A solvent-free Diels-Alder reaction of graphite into functionalized graphene nanosheets

A solvent-free Diels-Alder reaction was carried out by heating a mixture of graphite and a typical dienophile, maleic anhydride (MA) or maleimide (MI), in a sealed glass ampoule of argon. The functionalization of graphite with dienophiles was confirmed by various characterization techniques, suggesting the efficient functionalization and delamination of graphite into a few layers of graphitic nanosheets.close0

Rethinking repetition in dementia through a cartographic ethnography of subjectivity

This article critically engages with the predominant understandings of repetitive bodily practices within a dementia context. Rather than interpreting such practices as pathological and abnormal, I instead approach them through an ethnographic mapping, paying particular attention to the affective dynamics of repetition. Critically developing Fernand Deligny’s insights and methods of tracing and mapping bodily movements in dialogue with Tim Ingold’s notion of dwelling, I demonstrate affect-underpinned encounters and interactions of repetitive phenomena. I then argue for the extension of recent anthropological discussions about affect, repetition, and subjectivity by suggesting a more productive dialogue among theories of affect, body, atmosphere, cognition, memory, language, and life history

New Methodology for Measuring Semantic Functional Similarity Based on Bidirectional Integration

1.2 billion users in facebook, 17 million articles in Wikipedia, and 190 million tweets per day have demanded significant increase of information processing through Internet in recent years. Similarly life sciences and bioinformatics also have faced issues of processing Big data due to the explosion of publicly available genomic information resulted from the Human Genome Project (HGP) and the increasing usage of high throughput technology. HGP was completed in 2003 and resulted in identifying 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA and determining the sequences of three billion human base pairs. The information requires huge amount of data storage and becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. This thesis introduces new method, Biological and Statistical Mean (BSM) score to calculate functional similarity between gene products (GPs) that can help to extract biologically relevant and statistically robust information from large-scale biomedical, genomic and proteomic data sources. BSM score is defined by 16 different scoring matrices derived from principles of multi-view learning in machine learning algorithm and five different databases including Gene Ontology, UniProt, SCOP, CATH, and KUPS. The proposed method also shows how diverse databases and principles in machine learning theory can be integrated into a simple scoring function, and how the simple concept can give significant impact on the studies in biomedical and human life sciences. The comprehensive evaluations and performance comparisons with other conventional methods show that BSM score clearly outperforms other methods in terms of sensitivity of clustering similarity functional groups and coverage of identifying related genes. As a part of potential applications handling large amount of diverse data sources in medical domain, this thesis introduces similarity-based drug target identification and disease networks using BSM scores. Application of BSM score is freely available through http://www.ittc.ku.edu/chenlab/goal

A NEW METHODOLOGY FOR IDENTIFYING INTERFACE RESIDUES INVOLVED IN BINDING PROTEIN COMPLEXES

Genome-sequencing projects with advanced technologies have rapidly increased the amount of protein sequences, and demands for identifying protein interaction sites are significantly increased due to its impact on understanding cellular process, biochemical events and drug design studies. However, the capacity of current wet laboratory techniques is not enough to handle the exponentially growing protein sequence data; therefore, sequence based predictive methods identifying protein interaction sites have drawn increasing interest. In this article, a new predictive model which can be valuable as a first approach for guiding experimental methods investigating protein-protein interactions and localizing the specific interface residues is proposed. The proposed method extracts a wide range of features from protein sequences. Random forests framework is newly redesigned to effectively utilize these features and the problems of imbalanced data classification commonly encountered in binding site predictions. The method is evaluated with 2,829 interface residues and 24,616 non-interface residues extracted from 99 polypeptide chains in the Protein Data Bank. The experimental results show that the proposed method performs significantly better than two other conventional predictive methods and can reliably predict residues involved in protein interaction sites. As blind tests, the proposed method predicts interaction sites and constructs three protein complexes: the DnaK molecular chaperone system, 1YUW and 1DKG, which provide new insight into the sequence-function relationship. Finally, the robustness of the proposed method is assessed by evaluating the performances obtained from four different ensemble methods

O(D,D)\mathbf{O}(D,D) Covariant Noether Currents and Global Charges in Double Field Theory

Double field theory is an approach for massless modes of string theory, unifying and geometrizing all gauge invariance in manifest $\mathbf{O}(D,D)$ covariant manner. In this approach, we derive off-shell conserved Noether current and corresponding Noether potential associated with unified gauge invariance. We add Wald-type counter two-form to the Noether potential and define conserved global charges as surface integral. We check our $\mathbf{O}(D,D)$ covariant formula against various string backgrounds, both geometric and non-geometric. In all cases we examined, we find perfect agreements with previous results. Our formula facilitates to evaluate momenta along not only ordinary spacetime directions but also dual spacetime directions on equal footing. From this, we confirm recent assertion that null wave in doubled spacetime is the same as macroscopic fundamental string in ordinary spacetime.Comment: v2) 1+42 pages, Refs added, minor changes. To appear in JHE