Effective lining of tunnel kiln cars made of aluminosilicate ceramoconcrete

Aluminosilicate ceramoconcrete lining for cars used in ceramic plant firing kilns was developed and introduced. The first cars with this lining have already operated for more than 50 cyclesyesBelgorod State Universit

Search for the gamma-ray fluxes with energies above 10915) eV from various objects

Considerable interest has developed in the search for local sources of superhigh-energy gamma-rays. The experimental data obtained with the extensive air showers (EAS) array of the Moscow State University are analyzed with a view to searching for the superhigh-energy gamma-rays from various objects and regions of the Galaxy

Draft Genome Sequence of Magnetovibrio blakemorei Strain MV-1, a Marine Vibrioid Magnetotactic Bacterium.

We report here the genome sequence of Magnetovibrio blakemorei MV-1, a marine vibrioid magnetotactic bacterium with a single polar flagellum. The current assembly consists of 91 contigs with a combined size of 3,638,804 bp (54.3% G+C content). This genome allows for further investigations of the molecular biomineralization mechanisms of magnetosome formation

Magnetosome formation in marine vibrio MV-1

Marine vibrio MV-1 is a magnetotactic bacterium capable of aligning its cell in response to the Earth’s magnetic field. This ability is due to the presence of chainlike structures comprising magnetosomes, magnetite particles enclosed in a lipid membrane with associated proteins. Strain MV-1 differs from other, bettercharacterized strains of magnetotactic bacteria as the cells produce higher amounts of biomagnetite per litre of culture and its magnetosomes are unique in shape. This study investigates the presence and organisation of a gene cluster termed a “magnetosome island” within the genome of MV-1. In other magnetotactic bacteria this genomic region has been shown to contain many of the genes associated with magnetosome formation but has not been previously investigated for MV-1. One of the conserved fragments of this region was amplified using degenerate primers followed by extension of the known sequence using inverse PCR based technique and constructing plasmid libraries. Sequencing of the genome of strain MV-1 was accomplished as a part of this study. Significant work was done on comparison of the sequence quality obtained from SOLEXA, 454 and Sanger sequencing technologies. A number of obtained contigs were joined manually and the resulting sequence was automatically annotated using RAST. The obtained genome sequence of 3.6 Mb with a G+C content of 54.3 % was preliminarily analysed and used to search for magnetosome related genes. This study also analysed proteins associated with the magnetosomes of strain MV-1 using MALDI-TOF, LC-MS and Orbitrap mass spectrometry. These approaches allowed the identification of a number of proteins in the isolated magnetosome membrane fraction. Some of these proteins have very low similarity with other characterized proteins (either in magnetotactic bacteria or in other organisms). Another significant point is that genes that code for proteins such as MamR, MamK and MmsF were found to be present in several homologous copies within the “magnetosome island” of MV-1. Interestingly, this study shows that all homologous copies of these proteins were identified in the magnetosome membrane fraction. Generation of knock-out mutants of several specific genes from the “magnetosome island” of strain MV-1 was attempted; constructs were made based on suicide plasmids carrying the cre-lox or I-SceI systems. Despite altering numerous experimental conditions it was not possible to obtain conclusive evidence of the isolation of MV-1 transconjugants containing the integrated constructs. In order to investigate the cell localization of the magnetosome associated protein CAV30779.1, an enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) fusion based construct was generated and transferred into MV-1 cells. The EGFP fluorescent protein fusions within the cells were detected by microscopy. This study reveals novel information about magnetosome formation in marine vibrio MV-1. The obtained results provide an important foundation for further investigation of this organism and contribute towards broadening the knowledge of the complex process of magnetosome formation in bacteria

Switching median filter for suppressing multi-pixel impulse noise

This paper proposes a new switching median filter for suppressing multi-pixel impulse noise in X-ray images. A multi-pixel impulse is understood as a set of several neighboring pixels, the intensity of each significantly exceeds background intensity. Multi-pixel noise can occur, for example, due to the blooming effect, the reason being the limited value of pixel saturation capacity. This article defines the thresholds for the intensity increment relative to the eight immediate neighbors, above which the current pixel is processed by the median filter. The dependence of these thresholds on the number of pixels in an impulse is presented. The proposed algorithm is based on the median filtering process, which consists of several iterations. In this case, the filter has the smallest possible size, which minimizes image distortion during processing. In particular, to exclude a single-pixel impulse, pixel processing is turned on when intensity surge exceeds 3.5 with the grayscale value ranging from 0 to 1. At the same time, to exclude nine-pixel impulses, three iterations are required with the following thresholds: the first iteration with a threshold 2.0; the second iteration also with a threshold 2.0 and the third iteration with a threshold 3.5. The algorithm proposed was tested on real X-ray images corrupted by multi-pixel impulse noise. The algorithm is not only simple, but also reliable and suitable for real-time implementation and application. The efficiency of the technique is shown in comparison with other known filtering methods with respect to the degree of noise suppression. The main result of the testing is that only the proposed method allows excluding multi-pixel noise. Other advantage of the algorithm is its weak effect on the level of Gaussian noise leading to the absence of image blurring (or preserving image details) during processing.The research has been carried out due to the support of the Russian Science Foundation grant (project No.18-79-10168)