The Effect of Surface Roughness on Immiscible Displacement Using Pore Scale Simulation

Transport in Porous Media - Pore scale immiscible displacement is crucial in oil industry. The surface roughness of throat is an important factor affecting water–oil interface movement. In...     

Methods for engineering therapeutic peptides

This review discussed recent advancements related to therapeutic peptide engineering.     

Carbohydrate-binding module O-mannosylation alters binding selectivity to cellulose and lignin

Improved understanding of the effect of protein glycosylation is expected to provide the foundation for the design of protein glycoengineering strategies. In this study, we examine the impact of O-glycosylation on the binding selectivity of a model Family 1 carbohydrate-binding module (CBM), which has been shown to be one of the primary sub-domains responsible for non-productive lignin binding in multi-modular cellulases. Specifically, we examine the relationship between glycan structure and the binding specificity of the CBM to cellulose and lignin substrates. We find that the glycosylation pattern of the CBM exhibits a strong influence on the binding affinity and the selectivity between both cellulose and lignin. In addition, the large set of binding data collected allows us to examine the relationship between binding affinity and the correlation in motion between pairs of glycosylation sites. Our results suggest that glycoforms displaying highly correlated motion in their glycosylation sites tend to bind cellulose with high affinity and lignin with low affinity. Taken together, this work helps lay the groundwork for future exploitation of glycoengineering as a tool to improve the performance of industrial enzymes.

Improved understanding of the effect of protein glycosylation is expected to provide the foundation for the design of protein glycoengineering strategies.

The cell walls of terrestrial plants primarily comprise the polysaccharides cellulose, hemicellulose, and pectin, as well as the heterogeneous aromatic polymer, lignin. In nature, carbohydrates derived from plant polysaccharides provide a massive carbon and energy source for biomass-degrading fungi, bacteria, and archaea, which together are the primary organisms that recycle plant matter and are a critical component of the global carbon cycle. Across the various environments in which these microbes break down lignocellulose, a few known enzymatic and chemical systems have evolved to deconstruct polysaccharides to soluble sugars.^1–6 These natural systems are, in several cases, being evaluated for industrial use to produce sugars for further conversion into renewable biofuels and chemicals.From an industrial perspective, overcoming biomass recalcitrance to cost-effectively produce soluble intermediates, including sugars for further upgrading remains the main challenge in biomass conversion. Lignin, the evolution of which in planta provided a significant advantage for terrestrial plants to mitigate microbial attack, is now widely recognized as a primary cause of biomass recalcitrance.⁷ Chemical and/or biological processing scenarios of lignocellulose have been evaluated⁸ and several approaches have been scaled to industrial biorefineries to date. Many biomass conversion technologies overcome recalcitrance by partially or wholly removing lignin from biomass using thermochemical pretreatment or fractionation. This approach enables easier polysaccharide access for carbohydrate-active enzymes and/or microbes. There are however, several biomass deconstruction approaches that employ enzymes or microbes with whole, unpretreated biomass.^9,10 In most realistic biomass conversion scenarios wherein enzymes or microbes are used to depolymerize polysaccharides, native or residual lignin remains.^11,12 It is important to note that lignin can bind and sequester carbohydrate-active enzymes, which in turn can affect conversion performance.¹³Therefore, efforts aimed at improving cellulose binding selectivity relative to lignin have emerged as major thrusts in cellulase studies.^14–25 Multiple reports in the past a few years have made exciting new contributions to our collective understanding of how fungal glycoside hydrolases, which are among the most well-characterized cellulolytic enzymes given their importance to cellulosic biofuels production, bind to lignin from various pretreatments.^15,17 Taken together, these studies have demonstrated that the Family 1 carbohydrate-binding modules (CBMs) often found in fungal cellulases are the most relevant sub-domains for non-productive binding to lignin,^15,17,20,26 likely due to the hydrophobic face of these CBMs that is known to be also responsible for cellulose binding (Fig. 1).²⁷Open in a separate windowFig. 1Model of glycosylated CBM binding the surface of a cellulose crystal. Glycans are shown in green with oxygen atoms in red, tyrosines known to be critical to binding shown in purple, and disulfide bonds Cys8–Cys25 and Cys19–Cys35 in yellow.Furthermore, several studies have been published recently using protein engineering of Family 1 CBMs to improve CBM binding selectivity to cellulose with respect to lignin. Of particular note, Strobel et al. screened a large library of point mutations in both the Family 1 CBM and the linker connecting the catalytic domain (CD) and CBM.^21,22 These studies demonstrated that several mutations in the CBM and one in the linker led to improved cellulose binding selectivity compared to lignin. The emerging picture is that the CBM-cellulose interaction, which occurs mainly as a result of stacking between the flat, hydrophobic CBM face (which is decorated with aromatic residues) and the hydrophobic crystal face of cellulose I, is also likely the main driving force in the CBM-lignin interaction given the strong potential for aromatic–aromatic and hydrophobic interactions.Alongside amino acid changes, modification of O-glycosylation has recently emerged as a potential tool in engineering fungal CBMs, which Harrison et al. demonstrated to be O-glycosylated.^28–31 In particular, we have revealed that the O-mannosylation of a Family 1 CBM of Trichoderma reesei cellobiohydrolase I (TrCel7A) can lead to significant enhancements in the binding affinity towards bacterial microcrystalline cellulose (BMCC).^30,32,33 This observation, together with the fact that glycans have the potential to form both hydrophilic and hydrophobic interactions with other molecules, led us to hypothesize that glycosylation may have a unique role in the binding selectivity of Family 1 CBMs to cellulose relative to lignin and as such, glycoengineering may be exploited to improve the industrial performance of these enzymes. To test this hypothesis, in the present study, we systematically probed the effects of glycosylation on CBM binding affinity for a variety of lignocellulose-derived cellulose and lignin substrates and investigated routes to computationally predict the binding properties of different glycosylated CBMs.     

Non-Linear Interactions and Exchange Rate Prediction: Empirical Evidence Using Support Vector Regression

This paper analysed the prediction of the spot exchange rate of 10 currency pairs using support vector regression (SVR) based on a fundamentalist model composed of 13 explanatory variables. Different structures of non-linear dependence introduced by nine different Kernel functions were tested and the predictions were compared to the Random Walk benchmark. We checked the explanatory power gain of SVR models over the Random Walk by applying White’s Reality Check Test. The results showed that the majority of SVR models achieved better out-of-sample performance than the Random Walk, but in overall they failed to achieve statistical significance of predictive superiority. Furthermore, we observed that non-mainstream Kernel functions performed better than the ones commonly used in the machine-learning literature, a finding that can provide new insights regarding machine-learning methods applications and the predictability of exchange rates using non-linear interactions between the predictors.     

半绝缘碳化硅单晶衬底的研究进展

碳化硅(SiC)被认为是最重要的宽禁带半导体材料之一,具有禁带宽度大、击穿电场高、热导率高、电子饱和速率高、抗辐射能力强等优越性质。基于SiC材料制备的半导体器件不仅能在更高的温度下稳定运行,而且在高电压、高频率状态下也具有更高的可靠性。近20年来,随着材料生长技术、制造工艺与器件物理的迅速发展, SiC材料及器件在雷达、5G通信、电动汽车等领域获得了广泛应用,对国防工业发展、国家信息安全、国民经济建设均产生了极其重要的影响。在以SiC为基础的大功率半导体器件产业链中,高质量的SiC单晶制备及其产业化是最为重要的一环。本文针对半绝缘SiC单晶衬底材料国内外发展进行了分析归纳,重点介绍了山东大学半绝缘SiC的研究历程、现状,并对研究和产业发展、存在的挑战做了论述。     

8英寸导电型4H-SiC单晶的生长

采用物理气相传输(PVT)法扩径获得了8英寸(1英寸=2.54 cm)4H-SiC籽晶,用于8英寸导电型4H-SiC晶体生长,并加工出厚度520 μm的8英寸4H-SiC衬底。使用拉曼光谱、全自动显微镜面扫描、非接触电阻率测试仪面扫描和高分辨X射线衍射仪对衬底的晶型、微管、电阻率和结晶质量进行了表征。衬底颜色均一并结合拉曼光谱表明衬底4H-SiC晶型面积比例为100%;衬底微管密度小于0.3 cm^-2;衬底电阻率范围20~23 mΩ·cm,平均值为22 mΩ·cm;(004)面高分辨X射线摇摆曲线半峰全宽为32.7″,表明衬底良好的结晶质量。