Sequencing and In Silico Multi-aspect Analysis of S1 Glycoprotein in 793/B Serotype of Infectious Bronchitis Virus Isolated From Iran in 2003 and 2011

Infectious bronchitis (IB) is an acute, highly contagious, and economically important viral disease of chickens. The S1 subunit from Spike (S) protein plays the major role in protective immunity and is involved in the host-virus interactions, as well as infectious bronchitis virus (IBV) serotyping. Aim of the present study was multi-aspect analysis of the molecular and immunological features of 5' part belonging to the S1 glycoprotein sequence of Iranian 793/B IBV strain isolates. This might ideally help in characterization, prevention, and vaccine development. The tissue samples were prepared, followed by virus isolation, reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction and restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis. In addition, sequencing and registration of the sequences in the National Center for Biotechnology Information were performed. Moreover, 12 sequences were retrieved from Fars province, Iran. The next steps included evaluation of conservation/variability along the sequences, phylogenetic analysis, estimation of the average evolutionary divergence over all the sequence pairs, predicting the phosphorylation/N-glycosylation/palmitoylation sites, and the final analysis of antigenicity. The findings of alignment, entropy plot, and pairwise similarity analysis revealed 17 hypervariable regions. The isolates belonging to Tehran were clustered in phylogenetic tree, and the most similar isolates to them were ADW11182 and ADW11183. Location of some of the N-glycosylation/phosphorylation/palmitoylation points indicated that these sites were conserved among the isolates. Furthermore, the frequency of epitopes and their scores reflect the high immunogenicity of S1 protein in 793/B serotype. Analysis of the primary and secondary structures demonstrated that their parameters had variable values and were different regarding the number and location of α-helix, β-strand, and coils. According to our findings, the Iranian isolates of 793/B serotype change their molecular characteristics during time and in different geographical regions. These alterations might account for failure in prevention programs and differences in virulence and pathogenicity

Commuting probability of compact groups

http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S000497271200033

Evaluation and Determination of Silicon Eutectic Modification Level Using Thermal Analysis in 319 Aluminum Alloy

Eutectic Silicon phases form as the coarse and acicular shape in Aluminum-Silicon alloys. These phases have detrimental effect on mechanical properties of casting parts. Modification process has been used to change the shape of these phases to fibrous morphology. In this research different level of strontium; in the form of Al-10%Sr master alloy; have been added to 319 aluminum alloy to investigate their effects on modification. Thermal Analysis has been used as a technique to study the cooling curves and first derivative curves. Effect of strontium on solidification parameters such as nucleation temperature ((, and growth temperature () of eutectic silicon has been determined. ((and () have been reduced by increasing strontium content. () can be used as a parameter to control the modification of eutectic silicon. The results of this research indicate that thermal analysis technique can be used as an accurate and quick device of on-line quality control in production lines of aluminum casting industries

Imposition of Dirichlet Boundary Conditions in Element Free Galerkin Method through an Object-Oriented Implementation

Abstract One of the main drawbacks of Element Free Galerkin (EFG) method is its dependence on moving least square shape functions which don’t satisfy the Kronecker Delta property, so in this method it’s not possible to apply Dirichlet boundary conditions directly. The aim of the present paper is to discuss different aspects of three widely used methods of applying Dirichlet boundary conditions in EFG method, called Lagrange multipliers, penalty method, and coupling with finite element method. Numerical simulations are presented to compare the results of these methods form the perspective of accuracy, convergence and computational expense. These methods have been implemented in an object oriented programing environment, called INSANE, and the results are presented and compared with the analytical solutions

The usage of computer-aided cooling curve thermal analysis to optimise eutectic refiner and modifier in Al-Si alloys

Bismuth, antimony and strontium concentrations were optimised to alter the eutectic Al-Si phase in a commercial Al-Si-Cu-Mg alloy by way of computer-aided cooling curve thermal analysis. The results show that the eutectic growth temperature shifted to lower temperatures for all three inoculants. However, addition of Sr resulted in more depression of growth temperature compared with Bi and Sb. No further significant changes were observed with increasing the concentrations to more than 1, 0.5 and 0.04 wt% of Bi, Sb and Sr, respectively. The recalescence of these concentrations, meanwhile, showed a significant increase of magnitude. A good correlation was found between the results of thermal and microstructural analysis. For Bi and Sb, the eutectic depression temperature can be used as an individual criterion to gauge optimal levels of content in the refinement of Si, whereas for Sr, both depression temperature and recalescence magnitude must be considered. Based on the observed depression in eutectic growth temperature and recalescence, it can be concluded that the optimal concentrations to refine the eutectic Al-Si phase with Bi and Sb and to modify it with Sr at the given solidification conditions were 1, 0.5 and 0.04 wt%, respectively

An Object-Oriented Class Organization for Global-Local Generalized Finite Element Method

Abstract This paper shows and discusses a generic implementation of the global-local analysis toward generalized finite element method (GFEMgl). This implementation, performed into an academic computational platform, follows the object-oriented approach presented by the authors in a previous work for the standard version of GFEM in which the shape functions of finite elements are hierarchically enriched by analytical functions, according to the problem behavior. In global-local GFEM, however, the enrichment functions are constructed numerically from the solution of a local problem. This strategy allows the use of a coarse mesh even when the problem produces complex stress distributions. On the other hand, a local problem is defined where the stress field presents high gradients and it is discretized using a large number of elements. The results of the local problem are used to enrich the global problem which improves the approximate solution. The great advantage is allowing a well-refined description of the local problem, when necessary, avoiding an overburden for the computation of the global solution. Details of the implementation are presented and important aspects of using this strategy are highlighted in the numerical examples

Chronic Thromboembolic Pulmonary Hypertension: Epidemiology, Diagnosis, and Management

Chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH), classified as World Health Organization (WHO) group 4 pulmonary hypertension (PH), is an interesting and rare pulmonary vascular disorder secondary to mechanical obstruction of the pulmonary vasculature from thromboembolism resulting in PH. The pathophysiology is complex, beginning with mechanical obstruction of the pulmonary arteries, which eventually leads to arteriopathic changes and vascular remodeling in the nonoccluded arteries and in the distal segments of the occluded arteries mediated by thrombus nonresolution, abnormal angiogenesis, endothelial dysfunction, and various local growth factors. Based on available data, CTEPH is a rare disease entity occurring in a small proportion (0.5-3%) of patients after acute pulmonary embolism with an annual incidence ranging anywhere between 1 and 7 cases per million population. It is often underdiagnosed or misdiagnosed as idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension due to a lack of clinical suspicion or the under-utilization of radionuclide ventilation/perfusion scan. Although the current standard remains planar ventilation/perfusion scintigraphy as the initial imaging study to screen for CTEPH, and invasive pulmonary angiography with right heart catheterization as confirmatory modalities, they are likely to be replaced by modalities that can provide both anatomic and functional data while minimizing radiation exposure. Surgery is the gold standard treatment and offers better improvements in clinical and hemodynamic parameters compared with medical therapy. The management of CTEPH requires a multidisciplinary team, operability assessment, experienced surgical center, and the consideration of medical PH-directed therapies in patients who have inoperable disease, in addition to supportive therapies. Although, balloon pulmonary angioplasty is gaining interest to improve pulmonary hemodynamics and symptoms in CTEPH patients not amenable to surgery, further investigative randomized studies are needed to validate its use. It is very important for the present-day physician to be familiar with the disease entity and its appropriate evaluation to facilitate early diagnosis and appropriate management