalanobis distance is used to detect the anomalous conditions at the damaged wind turbine