Salt-induced osmotic stress for lipid overproduction in batch culture of Chlorella vulgaris

Effect of NaCl-induced osmotic stress on lipid production was investigated in batch culture of Chlorella vulgaris. Based on the facts that NaCl stress improved lipid production but inhibited cells growth at the same times, the novel strategies of multiple osmotic stresses with different NaCl additions (2 g/L at 80 h, 4 g/L at 100 h, and 6 g/L at 120 h) were adopted for lipid overproduction. Results show that after 180 h cultivation, lipid yield reached 3.16 g/L and intracellular lipid content was 58.6%, increased by 21.1 and 22.9%, respectively, compared to the control. Further applying the strategies to 5 L fermentor, lipid yield of 3.81 g/L was achieved at 180 h, which was 30.1% higher than the control, suggesting application of osmotic stress to lipid overproduction as being feasible.Key words: NaCl-induced osmotic stress, heterotrophic cultivation, lipid, glucose, Chlorella vulgaris

An adaptive medium access control scheme for mobile ad hoc networks under self-similar traffic

This article is available through the specified link below - Copyright @ 2010 Springer.An important function of wireless networks is to support mobile computing. Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) consist of a collection of mobile stations communicating with each other without the use of any pre-existent infrastructure. The self-organization characteristic of MANETs makes them suitable for many real-world applications where network topology changes frequently. As a result, the development of efficient MAC (Medium Access Control) protocols in MANETs is extremely challenging. Self-similar traffic with scale-invariant burstiness can generate bursty network loads and thus seriously degrade the system performance. This paper presents an adaptive MAC scheme which dynamically adjusts the increasing function and resetting mechanism of contention window based on the status of network loads. The performance of this scheme is investigated in comparison with the legacy DCF (Distributed Coordination Function) under self-similar traffic and different mobility models. The performance results reveal that the proposed scheme is able to achieve the higher throughput and energy efficiency as well as lower end-to-end delay and packet drop probability than the legacy DCF.Hong Liu’s research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 60603058

Dual Drug-Loaded Biofunctionalized Amphiphilic Chitosan Nanoparticles: Enhanced Synergy between Cisplatin and Demethoxycurcumin against Multidrug-Resistant Stem-Like Lung Cancer Cells

Lung cancer kills more humans than any other cancer and multidrug resistance (MDR) in cancer stem-like cells (CSC) is emerging as a reason for failed treatments. One concept which addresses this root cause of treatment failure is the utilization of nanoparticles to simultaneously deliver dual drugs to cancer cells with synergistic performance, easy to envision - hard to achieve. It is challenging to simultaneously load drugs of highly different physicochemical properties into one nanoparticle, release kinetics may differ between drugs and general requirements for biomedical nanoparticles apply. Here self-assembled nanoparticles of amphiphilic carboxymethyl-hexanoyl chitosan (CHC) were shown to present nano-microenvironments enabling simultaneous loading of hydrophilic and hydrophobic drugs. This was expanded into a dual-drug nano-delivery system to treat lung CSC. CHC nanoparticles were loaded/chemically modified with the anticancer drug cisplatin and the MDR-suppressing Chinese herbal extract demethoxycurcumin, followed by biofunctionalization with CD133 antibody for enhanced uptake by lung CSC, all in a feasible one-pot preparation. The nanoparticles were characterized with regard to chemistry, size, zeta potential and drug loading/release. Biofunctionalized and non-functionalized nanoparticles were investigated for uptake by lung CSC. Subsequently the cytotoxicity of single and dual drugs, free in solution or in nanoparticles, was evaluated against lung CSC at different doses. From the dose response at different concentrations the degree of synergy was determined through Chou-Talalay's Plot. The biofunctionalized nanoparticles promoted synergistic effects between the drugs and were highly effective against MDR lung CSC. The efficacy and feasible one-pot preparation suggest preclinical studies using relevant disease models to be justified

A porcine gene, PBK, differentially expressed in the longissimus muscle from Meishan and Large White pig

An investigation of differences in gene expression in the longissimus muscle of Meishan and Large White pigs was undertaken, using the mRNA display technique. A fragment of one differentially expressed gene was isolated and sequenced, whereupon the complete cDNA sequence was then obtained by using the rapid amplification of cDNA ends (RACE). The nucleotide sequence of the gene is not related to any known porcine gene. Sequence analysis revealed that the open reading frame of this gene encodes a protein with 322 amino acids, thus displaying high sequence identity with the PDZ binding kinase (PBK) of eleven other animal species – dog, horse, cattle, human, chimpanzee, crab-eating macaque, rhesus monkey, rat, mouse, gray short-tailed opossum and platypus, so it can be defined as the porcine PBK gene. This gene was finally assigned GeneID:100141310. Phylogenetic tree analysis revealed that the swine PBK gene has a closer genetic relationship with the PBK gene of platypus. Gene expression analysis of eight tissues of a Meishan x Large White cross showed that the porcine PBK gene is differentially expressed in various tissues. Our experiment established the primary foundation for further research on this gene

Excitonic quantum confinement modified optical conductivity of monolayer and few-layered MoS2

2016-2017 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journal201804_a bcmaVersion of RecordPublishe

Deep Learning Enabled Semantic Communications with Speech Recognition and Synthesis

In this paper, we develop a deep learning based semantic communication system for speech transmission, named DeepSC-ST. We take the speech recognition and speech synthesis as the transmission tasks of the communication system, respectively. First, the speech recognition-related semantic features are extracted for transmission by a joint semantic-channel encoder and the text is recovered at the receiver based on the received semantic features, which significantly reduces the required amount of data transmission without performance degradation. Then, we perform speech synthesis at the receiver, which dedicates to re-generate the speech signals by feeding the recognized text and the speaker information into a neural network module. To enable the DeepSC-ST adaptive to dynamic channel environments, we identify a robust model to cope with different channel conditions. According to the simulation results, the proposed DeepSC-ST significantly outperforms conventional communication systems and existing DL-enabled communication systems, especially in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. A software demonstration is further developed as a proof-of-concept of the DeepSC-ST

Gene Transfer of Engineered Calmodulin Alleviates Ventricular Arrhythmias in a Calsequestrin-Associated Mouse Model of Catecholaminergic Polymorphic Ventricular Tachycardia

Catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (CPVT) is a familial arrhythmogenic syndrome characterized by sudden death. There are several genetic forms of CPVT associated with mutations in genes encoding the cardiac ryanodine receptor (RyR2) and its auxiliary proteins including calsequestrin (CASQ2) and calmodulin (CaM). It has been suggested that impairment of the ability of RyR2 to stay closed (ie, refractory) during diastole may be a common mechanism for these diseases. Here, we explore the possibility of engineering CaM variants that normalize abbreviated RyR2 refractoriness for subsequent viral-mediated delivery to alleviate arrhythmias in non-CaM-related CPVT

Electrical and FT-IR measurements of undoped N-type INP materials grown from various stoichiometric melts

P-rich, In-rich and Stoichiometric undoped InP melts have been synthesed by phosphorus in-situ injection method. InP crystal ingots have been grown from these melts by Liquid Encapsulated Czochralski (LEC). Samples from these ingots grown from various Stoichiometric melts have been characterized by Hall Effect and Fourier Transform Infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy measurements respectively. The Hall Effect measurement results indicate that the net carrier concentration of P-inch undoped InP is higher than that of In-rich and Stoichiometric undoped InP materials. FT-IR spectroscopy measurements reveal that there are intensive absorption peaks which have been proved to be hydrogen related indium vacancy complex V InH 4. By comparing FT-IR spectra, it is found that P-rich InP material has the most intensive absorption peak of V InH 4, while In-rich InP material has the weakest absorption peak.published_or_final_versio

Relativistic effects in the chaotic Sitnikov problem

We investigate the phase space structure of the relativistic Sitnikov problem in the first post-Newtonian approximation. The phase space portraits show a strong dependence on the gravitational radius which describes the strength of the relativistic pericentre advance. Bifurcations appearing at increasing the gravitational radius are presented. Transient chaotic behavior related to escapes from the primaries are also studied. Finally, the numerically determined chaotic saddle is investigated in the context of hyperbolic and non-hyperbolic dynamics as a function of the gravitational radius.Comment: 8 pages, 11 figure