Sulfonic-Functionalized Carbon Catalyst for Esterification of High Free Fatty Acid

AbstractWe report synthesis and characteristics of sulfonic-functionalized carbon catalyst in this work. The carbon soild acid was prepared through the sulfonation of the incomplete carbonized mung bean vermicelli and was used as a solid acid catalyst for esterification of high free fatty acid. The catalyst (SBET = 18.1 m2/g, acid site density of 1.53 mmol H+/gcat) could exhibit high esterification activity in the reaction of oleic acid with methanol due to the efficient accessibility of bulky substrate molecule to sulfonic active site during the reaction. This environmentally benign and ecofriendly C-SO3H catalyst could be suited to esterify high FFA feedstocks reducing the production cost of biodiesel

Evaluation on performance of chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) genotypes under water stress condition

Drought is the most common abiotic stress limiting chickpea production because chickpea is usually grown under the residual soil moisture. To identify and evaluate drought tolerant chickpea genotypes, the study was carried out with four experiments at Sebin Research Farm, Zaloke Research Farm, and International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) during post-monsoon season of 2008-2009 and 2009-2010. The experimental materials consisted of 39 chickpea genotypes. Chickpea genotypes were significantly different for evaluated traits under nonirrigated and irrigated conditions, indicating that drought stress increased variation for these traits. Drought stress reduced seed yield and its attributes. Mean seed yield was decreased by 21% at Zaloke and by18% at ICRISAT experiments under non-irrigated condition than irrigated condition. Five genotypes were detected with high seed yield under non-irrigated condition. They were ICCC 37 at Sebin and Zaloke, and PCHL 04-5, ICCV 03107, Annigeri and ICCV 00108 at ICRISAT. These genotypes were also observed superior to the seed yield of drought tolerant check genotype (ICC 4958) under irrigated condition. Simple correlation among the traits with seed yield showed that there was significant and positive correlation between number of pods per plant and seed yield (r=0.41 at p < 0.01) at Sebin and (r=0.31 at p < 0.05) ICRISAT experiments, and drought tolerance indices were significantly associated with seed yield at Zaloke. The SPAD chlorophyll meter reading (SCMR) was increased but specific leaf area (SLA), and relative water content (RWC) were decreased in most of the genotypes under non-irrigated condition as compared to irrigated condition. This study also identified good performance in two genotypes for SCMR (ICCV 03110 and ICCV 00108), five genotypes for SLA (ICCV 01303, ICCV 03406, ICCV 04303, ICCV 04301 and ICCV 03302) and four genotypes for RWC (ICCC 37, Yezin 6, Karachi and ICCV 00108). Results showed that the SCMR was significantly related to seed yield (r=0.32 at p < 0.05) and SLA (r=-0.32 at p < 0.05). The genotypes having high SCMR and low SLA seemed to be resistance to drought. Root study revealed that a large genetic variability was observed for root traits with good levels of heritability. The genotypes, PCHL 04-34, Shwenilonegi, ICCV 03103, Yezin 6 and PCHL 04-32, were found to have the largest root length density and the deepest root system. All root traits were significantly inter-correlated and associated with shoot dry weight

C1 and C2 vertebrae osteomyelitis: a misleading presentation leading to a fatal outcome

Cervical vertebral osteomyelitis is rare. While an early and correct diagnosis is critical to prevent catastrophic neurological injury, the diagnosis of cervical vertebral osteomyelitis is often difficult because of its rarity and variable symptoms. We present a case of C1 and C2 vertebrae osteomyelitis with a misleading presentation and its fatal outcome

Improving the Performance of Low-resourced Speaker Identification with Data Preprocessing

Automatic speaker identification is done to tackle daily security problems. Speech data collection is an essential but very challenging task for under-resourced languages like Burmese. The speech quality is crucial to accurately recognize the speaker’s identity. This work attempted to find the optimal speech quality appropriate for Burmese tone to enhance identification compared with other more richy resourced languages on Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs). A Burmese speech dataset was created as part of our work because no appropriate dataset available for use. In order to achieve better performance, we preprocessed the foremost recording quality proper for not only Burmese tone but also for nine other Asian languages to achieve multilingual speaker identification. The performance of the preprocessed data was evaluated by comparing with the original data, using a time delay neural network (TDNN) together with a subsampling technique that can reduce time complexity in model training. The experiments were investigated and analyzed on speech datasets of ten Asian languages to reveal the effectiveness of the data preprocessing. The dataset outperformed the original dataset with improvements in terms of  equal error rate (EER). The evaluation pointed out that the performance of the system with the preprocessed dataset improved that of the original dataset

Authentications of Myanmar National Registration Card

The automatic identification system of Myanmar national registration card (NRC) holder is presented in this paper. The proposed system can be handled the identification by the extracted low quality face image and fingerprint image from Myanmar NRC. Both of the facial recognition and fingerprint recognition system are developed for Myanmar citizenship confirmation. Age invariant face recognition algorithm is performed based on combination of DiaPCA (Diagonal principal Component Analysis) and KNN (Kth nearest neighbor classifier) approaches. An algorithm of the fingerprint recognition is proposed for recognition of the poor quality fingerprint image with fabric background.  Several experiments have been done for confirming the effectiveness of the proposed approach

Survey on Emotion Recognition Using Facial Expression

Automatic recognition of human affects has become more interesting and challenging problem in artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction and computer vision fields. Facial Expression (FE) is the one of the most significant features to recognize the emotion of human in daily human interaction. FE Recognition (FER) has received important interest from psychologists and computer scientists for the applications of health care assessment, human affect analysis, and human computer interaction. Human express their emotions in a number of ways including body gesture, word, vocal and facial expressions. Expression is the important channel to convey emotion information of different people because face can express mainly human emotion. This paper surveys the current research works related to facial expression recognition. The study attends to explored details of the facial datasets, feature extraction methods, the comparison results and futures studies of the facial emotion system

Effects of roasting on phenolics composition and antioxidant activity of peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) kernel flour.

The effects of roasting on the phenolics composition and antioxidant activity of peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) kernel flour were appraised. Peanut kernel flour, with and without skin, were roasted at 160 °C for 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 min. The resultant changes in the antioxidant activity of roasted peanut kernel flour were assessed by the determinations of total phenolics, 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl free radical-scavenging capacity, percent inhibition of linoleic acid oxidation and thiobarbituric acid test and compared with those of unroasted kernel flour. It was observed that roasting significantly (p 20 min of roasting time). In contrast, over the course of heating, the amounts of phenolics were noted to be slightly increased in the peanut kernel flour with skin; the most significant (p < 0.05) increase occurred in the concentration of p-coumaric acid and quercetin at 30, 40, and 50 min of roasting. The results of this study reveal that optimum roasting time should be sought to enhancing the antioxidant capacity and phenolics concentration in peanut kernel flour

Clinical and microbiological characteristics of cryptococcosis in Singapore: predominance of Cryptococcus neoformans compared with Cryptococcus gattii

SummaryObjectivesTo describe the clinical features, treatments, outcomes, and subtype prevalence of cryptococcosis in Singapore.MethodsAll patients with laboratory confirmed cryptococcal infections admitted from 1999 to 2007 to a teaching hospital in Singapore were reviewed retrospectively. Identification and molecular types of Cryptococcus neoformans variants and Cryptococcus gattii were determined by polymerase chain reaction–restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP). Serotypes were inferred with a multiplex PCR method.ResultsOf 62 patients with cryptococcosis, C. neoformans var. grubii was the predominant subtype (in 95%), affecting mainly immunocompromised hosts (91%) with HIV infection (80%). Patients with HIV were younger (median age 36.5 vs. 49.5 years, p=0.006) and less likely to present with an altered mental status (14% vs. 50%, p=0.013). In contrast, delayed treatment (median 7 days vs. 2 days, p=0.03), pulmonary involvement (58% vs. 14%, p=0.03), and initial treatment with fluconazole (25% vs. 2%, p=0.02) were more common in HIV-negative patients. C. gattii was uncommon, affecting only three patients, all of whom were immunocompetent and had disseminated disease with pulmonary and neurological involvement. All C. gattii were RFLP type VG II, serotype B and all C. neoformans var. grubii were RFLP type VN I, serotype A, except for one that was RFLP type VN II.ConclusionC. neoformans var. grubii, subtype VN I, was the predominant subtype in Singapore, infecting younger, mainly immunocompromised hosts with HIV. C. gattii was uncommon, causing pulmonary manifestations in older, immunocompetent patients and were RFLP type VG II

Common transcriptional programs and the role of chemokine (C-C motif) ligand 20 (CCL20) in cell migration of cholangiocarcinoma

The incidence of cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) has risen in many countries, but there is still no appropriate screening and treatment available. The growing number of microarray data published todays can be a powerful resource for the discovery of biomarkers to tackle challenges in the management of CCA. This study analyzed multiple microarray datasets to identify the common transcriptional networks in CCA and select a possible biomarker for functional study in CCA cell lines. A systematic searching identified 4 microarray datasets from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) repository and PubMed articles. Differential expression analysis between tumor and normal tissues was performed in each dataset. In order to characterize the common expression pattern, differentially expressed genes (DEGs) from all datasets were combined and visualized by hierarchical clustering and heatmap. Gene enrichment analysis performed in each cluster revealed that over-expressed DEGs were enriched in cell cycle, cell migration and response to cytokines while under-expressed DEGs were enriched in metabolic processes such as oxidation-reduction, lipid, and drug. To explain tumor characteristics, genes enriched in cell migration and response to cytokines were further investigated. Among these genes, CCL20 was selected for functional study because its role has never been studied in CCA. Moreover, its signaling may be regulated by disrupting its only receptor, CCR6. Treatment with recombinant CCL20 induced higher cell migration and increased expression of N-cad. In contrast, knockdown of CCR6 by siRNA reduced cell migration ability and decreased N-cadherin level. Altogether, these results suggested the contribution of CCL20/CCR6 signaling in cell migration through epithelial-mesenchymal transition process. Thus, CCL20/CCR6 signaling might be a target for the management of CCA