Cloning, expression, and in vitro biological activities of bovine granulocyte-colony stimulating factor

Neutrophils are one of the essential components of the innate immune system that play a critical role in the host\u27s defense against bacterial and fungal infections. Hematopoietic growth factors are a class of regulatory cytokines that are required for stimulation, proliferation, and differentiation of blood cells. Granulocyte-colony stimulating factor (G-CSF) is a member of this regulatory family of cytokines that almost exclusively stimulates proliferation and differentiation of precursor neutrophilic cells in the bone marrow and modulates functional activities of mature neutrophils in the circulation. Treatment with G-CSF significantly enhances phagocytic, bactericidal, and fungicidal activities of neutrophils. A cDNA clone encoding bovine G-CSF (bG-CSF) was isolated and sequenced from an endothelial cell cDNA library. The full-length cDNA is 1460 nucleotides with 585 nucleotides comprising the open reading frame. The deduced G-CSF protein consists of 174 amino acids with a 21 amino acids-long signal peptide. This cDNA was expressed in Escherichia coli and the biological activities of the solubilized protein from purified inclusion bodies were examined. Flow cytometric analysis of membrane antigen density of neutrophils activated with this oxidized and refolded protein revealed an upregulation of CD11a, CD11b, CD11c, and CD18. Expression of CD62L was decreased while expression of CD14 remained unchanged. These findings indicate that recombinant bG-CSF expressed in E. coli is biologically active and exerts the same type of effects on neutrophils in vitro as those of human G-CSF (hG-CSF). Bovine G-CSF cDNA was also subcloned into a mammalian expression vector and tested for its in vivo efficacy as an immunomodulator in calves. Results obtained from the preliminary studies were inconclusive. Using the same endothelial cell cDNA library mentioned above, we also cloned and sequenced a full-length cDNA encoding bovine interleukin-7 and a partial cDNA sequence encoding bG-CSF receptor

Travelling fires methodology and probabilistic design of structures

Fire is a hazard and a building’s structure must be designed to maintain their structural stability when exposed to fire. Fire safety design of structures can be done following the prescriptive codes or carrying out a performance-based design. Prescriptive fire design codes describe how buildings should be built to fulfil generic fire resistance requirements depending on their use, height, or compartment area. Performance fire design allows derivation of structural fire resistance of buildings by characterizing the fire dynamics within a compartment and analysing the thermal and mechanical response of the structures. Travelling fires methodology (TFM) characterises the fire dynamics for the performance-based design of large compartments, which assumes that as fires burn, they travel along the compartment floor as flames spread. TFM is a design tool based on several assumptions. This thesis revisits and addresses its near field assumptions and applies a probabilistic model to assess the reliability of a structural element exposed to travelling fires and the uniform temperature fire. This work studies the horizontal flame extension under the ceiling, which affects duration of the heating exposure of the structural members and their load-bearing capacity. This study reformulates the TFM in terms of heat fluxes rather than temperatures, allowing for a more formal treatment of heat transfer. The Hasemi, Wakamatsu and Lattimer empirical expressions of heat flux from flames were applied for the near field. The analysis showed that the near field length with flame extension (fTFM) is between 1.5 and 6.5 times longer than without flame extension meaning that more structural elements are affected by the direct impact of the flame. The highest peak heat flux is obtained for small fires sizes, using flame extension and the Wakamatsu expression. The observations and findings from two travelling fire experiments, x-TWO.1 and x-TWO.2, conducted inside a very large compartment with an area of 380 m² in Poland, are presented. A uniform continuous wood crib along 29 m of the 35 m compartment provided the fuel load density of 345 MJ/m² in x-TWO.1 and 273 MJ/m² in x-TWO.2. In both experiments, the fire was observed to travel with clear leading and trailing edges and flashover was not observed. Flame spread was accelerating in x-TWO.1 and at a constant rate in x-TWO.2. The non-uniform distributions of temperatures are remarkably different from the conditions typically assumed in other scenarios/standards and could therefore lead to different failure times and mechanisms. A detailed sensitivity study was carried out for the main input parameters in the uniform temperature fire methodology, and in the heat transfer calculations. This was done to assess the sensitivity of structural element response to input parameter uncertainty. The sensitivity analysis identified the most influential input parameters for the structure and the range of values for each input parameter for which the design is structurally safe. To study comprehensively the structural fire design of open plan compartments and modern buildings, a simple probabilistic methodology was applied. Probabilistic approach defined the reliability of a fire-affected structure following the uniform fire condition methodology and fTFM methodology, while accounting for uncertainties in input parameters. The probabilistic analysis allowed quantification of the reliability of a structural element in terms of the likelihood of collapse for different fire scenarios. This study demonstrates that both sensitivity and probabilistic analyses can provide a comprehensive understanding of the factors affecting the structural fire resistance of a building and can further inform detailed fire safety and structural analysis. This work presented in this thesis is dealing with design purposes of non-combustible structures.Open Acces

A Markov Model for Dynamic Behavior of Toa-Based Ranging in Indoor Localization

The existence of undetected direct path ( UDP) conditions causes occurrence of unexpected large random ranging errors which pose a serious challenge to precise indoor localization using time of arrival ( ToA). Therefore, analysis of the behavior of the ranging error is essential for the design of precise ToA-based indoor localization systems. In this paper, we propose a novel analytical framework for the analysis of the dynamic spatial variations of ranging error observed by a mobile user based on an application of Markov chain. the model relegates the behavior of ranging error into four main categories associated with four states of the Markov process. the parameters of distributions of ranging error in each Markov state are extracted from empirical data collected from a measurement calibrated ray tracing ( RT) algorithm simulating a typical office environment. the analytical derivation of parameters of the Markov model employs the existing path loss models for the first detected path and total multipath received power in the same office environment. Results of simulated errors from the Markov model and actual errors from empirical data show close agreement

Quality of Life in Postmenopausal Female Members and Non-members of the Elderly Support Association.

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to evaluate the quality of life (QOL) in postmenopausal members and non-members of the elderly support association in Borujen city, Iran. METHODS This study was a cross-sectional descriptive study being applied to the participants were postmenopausal women of over 55 years. Thus, 40 postmenopausal members of the elderly support association of Borujen city and 40 non-members were randomly selected. The 36 item short-form health survey (SF-36), with the 4 psychological, social, physical-movement, and environmental domains, was completed. Data were analyzed using SPSS software. RESULTS The mean total score of QOL of member of the association was significantly greater than non-members. Student's t-test showed a significant relationship between QOL and membership of the association (P < 0.05). One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that the mean QOL of postmenopausal women, according to membership and marital status (P < 0.01), housing (P < 0.01), and underlying disease (P < 0.01), was statistically significant. CONCLUSIONS According to the results, supportive measures, such as increasing the participation of the elderly in public life through proper preparations to join them and membership in peer groups such as support associations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can be greatly effective in improving QOL. The results showed that the QOL of the participants was at a moderate level and membership in support associations for the elderly was effected on the QOL in postmenopausal women. Moreover, considering the importance of the elderly in the community

Fault diagnosis of gearboxes using wavelet support vector machine, least square support vector machine and wavelet packet transform

This work focuses on a method which experimentally recognizes faults of gearboxes using wavelet packet and two support vector machine models. Two wavelet selection criteria are used. Some statistical features of wavelet packet coefficients of vibration signals are selected. The optimal decomposition level of wavelet is selected based on the Maximum Energy to Shannon Entropy ratio criteria. In addition to this, Energy and Shannon Entropy of the wavelet coefficients are used as two new features along with other statistical parameters as input of the classifier. Eventually, the gearbox faults are classified using these statistical features as input to least square support vector machine (LSSVM) and wavelet support vector machine (WSVM). Some kernel functions and multi kernel function as a new method are used with three strategies for multi classification of gearboxes. The results of fault classification demonstrate that the WSVM identified the fault categories of gearbox more accurately and has a better diagnosis performance as compared to the LSSVM

THE ENCOUNTERS OF DEVELOPMENT AND ROLE OF HUMAN RESOURCES

The current financial crisis, which has engulfed East Asia since July 1997 and has subsequently spread to Russia and Brazil, is one of the most pressing challenges facing countries and businesses in today's global business environment. Development represents the structural making of the world characterized by the free flow of technology and human resources across national boundaries as well as the spread of Information Technology (IT) and mass media presenting an ever-changing and competitive business environment. Two major limitations are observed in the treatment of the twin issues of the responses to the East Asian economic crisis and the coverage of the literature on Development. While the response to the crisis has focused on macroeconomic aspects, the issue of Development has been addressed predominantly in and with respect to the developed economies of Western Europe, North America and Japan. This paper is an attempt to address these two limitations. Since the human factor is the key in the new era of Development, the primary objective of this paper is to present a conceptual framework for effective management of human resources as a response to the growing interaction of Development and business performance. Three central arguments are made in this paper. (1) That a growing body of evidence converge to suggest that changes taking place in the global business environment often are not accompanied by complementary changes in human resource management practices leading to a situation whereby the failure of some firms is due to the mismanagement of people rather than to problems with technical systems per se. (2) That this is because organizations have achieved relatively low levels effectiveness in implementing Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) practices especially in emerging economies of South East Asia and other developing countries like Nigeria that are exposed to the challenges and opportunities of Development. (3) That in order to manage employees for competitive edge in a period of Development, human resource personnel must possess competencies relevant for implementing such strategic HRM policies and practices. Guided by theoretical perspectives such as the firm’s resource-based theory of competitive advantage and empirical evidence, this paper develop propositions draws implications for the strategic management of human resources to prepare organizations for the challenges of Development.  Article visualizations