Picosecond fluctuating protein energy landscape mapped by pressure–temperature molecular dynamics simulation

Microscopic statistical pressure fluctuations can, in principle, lead to corresponding fluctuations in the shape of a protein energy landscape. To examine this, nanosecond molecular dynamics simulations of lysozyme are performed covering a range of temperatures and pressures. The well known dynamical transition with temperature is found to be pressure-independent, indicating that the effective energy barriers separating conformational substates are not significantly influenced by pressure. In contrast, vibrations within substates stiffen with pressure, due to increased curvature of the local harmonic potential in which the atoms vibrate. The application of pressure is also shown to selectively increase the damping of the anharmonic, low-frequency collective modes in the protein, leaving the more local modes relatively unaffected. The critical damping frequency, i.e., the frequency at which energy is most efficiently dissipated, increases linearly with pressure. The results suggest that an invariant description of protein energy landscapes should be subsumed by a fluctuating picture and that this may have repercussions in, for example, mechanisms of energy dissipation accompanying functional, structural, and chemical relaxation

Macrophage-derived interleukin-1beta promotes human breast cancer cell migration and lymphatic adhesion in vitro

Lymphovascular invasion (LVI), encompassing blood and lymphatic vessel invasion, is an important event in tumourigenesis. Macrophages within the tumour microenvironment are linked to the presence of LVI and angiogenesis. This study investigates the role of macrophage-derived, caspase-1 dependent interleukin-1beta (IL-1β) in an in vitro model of LVI. IL-1β significantly augmented the adhesion and transmigration of breast cancer cell lines MCF7 and MDA-MB-231 across endothelial cell barriers. MDA-MB-231 and MCF7 showed a higher percentage of adhesion to lymphatic endothelial cells than blood endothelial cells following endothelial cell IL-1β stimulation (P<0.001 and P<0.0001 respectively). Supernatants from activated macrophages increased the adhesion of tumour cells to lymphatic and blood endothelium. Secretion of IL-1β was caspase-1 dependent, and treatment with caspase-1 inhibitor reduced IL-1β production by 73% and concomitantly reduced tumour cell adhesion to levels obtained with resting macrophages. Transmigration of MDA-MB-231 cells across blood and lymphatic endothelial monolayers was significantly increased following IL-1β stimulation. Furthermore, supernatants from activated macrophages increased transmigration of MDA-MB-231 cells across endothelial monolayers, which was abolished by caspase-1 inhibition. IL-1β stimulation of tumour cells significantly increased their migratory ability and a significant increase in migration was observed when MDA-MB-231 cells were stimulated with macrophage conditioned media (two of three donors). Results demonstrate that macrophage production of IL-1β plays an important role in the migration of breast cancer cells and their adhesion to, and transmigration across, blood and lymphatic endothelial cells. Results suggest that IL-1β may play a role in the adhesion to lymphatic endothelial cells in particular

Microgrid for SCU with Vehicle-to-Grid

Santa Clara University is a large loads in Santa Clara needed two finders and a maximum of over 8MW peak demand; however, this consumption will only increase as the student body and electric vehicles on campus continue to grow. To meet this rising demand in both a sustainable and environmentally friendly manner, we proposed and simulated a complete energy management system with cost analysis of energy savings of a microgrid capable of reducing the power supplied to Santa Clara University’s campus from the grid by 40% using renewable energy, vehicle-to-grid (V2G) functionality, and real SCU energy data. The project further used machine learning to match SCU’s energy demand with the renewable generation for future use of optimizing the proposed system. The microgrid was simulated in MATLAB while the machine learning algorithm was developed in python. The benefits of this project provide SCU with a path to 100% clean energy, increased power reliability, and reduced operating cost for SCU. Increasing solar output on campus is the best way to achieve 100% renewable energy because the fuel cells on campus have a byproduct of carbon dioxide and are therefore not 100% renewable. Our vehicle to grid analysis showed that it is not currently a viable solution to help SCU run on 100% renewable energy; however, as electric vehicle charging capacity at SCU increases, vehicle to grid could become an important part of SCU achieving carbon neutrality

Trends of Indoor Environment and Energy Consumption Incidence by Human Activities

This study has been undertaken as part of the Energy Innovation for Deprived Communities (EIDC) project, which aims to deliver a new approach to energy efficiency and renewable energy projects within a minimum of ten of the most deprived communities across six Local Authorities within Yorkshire and the Humber region in the UK. The properties will be assessed by energy efficiency experts and then brought up to modern standards with a range of measures including so-called smart electricity meters and heating systems upgrades to boilers, wall and loft insulations, double glazing, insulated cladding and even solar panels where appropriate. It is important for the success of the EIDC project that both detailed monitoring and post occupancy evaluation are performed on a sample of houses before rolling out a wider refurbishment. Energy consumption and indoor environment were analysed based on indoor activity of participants. The results from one dwelling showed that the energy consumption rises in the evening due to the use of cooker to prepare dinner and the use of electric shower. In addition, the temperatures increased in the evening for everyday and remained on that level till late night due the lack of ventilation during the time. Electrical energy consumption was correlated to the indoor environment and indoor air quality. The results showed that electrical energy has a direct proportion to indoor air temperature levels i.e. temperature increases when electrical energy consumption increases

Sentiment Analysis for micro-blogging platforms in Arabic

Sentiment Analysis (SA) concerns the automatic extraction and classification of sentiments conveyed in a given text, i.e. labelling a text instance as positive, negative or neutral. SA research has attracted increasing interest in the past few years due to its numerous real-world applications. The recent interest in SA is also fuelled by the growing popularity of social media platforms (e.g. Twitter), as they provide large amounts of freely available and highly subjective content that can be readily crawled. Most previous SA work has focused on English with considerable success. In this work, we focus on studying SA in Arabic, as a less-resourced language. This work reports on a wide set of investigations for SA in Arabic tweets, systematically comparing three existing approaches that have been shown successful in English. Specifically, we report experiments evaluating fully-supervised-based (SL), distantsupervision- based (DS), and machine-translation-based (MT) approaches for SA. The investigations cover training SA models on manually-labelled (i.e. in SL methods) and automatically-labelled (i.e. in DS methods) data-sets. In addition, we explored an MT-based approach that utilises existing off-the-shelf SA systems for English with no need for training data, assessing the impact of translation errors on the performance of SA models, which has not been previously addressed for Arabic tweets. Unlike previous work, we benchmark the trained models against an independent test-set of >3.5k instances collected at different points in time to account for topic-shifts issues in the Twitter stream. Despite the challenging noisy medium of Twitter and the mixture use of Dialectal and Standard forms of Arabic, we show that our SA systems are able to attain performance scores on Arabic tweets that are comparable to the state-of-the-art SA systems for English tweets. The thesis also investigates the role of a wide set of features, including syntactic, semantic, morphological, language-style and Twitter-specific features. We introduce a set of affective-cues/social-signals features that capture information about the presence of contextual cues (e.g. prayers, laughter, etc.) to correlate them with the sentiment conveyed in an instance. Our investigations reveal a generally positive impact for utilising these features for SA in Arabic. Specifically, we show that a rich set of morphological features, which has not been previously used, extracted using a publicly-available morphological analyser for Arabic can significantly improve the performance of SA classifiers. We also demonstrate the usefulness of languageindependent features (e.g. Twitter-specific) for SA. Our feature-sets outperform results reported in previous work on a previously built data-set

The Effect of using Information Technology on Increasing the Efficiency of Internal Auditing Systems in Islamic Banks Operating in Jordan

This study aims to know the extinct to how compatible are the opinions of workers in control and internal auditing departments with how the technical and technological environment of information systems on the dangers of operational control, the availability of technical and technological environmental properties of appropriate and sound information systems, the effect of using information technology on the independency and privacy of internal auditing in Islamic banks operating in Jordan in the shadow of globalization, and finally how committed are they with the technological needs for controlling electronic banking activities. The importance of the study stems from the importance of internal auditing in Islamic banks, and of the significance of using information technology in raising the efficiency of internal auditing in Islamic banks operating in Jordan, as it is considered evidence on the speed and accuracy of management completing their reports and displaying them better with more clarity than what was produced by the manual system, that’s on one hand, however on the other hand, considering the active role that information technology plays in increasing the efficiency of internal auditing in making sure that tasks are carried out according to plan and that goals have been achieved. The study has found numerous results that show a positive impact of using information technology on the independency and privacy of internal auditing in Islamic banks operating in Jordan in the shadow of globalization, and that it is committed to using the technological needs for controlling its electronic banking activities. Key words: internal auditing, information technology, Islamic banks operating in Jordan, internal auditing systems