SYNTHESIS AND STRUCTURE-PROPERTY STUDIES OF ORGANIC MATERIALS CONTAINING FLUORINATED AND NON-FLUORINATED # SYSTEMS (SMALL MOLECULES AND POLYMERS)

Loline alkaloids (LA) are secondary metabolites produced by Epichloandamp;euml; (anamorph, Neotyphodium) grass endophytes. They are toxic and deterrent to a broad range of herbivorous insects but not to livestock. This protective bioactivity has spurred considerable research into the LA biosynthetic pathway. LOL, the gene cluster containing nine genes, is required for LA biosynthesis. The regulation of LOL genes during LA production in culture and in symbio is of interest. In this study, coordinate regulation between LOL gene expression and LA production level was investigated in both MM culture and symbiota. Results showed that expression of LOL genes in N. uncinatum MM culture were tightly correlated with each other (p andamp;lt; 0.0005), and all presented a significant temporal quadratic pattern during LA production. Gene expression started before LA were detectable, and increased while LA accumulated. The highest gene expression level was reached before the highest amounts of LA were detected, and gene expression level declined to a very low level after amounts of LA plateaued. Observations suggested that the hierarchical clusters based on the correlation coefficient could help to predict the roles of LOL genes in the LA pathway. In symbiota, coordinate coregulation of LOL gene expression with LA was found in E. festucae-meadow fescue inflorescences and stromata, whereby lower LOL gene expression corresponded with the lower LA level in stromata. In N. uncinatum (or N. siegelii)-meadow fescue vegetative tissues, dramatically higher LA levels were found in younger leaf tissue than in older leaf tissue, yet no evidence was found to relate this difference to LOL gene expression differences. Instead, substrate availability may regulate the LA level. In particular, asparagine was more than 10-fold higher in young leaf tissue than in old tissue, although proline was significantly lower in young tissue. Therefore, different regulatory mechanisms underlie LOL gene expression and LA production in different circumstances. The GUS activity of Pro-lolC2-GUS and Pro-lolA2-GUS in Neotyphodium species was almost undetectable in culture, though the activity could be detected in symbiota. The mRNA of GUS did not exhibit the same pattern as lolC2 or lolA2 in culture during LA production time course. A Pro-lolC2-cre transgene was expressed in complex medium, in which lolC2 mRNA was not detectable. These results suggest that proper regulation of LOL genes in culture or symbiota is dependent on the LOL cluster

Feasibility of Bauxite Residue in Pollution Mitigation and Resource Recovery

Bauxite residue is an industrial waste generated from the alumina refining industry, raising great concerns about environmental pollution. The primary problem for bauxite residue is its high alkalinity and salinity. This beneficial reuse of bauxite residue is desirable for the sustainable management of this waste stream. Bauxite residues can be used as an option of flue gas desulfurization to reduce the toxicity associated with high alkalinity. In this dissertation, it was first identified the linkage between the characteristics of the bauxite residues and their acid neutralization capacity (ANC). Further options of beneficial use were investigated according to the characteristics of bauxite residues. With the iron oxide-rich mineralogy, bauxite residue exhibited excellent capabilities to remove aqueous phosphate at environmentally relevant concentrations. Given that phosphate is an important nutrient, the removal and concentration of phosphorus with bauxite residue could be a strategy for the recovery of phosphorus as a resource. With its cation exchange capacity, bauxite residues were also found to be able to remove ciprofloxacin as an extensively used antibiotic and potential water pollutant. These findings show that bauxite residues could be used as feasible sorbents for pollution mitigation as well as resource recovery. The beneficial use was further demonstrated in the utilization of bauxite residues as an additive in anaerobic digestion, which is frequently implemented for the stabilization of organic waste and the production of biogas as a renewable energy source. My work shows that bauxite residues could be readily neutralized by the buffering capacity of the digestate in the anaerobic digestion without negatively impacting process performance. More importantly, the addition of bauxite residue could enhance the availability of phosphorus in the digestate which is desirable for the land application of anaerobic digestate as a soil supplement. In summary, this work has developed multiple pathways for the sustainable management of bauxite residue as a hazardous material with integrated applications in pollution mitigation and resource recovery

Learning over Knowledge-Base Embeddings for Recommendation

State-of-the-art recommendation algorithms -- especially the collaborative filtering (CF) based approaches with shallow or deep models -- usually work with various unstructured information sources for recommendation, such as textual reviews, visual images, and various implicit or explicit feedbacks. Though structured knowledge bases were considered in content-based approaches, they have been largely neglected recently due to the availability of vast amount of data, and the learning power of many complex models. However, structured knowledge bases exhibit unique advantages in personalized recommendation systems. When the explicit knowledge about users and items is considered for recommendation, the system could provide highly customized recommendations based on users' historical behaviors. A great challenge for using knowledge bases for recommendation is how to integrated large-scale structured and unstructured data, while taking advantage of collaborative filtering for highly accurate performance. Recent achievements on knowledge base embedding sheds light on this problem, which makes it possible to learn user and item representations while preserving the structure of their relationship with external knowledge. In this work, we propose to reason over knowledge base embeddings for personalized recommendation. Specifically, we propose a knowledge base representation learning approach to embed heterogeneous entities for recommendation. Experimental results on real-world dataset verified the superior performance of our approach compared with state-of-the-art baselines

Circulator based on spoof surface plasmon polaritons

Circulators based on spoof surface plasmon polaritons are designed and analyzed. In the letter, we use blade structure to realize the propagation of SSPPs wave and a matching transition is used to feed energy from coplanar waveguide to the SSPPs. And the circulator shows good nonreciprocal transmission characteristics. The simulation results indicate that in the frequency band from 5 to 6.6 GHz, the isolation degree and return loss basically reaches 15dB and the insertion loss is less than 0.5dB. Moreover, the use of confinement electromagnetic waves can decrease the size of the ferrite and show a broadband characteristic.Comment: 3 pages, 6 figures, submitted to IEEE antennas and wireless propagation letters on 27-Mar-201

Investor Sentiment and Assets Valuation

AbstractUsing the Chinese stock market data as sample, this paper investigates the impact of investor sentiment on the assets valuation. In order to classify stocks objectively, our sample stocks are sorted by double indicators (B/M and PE). In the portfolio, we find stocks with low B/M and high PE are sensitive to investor sentiment, which are considered to be costly to arbitrage. Investor sentiment has incremental power to explain stock return co-movements, which indicates that these stocks would perform higher (lower) excess returns when investors are bullish (bearish).Our findings support a role for investor sentiment in the formation of return and the change of investor sentiment should be taken as an important systemic risk in asset pricing and portfolio management

Neoproterozoic subduction along the Ailaoshan zone, South China : geochronological and geochemical evidence from amphibolite

This study was supported by China Natural Science Foundation (41190073 and 41372198), National Basic Research Program of China (2014CB440901) and Natural Environment Research Council (grant NE/J021822/1).Lenses of amphibolites occur along the Ailaoshan suture zone at the southwestern margin of the Yangtze Block, South China. Petrological, geochemical and zircon U-Pb geochronological data indicate that they are divisible into two coeval groups. Group 1, represented by the Jinping amphibolite, has mg-number of 71-76 and (La/Yb)cn ratios of 7.2-7.7, and displays a geochemical affinity to island arc volcanic rocks. Group 2 amphibolites occur at Yuanyang and are characterized by high Nb contents (14.3-18.4 ppm), resembling Nb-enriched basalts. The epsilon(Nd)(t) values for Group 1 range from -3.45 to -2.04 and for Group 2 from +4.08 to +4.39. A representative sample for Group 1 yields a U-Pb zircon age of 803 7 Ma, whereas two samples for Group 2 give U-Pb zircon ages of 813 +/- 11 Ma and 814 +/- 12 Ma. Petrogenetic analysis suggests that Group 1 originated from an orthopyroxene-rich source and Group 2 from a mantle wedge modified by slab-derived melt. In combination with other geological observations, these amphibolites are inferred to constitute part of an early Neoproterozoic (similar to 815-800 Ma) arc-back-arc basin system. The Neoproterozoic amphibolites and related rocks along the Ailaoshan zone may be the southward extension of the Neoproterozoic supra-subduction zone that developed along the western margin of the Yangtze Block. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.PostprintPeer reviewe

Study on nonlinear detection and identification for rubber isolation bearing

The isolation bearing nonlinear mechanical model is described based on the simplified Bouc-wen hysteresis model. In order to provide reasonable mechanical properties state assessment for isolation bearing of base isolated structure under seismic excitation, wavelet coefficient energy ratio index are proposed to detect the time-domain evolution characteristics during the nonlinear phase of isolation bearing, then the nonlinear characteristics and parameters of the isolation bearing are identified using wavelet multi-resolution analysis theory. Numerical examples show that the wavelet coefficient energy ratio (WCER) can be a good way to detect the nonlinear states of the isolation bearing under different seismic excitation levels, and the nonlinear characteristics and the model parameters of the isolation bearing can be accurately identified by using the wavelet multi-resolution identification methods

Research progress on water-soluble chitosan

Chitosan has good film-forming property, adsorption, biocompatibility, biodegradability and antimicrobial properties, but it can only be dissolved in weak acidic aqueous solution and cannot be directly dissolved in water, which greatly limits its application. In order to increase its solubility in water, chitosan is modified, the research on the water-soluble derivatives of chitosan is reviewed in this paper, and its application in the protection of paper relics is briefly introduced. Chitin is a kind of natural polysaccharide macromolecular polymer synthesized by biology in animals and plants, which mainly comes from shrimp shelsl, crab shells, insect shells and so on. Chitosan (CS) is obtained by deacetylation of chitin. The chitin is deacetylated under homogeneous conditions, and water-soluble product can be obtained by controlling the degree of deacetylation at about 50% [1]. The primary hydroxyl group, secondary hydroxyl group and amino group on the glucosamine unit in the chitosan molecular chain, with strong reactivity, which can be modified and embellished by functionalization to improve its solubility