The effects of methylamine osmolytes on the cytoskeleton microtubule assembly

Methylamine osmolytes are enriched in urea-rich cells. It is unclear, however, whether methylamines can promote microtubule assembly either in vitro or in cells. The osmolyte trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) at 200 mM increases the extent and the rate of formation of polymerized microtubule complex caused by microtubule-associated protein tau in vitro. Furthermore, TMAO counteracts the inhibition on the assembly caused by urea. Besides TMAO, betaine, another methylamine osmolyte, was found to have the same effects on MT as TMAO;Phosphorylation can affect the function of tau. Cyclic-AMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA)-phosphorylated tau does not promote tubulin assembly as judged by spectrophotometric and atomic force microscopy measurements, unless TMAO is;included in these assays. TMAO is also found to promote tubulin assembly with glycogen synthase kinase-3beta-phosphorylated tau. TMAO does not act by causing a chemical dephosphorylation of phosphorylated tau but it acts to overcome the functional deficit caused by phosphorylation. PKA-phosphorylated tau binds to tubulin in the presence of TMAO and lowers the critical concentration of tubulin needed for assembly. These results indicate that PKA-phosphorylated tau retains the ability to bind tubulin and promote tubulin assembly. TMAO is required, however, to sensitize the reaction;TMAO was examined its effects on the microtubule assembly of the XR1 glial cell line. The results of immunofluorescent staining showed that an increase in microtubule assembly occurred when culture media contained 200 mM TMAO. The change of microtubule assembly was correlated with the concentrations of intracellular TMAO, analyzed by 1H-NMR spectroscopy. The intracellular concentration of TMAO reached 30--50 mM after 6-hour incubation with 200 mM TMAO. During this time period microtubule assembly increased significantly. A spectrophotometric assay for microtubule assembly in vitro showed that 50 mM TMAO affected microtubule assembly, supporting the observations in cells. TMAO did not affect F-actin fibers as judged by fluorescent staining with phalloidin. Glycerol did not increase microtubule assembly of XR1 cells. These results indicate that the methylamine osmolytes, such as TMAO, can specifically enhance microtubule assembly in cells. Possible uses of TMAO in relation to studies of tubulin assembly in relation to neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer\u27s disease, are presented in this dissertation

Review on the Conflicts between Offshore Wind Power and Fishery Rights: Marine Spatial Planning in Taiwan

In recent years, Taiwan has firmly committed itself to pursue the green energy transition and a nuclear-free homeland by 2025, with an increase in renewable energy from 5% in 2016 to 20% in 2025. Offshore wind power (OWP) has become a sustainable and scalable renewable energy source in Taiwan. Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) is a fundamental tool to organize the use of the ocean space by different and often conflicting multi-users within ecologically sustainable boundaries in the marine environment. MSP is capable of definitively driving the use of offshore renewable energy. Lessons from Germany and the UK revealed that MSP was crucial to the development of OWP. This paper aims to evaluate how MSP is able to accommodate the exploitation of OWP in Taiwan and contribute to the achievement of marine policy by proposing a set of recommendations. It concludes that MSP is emerging as a solution to be considered by government institutions to optimize the multiple use of the ocean space, reduce conflicts and make use of the environmental and economic synergies generated by the joint deployment of OWP facilities and fishing or aquaculture activities for the conservation and protection of marine environments.Peer Reviewe

An Empirical Evaluation Of User Satisfaction With A School Nursing Information System

The adoption of a school nursing information system is considered one of the most efficient ways in which to document health records as well as monitor health conditions electronically. However, despite the importance of computerized health records in school nursing practice, few studies have examined user satisfaction of a school nursing information system. The aim of this study is to investigate the critical factors effecting school nurses’ satisfaction with a school nursing information system Utilizing a survey approach, questionnaires are distributed to nurses working in a primary or high school which introduces a new school nursing information system. The findings show several factors, including perceived usefulness, perceived of ease of use, training and workload are significant with user satisfaction. These results suggest that school nursing information system designers should comprehensively understand users’ demands and perceptions about the system, which will further facilitate user satisfaction, decrease their workload, and ultimately enhance job performance

Genetic analysis of fish iridoviruses isolated in Taiwan during 2001–2009

To investigate the genetic relationships between field strains of iridoviruses gathered from various fish species in Taiwan, viruses that were collected from 2001 to 2009 were analyzed. Open reading frames encoding the viral major capsid protein (MCP) and adenosine triphosphatase (ATPase) were sequenced for phylogenetic analysis. Our results indicated that iridoviruses from Taiwan aquaculture fishes could be classified into two groups: prior to 2005, the viruses were closely related to members of the genus Ranavirus; and after 2005, they were similar to members of the genus Megalocytivirus. Based on the analysis of MCP amino acid sequences, virus isolates were divided into 4 major genotypes that were related to ISKNV, RSIV, FLIV, and GIV, respectively. Pairwise comparisons of MCP genes showed that the ranavirus was an epidemic pathogen for economically important species in the major production regions and cultured marine fish, while the megalocytivirus isolates were sensitive to host range. In addition, the distribution of synonymous and non-synonymous changes in the MCP gene revealed that the iridoviruses were evolving slowly, and most of the variations were synonymous mutations. The Ka/Ks values were lower than one, and hence, the viruses were under negative selection

Post-Fire Assessment of Prestressed Concrete Bridges in Indiana

This project focused on evaluating the effects of fire-induced damage on concrete bridge elements, including prestressed concrete bridge girders. A series of controlled heating experiments, pool fire tests, material tests, and structural loading tests were conducted. Experimental results indicate that the portion of concrete subjected to temperatures higher than 400°C loses significant amounts of calcium hydroxide (CH). Decomposition of CH increases porosity and causes significant cracking. The portion of concrete exposed to temperatures higher than 400°C should be repaired or replaced. When subjected to ISO-834 standard fire heating, approximately 0.25 in. and 0.75 in. of concrete from the exposed surface are damaged after 40 minutes and 80 minutes of heating, respectively. Prestressed concrete girders exposed to about 50 minutes of hydrocarbon fire undergo superficial concrete material damage with loss of CH and extensive cracking and spalling extending to the depth of 0.75–1.0 in. from the exposed surface. These girders do not undergo significant reduction in flexural strength or shear strength. The reduction in the initial stiffness may be notable due to concrete cracking and spalling. Bridge inspectors can use these findings to infer the extent of material and structural damage to prestressed concrete bridge girders in the event of a fire and develop a post-fire assessment plan

Measuring the latency of cloud gaming systems

Cloud gaming, i.e., real-time game playing via thin clients, relieves players from the need to constantly upgrade their computers and deal with compatibility issues when playing games. As a result, cloud gaming is generating a great deal of interest among entrepreneurs and the public. However, given the large design space, it is not yet known which plat-forms deliver the best quality of service and which design elements constitute a good cloud gaming system. This study is motivated by the question: How good is the real-timeliness of current cloud gaming systems? To ad-dress the question, we analyze the response latency of two cloud gaming platforms, namely, OnLive and StreamMy-Game. Our results show that the streaming latency of On-Live is reasonable for real-time cloud gaming, while that of StreamMyGame is almost twice the former when the StreamMyGame server is provisioned using an Intel Core i7-920 PC. We believe that our measurement approach can be generally applied to PC-based cloud gaming platforms, and that it will further the understanding of such systems and lead to improvements

A Novel Approach for Defect Detection of Wind Turbine Blade Using Virtual Reality and Deep Learning

Wind turbines are subjected to continuous rotational stresses and unusual external forces such as storms, lightning, strikes by flying objects, etc., which may cause defects in turbine blades. Hence, it requires a periodical inspection to ensure proper functionality and avoid catastrophic failure. The task of inspection is challenging due to the remote location and inconvenient reachability by human inspection. Researchers used images with cropped defects from the wind turbine in the literature. They neglected possible background biases, which may hinder real-time and autonomous defect detection using aerial vehicles such as drones or others. To overcome such challenges, in this paper, we experiment with defect detection accuracy by having the defects with the background using a two-step deep-learning methodology. In the first step, we develop virtual models of wind turbines to synthesize the near-reality images for four types of common defects - cracks, leading edge erosion, bending, and light striking damage. The Unity perception package is used to generate wind turbine blade defects images with variations in background, randomness, camera angle, and light effects. In the second step, a customized U-Net architecture is trained to classify and segment the defect in turbine blades. The outcomes of U-Net architecture have been thoroughly tested and compared with 5-fold validation datasets. The proposed methodology provides reasonable defect detection accuracy, making it suitable for autonomous and remote inspection through aerial vehicles

Benchmarking of eight recurrent neural network variants for breath phase and adventitious sound detection on a self-developed open-access lung sound database-HF_Lung_V1

A reliable, remote, and continuous real-time respiratory sound monitor with automated respiratory sound analysis ability is urgently required in many clinical scenarios-such as in monitoring disease progression of coronavirus disease 2019-to replace conventional auscultation with a handheld stethoscope. However, a robust computerized respiratory sound analysis algorithm has not yet been validated in practical applications. In this study, we developed a lung sound database (HF_Lung_V1) comprising 9,765 audio files of lung sounds (duration of 15 s each), 34,095 inhalation labels, 18,349 exhalation labels, 13,883 continuous adventitious sound (CAS) labels (comprising 8,457 wheeze labels, 686 stridor labels, and 4,740 rhonchi labels), and 15,606 discontinuous adventitious sound labels (all crackles). We conducted benchmark tests for long short-term memory (LSTM), gated recurrent unit (GRU), bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), bidirectional GRU (BiGRU), convolutional neural network (CNN)-LSTM, CNN-GRU, CNN-BiLSTM, and CNN-BiGRU models for breath phase detection and adventitious sound detection. We also conducted a performance comparison between the LSTM-based and GRU-based models, between unidirectional and bidirectional models, and between models with and without a CNN. The results revealed that these models exhibited adequate performance in lung sound analysis. The GRU-based models outperformed, in terms of F1 scores and areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves, the LSTM-based models in most of the defined tasks. Furthermore, all bidirectional models outperformed their unidirectional counterparts. Finally, the addition of a CNN improved the accuracy of lung sound analysis, especially in the CAS detection tasks.Comment: 48 pages, 8 figures. To be submitte