Degradation and mineralization of 2-chloro-, 3-chloro- and 4-chlorobiphenyl by a newly characterized natural bacterial strain isolated from an electrical transformer fluid-contaminated soil

A bacterium classified as Achromobacter xylosoxidans strain IR08 by phenotypic typing coupled with 16S rRNA gene analysis was isolated from a soil contaminated with electrical transformer ?uid for over sixty years using Aroclor 1221 as an enrichment substrate. The substrate utilization profiles revealed that IR08 could grow on all three monochlorobiphenyls (CBs), 2,4’- and 4,4’-dichlorobiphenyl as well as 2-chlorobenzoate (2-CBA), 3-CBA, 4-CBA, and 2,3-dichlorobenzoate. Unusually, growth was poorly sustaine...

A Natural Vaccine Candidate Strain Against Cholera

E1 Tor Vibrio cholerae (EVC) strains may be classifled into two kinds-epidemigenic (EEVC) strains and non-epidemigenic (NEEVC) strains-based on a phage-biotyping system. A large number of EEVC strains have been screened for toxigenic and putative colonization attributes. One such naturally occurring strain (designated IEM 101) has been found which is devoid of genes encoding cholera toxin (CT), accessory cholera enterotoxin (ACE), zonula occludens toxin (ZOT), but possesses RS1 sequences and toxin-coregulated pilus A gene (tcpA) although tcpA is poorly expressed. It expresses type B pili but does not posses type C pili. It is an E1 Tor Ogawa strain and does not cause fluid accumulation in rabbit ileal loop tests. Active immunization of rabbits with strain IEM 101 elicited good protection against challenge with virulent strains of V cholerae O1. Oral administrationcaused no side effects in 15 human volunteers, colonized the gut for four to ten days and elicited good immune responses

C^1 natural element method for strain gradient linear elasticity and its application to microstructures

C^1 natural element method （C^1 NEM） is applied to strain gradient linear elasticity, and size effects on mi crostructures are analyzed. The shape functions in C^1 NEM are built upon the natural neighbor interpolation （NNI）, with interpolation realized to nodal function and nodal gradient values, so that the essential boundary conditions （EBCs） can be imposed directly in a Galerkin scheme for partial differential equations （PDEs）. In the present paper, C^1 NEM for strain gradient linear elasticity is constructed, and sev- eral typical examples which have analytical solutions are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the constructed method. In its application to microstructures, the size effects of bending stiffness and stress concentration factor （SCF） are studied for microspeciem and microgripper, respectively. It is observed that the size effects become rather strong when the width of spring for microgripper, the radius of circular perforation and the long axis of elliptical perforation for microspeciem come close to the material characteristic length scales. For the U-shaped notch, the size effects decline obviously with increasing notch radius, and decline mildly with increasing length of notch.

Assessment of structural damage using natural frequency changes

The present paper develops a new method for damage localization and severity estimation based on the employment of modal strain energy. This method is able to determine the damage locations and estimate their severities, requiring only the information about the changes of a few lower natural frequencies. First, a damage quantification method is formulated and iterative approach is adopted for determining the damage extent. Then a damage localization algorithm is proposed, in which a damage indicator is formulated where unity value corresponds to the true damage scenario. Finally, numerical studies and model tests are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed algorithm.