Determination of Oxygen in Ferrosilicon by Argon-Carrier Fusion with Tin-Carbon Powder Bath

Determination of oxygen in ferrosilicon was attempted by the argon-carrier fusion method, using carbon powder wrapped in tin foil as a bath. With the powder sample, an unreasonably higher value was obtained than a mean value of real and original oxygen contents because the oxygen contained in the surface contributes to the measured value more dominantly with the increase in surface area. For an accurate analysis of the block sample, it is essential to obtain a mean value of oxygen contents by sampling from many parts of the block sample as possible, or, at least, from the upper, middle, and lower layers of the sample, though, in the latter case, it is required to specify the sampling position with the analytical result. By the proposed method, the complete reduction of oxides is accomplished with a block sample and the determination of oxygen can be repeated with several samples for each bath

Spectrophotometric Determination of Micro-amounts of Aluminium in Iron and Steel with Chrome Azurol S

Fundamental experiments were carried out to determine the micro-amounts of aluminium by spectrophotometry, using chrome azurol S, a reagent used in complexometric titration of copper, zirconium and aluminium. By this new method, most part of the iron content was separated by methyl isobutyl ketone, and the remaining iron and copper was masked by thioglycolic acid and after adjusting the pH to 5.6-6.8, the absorbance of the aluminium chelate compound was measured at 550 mμ. This method requires only a few reagents and does not need warming for promoting coloration, nor does it require the protecting colloid in contrast with the aluminon method. Since this reagent presents very sensitive color reaction even in micro-amounts of aluminium, 0.002 to 0.1 per cent of it can be determined with good reproducibility

Determination of Hydrogen in Iron and Steel by the Argon Gas Carrier Hot-Extraction Method

An apparatus for a rapid determination of hydrogen in iron and steel was designed by applying the argon carrier gas hot-extraction method. The sample was heated at 950～1100℃ in the stream of pure argon at the flow rate of about 80ml/min, and hydrogen extracted was sent together with argon into a hot palladium osmosis tube. After allowing hydrogen to diffuse into the vacuum through the tube, the hydrogen was collected in a manometer through a mercury diffusion pump and an automatic Toepler pump, by which the mount of hydrogen was determined within 25 min. The present method was applied to the determination of hydrogen in iron and steel samples and satisfactory results could be obtained

MUCHA: multiple chemical alignment algorithm to identify building block substructures of orphan secondary metabolites

[Background]In contrast to the increasing number of the successful genome projects, there still remain many orphan metabolites for which their synthesis processes are unknown. Metabolites, including these orphan metabolites, can be classified into groups that share the same core substructures, originated from the same biosynthetic pathways. It is known that many metabolites are synthesized by adding up building blocks to existing metabolites. Therefore, it is proposed that, for any given group of metabolites, finding the core substructure and the branched substructures can help predict their biosynthetic pathway. There already have been many reports on the multiple graph alignment techniques to find the conserved chemical substructures in relatively small molecules. However, they are optimized for ligand binding and are not suitable for metabolomic studies. [Results]We developed an efficient multiple graph alignment method named as MUCHA (Multiple Chemical Alignment), specialized for finding metabolic building blocks. This method showed the strength in finding metabolic building blocks with preserving the relative positions among the substructures, which is not achieved by simply applying the frequent graph mining techniques. Compared with the combined pairwise alignments, this proposed MUCHA method generally reduced computational costs with improving the quality of the alignment. [Conclusions]MUCHA successfully find building blocks of secondary metabolites, and has a potential to complement to other existing methods to reconstruct metabolic networks using reaction patterns

WTC2005-63892 EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON SUPERLUBRICITY OF AG NANOMETER-THICK-LAYERS BY SLIDING ON A MACROSCOPIC SYSTEM

ABSTRACT The experimental study on the Ag film was carried out using a diamond pin-on-plate type tribometer under ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) conditions. The coefficient of friction varied with the film morphology in nanometric scale up to 170 nm, and superlubricity as minimum coefficient of friction 0.007 was obtained on 5-nm Ag film with network structure. RHEED and STM observation of the film showed that the film morphologies changed drastically during rubbing, and that the superlubricity of this system is attributed to the lamella gliding of Ag INTRODUCTION The concept of a superlubricity was theoretically discussed by Hirano and Shinjo [1]. Martin et al. [2] showed extraordinary low friction coefficient of molybdenum disulfide (MoS 2 ), which was less than 0.002 (milli-range), in ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) condition. They pointed out that the millirange coefficient of friction was attributed to the mechanism of the superlubric state as Hirano et al. discussed [1]. The sliding plane of MoS 2 is c-plane. Recently, Goto et al. [3][4][5] showed that the milli-range friction of epitaxial Ag film, and concluded that the low friction coefficient was attributed to inter-layer shearing between Ag (111) planes parallel to the sliding direction. This paper provides another example different from the superlubricity of MoS 2 , because the interaction between MoS 2 layers is Van der Waals interaction, whereas the interaction between Ag (111) planes is metallic bond

ODB: a database of operons accumulating known operons across multiple genomes

Operon structures play an important role in co-regulation in prokaryotes. Although over 200 complete genome sequences are now available, databases providing genome-wide operon information have been limited to certain specific genomes. Thus, we have developed an ODB (Operon DataBase), which provides a data retrieval system of known operons among the many complete genomes. Additionally, putative operons that are conserved in terms of known operons are also provided. The current version of our database contains about 2000 known operon information in more than 50 genomes and about 13 000 putative operons in more than 200 genomes. This system integrates four types of associations: genome context, gene co-expression obtained from microarray data, functional links in biological pathways and the conservation of gene order across the genomes. These associations are indicators of the genes that organize an operon, and the combination of these indicators allows us to predict more reliable operons. Furthermore, our system validates these predictions using known operon information obtained from the literature. This database integrates known literature-based information and genomic data. In addition, it provides an operon prediction tool, which make the system useful for both bioinformatics researchers and experimental biologists. Our database is accessible at