Enzyme production and profile by Aspergillus niger during solid substrate fermentation using palm kernel cake as substrate

The oil palm sector is one of the major plantation industries in Malaysia. Palm kernel cake is a byproduct of extracted palm kernel oil. Mostly palm kernel cake is wasted or is mixed with other nutrients and used as animal feed, especially for ruminant animals. Recently, palm kernel cake has been identified as an important ingredient for the formulation of animal feed, and it is also exported especially to Europe, South Korea, and Japan. It can barely be consumed by nonruminant (monogastric) animals owing to the high percentages of hemicellulose and cellulose contents. Palm kernel cake must undergo suitable pretreatment in order to decrease the percentage of hemicellulose and cellulose. One of the methods employed in this study is fermentation with microorganisms, particularly fungi, to partially degrade the hemicellulose and cellulose content. This work focused on the production of enzymes by Aspergillus niger and profiling using palm kernel cake as carbon source.     

Comments on the primary and scatter dose-spread kernels used for convolution methods

The basic primary and scatter dose-spread kernels used for convolution methods are usually produced by Monte Carlo simulations with the interaction point forced to the center of a large water phantom. However, it is still not clear whether such Monte Carlo based kernels allow accurate dose calculations with a wide range of field sizes and depths, especially in thorax phantoms. Using the differential primary and scatter concept, this paper proposes another type of basic kernel, with which perfectly accurate primary and scatter absorbed dose calculations can be performed under conditions that the beam is parallel, the incident beam intensity is uniform within and zero outside the field, and the primary beam attenuation coefficient along raylines is not a function of depth and off-axis distance.     

predForm-Site: Formylation site prediction by incorporating multiple features and resolving data imbalance

Formylation is one of the newly discovered post-translational modifications in lysine residue which is responsible for different kinds of diseases. In this work, a novel predictor, named predForm-Site, has been developed to predict formylation sites with higher accuracy. We have integrated multiple sequence features for developing a more informative representation of formylation sites. Moreover, decision function of the underlying classifier have been optimized on skewed formylation dataset during prediction model training for prediction quality improvement. On the dataset used by LFPred and Formator predictor, predForm-Site achieved 99.5% sensitivity, 99.8% specificity and 99.8% overall accuracy with AUC of 0.999 in the jackknife test. In the independent test, it has also achieved more than 97% sensitivity and 99% specificity. Similarly, in benchmarking with recent method CKSAAP_FormSite, the proposed predictor significantly outperformed in all the measures, particularly sensitivity by around 20%, specificity by nearly 30% and overall accuracy by more than 22%. These experimental results show that the proposed predForm-Site can be used as a complementary tool for the fast exploration of formylation sites. For convenience of the scientific community, predForm-Site has been deployed as an online tool, accessible at http://103.99.176.239:8080/predForm-Site.     

A combination of modified particle swarm optimization algorithm and support vector machine for gene selection and tumor classification

In the analysis of gene expression profiles, the number of tissue samples with genes expression levels available is usually small compared with the number of genes. This can lead either to possible overfitting or even to a complete failure in analysis of microarray data. The selection of genes that are really indicative of the tissue classification concerned is becoming one of the key steps in microarray studies. In the present paper, we have combined the modified discrete particle swarm optimization (PSO) and support vector machines (SVM) for tumor classification. The modified discrete PSO is applied to select genes, while SVM is used as the classifier or the evaluator. The proposed approach is used to the microarray data of 22 normal and 40 colon tumor tissues and showed good prediction performance. It has been demonstrated that the modified PSO is a useful tool for gene selection and mining high dimension data.     

Properties of a genetic algorithm extended by a random self-learning operator and asymmetric mutations: A convergence study for a task of powder-pattern indexing

Genetic algorithms represent a powerful global-optimisation tool applicable in solving tasks of high complexity in science, technology, medicine, communication, etc. The usual genetic-algorithm calculation scheme is extended here by introduction of a quadratic self-learning operator, which performs a partial local search for randomly selected representatives of the population. This operator is aimed as a minor deterministic contribution to the (stochastic) genetic search. The population representing the trial solutions is split into two equal subpopulations allowed to exhibit different mutation rates (so called asymmetric mutation). The convergence is studied in detail exploiting a crystallographic-test example of indexing of powder diffraction data of orthorhombic lithium copper oxide, varying such parameters as mutation rates and the learning rate. It is shown through the averaged (over the subpopulation) fitness behaviour, how the genetic diversity in the population depends on the mutation rate of the given subpopulation. Conditions and algorithm parameter values favourable for convergence in the framework of proposed approach are discussed using the results for the mentioned example. Further data are studied with a somewhat modified algorithm using periodically varying mutation rates and a problem-specific operator. The chance of finding the global optimum and the convergence speed are observed to be strongly influenced by the effective mutation level and on the self-learning level. The optimal values of these two parameters are about 6 and 5%, respectively. The periodic changes of mutation rate are found to improve the explorative abilities of the algorithm. The results of the study confirm that the applied methodology leads to improvement of the classical genetic algorithm and, therefore, it is expected to be helpful in constructing of algorithms permitting to solve similar tasks of higher complexity.     

基于超星学习通平台的有机化学录播课教学实践

由于新型冠状病毒肺炎疫情,高校延期开学。为了实现"停课不停教、停课不停学",需要积极开展在线教学。本文基于超星学习通平台,开展了有机化学课程录播课教学实践,为高校教师网络教学提供一定的参考。     

从电子工业“脊梁”到全面开花的镓元素

镓是第一个根据化学元素周期律预言并在自然界中证实的元素，是室温下电导率和热导率均为最大的液态物质，镓在电子工业中得到了广泛应用，被誉为电子工业“脊梁”。近十几年来，镓的更多应用潜力被发掘出来，在电子工业、散热、增材制造、柔性机器、生物医学等领域均有重要的应用前景。     

基于SVR和k-近邻群的组合预测在QSAR中的应用

为提高定量构效关系(QSAR)研究的预测精度,发展了一种新的基于支持向量机回归(SVR)非线性筛选分子结构描述符、基于k-近邻群的非线性组合预测方法.首先以均方误差(MSE)最小为原则,以留一法通过多轮末尾淘汰实施分子结构描述符的非线性SVR汰选并给出最优核函数和相应保留描述符;其次基于待测样本与训练样本保留描述符向量的欧氏距离,以不同k-近邻群子模型双重留一法预测值反映样本集的异质性;然后基于MSE最小,以留一法通过多轮末尾淘汰实施近邻群子模型的非线性SVR汰选并给出最优核函数和相应保留子模型;最后基于保留子模型以双重留一法实施组合预测.以取代苯胺和苯酚类化合物对大型溞的QSAR实例验证表明:新方法在所有参比模型中预测精度最高,且能更精细地反映描述符与化合物毒性间的非线性关系,具结构风险最小、非线性、适于小样本,能有效克服过拟合、维数灾和局极小,非线性筛选描述符和子模型,非线性组合预测,自动选择最优核函数及其相应参数,泛化推广能力优异、预测精度高等诸多优点,在QSAR研究中有广泛应用前景.     

THPep: A machine learning-based approach for predicting tumor homing peptides

In the present era, a major drawback of current anti-cancer drugs is the lack of satisfactory specificity towards tumor cells. Despite the presence of several therapies against cancer, tumor homing peptides are gaining importance as therapeutic agents. In this regard, the huge number of therapeutic peptides generated in recent years, demands the need to develop an effective and interpretable computational model for rapidly, effectively and automatically predicting tumor homing peptides. Therefore, a sequence-based approach referred herein as THPep has been developed to predict and analyze tumor homing peptides by using an interpretable random forest classifier in concomitant with amino acid composition, dipeptide composition and pseudo amino acid composition. An overall accuracy and Matthews correlation coefficient of 90.13% and 0.76, respectively, were achieved from the independent test set on an objective benchmark dataset. Upon comparison, it was found that THPep was superior to the existing method and holds high potential as a useful tool for predicting tumor homing peptides. For the convenience of experimental scientists, a web server for this proposed method is provided publicly at http://codes.bio/thpep/.