in English β-N-acetylhexosaminidase (EC 3.2.1.52) belongs to exoglycosidase, and is one of the most abundant enzymes found in organisms from bacteria to human. The fungal β-N-acetylhexosaminidase from Aspergillus oryzae is composed of propeptide and catalytic domain. The propeptide is noncovalently associated with the catalytic domain of the enzyme. Propeptide is essential for the enzyme activity. While the structure of the catalytic domain was desidned by homology modeling, the structure of the propeptide has not been resolved yet. In this study, the position where the propeptide is associated with the catalytic domain, was uncovered. Presented work consists of two parts. First part deals with optimization of production conditions, purification and crystallization of β-N-acetylhexosaminidase from the filamentous fungi Aspergillus oryzae. Second part is devoted to the study of interaction between propeptide and catalytic domain, which was characterized by chemical cross-linking and high-resolution mass spectrometry. It was found that the structural changes of the catalytic domain depend on the presence of the propeptide molecule. Moreover the region of propeptide-catalytic domain interaction was revealed.

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Scholars have repeatedly contrasted the 1805 and 1850 versions of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude since the discovery and publication of the former by Ernest De Sélincourt in 1926. Points of contention have included the 1850 poem’s grammatical revisions and shifts toward greater political and religious orthodoxy. While these discussions have waned in recent decades, digital humanities tools allow us to revisit oft-debated texts through new lenses. Wanting to examine scholarly claims about The Prelude from a digital humanities perspective, I collaborated with Dr. Billy Hall to enter both versions of the poem into a data analysis and visualization tool, which displayed the results in topic-modeling outputs and most-frequent-words lists. The 1805 and 1850 topic modeling outputs were essentially identical to one another, suggesting either that scholars have overstated differences between the versions or that the themes of the poem may have evolved in ways not easily captured by my digital humanities methods. On the other hand, the most-frequent-words lists revealed some notable discrepancies between the two Preludes. One set of lists included articles, conjunctions, pronouns, and linking verbs (otherwise known as “stop words”), demonstrating, for instance, that the word “was” appeared with significantly less frequency in the 1850 Prelude. I found that other linking verbs also decreased in the 1850 Prelude, and this discovery prompted me to conduct a stylistic analysis of said verbs. Knowing that a raw statistical count of linking verbs in both texts would reveal only an incomplete portrait of Wordsworth’s shifting verb usage, I divided the verb revisions into two primary categories: replacements of linking verbs with dynamic verbs and descriptors, and removals of lines containing linking verbs. While scholars have previously highlighted the replacement of linking verbs with dynamic verbs and descriptors in the 1850 Prelude, these revisions only account for 30% of the 1850 linking verb revisions. In fact, the majority of linking verb revisions consist of removed 1805 lines. Many of these lines are declarative statements—the removal of which suggests that Wordsworth preferred, in some cases, a less prescriptive approach in the 1850 Prelude.

The purpose of this essay is to explore the connection between the novel adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy’s and its video game source. As well as questioning how the two sources have developed a unique transmedial symbiosis. This relationship will be explored through the lens of modern adaptation, transmedial storytelling, worldbuilding, and world linking methods. By exploring the games unnatural narrative the transmedial tools and ideas the franchise has been based on can be defined. Through interaction and puzzle-like narrative which invites the player to participate by discussing and theorizing. Which then evolved and expanded further through the creation of the novel trilogy. The novel trilogy creates a transmedial narrative using world linking transmedial methodology to achieve interconnection between the works.

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No description available.

Background and objectives: TISSIUM light-activated adhesive was investigated as an alternative to tissue-penetrating products to fix meshes in intraperitoneal laparoscopic ventral hernia repair. The objective of this study was to ensure efficient polymer light activation through commercial meshes and to assess the acute and chronic fixation strength of the light-activated adhesive in a porcine model in comparison to commercial fixation products. Methods: A spectroscopic analysis was conducted on the light-activated adhesive through three different meshes (1, 2, and 3) to quantify the acrylate conversion associated with the level of polymer cross-linking. Two setups were implemented: a static (light source fixed over a drop of polymer) and a dynamic (light source rotated around a pattern of polymer to mimic the surgical procedure). Hernia defects were created in porcine models and repaired either using the light-activated adhesive or a commercial product (A, B, C, and D) to fix a mesh. For each tested condition, the acute and chronic (3 months) fixation strength performances were assessed using burst ball and t-peel mechanical tests. Results: The light activation proved to be effective (more than 90% of the acrylates converted) in static in 7 seconds through the three meshes and in dynamic between 3 min and 5 min 32 sdepending on the considered mesh. In a burst ball test, the light-activated adhesive reached between 42 and 84% of the commercial products’ acute performance with the three meshes (between 75,9 and 95,9 N) and reached 88% of the commercial product A’s chronic performance with mesh 1 (610,1 N). A t-peel test demonstrated similar strength of ingrowth for the repairs using the light-activated adhesive or the commercial product A at the 3-month timepoint with mesh 1 (2,55 and 2,37 N/cm respectively). Conclusions: Data suggest the light-activated adhesive has the potential to be used in intraperitoneal laparoscopic ventral hernia repair. In a reasonable time, the adhesive is efficiently light-activated through commercial meshes. The light-activated adhesive’s performances to fix commercial meshes, both acute and chronic, are similar to commercial products, but with a strong advantage of not being tissue penetrating.

Among all the tasks that exist in Information Extraction, Entity Linking, also referred to as entity disambiguation or entity resolution, is a new and important problem which has recently caught the attention of a lot of researchers in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community. The task involves linking/matching a textual mention of a named-entity (like a person or a movie-name) to an appropriate entry in a database (e.g. Wikipedia or IMDB). If the database does not contain the entity it should return NIL (out-of-database) value. Existing techniques for linking named entities in text mostly focus on Wikipedia as a target catalog of entities. Yet for many types of entities, such as restaurants and cult movies, relational databases exist that contain far more extensive information than Wikipedia. In this dissertation, we introduce a new framework, called Open-Database Entity Linking (Open-DB EL), in which a system must be able to resolve named entities to symbols in an arbitrary database, without requiring labeled data for each new database. In experiments on two domains, our Open-DB EL strategies outperform a state-of-the-art Wikipedia EL system by over 25% in accuracy. Existing approaches typically perform EL using a pipeline architecture: they use a Named-Entity Recognition (NER) system to find the boundaries of mentions in text, and an EL system to connect the mentions to entries in structured or semi-structured repositories like Wikipedia. However, the two tasks are tightly coupled, and each type of system can benefit significantly from the kind of information provided by the other. We propose and develop a joint model for NER and EL, called NEREL, that takes a large set of candidate mentions from typical NER systems and a large set of candidate entity links from EL systems, and ranks the candidate mention-entity pairs together to make joint predictions. In NER and EL experiments across three datasets, NEREL significantly outperforms or comes close to the performance of two state-of-the-art NER systems, and it outperforms 6 competing EL systems. On the benchmark MSNBC dataset, NEREL, provides a 60% reduction in error over the next best NER system and a 68% reduction in error over the next-best EL system. We also extend the idea of using semi-structured resources to a relatively less explored area of entity information extraction. Most previous work on information extraction from text has focused on named-entity recognition, entity linking, and relation extraction. Much less attention has been paid to extracting the temporal scope for relations between named-entities; for example, the relation president-Of (John F. Kennedy, USA) is true only in the time-frame (January 20, 1961 - November 22, 1963). In this dissertation we present a system for temporal scoping of relational facts, called TSRF which is trained on distant supervision based on the largest semi-structured resource available: Wikipedia. TSRF employs language models consisting of patterns automatically bootstrapped from sentences collected from Wikipedia pages that contain the main entity of a page and slot-fillers extracted from the infobox tuples. This proposed system achieves state-of-the-art results on 6 out of 7 relations on the benchmark Text Analysis Conference (TAC) 2013 dataset for the task of temporal slot filling (TSF). Overall, the system outperforms the next best system that participated in the TAC evaluation by 10 points on the TAC-TSF evaluation metric. / Computer and Information Science

The goal of this research was to utilize the morphological control inherently imparted by the electrospinning process to improve the active layer performance in energy conversion devices as well as to better understand the relationship between morphology and performance in energy storage devices. Discrete control of the active layer morphology can promote exciton dissociation in organic photovoltaic cells (OPVs), whereas developing efficient ion diffusion pathways and beneficial polymer-ion interaction in polymer-gel electrolytes is demonstrated to result in enhanced battery performance. We demonstrate the ability to develop unique morphologies in Poly(3-hexafluoro propylene) (P3HT) films with energy storage applications using various electrospinning techniques. Electrospinning in a solvent-saturated atmosphere allows for the design of ribbon architectures with polymer domains on the order of 5-10 um. These ribbon structures form what appear to be bi-continuous films, which could then be filled with an acceptor / fullerene type material to create a bulk heterojucton for OPV devices. Dropping chloroform onto the electrospinning needle during the spinning process results in P3HT fibers with porous surfaces. These fibers have diameters of ~ 2 um. Using a coaxial needle to electrospin a P3HT solution in the core, and a CHCl3 sheath solution created hybrid ribbon-fiber structures. These structures have even smaller domain sizes than the ribbons created using a solvent saturated atmosphere. Cospinning P3HT with sacrificial polymers results in P3HT fiber morphologies upon removal of the sacrificial template polymer. Additionally, introducing P3HT into an established fiber matrix results in fibrous P3HT architectures after the template fibers are removed. Developing hybrid polymer-gel electrolytes using crosslinked PEO electrospun fibers results in membranes with high affinity for liquid electrolyte components. These electrospun PEO fiber mats exhibit excellent ionic conductivities at room temperature (12 mS/cm) exceeding an electrospun PVDF control. Furthermore, the PEO fiber mats can absorb nearly three times as much liquid electrolyte as the PVDF control. PEO has been show to interact with lithium salts to aid in dissociation and diffusion during battery cycling. Although the ionic conductivity data suggest PEO to be a superior electrolyte, pulsed-field-gradient NMR shows that lithium diffusion is faster in PVDF samples. From coin cell discharge experiments, PEO is believed to interact strongly with Li+ ions, inhibiting them from diffusing rapidly during fast charge/discharge rates. However, PEO/PETA fiber electrolytes show nearly 100% theoretical capacity discharge at C/100 and a capacity retention of ~ 35% at a C/5 discharge rate in contrast to a glass fiber separator which shows only a capacity that is approximately 85% of the theoretical value. The unique mechanical properties of PEO/PETA electrospun mats could lead to interesting artificial skin and wound healing applications. Upon crosslinking at elevated temperatures (~40 degrees C), the fiber mats exhibit improved tensile strength and much higher ultimate stress at break. The porous nature of the materials lend to easy oxygen diffusion for wound healing, and the hydrophilicity promotes continued adhesion to existing tissue making these mats possible adhesive-less bandages. / Ph. D.

Corneal cross-linking (CXL) with riboflavin and ultraviolet A light is a therapeutic procedure to restore the mechanical stability of corneal tissue. The treatment method is applied to pathological tissue, such as keratoconus and induces the formation of new cross-links. At present, the molecular mechanisms of induced cross-linking are still not known exactly. In this study, we investigated molecular alterations within porcine cornea tissue after treatment with riboflavin and ultraviolet A light by surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). For that purpose, after CXL treatment a thin silver layer was vapor-deposited onto cornea flaps. To explore molecular alterations induced by the photochemical process hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) was used. The detailed analysis of SERS spectra reveals that there is no general change in collagen secondary structure while modifications on amino acid side chains are the most dominant outcome. The formation of secondary and aromatic amine groups as well as methylene and carbonyl groups were observed. Even though successful cross-linking could not be registered in all treated samples, Raman signals of newly formed chemical groups are already present in riboflavin only treated corneas.