Measurement of fructose, glucose, maltose and sucrose in barley malt using attenuated total reflectance mid-infrared spectroscopy

The objective of the present study was to develop a simple, rapid and accurate method for the determination of glucose, fructose, maltose and sucrose in barley malt using attenuated total reflectance (ATR) mid-infrared (MIR) spectroscopy. A total of 100 malt samples were analysed using an ATR-MIR instrument and the concentration of individual sugars determined using HPLC. Partial least squares (PLS) regression models yielded a coefficient of determination in cross validation (R2) and standard error in cross validation (SECV) of 0.64 (1.38 mg mL−1), 0.84 (0.12 mg mL−1), 0.80 (8.3 mg mL−1), and 0.60 (0.91 mg mL−1) for glucose, fructose, maltose and sucrose, respectively. This study demonstrated the potential benefits of ATR-MIR spectroscopy for the rapid measurement of the concentration of individual sugars in malt samples sourced from different commercial barley varieties, harvest seasons and localities. © 2015, Springer Science+Business Media New York

An Improved Variational Adaptive Kalman Filter for Cooperative Localization

In this paper, an improved variational adaptive Kalman filter for cooperative localization with inaccurate prior information is proposed, in which the prior scale matrix of the one-step prediction error covariance matrix is adaptively estimated by using the expectation-maximization algorithm. A novel alternate iteration strategy is proposed to reduce the computational complexity of the proposed method. Convergence analysis and theoretical comparisons with the existing advanced adaptive Kalman filtering methods are also provided. Based on this, a new master-slave cooperative localization method is proposed. Lake experiment results of cooperative localization for autonomous underwater vehicles demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method over existing methods. Compared with the cutting-edge adaptive master-slave cooperative localization method, the proposed method has been improved by 22.52% in average localization error but no more than twice computational time is needed

PepMapper: a collaborative web tool for mapping epitopes from affinity-selected peptides

Epitope mapping from affinity-selected peptides has become popular in epitope prediction, and correspondingly many Web-based tools have been developed in recent years. However, the performance of these tools varies in different circumstances. To address this problem, we employed an ensemble approach to incorporate two popular Web tools, MimoPro and Pep-3D-Search, together for taking advantages offered by both methods so as to give users more choices, support and convenience for their specific purposes of epitope-peptide mapping. The combined operation of Union finds as many associated peptides as possible from both methods, which increases sensitivity in finding potential epitopic regions on a given antigen surface. The combined operation of Intersection achieves to some extent the mutual verification by the two methods and hence increases the likelihood of locating the genuine epitopic region on a given antigen in relation to the interacting peptides. The Consistency between Intersection and Union is an indirect sufficient condition to assess the likelihood of successful peptide-epitope mapping. On average from 27 tests, the combined operations of PepMapper outperformed either MimoPro or Pep-3D-Search alone. Therefore, PepMapper is another multipurpose mapping tool for epitope prediction from affinity-selected peptides. The Web server can be freely accessed at: http://informatics.nenu.edu.cn/PepMapper

A Novel Adaptive Kalman Filter with Inaccurate Process and Measurement Noise Covariance Matrices

In this paper, a novel variational Bayesian (VB)-based adaptive Kalman filter (VBAKF) for linear Gaussian state-space models with inaccurate process and measurement noise covariance matrices is proposed. By choosing inverse Wishart priors, the state together with the predicted error and measurement noise covariance matrices are inferred based on the VB approach. Simulation results for a target tracking example illustrate that the proposed VBAKF has better robustness to resist the uncertainties of process and measurement noise covariance matrices than existing state-of-the-art filters

An Outlier-Robust Kalman Filter With Adaptive Selection of Elliptically Contoured Distributions

In this paper, elliptically contoured (EC) distributions are used to model outlier-contaminated measurement noises. Exploiting a heuristic approach to introduce an unknown parameter, we present an analytical update form of the joint posterior probability density function of the state vector and auxiliary random variable, from which a novel robust EC distributions-based Kalman filtering framework is first derived. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, the convergence, robustness, optimality and computational complexity analyses of the proposed method are then given. In addition, to cope with complex noise environments, the interaction multiple model is employed to achieve the adaptive selection of EC distributions such that well-behaved estimation performance can be obtained for different noise cases. Simulation results demonstrate the validity and superiority of the proposed algorithm

Reverse transcriptase is an important factor for the primer tRNA selection in HIV-1

During assembly, HIV-1 selectively packages tRNA(Lys3), the primer tRNA for reverse transcriptase (RT). Because of tRNA(Lys3)'s ability to interact with RT, RT may be the viral protein which binds to primer tRNA and carries it into the virus. We have tested this hypothesis by measuring the amount of tRNA(Lys3) incorporated into wild type and RT(-) virus, and have also measured the tRNA tightly associated with the RNA genome, a characteristic of primer tRNA. We find that in RT(-) HIV-1, primer tRNA(Lys3) is reduced approximately 10 fold compared to wild type virus (which contains 8 molecules tRNA(Lys3)/virus), and the tRNA found tightly associated with the RNA genome is also greatly reduced in these mutant virus

MimoPro : a more efficient Web-based tool for epitope prediction using phage display libraries

Background: A B-cell epitope is a group of residues on the surface of an antigen which stimulates humoral responses. Locating these epitopes on antigens is important for the purpose of effective vaccine design. In recent years, mapping affinity-selected peptides screened from a random phage display library to the native epitope has become popular in epitope prediction. These peptides, also known as mimotopes, share the similar structure and function with the corresponding native epitopes. Great effort has been made in using this similarity between such mimotopes and native epitopes in prediction, which has resulted in better outcomes than statistics-based methods can. However, it cannot maintain a high degree of satisfaction in various circumstances. Results: In this study, we propose a new method that maps a group of mimotopes back to a source antigen so as to locate the interacting epitope on the antigen. The core of this method is a searching algorithm that is incorporated with both dynamic programming (DP) and branch and bound (BB) optimization and operated on a series of overlapping patches on the surface of a protein. These patches are then transformed to a number of graphs using an adaptable distance threshold (ADT) regulated by an appropriate compactness factor (CF), a novel parameter proposed in this study. Compared with both Pep-3D-Search and PepSurf, two leading graph-based search tools, on average from the results of 18 test cases, MimoPro, the Web-based implementation of our proposed method, performed better in sensitivity, precision, and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) than both did in epitope prediction. In addition, MimoPro is significantly faster than both Pep-3D-Search and PepSurf inprocessing. Conclusions: Our search algorithm designed for processing well constructed graphs using an ADT regulated by CF is more sensitive and significantly faster than other graph-based approaches in epitope prediction. MimoPro is a viable alternative to both PepSurf and Pep-3D-Search for epitope prediction in the same kind, and freely accessible through the MimoPro server located at http://informatics.nenu.edu.cn/MimoPr

Agile gesture recognition for capacitive sensing devices: adapting on-the-job

Automated hand gesture recognition has been a focus of the AI community for decades. Traditionally, work in this domain revolved largely around scenarios assuming the availability of the flow of images of the operator's/user's hands. This has partly been due to the prevalence of camera-based devices and the wide availability of image data. However, there is growing demand for gesture recognition technology that can be implemented on low-power devices using limited sensor data instead of high-dimensional inputs like hand images. In this work, we demonstrate a hand gesture recognition system and method that uses signals from capacitive sensors embedded into the etee hand controller. The controller generates real-time signals from each of the wearer's five fingers. We use a machine learning technique to analyse the time-series signals and identify three features that can represent 5 fingers within 500 ms. The analysis is composed of a two-stage training strategy, including dimension reduction through principal component analysis and classification with K-nearest neighbour. Remarkably, we found that this combination showed a level of performance which was comparable to more advanced methods such as supervised variational autoencoder. The base system can also be equipped with the capability to learn from occasional errors by providing it with an additional adaptive error correction mechanism. The results showed that the error corrector improve the classification performance in the base system without compromising its performance. The system requires no more than 1 ms of computing time per input sample, and is smaller than deep neural networks, demonstrating the feasibility of agile gesture recognition systems based on this technology

Supplemental Material, Apoptotic_pathway_of_nanosilver_Fig_S1 - Comparative cytotoxicity and apoptotic pathways induced by nanosilver in human liver HepG2 and L02 cells

<p>Supplemental Material, Apoptotic_pathway_of_nanosilver_Fig_S1 for Comparative cytotoxicity and apoptotic pathways induced by nanosilver in human liver HepG2 and L02 cells by Y Xue, J Wang, Y Huang, X Gao, L Kong, T Zhang and M Tang in Human & Experimental Toxicology</p

Supplemental Material, Apoptotic_pathway_of_nanosilver_Fig_S2 - Comparative cytotoxicity and apoptotic pathways induced by nanosilver in human liver HepG2 and L02 cells

<p>Supplemental Material, Apoptotic_pathway_of_nanosilver_Fig_S2 for Comparative cytotoxicity and apoptotic pathways induced by nanosilver in human liver HepG2 and L02 cells by Y Xue, J Wang, Y Huang, X Gao, L Kong, T Zhang and M Tang in Human & Experimental Toxicology</p