Super-aptamer bio-imprinted hydrogels : an investigation into the optimization and characterization of cross-linked polymeric materials displaying macromolecular amplified responses

It is becoming more important to detect ultra-low concentrations of analytes for biomedical, environmental, and national security applications. Equally important is that new methods should be easy to use, inexpensive, portable, and if possible allow detection using the naked eye. Detection of low concentrations of analytes generally cannot be achieved directly, but requires signal amplification by catalysts, macromolecules, metal surfaces or supramolecular aggregates. The rapidly progressing field of macromolecular signal amplification has been advanced using conjugated polymers, chirality in polymers, solvating polymers and polymerization/depolymerization strategies. The use of molecularly imprinted polymers is ideal for creation of novel sensors to meet the demands of bioanalytical fields. Often referred to as plastic antibodies, molecularly imprinted polymers can often approach the activity and specificity of antibodies. Additionally, they are cheap to produce relative to traditional bioassays, exhibit greater stability to pH, heat, enzymatic degradation, and are reusable over long periods of time. The ever expanding field of molecularly imprinted polymers generally focuses of new techniques and materials aimed at increasing the selectivity of artificial binding sites based of improved shape, size, or functional selectivity both as a function of bulk polymer matrix and functional receptor molecules located in the active site. Here, a new type of aptamer-based hydrogel with specific response to target proteins demonstrates an additional category of macromolecular signal amplification. This super-aptamer assembly provides the first example of using protein-specific aptamers to create volume changing hydrogels with amplified response to the target protein. A remarkable aspect of these super-aptamer hydrogels is that volume shrinking is visible to the naked eye down to femtomolar concentrations of protein. This extraordinary macromolecular amplification is attributed to a complex interplay between protein-aptamer crosslinks and the structure of the hydrogel network surrounding it. Additionally, the further investigation of the role played by N, O-bismethacrylethanolamine toward the recognition of a pair of enantiomers was explored. Previous work showed its utility as a one monomer moleculary imprinted polymer material capable of enantiomeric separation. Its further characterization was explored here concerning its ability to be used as a binding receptor in concert with its role in reducing polymer matrix non-selective binding. The deconvolution of this duality could lead to the design of better monomers capable of greater specificity and selectivity in monolithic molecularly imprinted polymers

Secure optical layer flexibility in 5G networks

We propose an adaptive resource allocation framework for on-demand communications in a software-defined mobile fronthaul (MFH) network that supports dynamic processing resource sharing. Our theoretical and experimental studies point to the feasibility of secure bidirectional transmission with guaranteed bit error rate (BER) service using adaptive modulation and coding.This 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]

Landslides in a changing climate

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Rainstorms able to induce flash floods in a Mediterranean-climate region (Calabria, southern Italy)

Abstract. Heavy rainstorms often induce flash flooding, one of the natural disasters most responsible for damage to man-made infrastructures and loss of lives, also adversely affecting the opportunities for socio-economic development of Mediterranean countries. The frequently dramatic damage of flash floods are often detected, with sufficient accuracy, by post-event surveys, but rainfall causing them are still only roughly characterized. With the aim of improving the understanding of the temporal structure and spatial distribution of heavy rainstorms in the Mediterranean context, a statistical analysis was carried out in Calabria (southern Italy) concerning rainstorms that mainly induced flash floods, but also shallow landslides and debris flows. Thus, a method is proposed – based on the overcoming of heuristically predetermined threshold values of cumulated rainfall, maximum intensity, and kinetic energy of the rainfall event – to select and characterize the rainstorms able to induce flash floods in the Mediterranean-climate countries. Therefore, the obtained (heavy) rainstorms were automatically classified and studied according to their structure in time, localization, and extension. Rainfall-runoff watershed models can consequently benefit from the enhanced identification of design storms, with a realistic time structure integrated with the results of the spatial analysis. A survey of flash flood events recorded in the last decades provides a preliminary validation of the method proposed to identify the heavy rainstorms and synthetically describe their characteristics. The notable size of the employed sample, including data with a very detailed resolution in time that relate to several rain gauges well-distributed throughout the region, gives robustness to the obtained results

Changes in the occurrence of rainfall-induced landslides in Calabria, southern Italy, in the 20th century

Abstract. Only a few studies have investigated the geographical and temporal variations in the frequency and distribution of rainfall-induced landslides, and the consequences of the variations on landslide risk. Lack of information limits the possibility to evaluate the impact of environmental and climate changes on landslide frequency and risk. Here, we exploit detailed historical information on landslides and rainfall in Calabria, southern Italy, between 1921 and 2010 to study the temporal and the geographical variation in the occurrence of rainfall-induced landslides and in their impact on the population. We exploit a catalogue with information on historical landslides from June 1920 to December 2010, and daily rainfall records obtained by a network of 318 rain gauges in the same period, to reconstruct 448 493 rainfall events (RE). Combining the rainfall and the landslide information, we obtain a catalogue of 1466 rainfall events with landslides (REL), where an REL is the occurrence of one or more landslide during or immediately after a rainfall event. We find that (i) the geographical and the temporal distributions of the rainfall-induced landslides have changed in the observation period, (ii) the monthly distribution of the REL has changed in the observation period, and (iii) the average and maximum cumulated event rainfall that have resulted in landslides in the recent 30-year period 1981–2010 are lower than the rainfall necessary to trigger landslides in previous periods, whereas the duration of the RE that triggered landslides has remained the same. We attribute the changes to variations in the rainfall conditions and to an increased vulnerability of the territory. To investigate the variations in the impact of REL on the population, we compared the number of REL in each of the 409 municipalities in Calabria with the size of the population in the municipalities measured by national Censuses conducted in 1951, 1981, and 2011. We adopted two strategies; the first strategy considered impact as IREL = #REL / P, and the second strategy measured impact as RREL = #REL × P, where #REL is the total number of REL in a period, and P is the size of the population in the same period and geographical area. The analysis has revealed a complex pattern of changes in the impact of rainfall-induced landslides in Calabria in the recent past, with areas where IREL and RREL have increased, and other areas where they have decreased. Municipalities where IREL has increased are mainly in the mountains, and municipalities where RREL has increased are mainly along the coasts. The complexity of the changes in the frequency and impact of rainfall-induced landslides observed in Calabria suggests that it remains difficult and uncertain to predict the possible variations in the frequency and impact of landslide in response to future climatic and environmental changes