Scanning electron microscopy coupled with energydispersive X-ray spectrometry for quick detection of sulfuroxidizing bacteria in environmental water samples

Detection of sulfur-oxidizing bacteria has largely been dependent on targeted gene sequencing technology or traditional cell cultivation, which usually takes from days to months to carry out. This clearly does not meet the requirements of analysis for time-sensitive samples and/or complicated environmental samples. Since energy-dispersive X-ray spectrometry(EDS) can be used to simultaneously detect multiple elements in a sample, including sulfur, with minimal sample treatment, this technology was applied to detect sulfur-oxidizing bacteria using their high sulfur content within the cell. This article describes the application of scanning electron microscopy imaging coupled with EDS mapping for quick detection of sulfur oxidizers in contaminated environmental water samples, with minimal sample handling. Scanning electron microscopy imaging revealed the existence of dense granules within the bacterial cells, while EDS identified large amounts of sulfur within them. EDS mapping localized the sulfur to these granules. Subsequent 16S rRNA gene sequencing showed that the bacteria detected in our samples belonged to the genus Chromatium, which are sulfur oxidizers. Thus, EDS mapping made it possible to identify sulfur oxidizers in environmental samples based on localized sulfur within their cells, within a short time(within 24 h of sampling). This technique has wide ranging applications for detection of sulfur bacteria in environmental water samples.

STACKING SEQUENCE OPTIMIZA-TION OF LAMINATED COMPOSITE CYLINDER SHELL FOR MAXIMAL BUCKLING LOAD

A new optimization method for the optimization of stacking of composite glass fiber laminates is developed. The fiber orientation and angle of the layers of the cylindrical shells are sought considering the buckling load. The proposed optimization algorithm applies both finite element analysis and the mode-pursuing sampling （MPS）method. The algorithms suggest the optimal stacking sequence for achieving the maximal buckling load. The procedure is implemented by integrating ANSYS and MATLAB. The stacking sequence designing for the symmetric angle-ply three-layered and five-layered composite cylinder shells is presented to illustrate the optimization process, respectively. Compared with the genetic algorithms, the proposed optimization method is much faster and efficient for composite staking sequence plan.

High Performance Compressed Sampling for OFDM-UWB Systems

In order to solve the problem of high-speed sampling in OFDM based ultra wide band(UWB) systems, this paper first gives analysis on the applicability of existing compressed sampling methods. Then, on the basis of an established segmented observation model, it presents an optimized parallel segmented compressed sampling(OPSCS) scheme based on Hadamard matrix. The orthogonal Hadamard matrix is adopted to construct the segmented measurement matrix with any dimensions, thus orthogonal or quasi-orthogonal multiplex observation sequences are obtained, and the restricted isometry property is improved. The optimized orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm is also used for the known sparsity avoiding iterative operation. Researches show that the proposed method can effectively reduce the sampling rate in OFDM-UWB systems, and also has a good ability of noise resisting that it achieves a high system performance better than the existing schemes of compressed sampling and even Nyquist rate sampling.

The Performance of Double Bootstrap Method for Large Sampling Sequence

Studies on the iteration procedure in double bootstrap method have given a great impact on confidence interval performance. However, the procedure was claimed to be complicated and demand intensive computer processor. Considering this problem, an alternative procedure was proposed in this research. Despite of using small sampling sequence, this research was aimed to increase the accuracy estimation using a second replication number which resulted in a large sampling sequence of double bootstrap. In this paper, the alternative double bootstrap method was hybrid onto an example model and its performance was based on Studentised interval. The performance was examined in simulation study and real sample data of sukuk Ijarah. The result showed that hybrid double bootstrap model gave more accurate estimation in terms of its shorter length when dealing with various parameter values and has shown to improve the single bootstrap estimation.