Effect of non-enzymatic glycosylation of pea albumins on their immunoreactive properties

The aim of this study was to determine the effect of non-enzymatic glycosylation of pea proteins on their immunoreactive properties. Extracted total pea albumins were glycated. No changes were found in molecular weight distribution of total pea albumins before and after glycation using size exclusion chromatography and SDS–PAGE methods. SDS–PAGE GLYCO test stained the glycated proteins and OPA method showed 15% progress in glycation. Glycated and unglycated pea albumins were orally and intraperitoneally administered to Balb/C mice. Serum specific IgG and IgA and sIgA were determined. No difference in serum specific IgG level was found after oral mice immunization with TA and GTA. In the presence of antigen SPL lymphocytes culture showed higher proliferation activity as compared to the culture without the antigen addition. The glycation does not change the immunoreactivity of proteins significantly. During the presented route of immunization with TA and GTA specific tolerance mechanism could be induced.     

The Peculiarities of Magnetic Flux Dynamics at Magnetothermal Instability in Textured Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ

The magnetic flux dynamics was investigated in a textured Bi₂Sr₂CaCu₂O₈₊ sample using a miniature Hall probe placed on the surface of the superconductor. The process of magnetic flux penetration into the superconductor was found to have a complex structure and consist of two processes with different time scales. The first one has a length of tens of microseconds and is considered as locally adiabatic. The second one has a length comparable with the time of thermal diffusion. The importance of the above two processes in the development of magnetic instability is analyzed.     

Application of space periodic variation of light polarization in imaging polarimetry

The application of space periodic variation of light polarization for measurement and calculation of the distribution of the phase retardation between two eigenwaves propagating inside a linearly birefringent media and the distribution of the azimuth angle of the first eigenvector is described. The measuring method proposed does not require any mechanical movements or rotations of any optical elements. Application of a liquid crystal (LC) modulator instead of a quarter-wave plate gives an opportunity to introduce the required phase shift. The space periodic modulation of the polarization of light is achieved by the use of a Wollaston prism placed inside the path of the light beam. Then a fast Fourier transform is used for further calculations. The number of measurements of the light intensity at the output of the system is minimized to two. These assumptions make the proposed method very fast, which is especially important in measurements of the objects with optical anisotropy that is changing in time.     

Shear and membrane locking in curved C0 elements

Locking phenomena in C⁰ curved finite elements are studied for displacement, hybrid-stress and mixed formulations. It is shown that for a curved beam element, shear and membrane locking are interrelated and either shear or membrane underintegration can alleviate it. However, reduced shear integration tends to diminish the membrane-flexural coupling which characterizes curved elements. Locking can also be expected in certain types of mixed formulations, the hybrid-stress formulations avoids locking for beams (but not for shells). Methods for avoiding locking are explored and alternatives evaluated.     

Bang–Bang Refocusing of a Qubit Exposed to Telegraph Noise

Solid state qubits promise the great advantage of being naturally scalable to large quantum computer architectures, but they also possess the significant disadvantage of being intrinsically exposed to many sources of noise in the macroscopic solid-state environment. With suitably chosen systems such as superconductors, many of sources of noise can be suppressed. However, imprecision in nanofabrication will inevitably induce defects and disorder, such as charged impurities in the device material or substrate. Such defects generically produce telegraph noise and can hence be modelled as bistable fluctuators. We demonstrate the possibility of the active suppression of such telegraph noise by bang–bang control through an exhaustive study of a qubit coupled to a single bistable fluctuator. We use a stochastic Schrödinger equation, which is solved both numerically and analytically. The resulting dynamics can be visualized as diffusion of a spin vector on the Bloch sphere. We find that bang–bang control suppresses the effect of a bistable fluctuator by a factor roughly equalling the ratio of the bang–bang period and the typical fluctuator period. Therefore, we show the bang–bang protocol works essentially as a high pass filter on the spectrum of such telegraph noise sources. This suggests how the influence of 1/f-noise ubiquitous to the solid state world could be reduced, as it is typically generated by an ensemble of bistable fluctuators. Finally, we develop random walk models that estimate the level of noise suppression resulting from imperfect bang–bang operations, such as those that cannot be treated as -function impulses and those that have phase and axis errors. PACS: 03.65.Yz, 03.67.Lx, 05.40.-a     

Mid-ultraviolet light-emitting diode detects dipicolinic acid

Dipicolinic acid (DPA, 2,6-pyridinedicarboxylic acid) is a substance uniquely present in bacterial spores such as that from anthrax (B. anthracis). It is known that DPA can be detected by the long-lived fluorescence of its terbium chelate; the best limit of detection (LOD) reported thus far using a large benchtop gated fluorescence instrument using a pulsed Xe lamp is 2 nM. We use a novel AlGaN light-emitting diode (LED) fabricated on a sapphire substrate that has peak emission at 291 nm. Although the overlap of the emission band of this LED with the absorption band of Tb-DPA (lambda(max) doublet: 273, 279 nm) is not ideal, we demonstrate that a compact detector based on this LED and an off-the-shelf gated photodetection module can provide an LOD of 0.4 nM, thus providing a basis for convenient early warning detectors.     

The Poincaré Center Problem

We present two examples of real planar polynomial vector fields with an orbitally linearizable saddle point such that they are neither rationally reversible nor Liouvillian integrable. We show that vector fields from one of these examples form an isolated component of the so-called integrable saddle variety. Next, we discuss the problem of partial duality between real centers and real integrable saddles and the problem of continuous moduli for the center variety. The first author is supported by the Polish MNiSzW Grant No. 1 P03A 015 29, and the second by a MCYT/FEDER grant number MTM2005–06098–C02–01 and by a CIRIT grant number 2005SGR 00550.