This thesis describes the development of an ion channel system exhibiting dissipative assembly characteristics. In this system an active transporter based on an oligoester fragment terminated in a thioester of 6-aminohexanoic acid (HO2C-Hex-Adip-OctS-Hex-NH2) undergoes thioester cleavage to form a thiol terminated oligoester (HO2C-Hex-ADip-Oct-SH). This fragment was expected to be inactive for ion transport but previous work showed high activity in planar bilayer experiments. In this work, the high activity was shown to be due to the oxidized form of the thiol, the disulfide HO2C-ADip-Oct-SS-Oct-ADip-Hex-CO2H. Air oxidation was found to be quite rapid for the thiol based on ESI-MS (negative ion) and HPLC analysis. Under anaerobic conditions, the thiol fragment was an inactive species for ion transport. In situ air oxidation initiated transport activity associated with the disulfide. The transporter HO2C-Hex-Adip-Oct-Hex-NH2 was active in planar bilayer experiments and was compared to the disulfide via activity grids. The activity of these two compounds was shown to be distinct from each other by conductance and channel duration differences. The activity of HO2C-Hex-Adip-Oct-Hex-NH2 was shown to die off in a period of 30 minutes at pH 8.2. Techniques were developed to stimulate and monitor activity and bilayer quality so that an inactive condition could be confirmed. The addition of Pr-S-Hex-NH3+-Cl as a fuel was shown to extend the activity of HO2C-Hex-Adip-Oct-Hex-NH2 by eight-fold in 1M CsCl electrolyte. Previous work had established the capability of thioester exchange reactions by a reaction between Pr-S-Hex-NH3+-Cl and benzyl thiol in a homogenous solution. The extended activity indicated that the same process may occur in a heterogeneous bilayer system. An inactive system created by the die-off in activity of HO2C-Hex-Adip-Oct-S-Hex-NH2 was treated with Pr-S-Hex-NH3+-Cl to regenerate activity. This cycle could be repeated once the activity died off again. All these findings are consistent with the dissipative assembly of a membrane transport system. / Graduate / 0490

Most theoretical and empirical literatures have investigated the credit channel of monetary transmission in a closed economy. However, when Taiwan becomes financially more internationalized, little literature can provide economic implication for the credit-channel effect of a monetary policy to the case of Taiwan. Therefore we set up a model with the credit market under an open economy to study the credit channel-effect of monetary policy with the inclusion of foreign assets and debts in the bank’s balance sheet. The main conclusion in our theoretical model is that the effect of a tight monetary policy on bank loans will be reduced in an open economy; furthermore, such effect may make bank loans increase after a contractionary monetary policy. Besides, the empirical evidence also shows that bank loans increase after a contractionary monetary policy with the data of Taiwan.

The credit channel literature has made great strides in recent years, however, much of the literature to date has focused largely on the closed economy. Even some of the literatures are in a framework of an open economy, they only concentrate on the fixed or a quasi-fixed exchange rate regime. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to complete the theoretical framework by extending the Bernanke and Blinder model to the case of an open economy under a floating exchange rate regime. We find that the exchange rates puzzle takes place in our model when the influence from credit channels is very significant. We further to compare the credit channel effects under different models. Moreover, we adopt a cointegration analysis to study the credit channel effect, and the empirical evidences show that the credit channels exist in Taiwan for the sample period during November 1991 to January 2005.

Channel assignment in wireless mesh network (WMN) aims at improving the network throughput by utilizing multiple orthogonal frequency channels to minimize the interference. Interference can be categorized as coordinated and non-coordinated, depending upon the relative location of the interfering links. Compared to coordinated interference, non-coordinated interference has a severe adverse impact on throughput. This thesis is based on the hypothesis that the network throughput can be improved significantly, if channel assignment minimizes non-coordinated interference with priority. We propose a static and centralized channel assignment scheme CCAS to show the effectiveness of the hypothesis. The cluster-based approach of CCAS minimizes non-coordinated interference with reduced complexity. CCAS improves the network throughput by upto 80%, compared to the existing schemes. We propose topology control scheme MATS that constructs low interference multipath network topology using a subset of links from physical topology. We report an additional improvement of upto 10% in the network throughput, when CCAS assigns channels to the links selected by MATS. In the final part of the thesis, we formulate generalized channel assignment as an optimization problem, accounting for real network traffic. The objective of the problem is to select the channels for links such that maximum incident traffic can be transmitted over the links, while ensuring a fair distribution of throughput amongst links and elimination of non-coordinated interference. For a given network and incident traffic, the solution to this problem generates the channel assignment resulting in optimal network throughput. We propose dynamic and distributed scheme LYCAS as an approximate solution to the problem. LYCAS employs MATS to construct network topology and cluster-based approach of CCAS to minimize non-coordinated interference. In addition, it periodically updates the assignment of channels to adapt to the changing traffic load. LYCAS achieves upto 68% of the optimal network throughput and upto 72% of optimal aggregate end-to-end throughput of multi-hop flows. It outperforms the existing schemes by a factor of 2.

No description available.

This thesis is concerned with the channel assignment (CA) problem in multi-channel multi-interface wireless mesh networks (M2WNs). First, for M2WNs with general topologies, we rigorously demonstrate using the combinatorial principle of inclusion/exclusion that the CA solution space can be quantified, indicating that its cardinality is greatly influenced by the number of radio interfaces installed on each router. Based on this analysis, a novel scheme is developed to construct a new reduced search space, represented by a lattice structure, that is searched more efficiently for a CA solution. The elements in the reduced lattice-based space, labeled Solution Structures (SS), represent groupings of feasible CA solutions satisfying the radio constraints at each node. Two algorithms are presented for searching the lattice structure. The first is a greedy algorithm that finds a good SS in polynomial time, while the second provides a user-controlled depthfirst search for the optimal SS. The obtained SS is used to construct an unconstrained weighted graph coloring problem which is then solved to satisfy the soft interference constraints. For the special class of full M2WNs (fM2WNs), we show that an optimal CA solution can only be achieved with a certain number of channels; we denote this number as the characteristic channel number and derive upper and lower bounds for that number as a function of the number of radios per router. Furthermore, exact values for the required channels for minimum interference are obtained when certain relations between the number of routers and the radio interfaces in a given fM2WN are satisfied. These bounds are then employed to develop closed-form expressions for the minimum channel interference that achieves the maximum throughput for uniform traffic on all communication links. Accordingly, a polynomial-time algorithm to find a near-optimal solution for the channel assignment problem in fM2WN is developed. Experimental results confirm the obtained theoretical results and demonstrate the performance of the proposed schemes.

Physiological Reports published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of the American Physiological Society and The Physiological Society. A volume-regulated anion channel (VRAC) has been electrophysiologically characterized in innumerable mammalian cell types. VRAC is activated by cell swelling and mediates the volume regulatory efflux of Cl− and small organic solutes from cells. Two groups recently identified the mammalian leucine-rich repeat containing protein LRRC8A as an essential VRAC component. LRRC8A must be coexpressed with at least one of the other four members of this gene family, LRRC8B-E, to reconstitute VRAC activity in LRRC8−/− cells. LRRC8 genes likely arose with the origin of chordates. We identified LRRC8A and LRRC8C-E orthologs in the zebrafish genome and demonstrate that zebrafish embryo cells and differentiated adult cell types express a swelling-activated Cl− current indistinguishable from mammalian VRAC currents. Embryo cell VRAC currents are virtually eliminated by morpholino knockdown of the zebrafish LRRC8A ortholog lrrc8aa. VRAC activity is fully reconstituted in LRRC8−/− human cells by coexpression of zebrafish lrrc8aa and human LRRC8C cDNAs. lrrc8aa expression varies during zebrafish embryogenesis and lrrc8aa knockdown causes pericardial edema and defects in trunk elongation and somatogenesis. Our studies provide confirmation of the importance of LRRC8A in VRAC activity and establish the zebrafish as a model system for characterizing the molecular regulation and physiological roles of VRAC and LRRC8 proteins.

Dans de nombreux scénarios de communication sans fil multiutilisateurs, une bonne rétroaction est un ingrédient essentiel qui facilite l'amélioration des performances. Bien qu'étant utile, une rétroaction parfaite reste difficile et fastidieuse à obtenir. En considérant ce défi comme point de départ, le principal objet de cette thèse s'applique à adresser la question simple et pourtant insaisissable et fondamentale suivante: "Quel niveau de qualité de la rétroaction doit-on rechercher, et à quel moment faut-il effectuer un envoi pour atteindre une certaine performance en degrés de liberté (DoF)". La présente étude réussit à décrire de manière concise les régions DoF dans un cadre très général, correspondant à un processus général de rétroaction qui, à tout moment, peut ou non fournir des informations sur l'état du canal au niveau de l'émetteur (CSIT) - d'une qualité arbitraire - pour toute réalisation passée, actuelle ou future du canal. Sous des hypothèses standard , et en supposant par ailleurs que l'on dispose d'un CSIT suffisamment bien retardé, l'effet de la qualité du CSIT offert à tout moment, pour presque tout type de canaux est étudié de manière précise. Ceci est réalisé dans le cadre MISO-BC à deux utilisateurs, puis est directement étendu aux cas des MIMO-BC et MIMO-IC. En outre différents aspects de communication avec rétroaction limitée sont considérés, ainsi que l'aspect CSI global au niveau des récepteurs, et l'aspect diversité. En plus de fournir des limites théoriques et des nouveaux encodeurs et décodeurs, l'étude s'applique à obtenir une meilleure comprehension sur plusieurs questions pratiques d'intérêt capital dans le domaine. / In many multiuser wireless communications scenarios, good feedback is a crucial ingredient that facilitates improved performance. While being useful, perfect feedback is also hard and time-consuming to obtain. With this challenge as a starting point, the main work of thesis seeks to address the simple yet elusive and fundamental question of ``HOW MUCH QUALITY of feedback, AND WHEN, must one send to achieve a certain degrees-of-freedom (DoF) performance''. The work manages to concisely describe the DoF region in a very broad setting corresponding to a general feedback process that, at any point in time, may or may not provide channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) - of some arbitrary quality - for any past, current or future channel (fading) realization. Under standard assumptions, and under the assumption of sufficiently good delayed CSIT, the work concisely captures the effect of the quality of CSIT offered at any time, about any channel. This was achieved for the two user MISO-BC, and was then immediately extended to the MIMO BC and MIMO IC settings. Further work also considers different aspects of communicating with limited feedback, such as the aspect of global CSI at receivers, and the aspect of diversity. In addition to the theoretical limits and novel encoders and decoders, the work applies towards gaining insights on many practical questions.

No description available.

No description available.