Reclamation of Marine Chitinous Materials for Chitosanase Production via Microbial Conversion by Paenibacillus macerans

[[abstract]]: Chitinous materials from marine byproducts elicit great interest among biotechnologists for their potential biomedical or agricultural applications. In this study, four kinds of marine chitinous materials (squid pens, shrimp heads, demineralized shrimp shells, and demineralized crab shells) were used to screen the best source for producing chitosanase by Paenibacillus macerans TKU029. Among them, the chitosanase activity was found to be highest in the culture using the medium containing squid pens as the sole carbon/nitrogen (C/N) source. A chitosanase which showed molecular weights at 63 kDa was isolated from P. macerans cultured on a squid pens medium. The purified TKU029 chitosanase exhibited optimum activity at 60 ◦C and pH 7, and was stable at temperatures under 50 ◦C and pH 3-8. An analysis by MALDI-TOF MS revealed that the chitosan oligosaccharides (COS) obtained from the hydrolysis of water-soluble chitosan by TKU029 crude enzyme showed various degrees of polymerization (DP), varying from 3–6. The obtained COS enhanced the growth of four lactic acid bacteria strains but exhibited no effect on the growth of E. coli. By specialized growth enhancing effects, the COS produced from hydrolyzing water soluble chitosan with TKU029 chitinolytic enzymes could have potential for use in medicine or nutraceuticals.[[sponsorship]]MOST[[notice]]補正完

Minimizing makespan of Personal Scheduling problem in available time-windows with split-min and setup-time constraints

This paper deals with personal scheduling problem in available time-windows with split-min and setup-time constraints. The jobs are splitable into sub-jobs and a common lower bound on the size of each sub-job is imposed. The objective function aims to find a feasible schedule that minimizes the maximum completion time of all jobs. The proposed scheduling problem was proved to be strongly NP-hard by a reduction to 3-SAT problem in the preliminary results. We propose in this paper an exact method based on MILP model to find optimal solution, some heuristics to find feasible solution and a meta-heuristic based on tabu search algorithm to find good solution. The computational results show the performance of proposed exact method, some heuristics and tabu search algorithm

Neighborhood search for solving personal scheduling problem in available time windows with split-min and deadline constraints

The scheduling of individual jobs with certain constraints so that efficiency is a matter of concern. Jobs have deadlines to complete, can be broken down but not too small, and will be scheduled into some available time windows. The goal of the problem is to find a solution so that all jobs are completed as soon as possible. This problem is proved to be a strongly $NP$-hard problem. The implementation of the proposed MILP model using a CPLEX solver was also conducted to determine the optimal solution for the small-size dataset. For large-size dataset, heuristic algorithms are recommended such as First Come First Served (FCFS), Earliest Deadline (EDL), and neighborhood search including  Stochastic Hill Climbing (SHC), Random Restart Hill Climbing (RRHC), Simulated Annealing (SA) to determine a good solution in an acceptable time. Experimental results will present in detail the performance among the groups of exact, heuristic, and neighborhood search methods

Taxonomic assignment for large-scale metagenomic data on high-perfomance systems

Metagenomics is a powerful approach to study environment samples which do not require the isolation and cultivation of individual organisms. One of the essential tasks in a metagenomic project is to identify the origin of reads, referred to as taxonomic assignment. Due to the fact that each metagenomic project has to analyze large-scale datasets, the metatenomic assignment is very much computation intensive. This study proposes a parallel algorithm for the taxonomic assignment problem, called SeMetaPL, which aims to deal with the computational challenge. The proposed algorithm is evaluated with both simulated and real datasets on a high performance computing system. Experimental results demonstrate that the algorithm is able to achieve good performance and utilize resources of the system efficiently. The software implementing the algorithm and all test datasets can be downloaded at http://it.hcmute.edu.vn/bioinfo/metapro/SeMetaPL.html

Bioactivity-guided purification of novel herbal antioxidant and anti-NO compounds from Euonymus laxiflorus Champ

[[abstract]]Euonymus laxiflorus Champ., a medicinal herb collected in Vietnam, has been reported to show several potent bioactivities, including anti-NO, enzyme inhibition, hypoglycemic and antidiabetic effects. Recently, the antioxidant activity of Euonymus laxiflorus Champ. trunk bark (ELCTB) has also been reported. However, the active antioxidant and anti-NO constituents existing in ELCTB have not been reported in the literature. The objective of this study was to purify the active antioxidants from ELCTB and investigate the anti-NO effect of the major constituents. Twenty-two phenolics isolated from ELCTB, including 12 compounds newly isolated in this study (1–12) and 10 constituents obtained from our previous work, were evaluated for their antioxidant activity. Of these, 12 compounds (4–6, 9, 13–15, 18–22) showed a potent antioxidant capacity (FRS50 = 7.8–58.11 µg/mL), in comparison to α-tocopherol (FRS50 = 23 µg/mL). In the anti-NO activity tests, Walterolactone A (1a) and B (1b) β-D-glucopyranoside (13) demonstrated the most effective and comparable activity to that of quercetin with max inhibition and IC50 values of 100%, 1.3 µg/mL, and 100%, 1.21 µg/mL, respectively. The crude extract and its major compounds showed no cytotoxicity on normal cells. Notably, three constituents (9, 11, and 12) were identified as new compounds, another three constituents, including 1, 7, and 8, were found to be new natural products, constituents 9 and 13 were determined to be new antioxidants, and compound 13 was reported to have novel potent anti-NO activity for the first time. The results of this study contribute to the enrichment of new natural products and compounds, as well as the novel biological activity of constituents isolated from Euonymus laxiflorus Champ. The current study also indicates ELCTB as a rich natural source of active phenolics. It is suggested that ELCTB could be developed as a health food with promising antioxidant and anti-NO effects, as well as other beneficial biological activities.[[sponsorship]]科技部[[notice]]補正完

Production of Sucrolytic Enzyme by Bacillus licheniformis by the Bioconversion of Pomelo Albedo as a Carbon Source

[[abstract]]Recently, there has been increasing use of agro-byproducts in microbial fermentation to produce a variety of value-added products. In this study, among various kinds of agro-byproducts, pomelo albedo powder (PAP) was found to be the most effective carbon source for the production of sucrose hydrolyzing enzyme by Bacillus licheniformis TKU004. The optimal medium for sucrolytic enzyme production contained 2% PAP, 0.75% NH4NO3 , 0.05% MgSO4 , and 0.05% NaH2PO4 and the optimal culture conditions were pH 6.7, 35 ◦C, 150 rpm, and 24 h. Accordingly, the highest sucrolytic activity was 1.87 U/mL, 4.79-fold higher than that from standard conditions using sucrose as the carbon source. The purified sucrolytic enzyme (sleTKU004) is a 53 kDa monomeric protein and belongs to the glycoside hydrolase family 68. The optimum temperature and pH of sleTKU004 were 50 ◦C, and pH = 6, respectively. SleTKU004 could hydrolyze sucrose, raffinose, and stachyose by attacking the glycoside linkage between glucose and fructose molecules of the sucrose unit. The Km and Vmax of sleTKU004 were 1.16 M and 5.99 µmol/min, respectively. Finally, sleTKU004 showed strong sucrose tolerance and presented the highest hydrolytic activity at the sucrose concentration of 1.2 M–1.5 M.[[sponsorship]]科技部[[notice]]補正完

Potential application of rhizobacteria isolated from the Central Highland of Vietnam as an effective biocontrol agent of robusta coffee nematodes and as a bio-fertilizer

[[abstract]]Robusta coffee is a major commercial crop in the Central Highland of Vietnam with high economic and export value. However, this crop is adversely affected by various pathogens, particularly nematodes. This study aimed to screen active anti-nematode rhizobacterial strains for sustainable coffee production. Among more than 200 isolates, the isolate TUN03 demonstrated efficient biocontrol with nearly 100% mortality of J2 coffee nematodes Meloidogyne spp. and 84% inhibition of nematode egg hatching. This active strain was identified as Pseudomonas aeruginosa TUN03 based on its 16S rRNA gene sequence and phylogenetic analysis. In greenhouse tests, the strain TUN03 significantly reduced the coffee nematode population in the rhizome-soil with an 83.23% inhibition rate and showed plant growth-promoting effects. Notably, this is the first report of the nematicidal effect of P. aeruginosa against coffee nematodes. This potent strain further showed an antifungal effect against various crop-pathogenic fungi and was found to be the most effective against Fusarium solani F04 (isolated from coffee roots) with a 70.51% inhibition rate. In addition, high-performance liquid chromatography analysis revealed that this bacterial strain also secretes plant growth regulators including indole acetic acid (IAA), gibberellic acid (GA3), kinetin, and zeatin in significant amounts of 100, 2700, 37, and 9.5 µg/mL, respectively. The data from this study suggest that P. aeruginosa TUN03 may be a potential biocontrol agent and biofertilizer for the sustainable production of Robusta coffee and other crops.[[sponsorship]]科技部[[notice]]補正完

Logic, Probability and Action: A Situation Calculus Perspective

The unification of logic and probability is a long-standing concern in AI, and more generally, in the philosophy of science. In essence, logic provides an easy way to specify properties that must hold in every possible world, and probability allows us to further quantify the weight and ratio of the worlds that must satisfy a property. To that end, numerous developments have been undertaken, culminating in proposals such as probabilistic relational models. While this progress has been notable, a general-purpose first-order knowledge representation language to reason about probabilities and dynamics, including in continuous settings, is still to emerge. In this paper, we survey recent results pertaining to the integration of logic, probability and actions in the situation calculus, which is arguably one of the oldest and most well-known formalisms. We then explore reduction theorems and programming interfaces for the language. These results are motivated in the context of cognitive robotics (as envisioned by Reiter and his colleagues) for the sake of concreteness. Overall, the advantage of proving results for such a general language is that it becomes possible to adapt them to any special-purpose fragment, including but not limited to popular probabilistic relational models

The Carnegie-Irvine Galaxy Survey. I. Overview and Atlas of Optical Images

The Carnegie-Irvine Galaxy Survey (CGS) is a long-term program to investigate the photometric and spectroscopic properties of a statistically complete sample of 605 bright (B_T < 12.9 mag), southern (Dec. < 0) galaxies using the facilities at Las Campanas Observatory. This paper, the first in a series, outlines the scientific motivation of CGS, defines the sample, and describes the technical aspects of the optical broadband (BVRI) imaging component of the survey, including details of the observing program, data reduction procedures, and calibration strategy. The overall quality of the images is quite high, in terms of resolution (median seeing 1"), field of view (8.9' X 8.9'), and depth (median limiting surface brightness 27.5, 26.9, 26.4, and 25.3 mag/arcsec2 in the B, V, R, and I bands, respectively). We prepare a digital image atlas showing several different renditions of the data, including three-color composites, star-cleaned images, stacked images to enhance faint features, structure maps to highlight small-scale features, and color index maps suitable for studying the spatial variation of stellar content and dust. In anticipation of upcoming science analyses, we tabulate an extensive set of global properties for the galaxy sample. These include optical isophotal and photometric parameters derived from CGS itself, as well as published information on multiwavelength (ultraviolet, U-band, near-infrared, far-infrared) photometry, internal kinematics (central stellar velocity dispersions, disk rotational velocities), environment (distance to nearest neighbor, tidal parameter, group or cluster membership), and H I content. The digital images and science-level data products will be made publicly accessible to the community.Comment: To appear in ApJS. This is the companion paper to Li et al. (2011). Online materials and other information available in the CGS website http://cgs.obs.carnegiescience.ed

Open source clinical science for emerging infections

International audienc