Polycaprolactone-based, porous CaCO3 and Ag nanoparticle modified scaffolds as a SERS platform with molecule-specific adsorption

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) is a high-performance technique allowing detection of extremely low concentrations of analytes. For such applications, fibrous polymeric matrices decorated with plasmonic metal nanostructures can be used as flexible SERS substrates for analysis of analytes in many application. In this study, a three-dimensional SERS substrate consisting of a CaCO3-mineralized electrospun (ES) polycaprolactone (PCL) fibrous matrix decorated with silver (Ag) nanoparticles is developed. Such modification of the fibrous substrate allows achieving a significant increase of the SERS signal amplification. Functionalization of fibers by porous CaCO3 (vaterite) and Ag nanoparticles provides an effective approach of selective adsorption of biomolecules and their precise detection by SERS. This new SERS substrate represents a promising biosensor platform with selectivity to low and high molecular weight molecules

Urban Railway within the Linear Urban Structure: the Case Study of Perm, Russia

Perm is a city of slightly under one million inhabitants situated on the banks of the Kama River, in the European part of Russia. Being the 4th largest city in Russia in its area and only 13th in terms of population Perm stretches for over 80 kilometres along the river. Largely due to the city’s linearly extended urban structure a significant part of its population experience serious commuting problems. Most of the remote areas of the city are not well integrated into its central part and suffer from poor connectivity and accessibility. The latter is the feature shared by many other cities and other post-Soviet states, so the experience of Perm may also be instructive and useful to other cities. When it comes to improving the connectivity between different areas of the city, metro railway is one of the commonly used type of contemporary urban interventions. In 2004 the project “Urban Train” was launched in Perm with an ambitious aspiration to become “a “skeleton of the city transport system”. The new route was set up using the existing railway lines. It has a total length of 51 km and includes 22 stations on both sides of the Kama River. All other modes of transport, namely buses, trams and trolleybuses, were to be connected with this newly established route. The project was funded by the regional budget. Despite the fact that Urban train has obviously failed to become city’s principal mode it did provided several remote areas of the city with comparatively fast and convenient way to get to the city centre. In the years 2004-2008 the number of passengers was stable at around 1 mln people annually but starting from 2009, when several trains were removed from the timetable, the number of passengers dropped significantly every year reaching around 0,6 mln in 2013. After that the question of the abolition of funding for the project was raised. The service is still in place but the question of financing remains open. Nevertheless, the company managing the project has plans of further infrastructure investment. The paper analyses the ten years’ experience of Perm to develop its system of the urban train trying to reveal the reasons for its modest performance and decline in the passenger traffic. The authors show how the Urban Train fits within the city urban structure and evaluate the potential of the Urban Train to become a feasible solution to the problem of connecting the periphery with the city centre. Furthermore, the paper tries to answer the question whether the proposed further development of the project, including the formation of the transport hubs, is worth implementing in terms of increasing efficiency and volume of passenger traffic. Finally, the authors make some general conclusions on the feasibility of projects of this type in the context characteristic of post-socialist cities in Russia and beyond

Pathogenesis and antigenic characterization of a new East European subtype 3 porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus isolate

Background: Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) is divided into a European and North American genotype. East European PRRSV isolates have been found to be of the European genotype, but form different subtypes. In the present study, PRRSV was isolated from a Belarusian farm with reproductive and respiratory failure and designated "Lena". Analyses revealed that Lena is a new East European subtype 3 PRRSV isolate. The main purpose of this investigation was to study the pathogenesis and antigenic characteristics of PRRSV (Lena). Results: Obvious clinical and virological differences were observed between the animals inoculated with a recent European subtype 1 PRRSV isolate (Belgium A) and animals inoculated with PRRSV (Lena). Three out of six pigs inoculated with PRRSV (Belgium A) had anorexia and low fever at 3, 4 and 5 days post-inoculation (dpi). High fever, anorexia and depression were prominent signs in most pigs inoculated with PRRSV (Lena) between 2 and 28 dpi. Four pigs out of ten died during the experiment. Arcanobacterium pyogenes was isolated from lungs of one animal that died, and Streptococcus suis was isolated from lungs of one animal that was euthanized. The difference in viral titres in sera from PRRSV (Belgium A) and PRRSV (Lena)-infected pigs was statistically significant (p < 0.05) at 7, 10, 14 and 21 dpi. The highest viral titres in sera ranged from 10(4.8) to 10(6.1) TCID50/ml for PRRSV (Lena) whereas they ranged from 10(3.1) to 10(4.8) TCID50/ml for PRRSV (Belgium A). The replication of PRRSV (Lena) was further studied in depth. Viral titres ranged from 10(2.5) TCID50/100 mg to 10(5.6) TCID50/100 mg in nasal secretions between 3 and 14 dpi and from 10(2.8) TCID50/100 mg to 10(4.6) TCID50/100 mg in tonsillar scrapings between 3 and 21 dpi. High viral titres were detected in lungs (10(2.3)-10(7.7) TCID50/g tissue), tonsils (10(2.0)-10(6.2) TCID50/g tissue) and inguinal lymph nodes (10(2.2)-10(6.6) TCID50/g tissue) until 35, 28 and 35 dpi, respectively. To examine the antigenic heterogeneity between the East European subtype 3 isolate Lena, the European subtype 1 strain Lelystad and the North American strain US5, sets of monospecific polyclonal antisera were tested in immunoperoxidase monolayer assays (IPMAs) with homologous and heterologous viral antigens. Heterologous antibody titres were significantly lower than homologous titres (p = 0.01-0.03) for antisera against PRRSV (Lena) at all sampling time points. For antisera against PRRSV (Lelystad) and PRRSV (US5), heterologous antibody titres were significantly lower than homologous titres at 14 and 21 dpi (p = 0.01-0.03) and at 10 and 14 dpi (p = 0.04), respectively. Conclusions: Lena is a highly pathogenic East European subtype 3 PRRSV, which differs from European subtype 1 Lelystad and North American US5 strains at both the genetic and antigenic level

Analysis hysteresis clutch technical characteristics of the shut-off valves electrical drive system

The results of calculations of the hysteresis clutches of various designs for use in electric shut-off valves of the pipeline. The possibility of using the clutch with an axial air gap for a wide range of electric power

ALFA: Agglomerative Late Fusion Algorithm for Object Detection

We propose ALFA - a novel late fusion algorithm for object detection. ALFA is based on agglomerative clustering of object detector predictions taking into consideration both the bounding box locations and the class scores. Each cluster represents a single object hypothesis whose location is a weighted combination of the clustered bounding boxes. ALFA was evaluated using combinations of a pair (SSD and DeNet) and a triplet (SSD, DeNet and Faster R-CNN) of recent object detectors that are close to the state-of-the-art. ALFA achieves state of the art results on PASCAL VOC 2007 and PASCAL VOC 2012, outperforming the individual detectors as well as baseline combination strategies, achieving up to 32% lower error than the best individual detectors and up to 6% lower error than the reference fusion algorithm DBF - Dynamic Belief Fusion.Comment: E. Razinkov, I. Saveleva and J. Matas, "ALFA: Agglomerative Late Fusion Algorithm for Object Detection," 2018 24th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), Beijing, 2018, pp. 2594-259

The image of Rome in Russian culture between the end of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century

Nella tesi si osserva come nella cultura russa cambiava l’immagine di Roma. Se ancora alla fine del settecento l’antichità romana poteva risultare solamente uno strumento retorico-filologico da utilizzare per fare il proprio discorso più convincente, la generazione dei decabristi la stessa antica romanità la accostava alla cultura e storia russe tramite gli elevati ideali civici. La romanità ora risultava uno strumento di analisi della esperienza storica e politica della Russia anche nel contesto europeo. Da qui nasceva una serie di modelli russi legati all’antica Roma: il Catone di Radiscev, il Bruto dei decabristi, ecc. Vi attingeva generosamente anche una corrente di lirica russo-antica con i suoi ricchi riferimenti agli autori classici, Ovidio, Tacito, Orazio. Nasceva così una specie di Roma antica russa che viveva secondo le sue regole etiche ed estetiche. Con il fallimento dell’esperienza decabrista cambia anche l’approccio alle antichità: ci si distacca dalla visione storico-morale dell’antico, Roma non è più una categoria da emulare, ma una storia a sé stante e chiusa in sé stessa come ogni periodo storico. Essa smette di essere un criterio universale di giudizio etico e morale. Allo stesso tempo, una parte integrante della cultura russa all’epoca era il viaggio a Roma. I russi cresciuti con interesse e amore verso la Roma antica, impazienti ed emozionati, desideravano ora di vedere quella patria dei classici. Era come se fosse un appuntamento fra gli amici di vecchia data. Si affrettava a verificare di persona le muse di storia e di poesia. E con tutto questo si imparavano ad amare tutti i defetti della Roma reale, spesso inospitale, la Roma del dolore e della fatica. La voce importante nel racconto romano dei russi era anche la Roma del cristianesimo, dove ritrovare e ricoprire la propria “anima cristiana”.In the thesis we observe how in Russian culture was changing the image of Rome. If still at the end of the Eighteenth century the Roman antiquity could only be rhetorical and philological tool to use to make your speech more convincing, the generation of the “Decembrists” used the same Roman images to approach the Russian culture and history through high civic ideals. The Roman antiquity now appeared a tool for the analysis of historical and political experience of Russia also in the European context. In this way was born a series of Russian cultural models related to ancient Rome: the Cato of Radiscev , the Brutus of the Decembrists , etc. . There were rich references to classical authors, Ovid, Tacitus, Horace also in the Russian literature. Thus was born a kind of ancient Russian Rome that lived by its own ethical and aesthetic rules. With the failure of the Decembrist experience also changes the approach to antiquity: the moral - historical vision of ancient Rome is no longer a category to emulate, but a part of History. It ceases to be a universal standard of moral and ethical judgment. At the same time, an integral part of Russian culture was the journey to Rome. The Russians who have grown with interest and love for the ancient Rome, eager and excited, wanted to see the homeland of the classics. It was as if it were a meeting between old friends. They wanted to see for themselves the muse of history and poetry, trying to lean also the real Rome, often inhospitable, the Rome of pain and fatigue. One of the major items in the Russian journey to Rome was also the Christian Rome, where to regain the own christian soul

ІМУНОЛОГІЧНІ АСПЕКТИ ГЕНЕРАЛІЗОВАНОГО ПАРОДОНТИТУ (ОГЛЯД ЛІТЕРАТУРИ)

У статті викладено результати аналітичного огляду літературних даних в галузі оцінки стану імунологічних показників у пацієнтів із генералізованим пародонтитом. Наведені дані вказують на тісний зв’язок між станом імунної системи людини та розвитком генералізованого пародонтиту на тлі супутніх соматичних захворювань. Висвітлюється вплив пародонтопатогенних мікроорганізмів на імунну відповідь макроорганізму. Наводяться дані про стан місцевого та системного імунітету хворих на генералізований пародонтит, порушення в антитілоутворенні й функціонуванні клітинних механізмів захисту, активності та вміст в яснах і периферичній крові фагоцитуючих клітин, Т-лімфоцитів, природних кілерів, дисбаланс в цитокіновій системі. Ряд авторів відзначає значну роль у розвитку генералізованого пародонтита вторинного імунодефіциту, алергічних реакцій та аутоімунних процесів, загального стану адаптаційних механізмів організму. Розкриття або поглиблення знань про патогенез генералізованого пародонтиту дозволять побудувати оптимальну адекватну терапію і запропонувати ефективну профілактику стоматологічного захворювання

Estimation of charge carrier mobility in polymer thin-film structures

© Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd. In this article, the polymer polydiphenylenphthalide. The estimates of the mobility of charge carriers for FDP films of different thicknesses by the CELIV method are carried out. During the measurements it was concluded that the mobility value does not depend on the thickness of the polymer film within 100-800 nm