Experimental findings of the suppression of rotary sloshing on the dynamic response of a liquid storage tank

In liquid storage tanks, rotary sloshing occurs when the frequency of the lateral harmonic load is near the lowest frequency of the tank–liquid system. Rotary sloshing is a type of sloshing that modifies the tank response, which may cause instabilities of the tank wall. However, the consequences of rotary sloshing for the development of strain in the tank wall have not been elucidated. This paper presents an experimental determination of the effects of rotary sloshing on the development of strain and acceleration at various locations of a storage tank. A low-density-polyethylene tank containing water was tested using a shake table. Nine excitations with frequencies near the first free-vibration frequency of the tank–water system were employed. To suppress rotary sloshing, a high-density foam floating lid was utilised as a barrier. Results reveal rotary sloshing boosts not only the development of both hoop and axial strain but also the acceleration in the horizontal direction perpendicular to the excitation. The lid reduced the maximum hoop and axial strain by 500% and 400%, respectively compared to that when rotary sloshing occurs. Moreover, the lid suppressed the nonplanar sloshing by erasing the first three free-vibration frequencies of the tank–water system without the lid.     

Enzyme classification using multiclass support vector machine and feature subset selection

Proteins are the macromolecules responsible for almost all biological processes in a cell. With the availability of large number of protein sequences from different sequencing projects, the challenge with the scientist is to characterize their functions. As the wet lab methods are time consuming and expensive, many computational methods such as FASTA, PSI-BLAST, DNA microarray clustering, and Nearest Neighborhood classification on protein–protein interaction network have been proposed. Support vector machine is one such method that has been used successfully for several problems such as protein fold recognition, protein structure prediction etc. Cai et al. in 2003 have used SVM for classifying proteins into different functional classes and to predict their function. They used the physico-chemical properties of proteins to represent the protein sequences. In this paper a model comprising of feature subset selection followed by multiclass Support Vector Machine is proposed to determine the functional class of a newly generated protein sequence. To train and test the model for its performance, 32 physico-chemical properties of enzymes from 6 enzyme classes are considered. To determine the features that contribute significantly for functional classification, Sequential Forward Floating Selection (SFFS), Orthogonal Forward Selection (OFS), and SVM Recursive Feature Elimination (SVM-RFE) algorithms are used and it is observed that out of 32 properties considered initially, only 20 features are sufficient to classify the proteins into its functional classes with an accuracy ranging from 91% to 94%. On comparison it is seen that, OFS followed by SVM performs better than other methods. Our model generalizes the existing model to include multiclass classification and to identify most significant features affecting the protein function.     

Preferred Endocytosis of Amyloid Precursor Protein from Cholesterol-Enriched Lipid Raft Microdomains

Amyloid precursor protein (APP) at the plasma membrane is internalized via endocytosis and delivered to endo/lysosomes, where neurotoxic amyloid-β (Aβ) is produced via β-, γ-secretases. Hence, endocytosis plays a key role in the processing of APP and subsequent Aβ generation. β-, γ-secretases as well as APP are localized in cholesterol-enriched lipid raft microdomains. However, it is still unclear whether lipid rafts are the site where APP undergoes endocytosis and whether cholesterol levels affect this process. In this study, we found that localization of APP in lipid rafts was increased by elevated cholesterol level. We also showed that increasing or decreasing cholesterol levels increased or decreased APP endocytosis, respectively. When we labeled cell surface APP, APP localized in lipid rafts preferentially underwent endocytosis compared to nonraft-localized APP. In addition, APP endocytosis from lipid rafts was regulated by cholesterol levels. Our results demonstrate for the first time that cholesterol levels regulate the localization of APP in lipid rafts affecting raft-dependent APP endocytosis. Thus, regulating the microdomain localization of APP could offer a new therapeutic strategy for Alzheimer’s disease.     

Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (FCS) Analysis of Human Red Blood Cell System

Recent studies have revealed the importance of the lipid micro domain for signal transduction in cell membrane. To analyze the biophysical properties of the lipid micro domain at the single molecule level, we measured the diffusion of fluorescence probe in human red blood cell (RBC) membrane using fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS). The value of diffusion constant of octadecyl rhodamine B chloride (R18), D = 4.7 × 10⁻⁹cm²/s, is close to that of phospholipid molecules in membrane. This indicates that the probed RBC with R18 could be a convenient model for analyzing membrane property under natural conditions. Using this model, we investigated how amyloid beta peptide (A-beta) interacts with plasma membrane. This paper demonstrates that A-beta was inserted into the phospholipid bilayer of the RBC membrane and predicts the existence of the micro domain, lipid raft, on this membrane by the heterologous insertion of A-beta.     

高层建筑桩箱（筏）基础的优化设计

基于桩箱基础的工作特征，建立桩箱基础最小造价的优化设计数学模型。算例表明，优化设计具有主动改进设计的优势和明显的经济效益。     

Combining bar adsorptive microextraction with capillary electrophoresis—Application for the determination of phenolic acids in food matrices

In this contribution, bar adsorptive microextraction coated with a mixed‐mode anion exchange/RP followed by liquid desorption was combined for the first time with a capillary electrophoresis‐diode array detection system (BAμE(MAX)‐LD/CE‐DAD), for the determination of phenolic acids in food matrices, using chlorogenic, ferulic, cumaric, and caffeic acids as model compounds. Assays performed in aqueous media spiked at the 0.8 mg/L level yielded average recoveries up to 40% for all four phenolic acids, under optimized experimental conditions. The analytical performance showed also good precision (RSD < 15%), convenient LODs (18.0–85.0 μg/L) and linear dynamic ranges (0.8–8.0 mg/L) with convenient determination coefficients (r² > 0.9900). By using the standard addition method, the application to food matrices such as green tea, red fruit juice, and honey allowed very good performances for the determination of minor amounts of phenolic acids. The proposed methodology proved to be a suitable alternative for the analysis of polar to ionic compounds, showing to be easy to implement, reliable, sensitive, and requiring a low sample volume to determine phenolic acids in food samples.     

The Cellular and Chemical Biology of Endocytic Trafficking and Intracellular Delivery—The GL–Lect Hypothesis

Lipid membranes are common to all forms of life. While being stable barriers that delimitate the cell as the fundamental organismal unit, biological membranes are highly dynamic by allowing for lateral diffusion, transbilayer passage via selective channels, and in eukaryotic cells for endocytic uptake through the formation of membrane bound vesicular or tubular carriers. Two of the most abundant fundamental fabrics of membranes—lipids and complex sugars—are produced through elaborate chains of biosynthetic enzymes, which makes it difficult to study them by conventional reverse genetics. This review illustrates how organic synthesis provides access to uncharted areas of membrane glycobiology research and its application to biomedicine. For this Special Issue on Chemical Biology Research in France, focus will be placed on synthetic approaches (i) to study endocytic functions of glycosylated proteins and lipids according to the GlycoLipid–Lectin (GL–Lect) hypothesis, notably that of Shiga toxin; (ii) to mechanistically dissect its endocytosis and intracellular trafficking with small molecule; and (iii) to devise intracellular delivery strategies for immunotherapy and tumor targeting. It will be pointed out how the chemical biologist’s view on lipids, sugars, and proteins synergizes with biophysics and modeling to “look” into the membrane for atomistic scale insights on molecular rearrangements that drive the biogenesis of endocytic carriers in processes of clathrin-independent endocytosis.     

SMS沉默对HepG2细胞炎症和CD14表达的影响

肝细胞的炎性损伤与全身性炎症引起的多器官功能障碍的发生相关,LPS可致全身性炎症,在炎症发生过程中,CD14是LPS的膜受体,可通过激活NF-κB诱导炎症相关因子的表达,CD14主要分布于细胞膜脂筏部位,脂筏是由鞘磷脂(SM)和胆固醇相互锚定,并与相关蛋白质组成的一种微空间结构,因此降低SM的合成,会降低SM在脂筏部位的含量,进而改变脂筏结构及CD14在脂筏部位的分布,最终影响炎症的发生。本研究利用干扰载体pSUPER-SMS沉默HepG2细胞鞘磷脂合酶(SMS)的表达,并检测SM在脂筏部位的含量及CD14和TNF-ɑ的表达,结果显示SMS1和SMS2的mRNA水平表达和酶活都有显著下降(P<0.001,n=3),SM在脂筏部位含量和CD14的表达均有显著降低(P<0.001,n=3),导致LPS所致HepG2细胞TNF-ɑmRNA水平的表达下降。可见SMS可通过改变CD14在脂筏部位的含量,最终影响和炎症发生相关分子TNF-ɑ的表达。     

Novel sorption-based methodologies for static microextraction analysis: A review on SBSE and related techniques

Stir bar sorptive extraction (SBSE) became a well-established analytical technique in the last years, for which hundreds of applications in almost all types of scientific fields can be found in the literature. In spite of the great enrichment capacity and outstanding performance to operate at the ultra-trace level, this remarkable static sorption-based method is already not quite effective for some complex systems, in particular to monitor the large group of polar organic compounds. This review aims to cover the state-of-the-art in SBSE, as well as supplying a discussion of the analytical potential of the novel adsorptive microextraction techniques, as complementary enrichment approaches, by explaining the main principles and providing technical know-how for the beginners.     

Attitude dynamics of a cylinder floating in immiscible fluids

This study elaborates the attitude dynamics of a cylinder floating in two immiscible fluids. A cubic polyno- mial was derived based on the attitude angle, weight, center of gravity, and the density ratio of fluids. The numerical solution was validated by experimental data. Under prescribed constraints for the physical model, we have found that multiple solutions exist for cases with no radially biased center of gravity. When the center of gravity is biased, the attitude angles change abruptly around some critical values, which is related to the density ratio. Moreover, the attitude angles are less sensitive to the varying density ratios when the cylinder is heavier. The results also reveal that the cylinder tends to be vertical for nearly the whole range of density ratios when the center of gravity is slightly biased radially.