Structural panels

Vinyl pyridines including vinyl stilbazole materials and vinyl styrylpyridine oligomer materials are disclosed. These vinylpyridines form copolymers with bismaleimides which copolymers have good fire retardancy and decreased brittleness. The cure temperatures of the copolymers are substantially below the cure temperatures of the bismaleimides alone. Reinforced composites made from the cured copolymers are disclosed as well

Vinyl stilbazoles

Vinyl pyridines including vinyl stilbazole materials and vinyl styrylpyridine oligomer materials are disclosed. These vinylpyridines form copolymers with bismaleimides which copolymers have good fire retardancy and decreased brittleness. The cure temperatures of the copolymers are substantially below the cure temperatures of the bismaleimides alone. Reinforced composites made from the cured copolymers are disclosed as well

Analysis of 10086 Microarray Gene Expression Data Uncovers Genes that Subclassify Breast Cancer Intrinsic Subtypes

Breast cancer is a complex disease comprising molecularly distinct subtypes. The prognosis and treatment differ between subtypes; thus, it is important to distinguish one subtype from another. In this chapter, we make use of high-throughput microarray dataset to perform breast cancer subtyping of 10086 samples. Aside from the four major subtypes, that is, Basal-like, HER2-enriched, luminal A, and luminal B, we defined a normal-like subtype that has a gene expression profile similar to that found in normal and adjacent normal breast samples. Also, a group of luminal B-like samples with better prognosis was distinguished from the high-risk luminal B breast cancer. We additionally identified 33 surface-protein encoding genes whose gene expression profiles were associated with survival outcomes. We believe these genes are potential therapeutic targets and diagnostic biomarkers for breast cancer

Light-weight ceramic insulation

Ultra-high temperature, light-weight, ceramic insulation such as ceramic tile is obtained by pyrolyzing a siloxane gel derived from the reaction of at least one organo dialkoxy silane and at least one tetralkoxy silane in an acid or base liquid medium. The reaction mixture of the tetra- and dialkoxy silanes may contain also an effective amount of a mono- or trialkoxy silane to obtain the siloxane gel. The siloxane gel is dried at ambient pressures to form a siloxane ceramic precursor without significant shrinkage. The siloxane ceramic precursor is subsequently pyrolyzed, in an inert atmosphere, to form the black ceramic insulation comprising atoms of silicon, carbon and oxygen. The ceramic insulation, can be characterized as a porous, uniform ceramic tile resistant to oxidation at temperatures ranging as high as 1700.degree. C. and is particularly useful as lightweight tiles for spacecraft and other high-temperature insulation applications

Light-weight black ceramic insulation

Ultra-high temperature, light-weight, black ceramic insulation having a density ranging from about 0.12 g/cc. to 0.6 g/cc. such as ceramic tile is obtained by pyrolyzing siloxane gels derived from the reaction of at least one organo dialkoxy silane and at least one tetralkoxy silane in an acid or base liquid medium. The reaction mixture of the tetra- and dialkoxy silanes also may contain an effective amount of a mono- or trialkoxy silane to obtain the siloxane gels. The siloxane gels are dried at ambient temperatures and pressures to form siloxane ceramic precursors without significant shrinkage. The siloxane ceramic precursors are subsequently pyrolyzed, in an inert atmosphere, to form the black ceramic insulation comprising atoms of silicon, carbon and oxygen. The ceramic insulation can be characterized as a porous, uniform ceramic tile resistant to oxidation at temperatures ranging as high as 1700.degree. C., and particularly useful as lightweight tiles for spacecraft and other high-temperature insulation applications

Safety-quantifiable Line Feature-based Monocular Visual Localization with 3D Prior Map

Accurate and safety-quantifiable localization is of great significance for safety-critical autonomous systems, such as unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The visual odometry-based method can provide accurate positioning in a short period but is subjected to drift over time. Moreover, the quantification of the safety of the localization solution (the error is bounded by a certain value) is still a challenge. To fill the gaps, this paper proposes a safety-quantifiable line feature-based visual localization method with a prior map. The visual-inertial odometry provides a high-frequency local pose estimation which serves as the initial guess for the visual localization. By obtaining a visual line feature pair association, a foot point-based constraint is proposed to construct the cost function between the 2D lines extracted from the real-time image and the 3D lines extracted from the high-precision prior 3D point cloud map. Moreover, a global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) receiver autonomous integrity monitoring (RAIM) inspired method is employed to quantify the safety of the derived localization solution. Among that, an outlier rejection (also well-known as fault detection and exclusion) strategy is employed via the weighted sum of squares residual with a Chi-squared probability distribution. A protection level (PL) scheme considering multiple outliers is derived and utilized to quantify the potential error bound of the localization solution in both position and rotation domains. The effectiveness of the proposed safety-quantifiable localization system is verified using the datasets collected in the UAV indoor and UGV outdoor environments

Protein domain repetition is enriched in Streptococcal cell-surface proteins

AbstractTandem repetition of domain in protein sequence occurs in all three domains of life. It creates protein diversity and adds functional complexity in organisms. In this work, we analyzed 52 streptococcal genomes and found 3748 proteins contained domain repeats. Proteins not harboring domain repeats are significantly enriched in cytoplasm, whereas proteins with domain repeats are significantly enriched in cytoplasmic membrane, cell wall and extracellular locations. Domain repetition occurs most frequently in S. pneumoniae and least in S. thermophilus and S. pyogenes. DUF1542 is the highest repeated domain in a single protein, followed by Rib, CW_binding_1, G5 and HemolysinCabind. 3D structures of 24 repeat-containing proteins were predicted to investigate the structural and functional effect of domain repetition. Several repeat-containing streptococcal cell surface proteins are known to be virulence-associated. Surface-associated tandem domain-containing proteins without experimental functional characterization may be potentially involved in the pathogenesis of streptococci and deserve further investigation

I. Electron Microscope Heteroduplex Analysis of DNA Sequences in F-Prime Factors. II. Electron Microscope Studies of λ and Mu Prophages. III. An Electron Microscope Study of Sindbis Virus RNA

This thesis is composed of three parts. Part I is concerned with studies of the DNA sequences of several F-prime factors and the sequence relations among them using electron microscope heteroduplex methods. It was found that the DNA sequence of the F factor can be roughly divided into three regions: 1) a region about one-fourth of the molecule which is concerned with the fertility functions of the F factor. 2) a region about one-third of the molecule which is rich in A+T sequence and contains the sequences used to interact with the bacterial chromosome for the integration or excision of F factor DNA. J) a region which contains the genes for autonomous replication and female phage resistance and the structural element for conjugal transfer. The structure of the bacterial DNA carried in several classical episomes, F100, F152, F8 and some of their derivatives was studied extensively. Bacterial markers between fep and uvrB were analyzed both genetically and physically. A method was developed to reconstruct the original episomes from their deletion variants. The results confirm the history that F100 and F152 were derived from the same Hfr. The formation of a new episome, F80, from F8 suggested that there is a hot spot in the E. coli chromosome for the recombination with F sequence between 93.2 and 94.5/0.0F. In part II, the structures of λ and Mu prophages and Mu phage DNA were studied. The λ prophage carried in an F-prime factor was found by electron microscope heteroduplex analysis to be circularly permuted relative to the vegetative viral DNA. On the other hand, Mu prophage DNA was shown to be collinear with the viral DNA. The integrated Mu prophage DNA was used as a marker for physical mapping of bacterial genes in E. coli. Sequence heterogeneity in Mu phage and prophage DNA's was also studied. The G loop heterogeneity was found to be present in both phage and prophage DNA.'s and was shown to be due to sequence inversion. The heterogeneous split ends sequences were found to be absent in the several prophages studied. Part III contains an electron microscope study of viral RNA of Sindbis virus and a method for mapping poly A sequences in RNA molecules. Under weak denaturing conditions Sindbis virus RNA appears in circular form with a double stranded "handle" of about 250 nucleotides long. This implies that Sindbis RNA contains complementary sequences at or near the ends of the molecule. A technique using glyoxal as a denaturing agent for mapping polyA sequences in RNA was developed. Glyoxal attaches to guanine base irreversibly and thus removes the secondary structure of RNA without inhibiting the renaturation capacity of polyA sequences in the molecule. A polyA sequence was found at or near one end of Sindbis RNA by this method.</p