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Additional file 1: Supplementary Figures. The logic gating and analyzing figures for flow cytometry.

Additional file 1: Supplementary Table 1. Clinical features of the study population (n = 108).

Additional file 2: Supplementary Table 1. The fluorochrome-conjugated antibodies for flow cytometry.

Glucose oxidation reaction (GOR) plays a significant role in glucose fuel cells anode and glucose sensors. Therefore, optimizing the GOR catalyst nanostructure is auxiliary to their efficient operation. In this study, we present a cascade-assembled strategy to prepare CuO nanobundles (CuO-NB) with high-density and homogenous grain boundaries (GBs). The essence of activity in GOR that depended on GBs are thoroughly investigated. The increased glucose diffusion coefficient of CuO-NB means that GBs has a faster glucose mass transfer, which is attributed to the terraces in GBs dislocation surface. Furthermore, the accumulation of electrons on GBs makes the glucose adsorption increased and the free energy of dehydrogenation step decreased, leading to a lower glucose oxidation barrier. Therefore, CuO-NB is appropriate for non-invasive glucose detection and glucose fuel cells. This study sheds new light on the GBs effect in GOR and paves the way for developing high-efficiency electrocatalysts.

Energy level modulation is an effective strategy of increasing the separation efficiency of the photogenerated electrons and holes of sulfide solid solution. In this work, Mn element was introduced to Zn0.5Cd0.5S sulfide solid solution to modulate energy level of photocatalyst. Compared with pure Zn0.5Cd0.5S, Mn-doped Zn0.5Cd0.5S can effectively improve the separation of photogenerated electrons and holes. As a result, the hydrogen production rate of Mn-doped Zn0.5Cd0.5S photocatalyst is 4 and 12 times than that of Zn0.5Cd0.5S and CdS under visible-light irradiation. This improvement of photocatalytic activity of Mn-doped Zn0.5Cd0.5S is attributed to an emerging impurity band, narrow band gap, and negative conduction band after Mn doping. This work provides a rational doping strategy of catalyst and a deep insight of the enhancement mechanism of doping effect for photocatalytic reactions.

In this thesis, we propose different data hiding techniques for authentication of binary images. Issues in capacity, visual quality, system security, computational complexity and accuracy in tampering localization are addressed. The validity of the proposed methods is demonstrated by both quantitative results and theoretical analysis. DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (EEE)

Thirty flue-cured tobacco samples from Henan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Hunan and Guangdong were collected and a variety test was set up in Luoyang, Henan province to investigate the relationship between TSNAs content and their precursors in flue-cured tobacco lamina and midrib, and effect of geographic location, variety and leaf position on this relationship. Flue-cured tobacco lamina and midrib were stored at 50℃ to study the effect of high temperature storage on contents of TSNAs, alkaloid and nitrate. Results showed that content of TSNAs in flue-cured tobacco lamina was significantly higher than in midrib, and the highest proportion in lamina was NNN, whereas the highest percentage in midrib was NNK. Total alkaloids in lamina were about 4.7 times higher than in midrib. Nitrate content in midrib was higher than in lamina. TSNAs content in lamina varies significantly between regions, with the highest content in Hunan and Guangdong. Significant differences were found in TSNAs content of lamina between varieties, and the changes of TSNAs were closely related with alkaloid content. Lamina had the highest TSNAs content, followed by side-vein and mid-vein. Correlation analysis revealed that accumulation of TSNAs in tobacco was mainly affected by amount of alkaloid accumulated during flue-curing. TSNAs content of midrib and lamina under 50℃ storage increased 229.2% and 30.6%, respectively, compared with that in low temperature, suggesting that nitrate levels had greater influence on TSNAs formation during high temperature storage.

The advent of human pluripotent cell lines holds enormous promise for the development of cell therapies to treat degenerative disease. Safety, however, is a crucial pre-condition for clinical application. Numerous groups have attempted to eliminate potentially harmful cells through the use of suicide genes1; however, none of these efforts quantitatively define safety. Here, we show a concept for the protection of a suicide transgene system from inactivation and its realisation withgenome engineering strategies. The strategy behind our fail-safe (FS) design is to create a transcriptional link between the suicide gene herpes simplex virus-thymidine kinase (HSV-TK) and a cell division essential gene, Cyclin-Dependent Kinase 1 (CDK1). Furthermore, we add a quantitative measure to cell therapy safety as the function of the cell number needed for a therapy and the type of genome editing performed. Even with the highly conservative estimates describedhere, we anticipate that our solution and the quantification of safety will rapidly accelerate the entry of cell-based medicine to the clinic.

To analyze the effects of phenol red at various pH values on the Sabin type 2 inactivated polio vaccine (sIPV2), several biophysical techniques were used to evaluate the particle size and capsid protein for conformation. sIPV2's size was assessed via transmission electron microscopy and dynamic light scattering. The effects of various pH values (from 4.0 to 7.0) on the biophysical characters of sIPV2 particles in solution were determined by dynamic light scattering and zeta potential. The results clearly indicated that aggregation and instability occurred in the solution of sIPV2 particles at a pH of 6.0. Under similar conditions, by dynamic light scattering and zeta potential, the virus particles in solution showed more dispersion and were stable with the addition of 0.05 mM phenol red. According to circular dichroism and intrinsic tryptophan fluorescence data, it was observed that the secondary and tertiary structures of the sIPV2 particles were more stable with the protection of phenol red. At a pH below 6.0, the sIPV2 solution with phenol red had more D-antigen content, which was confirmed by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and rat experiments. These results strongly suggested that phenol red improved the pH stability of the sIPV2. The study indicated the potential of phenol red in preserving vaccine potency of the sIPV2 at various pH values.

The effects of Cu/Fe ratio on structure of attapulgite (ATP) supported CuFeCo-based catalysts were detected by N 2 physical adsorption/desorption, XRD, H 2 -TPR, FE-SEM, TEM, XPS etc.. And the effect on the catalytic performance for mixed alcohols synthesis (MAS) from syngas was evaluated with a continuous flow fixed bed reactor as well. The characterization results indicated that the increase of iron addition resulted in the increase of BET surface area and facilitated the dispersion of oxide particles. Increasing iron concentration also facilitated the separation of Cu–Fe alloy phase, the incorporation of Cu and Fe species and the formation and dispersion of CuFe 2 O 4 spinel phase, thus promoting its reduction to generate Cu–FeC x dual active site for C 2+ alcohol formation. However, more Fe 2 O 3 was formed and dispersed on/in the catalyst with higher iron concentration and was reduced to generate sole FeC x and Fe 3 O 4 phase during reaction. The coverage of CuFe 2 O 4 phase by Fe 2 O 3 inhibited the mixed alcohols formation. In the MAS reaction, the Cu 5.2 Fe 4.8 catalyst showed the highest selectivity and yield of total alcohol due to the well dispersion of high concentration of Cu-FeC x dual active site, which may be attributed to the optimum Cu–Fe interaction and the intimate contact of Cu–Fe species. In view of the utilization of low-cost nonmetallic mineral resource and the production of clean liquid fuel, the attapulgite clay has a great promise to be used as catalyst support in energy field.

Conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to liquid fuels through the synthesis gas (syngas) intermediate product will become an important route for production of clean fuel in the future. In this work, H2SO4-activated palygorskite (Pal) supported Cu–Fe–Co based catalysts were prepared by an impregnation method and applied to mixed alcohols synthesis (MAS) from syngas. The structural properties of those catalysts were characterized by N2 adsorption/desorption, X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray fluorescence (XRF), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and H2-Temperature programmed reduction (H2-TPR). The CFCK/Pal-B21 catalyst exhibited better catalytic activity, yield and selectivity for mixed alcohols due to the high surface concentration of Cu–FeCx dual site and the ideal interaction between Cu and Fe species. Due to the unique property and the low cost and easy availability, the Pal clay has a great promise to be used as catalyst support for liquid biofuel production from biomass-derived syngas.

The acid-activated palygorskite (Pal) and those functionalized with 3-aminopropyltriethoxysilane (PalKH550) were used as supports to immobilize peroxophosphotungstate. The samples were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and the catalytic activity was tested for the epoxidation of soybean oil with hydrogen peroxide. The effect of some factors, such as reaction time, reaction temperature, agitation way and ratio of hydrogen peroxide to soybean oil, was investigated. The results showed that the silylation of Pal during preparation of the catalysts is very effective in improving catalytic activity and mechanical agitation combined with ultrasonic agitation is the best agitation method. Under the optimum condition, the relative percentage conversion to oxirane, the epoxide yield and the epoxide selectivity were 90.69%, 79.34% and 87.48%, respectively.

E-mail’s text is the main body of an E-mail. Its content is reflected by semantic body formed by a large number of semantic elements, so it is the most authoritative and effective to study semantic body information of spam when analyzing its text. Firstly, this paper takes the advantage of HowNet in analysis of semantic element and analyze semantic bodies in email text, then proposes the method of constructing semantic body and calculation ways of similarity between semantic bodies based on sentence similarity. Secondly, for the problem of Imprecision and Fuzziness existing in current spam filtering technology, we use fuzzy clustering method to solve it. Combining fuzzy clustering with the semantic body, the paper proposes the method of fuzzy clustering based on semantic body. It is different from the traditional methods that semantic body is used as the object to be classified and the similarity between semantic bodies used as similarity coefficient in the proposed method. The method reduces the dimension when we use fuzzy clustering method to deal with text clustering problem. Finally, we apply the new method of fuzzy clustering based on semantic body to spam filtering. The result of the experiment shows that this method is more objective in determining email content when comparing with the method of traditional email filtering in semantic unit. The proposed method reflects much better in recall rate of discernment of email for spam whose meaning is expressed unclearly.

Proceedings of the fifth International Brain-Computer Interface Meeting

The use of motor imagery-based brain computer interface has recently been shown to have potential for rehabilitation. This paper proposes a novel scheme to detect motor imagery of swallow from electroencephalography (EEG) signals for dysphagia rehabilitation. The proposed scheme extracts features from the coefficients of dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DT-CWT). A novel sliding window-based peak localization scheme is proposed to dynamically locate the initiation of tongue movement from Electromyography (EMG) signal. Subsequently, effective time segments are extracted from EEG signal for classification based on the detected dynamic initiation location. Comparisons are made between our proposed scheme with that of the three existing approaches. The results based on six healthy subjects show that an increase in averaged accuracy of 9.95% is achieved. Further, an increase in averaged accuracy of 8.02% is resulted comparing our proposed scheme by using and not using the dynamic initiation to extract the time segments. Classification results using EMG data confirm that our results are not due to movements artifacts. Statistical tests with 95% confidence to estimate the accuracy on the respective action at chance level show that five out of six subjects performed above chance level for our proposed dynamic initiation and wavelet feature-based approach.

In this thesis, five schemes for watermarking on two categories (i.e. raw and compressed) of audio signals are proposed. Master of Engineering