Occurence of elliptical fractal patterns in multi-bit bandpass sigma delta modulators

It has been established that the class of bandpass sigma delta modulators (SDMs) with single bit quantizers could exhibit state space dynamics represented by elliptic or fractal patterns confined within trapezoidal regions. In this letter, we find that elliptical fractal patterns may also occur in bandpass SDMs with multibit quantizers, even for the case when the saturation regions of the multibit quantizers are not activated and a large number of bits are used for the implementation of the quantizers. Moreover, the fractal pattern may occur for low bit quantizers, and the visual appearance of the phase portraits between the infinite state machine and the finite state machine with high bit quantizers is different. These phenomena are different from those previously reported for the digital filter with two’s complement arithmetic. Furthermore, some interesting phenomena are found. A bit change of the quantizer can result in a dramatic change in the fractal patterns. When the trajectories of the corresponding linear systems converge to a fixed point, the regions of the elliptical fractal patterns diminish in size as the number of bits of the quantizers increases

Engineered Tumor-Targeted T Cells Mediate Enhanced Anti-Tumor Efficacy Both Directly and through Activation of the Endogenous Immune System.

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy has proven clinically beneficial against B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. However, suboptimal clinical outcomes have been associated with decreased expansion and persistence of adoptively transferred CAR T cells, antigen-negative relapses, and impairment by an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment. Improvements in CAR T cell design are required to enhance clinical efficacy, as well as broaden the applicability of this technology. Here, we demonstrate that interleukin-18 (IL-18)-secreting CAR T cells exhibit enhanced in vivo expansion and persistence and significantly increase long-term survival in syngeneic mouse models of both hematological and solid malignancies. In addition, we demonstrate that IL-18-secreting CAR T cells are capable of modulating the tumor microenvironment, as well as enhancing an effective endogenous anti-tumor immune response. IL-18-secreting CAR T cells represent a promising strategy to enhance the clinical outcomes of adoptive T cell therapy

Prediction of conformational B-cell epitopes from 3D structures by random forests with a distance-based feature

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Antigen-antibody interactions are key events in immune system, which provide important clues to the immune processes and responses. In Antigen-antibody interactions, the specific sites on the antigens that are directly bound by the B-cell produced antibodies are well known as B-cell epitopes. The identification of epitopes is a hot topic in bioinformatics because of their potential use in the epitope-based drug design. Although most B-cell epitopes are discontinuous (or conformational), insufficient effort has been put into the conformational epitope prediction, and the performance of existing methods is far from satisfaction.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In order to develop the high-accuracy model, we focus on some possible aspects concerning the prediction performance, including the impact of interior residues, different contributions of adjacent residues, and the imbalanced data which contain much more non-epitope residues than epitope residues. In order to address above issues, we take following strategies. Firstly, a concept of 'thick surface patch' instead of 'surface patch' is introduced to describe the local spatial context of each surface residue, which considers the impact of interior residue. The comparison between the thick surface patch and the surface patch shows that interior residues contribute to the recognition of epitopes. Secondly, statistical significance of the distance distribution difference between non-epitope patches and epitope patches is observed, thus an adjacent residue distance feature is presented, which reflects the unequal contributions of adjacent residues to the location of binding sites. Thirdly, a bootstrapping and voting procedure is adopted to deal with the imbalanced dataset. Based on the above ideas, we propose a new method to identify the B-cell conformational epitopes from 3D structures by combining conventional features and the proposed feature, and the random forest (RF) algorithm is used as the classification engine. The experiments show that our method can predict conformational B-cell epitopes with high accuracy. Evaluated by leave-one-out cross validation (LOOCV), our method achieves the mean AUC value of 0.633 for the benchmark bound dataset, and the mean AUC value of 0.654 for the benchmark unbound dataset. When compared with the state-of-the-art prediction models in the independent test, our method demonstrates comparable or better performance.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our method is demonstrated to be effective for the prediction of conformational epitopes. Based on the study, we develop a tool to predict the conformational epitopes from 3D structures, available at <url>http://code.google.com/p/my-project-bpredictor/downloads/list</url>.</p

The Association of Depressive Symptoms with Inflammatory Factors and Adipokines in Middle-Aged and Older Chinese

Studies in Western populations find that depression is associated with inflammation and obesity. The present study aimed to evaluate the relation of depressive symptoms with inflammatory factors and adipose-derived adipokines in middle-aged and older Chinese.Data were from 3289 community residents aged 50-70 from Beijing and Shanghai who participated in the Nutrition and Health of Aging Population in China project. Depressive symptoms were defined as a Center for Epidemiological Studies of Depression Scale (CES-D) score of 16 or higher. Plasma concentrations of C-reactive protein (CRP), interleukin-6 (IL-6), adiponectin, resistin, plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) and retinol binding protein 4 (RBP4) were measured. Of the 3289 participants, 312 (9.5%) suffered from current depressive symptoms. IL-6 level was higher in participants with depressive symptoms compared to their counterparts in the crude analyses (1.17 vs. 1.05 pg/mL, p = 0.023) and this association lost statistical significance after multiple adjustments (1.13 vs. 1.10 pg/mL, p = 0.520). Depressive symptoms were not associated with increased mean levels of any other inflammatory factors or adipokines in the unadjusted or adjusted analyses.We found no evidence that depressive symptoms were associated with inflammatory factors and adipokines in the middle-aged and older Chinese populations. Prospective studies and studies in clinically diagnosed patients are needed to confirm our results and clarify the relation of depression with inflammatory factors and adipokines

Blockchain: What Does It Mean to Industrial Electronics?: Technologies, Challenges, and Opportunities

Imagine you want to send money to a friend overseas. Wouldn't it be good if you didn't have to pay hefty fees to the intermediaries, and your friend received the funds very quickly? Now imagine ordering parts to make a product in your manufacturing plant. Wouldn't it be great if you were able to verify where each part comes from and have access to a reliable certificate on its quality automatically? Also think about dealing with energy use or selling off your excess solar energy as a prosumer. Wouldn't it be nice if you could purchase cheaper energy or sell it profitably at ease?Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Intelligent Electrical Power Grid

Synchronization of the duffing oscillator by using terminal sliding mode control

This paper presents a terminal sliding mode controller used for the chaos synchronization of the Duffing oscillator. The error dynamical equation between the master subsystem and the slave subsystem is established firstly. Then the controller drives the error variables of the error dynamics to zero. The time taken to reach the equilibrium point from any initial states is guaranteed to be in finite time and the chaos synchronization is realized by using the controller. Simulation results are presented to validate the analysis