Protein Assembly for a Functional Fibrous Product

Natural protein-based materials are exploring their new applications from the traditional uses. Structural proteins provide scaffolds, whereas functional proteins carry essential biological activities through millions of biochemical reactions. The idea of implementing functionalities into natural structures could provide manufactured protein products with a better fit for human desire. The development of synthetic biology and molecular assembly methods illustrates possibilities for the production of functional structures in-situ, which provides better connections between the functional partners with the structural scaffolds. Protein fibres are one of the natural structures which possess a unique shape and superior mechanical properties. Apart from the natural protein fibres, many disease-related peptides self-assembled into amyloid filaments and fibrous structures. Natural globular proteins could also form fibres through the directed assembly by changing their storage conditions or through fusion. Elongated polyglutamine peptides cause many neurodegenerative diseases as they assemble. In this thesis, a polyglutamine peptide (Q77) was fused with functional partners to direct the protein assembly in vitro. The role of the polyglutamine was studied during assembly and after the formation of a self-supportive fibrous product. The extensibility of traditionally size-limited fibrous materials formed by disease-related peptides was tested experimentally for the first time. The resultant fibrous product with embedded functionalities mimics the structure of silk, but the mechanical behaviour of collagen. Two structurally distinct proteins were chosen as the functional partners for Q77: a monomeric red fluorescent protein (mcRFP), which is relatively small in size and possesses a b-barrel structure, and firefly luciferase (Luc), which is a larger protein with a fragile structure consisting of two mobile domains. Both proteins have been widely used as reporters for intracellular activities with either fluorescence or bioluminescent signal. In this work, the functionalities of both proteins were investigated after Q77 fusion and after assembly towards respective fibrous products. The structural variation of these recombinant proteins resulted in the changes of their functionalities. Finally, a self-supportive fibrous ATP sensor was achieved for the first time with this dual functional protein product.Cambridge Trust, China Scholarship Counci

EduSAT: A Pedagogical Tool for Theory and Applications of Boolean Satisfiability

Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) and Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) are widely used in automated verification, but there is a lack of interactive tools designed for educational purposes in this field. To address this gap, we present EduSAT, a pedagogical tool specifically developed to support learning and understanding of SAT and SMT solving. EduSAT offers implementations of key algorithms such as the Davis-Putnam-Logemann-Loveland (DPLL) algorithm and the Reduced Order Binary Decision Diagram (ROBDD) for SAT solving. Additionally, EduSAT provides solver abstractions for five NP-complete problems beyond SAT and SMT. Users can benefit from EduSAT by experimenting, analyzing, and validating their understanding of SAT and SMT solving techniques. Our tool is accompanied by comprehensive documentation and tutorials, extensive testing, and practical features such as a natural language interface and SAT and SMT formula generators, which also serve as a valuable opportunity for learners to deepen their understanding. Our evaluation of EduSAT demonstrates its high accuracy, achieving 100% correctness across all the implemented SAT and SMT solvers. We release EduSAT as a python package in .whl file, and the source can be identified at https://github.com/zhaoy37/SAT_Solver

Fairguard: Harness Logic-based Fairness Rules in Smart Cities

Smart cities operate on computational predictive frameworks that collect, aggregate, and utilize data from large-scale sensor networks. However, these frameworks are prone to multiple sources of data and algorithmic bias, which often lead to unfair prediction results. In this work, we first demonstrate that bias persists at a micro-level both temporally and spatially by studying real city data from Chattanooga, TN. To alleviate the issue of such bias, we introduce Fairguard, a micro-level temporal logic-based approach for fair smart city policy adjustment and generation in complex temporal-spatial domains. The Fairguard framework consists of two phases: first, we develop a static generator that is able to reduce data bias based on temporal logic conditions by minimizing correlations between selected attributes. Then, to ensure fairness in predictive algorithms, we design a dynamic component to regulate prediction results and generate future fair predictions by harnessing logic rules. Evaluations show that logic-enabled static Fairguard can effectively reduce the biased correlations while dynamic Fairguard can guarantee fairness on protected groups at run-time with minimal impact on overall performance.Comment: This paper was accepted by the 8th ACM/IEEE Conference on Internet of Things Design and Implementatio

Selenium intake help prevent age-related cataract formation: Evidence from NHANES 2001–2008

IntroductionCataract is one of the leading causes of blindness and visual impairment, about 16 million people around the world. Trace elements play an important role in a variety of the processes in human body. This study aimed to investigate the association between daily dietary intake of trace elements and age-related cataract incidence based on data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2001–2008.MethodsIron, zinc, copper, and selenium were conducted in this study among subjects aged 50 years and older for African Americans and 55 and older in US adults. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was used in different models to investigate the association of trace elements intake and cataract.ResultsAfter screening, 7,525 subjects were ultimately included in this study. A significant negative association was found between selenium intake and cataract incidence in adjusted models using multivariate logistic regression analysis (model 1: OR = 0.998, 95% CI = 0.997–1.000; model 2: OR = 0.997, 95% CI = 0.995–1.000; and model 3: OR = 0.998, 95% CI = 0.995–1.000). After dividing selenium intake into quintiles, significant negative associations between selenium intake and cataract were observed in the first quintile of model 3, the fourth and fifth quintiles of all models. In subgroup analyses adjusted for age and sex, a significant negative association was observed only in women aged 65–74 years.DiscussionOur study points out that maintaining daily dietary selenium intake at higher levels is helpful for cataract prevention, and that increasing daily dietary selenium intake in American women aged 65–74 years may contribute to the prevention of age-related cataract. The intakes of iron, zinc, copper may not be associated with age-related cataract

Electrolyte Optimization to Improve the High-Voltage Operation of Single-Crystal LiNi0.83_{0.83}Co0.11_{0.11}Mn0.06_{0.06}O2_2 in Lithium-Ion Batteries

Single-crystal Ni-rich layered oxide materials LiNi$_{1−x−y}$Co$_x$Mn$_y$O$_2$ (NCM, 1 – x − y ≥ 0.6) are emerging as promising cathode materials that do not show intergranular cracks as a result of the lack of grain boundaries and anisotropy of the bulk structure, enabling extended cyclability in lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) operating at high voltage. However, SC-NCM materials still suffer from capacity fading upon extended cycling. This degradation of capacity can be attributed to a reconstruction of the surface. A phase transformation from layered structures to disordered spinel/rock-salt structures was found to be responsible for impedance growth and capacity loss. Film-forming additives are a straightforward approach for the mitigation of surface reconstruction via the formation of a robust protection layer at the cathode’s surface. In this work, we investigate various additives on the electrochemical performance of single-crystal LiNi$_{0.83}$Co$_{0.11}$Mn$_{0.06}$O$_2$ (SC-NCM83). The results demonstrate that the use of 1% lithium difluoroxalate borate (LiDFOB) and 1% lithium difluorophosphate (LiPO$_2$F$_2$) additives substantially enhanced the cycling performance (with a capacity retention of 93.6% after 150 cycles) and rate capability in comparison to the baseline electrolyte (72.7%) as well as electrolytes using 1% LiDFOB (90.5%) or 1% LiPO$_2$F$_2$ (88.3%) individually. The superior cycling stability of the cell using the combination of both additives was attributed to the formation of a conformal cathode/electrolyte interface (CEI) layer, resulting in a stabilized bulk structure and decreased impedance upon long-term cycling, as evidenced via a combination of state-of-the-art analytical techniques

LoG-CAN: local-global Class-aware Network for semantic segmentation of remote sensing images

Remote sensing images are known of having complex backgrounds, high intra-class variance and large variation of scales, which bring challenge to semantic segmentation. We present LoG-CAN, a multi-scale semantic segmentation network with a global class-aware (GCA) module and local class-aware (LCA) modules to remote sensing images. Specifically, the GCA module captures the global representations of class-wise context modeling to circumvent background interference; the LCA modules generate local class representations as intermediate aware elements, indirectly associating pixels with global class representations to reduce variance within a class; and a multi-scale architecture with GCA and LCA modules yields effective segmentation of objects at different scales via cascaded refinement and fusion of features. Through the evaluation on the ISPRS Vaihingen dataset and the ISPRS Potsdam dataset, experimental results indicate that LoG-CAN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for general semantic segmentation, while significantly reducing network parameters and computation. Code is available at~\href{https://github.com/xwmaxwma/rssegmentation}{https://github.com/xwmaxwma/rssegmentation}.Comment: Accepted at ICASSP 202

Relationship between high dose intake of vitamin B12 and glaucoma: Evidence from NHANES 2005–2008 among United States adults

ObjectiveGlaucoma has currently become the second leading cause of blindness in the world. Serum vitamin B12 level has been found to be involved in the development and progression of glaucoma. We performed the present study to confirm this association.MethodsThis cross-sectional study included 594 participants aged 40 years and older in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 2005 to 2008. Retinal imaging was performed using the Ophthalmic Digital Imaging system (Retinography) to assess the retina for the presence of features of glaucomatous lesions. Logistic regression models were used to assess the association between dietary vitamin intake and glaucoma.ResultsAfter screening, 594 subjects were finally included. Among all vitamin intakes, we observed significant differences between the two groups for vitamin B12 intake (5.93 vs. 4.77 mg, p = 0.033). According to the logistic regression results, the intake of vitamin B12 was significantly positively associated with glaucoma (model 1: OR = 1.078, 95% CI = 1.019–1.141; model 2: OR = 1.092, 95% CI = 1.031–1.158; model 3: OR = 1.092, 95% CI = 1.029–1.158). After performing a quantile regression, we observed a significant positive association between vitamin B12 intake and incident glaucoma in the fourth quartile (model 1: OR = 1.133, 95% CI = 1.060–1.210; model 2: OR = 1.141, 95% CI = 1.072–1.215; model 3: OR = 1.146, 95% CI = 1.071–1.226).ConclusionsTherefore, the above results, high-dose intake of vitamin B12 may promote the development of glaucoma