Efficient processing of an antigenic sequence for presentation by MHC class I molecules depends on its neighboring residues in the protein

Processing of endogenously synthesized proteins generates short peptides that are presented by MHC class I molecules to CD8 T lymphocytes. Here it is documented that not only the sequence of the presented peptide but also the residues by which it is flanked in the protein determine the efficiency of processing and presentation. This became evident when a viral sequence of proven antigenicity was inserted at different positions into an unrelated carrier protein. Not different peptides, but different amounts of the antigenic insert itself were retrieved by isolation of naturally processed peptides from cells expressing the different chimeric proteins. Low yield of antigenic peptide from an unfavorable integration site could be overcome by flanking the insert with oligo-alanine to space it from disruptive neighboring sequences. Notably, the degree of protection against lethal virus disease related directly to the amount of naturally processed antigenic peptide

Effect of stress and/or field annealing on the magnetic behavior of the „Co77Si13.5B9.5…90Fe7Nb3 amorphous alloy

Variations of coercive field, induced magnetic anisotropy, and saturation magnetostriction constant in sCo77Si13.5B9.5d90Fe7Nb3 amorphous ribbons submitted to stress and/or axial magnetic-field annealing are reported. The annealing was carried out by using the Joule-heating effect saverage temperature values of the sample corresponding to the intensity of the electrical current were 273, 378, 409, and 445 °Cd and the applied stress and axial magnetic field during the thermal treatments were 500 MPa and 750 A/m, respectively. As a result of these treatments, a uniaxial in-plane magnetic anisotropy, which affects drastically the soft magnetic character of the samples, was developed.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología de España-MAT2001-0082-C04-0

Electrooxidación del etanol y bioetanol sobre catalizadores de naturaleza amorfa de composición Ni59Nb40Pt1 y Ni59Nb39Pt2

La ecotoxicidad de las disoluciones provenientes de las pilas de combustible de etanol directo (DEFC) disminuyetras el proceso de electrooxidación con electrodos de naturalezaamorfa. Esta disminución es función del potencialaplicado y de la composición del electrodo utilizado.El proceso de electrooxidación del etanol y bioetanol, sucedetras una secuencia de reacciones, donde se formanvarios productos intermedios que pueden afectar al procesogeneral de electrooxidación de los alcoholes.El bioetanol, se está estudiando como combustible alternativoal etanol para las DEFC, pero se comporta de formadiferente, en cuanto a su electrooxidación. Se han obtenidoresultados diferentes al electrooxidar disoluciones deetanol y de bioetanol

Load Generators for Automatic Simulation of Urban Fleets

[EN] To ensure cities sustainability, we must deal with, among other challenges, traffic congestion, and its associated carbon emissions. We can approach such a problem from two perspectives: the transition to electric vehicles, which implies the need for charging station infrastructure, and the optimization of traffic flow. However, cities are complex systems, so it is helpful to test changes on them in controlled environments like the ones provided by simulators. In our work, we use SimFleet, an agent-based fleet simulator. Nevertheless, SimFleet does not provide tools for easily setting up big experiments, neither to simulate the realistic movement of its agents inside a city. Aiming to solve that, we enhanced SimFleet introducing two fully configurable generators that automatize the creation of experiments. First, the charging stations generator, which allocates a given amount of charging stations following a certain distribution, enabling to simulate how transports would charge and compare distributions. Second, the load generator, which populates the experiment with a given number of agents of a given type, introducing them dynamically in the simulation, and assigns them a movement that can be either random or based on real city data. The generators proved to be useful for comparing different distributions of charging stations as well as different agent behaviors over the same complex setup.This work was partially supported by MINECO/FEDER RTI2018-095390-B-C31 project of the Spanish government. Pasqual Martí and Jaume Jordán are funded by UPV PAID-06-18 project. Jaume Jordán is also funded by grant APOSTD/2018/010 of Generalitat Valenciana - Fondo Social Europeo.Martí Gimeno, P.; Jordán, J.; Palanca Cámara, J.; Julian Inglada, VJ. (2020). Load Generators for Automatic Simulation of Urban Fleets. Springer. 394-405. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51999-5_33S394405Campo, C.: Directory facilitator and service discovery agent. FIPA Document Repository (2002)Dong, J., Liu, C., Lin, Z.: Charging infrastructure planning for promoting battery electric vehicles: an activity-based approach using multiday travel data. Transp. Res. Part C: Emerg. Technol. 38, 44–55 (2014)Jordán, J., Palanca, J., Del Val, E., Julian, V., Botti, V.: A multi-agent system for the dynamic emplacement of electric vehicle charging stations. Appl. Sci. 8(2), 313 (2018)Noori, H.: Realistic urban traffic simulation as vehicular Ad-hoc network (VANET) via Veins framework. In: 2012 12th Conference of Open Innovations Association (FRUCT), pp. 1–7. IEEE (2012)Palanca, J., Terrasa, A., Carrascosa, C., Julián, V.: SimFleet: a new transport fleet simulator based on MAS. In: De La Prieta, F., et al. (eds.) PAAMS 2019. CCIS, vol. 1047, pp. 257–264. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24299-2_22Skippon, S., Garwood, M.: Responses to battery electric vehicles: UK consumer attitudes and attributions of symbolic meaning following direct experience to reduce psychological distance. Transp. Res. Part D: Transp. Environ. 16(7), 525–531 (2011)del Val, E., Palanca, J., Rebollo, M.: U-tool: a urban-toolkit for enhancing city maps through citizens’ activity. In: Demazeau, Y., Ito, T., Bajo, J., Escalona, M.J. (eds.) PAAMS 2016. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 9662, pp. 243–246. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39324-7_2

Compilability of Abduction

Abduction is one of the most important forms of reasoning; it has been successfully applied to several practical problems such as diagnosis. In this paper we investigate whether the computational complexity of abduction can be reduced by an appropriate use of preprocessing. This is motivated by the fact that part of the data of the problem (namely, the set of all possible assumptions and the theory relating assumptions and manifestations) are often known before the rest of the problem. In this paper, we show some complexity results about abduction when compilation is allowed

Análisis del comportamiento de un firme reciclado en central en caliente con alta tasa tras un año en servicio

En 2008-2009 el Ministerio de Fomento llevó a cabo la rehabilitación del firme de la autovía A-5 en la provincia de Cáceres, en el tramo comprendido entre el límite con la provincia de Toledo y Almaraz. La rehabilitación se ejecutó mediante un reciclado en caliente en central con una tasa de fresado del 40 %, de manera que para la reposición de la capa de base se extendió una mezcla bituminosa en caliente del tipo AC 22 base G-R40, cuyo ligante fue un betún con rejuvenecedores diseñado al efecto. Se utilizó para la fabricación de la mezcla una central de tipo discontinuo con una capacidad de 200 t/h. Los ensayos realizados durante las obras arrojaron unos resultados que cumplían las exigencias de las especificaciones del Proyecto, y el resultado final fue absolutamente satisfactorio. Un año después de la puesta en obra de la mezcla reciclada se ha querido analizar en detalle su comportamiento a través de ensayos sobre testigos extraídos en la campaña que se ha realizado ahora expresamente para ello. Por un lado se ha pretendido comparar los resultados obtenidos en los testigos de esta campaña con los que se obtuvieron durante la ejecución de las obras. Por otro lado, se ha procedido a comparar el comportamiento de la mezcla reciclada con el de la mezcla convencional colocada en la misma obr

Utilización de aditivos para mejorar la sensibilidad de las mezclas bituminosas al calentamiento con microondas

This study examines the potential of adding electric arc furnace slag to bituminous mixtures to be heated by microwaves. The susceptibility of bituminous mixtures to microwave energy is limited and so, in order to improve the energy performance of the heating process, it is necessary to incorporate additives or components to the mixture so as to improve the capacity for microwave heating. The article presents the results of adding various components, (steel wool, scrap tire wire, silicon carbide, iron filings) and an alternative aggregate: electric arc furnace slag. According to the results obtained in the laboratory, slag addition of at least 5% by weight of the bituminous mixture represents the best option for both technical and economic reasons. The results may promote the valorization of this steel industry residue in bituminous mixtures by improving microwave heating response.El presente trabajo examina el potencial de añadir escorias siderúrgicas de horno de arco eléctrico en mezclas bituminosas cuando se calientan con energía de microondas. La susceptibilidad de las mezclas bituminosas a las microondas es limitada y con el objetivo de incrementarla es necesario incorporar aditivos o componentes que sí son susceptibles. El artículo presenta los resultados obtenidos con varios aditivos (lana de acero, alambre metálico reciclado de neumáticos fuera de uso, carburo de silíceo y limaduras de hierro) y un árido alternativo: escorias de horno de arco eléctrico. De acuerdo con los resultados obtenidos en el estudio, la incorporación de escorias en al menos un 5% en masa de la mezcla bituminosa representa la mejor opción por motivos técnicos y económicos. Este resultado puede potenciar la valorización de este residuo de la industria del acero en mezclas bituminosas para mejorar su respuesta al calentamiento con energía microondas

Performance comparison of multi-wavelength conversion using SOA-MZI and DSF for optical wavelength multicast

The electronic layer multicast is going to face the speed and capacity bottleneck of the future optical data networks. Transparent optical wavelength multicast by multi-wavelength conversion is an effective way of achieving data multicast in the optical domain without any optical-electronic-optical conversion. In this paper, two multiple wavelength conversion technologies for 10 Gb/s data rate are investigating and discussed. The first technology is based on cross-phase modulation in a semiconductor optical amplifier – Mach-Zehnder interferometer, and the second is based on four-wave mixing in a dispersion-shifted fiber. We present the simulated performance comparison of two approaches obtained using VPItransmissionMakerTMWDM simulator. Afterwards, we analyze these results in comparison with our previous experimental results of the same schemes

Onto-CC: a web server for identifying Gene Ontology conceptual clusters

The Gene Ontology (GO) vocabulary has been extensively explored to analyze the functions of coexpressed genes. However, despite its extended use in Biology and Medical Sciences, there are still high levels of uncertainty about which ontology (i.e. Molecular Process, Cellular Component or Molecular Function) should be used, and at which level of specificity. Moreover, the GO database can contain incomplete information resulting from human annotations, or highly influenced by the available knowledge about a specific branch in an ontology. In spite of these drawbacks, there is a trend to ignore these problems and even use GO terms to conduct searches of gene expression profiles (i.e. expression + GO) instead of more cautious approaches that just consider them as an independent source of validation (i.e. expression versus GO). Consequently, propagating the uncertainty and producing biased analysis of the required gene grouping hypotheses. We proposed a web tool, Onto-CC, as an automatic method specially suited for independent explanation/validation of gene grouping hypotheses (e.g. coexpressed genes) based on GO clusters (i.e. expression versus GO). Onto-CC approach reduces the uncertainty of the queries by identifying optimal conceptual clusters that combine terms from different ontologies simultaneously, as well as terms defined at different levels of specificity in the GO hierarchy. To do so, we implemented the EMO-CC methodology to find clusters in structural databases [GO Directed acyclic Graph (DAG) tree], inspired on Conceptual Clustering algorithms. This approach allows the management of optimal cluster sets as potential parallel hypotheses, guided by multiobjective/multimodal optimization techniques. Therefore, we can generate alternative and, still, optimal explanations of queries that can provide new insights for a given problem. Onto-CC has been successfully used to test different medical and biological hypotheses including the explanation and prediction of gene expression profiles resulting from the host response to injuries in the inflammatory problem. Onto-CC provides two versions: Ready2GO, a precalculated EMO-CC for several genomes and an Advanced Onto-CC for custom annotation files (http://gps-tools2.wustl.edu/onto-cc/index.html)