Earthquake Fragility Assessment of the Underground Tunnel Using an Efficient SSI Analysis Approach

This paper represents a simplified seismic fragility analysis approach of the underground tunnel structure in consideration of the soil-structure interaction (SSI) effect. SSI effect founds to be essential in the estimation of dynamic analysis of underground structures like tunnels and thus needs to be considered. The ground response acceleration method for buried structures (GRAMBS) known to be a very efficient quasi-static method that can consider SSI effect is used in the proposed approach to evaluate seismic structural responses without sacrificing much accuracy. Seismic fragility curves are then developed by applying the maximum likelihood estimates (MLE) to responses of a large set of artificial ground motion time histories generated for multiple different levels of earthquake intensity. It is also assumed in this paper that the seismic fragility curve can be represented by a two-parameter lognormal distribution function with median and log-standard deviation that need to be defined using MLE.

A computational study of the chemokine receptor CXCR1 bound with interleukin-8

CXCR1 is a G-protein coupled receptor, transducing signals from chemokines, in particular the interleukin-8 （1L8） molecules. This study combines homology modeling and molecular dynamics simulation methods to study the structure of CXCRI-IL8 complex. By using CXCR4-vMIP-II crystallography structure as the homologous template, CXCRI-IL8 complex structure was constructed, and then refined using all-atom molecular dynamics simulations. Through extensive simulations, CXCRI-IL8 binding poses were investigated in detail. Furthermore, the role of the N-terminal of CXCR1 receptor was studied by comparing four complex models differing in the N-terminal sequences. The results indicate that the receptor N-terminal affects the binding of IL8 significantly. With a shorter N-terminal domain, the binding of IL8 to CXCR1 becomes unstable. The homology modeling and simulations also reveal the key receptor-ligand residues involved in the electrostatic interactions known to be vital for complex formation.

Optimal Trajectory Planning of the Dual Arm Manipulator Using DAMM

This paper presents an optimal trajectory planning method of the dual arm manipulator using Dual Arm Manipulability Measure(DAMM).When the manipulator carries an object from a certain position to the destination,various trajectory candidates could be considered.To select the optimal trajectory from the several candidates,energy,time,and the length of the trajectory could be utilized.In order to quantify the carrying efficiency of dual-arms,DAMM has been defined and applied for the decision of the optimal path.DAMM is defined as the intersection of the manipulability ellipsoids of the dual-arms,while the manipulability measure indicates the relationship between the joint velocity and the Cartesian velocity for each arm.The cost function for achieving the optimal path is defined as the summation of the distance to the goal and inverse of this DAMM,which aims to generate the efficient motion to the goal.It is confirmed that the optimal path planning keeps higher manipulability through the short distance path by using computer simulation.To show the effectiveness of this cooperative control algorithm experimentally,a 5-DOF dual-arm robot with distributed controllers for synchronization control has been developed and used for the experiments.

Analysis of microsatellite instability in stool DNA of patients with colorectal cancer using denaturing high performance liquid chromatography

AIM: To evaluate the usefulness of denaturing high performance liquid chromatography (DHPLC) for analyzing microsatellite instability (MSI) status in stool DNA of patients with colorectal cancer. METHODS: A total of 80 cancer tissues from patients with primary sporadic colorectal tumor (proximal cancer: 27, distal cancer: 53) and matched stool (which were employed for comparison with the tissues) were analyzed for MSI status in BAT 26. DNA samples extracted from stool were evaluated by nested polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and DHPLC for MSI analysis. RESULTS: Six cases (7.5%) of MSI were identified in BAT 26 from 80 cancer tissues. All the stool DNA samples from patients whose cancer tissue showed MSI also displayed MSI in BAT 26. CONCLUSION: As MSI is one of the established fecal DNA markers to screen colorectal cancer, we propose to use DHPLC for the MSI analysis in fecal DNA.