The NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) on "Regulation of Enzymatic Systems Detoxifying Xenobiotics in Plants" intended to provide a forum to scientists from academia, industry, and govemment for discussing and critically assessing recent advances in the field of xenobiotic metabolism in plants and for identifying new directions for future research. Plants function in a chemical environment made up of nutrients and xenobiotics. Xenobiotics (foreign chemicals) are natural or synthetic compounds that can not be utilized by plants for energy-yielding metabolism. Plants may be exposed to xenobiotics either deliberately, due to their use as pesticides or accidentally, from industrial, agricultural, and other uses. Plants, like most other organisms, evolved a remarkable battery or metabolic reactions to defend themselves against the potentially toxic effects of xenobiotics. The main enzymatic reactions utilized by plants for xenobiotic detoxification include oxidation, reduction, hydrolysis and conjugation with glutathione, sugars (e.g., glucose), and amino acids. Eventually, xenobiotic conjugates are converted to insoluble bound residues or to secondary conjugates, which are deposited in the vacuole of plant cells.

During the last 40 years, the study of the biological basis of aging has progressed tremendously, and it has now become an independent and respectable field of study and research. The essential cause of aging is molecular damage that slowly overwhelms cellular and organismic defense, repair and maintenance systems. In recent years, a wealth of highly sophisticated research has transformed this idea from a credible hypothesis not only to a major theory, but essentially to accepted knowledge. Aging at the Molecular Level examines the key elements in this transformation.
Bringing together contributions from an international team of authors, this volume will be of interest to graduates and postgraduates in the fields of medicine and nursing, researchers of different aspects of biogerontology and those in the pharmaceutical, cosmeceutical, nutraceutical and health-care industry.

Edited by a leading expert and with contributions from pioneers, the three-volume Handbook of Nanostructured Thin Films and Coatings is a resource as dynamic and flexible as the field itself. The first two volumes cover the latest research and application of the mechanical and functional properties of thin films and coatings, while the third volume explores the cutting-edge organic nanostructured devices used to produce clean energy.

The first volume, Nanostructured Thin Films and Coatings: Mechanical Properties, covers the mechanical properties (i.e., hardness, toughness, and adhesion), including processing, properties, and performance. It also offers a detailed analysis of theories and size effect, in addition to other key topics. Volume Two, Nanostructured Thin Films and Coatings: Functional Properties, focuses on functional properties (i.e., optical, electronic, and electrical) and related devices and applications. The third volume, Organic Nanostructured Thin Film Devices and Coatings for Clean Energy, addresses various aspects of the processing and properties of organic thin films, devices, and coatings for clean energy applications.

A complete resource, this handbook provides detailed explanations for newcomers and the latest research and data for experts. Covering a wide range of mechanical and functional technologies, including those used in clean energy, these books feature figures, tables, and images that aid researchers and help professionals acquire and maintain a solid grasp of this burgeoning field.

This book investigates in detail the emerging deep learning (DL) technique in computational physics, assessing its promising potential to substitute conventional numerical solvers for calculating the fields in real-time. After good training, the proposed architecture can resolve both the forward computing and the inverse retrieve problems. Pursuing a holistic perspective, the book includes the following areas. The first chapter discusses the basic DL frameworks. Then, the steady heat conduction problem is solved by the classical U-net in Chapter 2, involving both the passive and active cases. Afterwards, the sophisticated heat flux on a curved surface is reconstructed by the presented Conv-LSTM, exhibiting high accuracy and efficiency. Besides, the electromagnetic parameters of complex medium such as the permittivity and conductivity are retrieved by a cascaded framework in Chapter 4. Additionally, a physics-informed DL structure along with a nonlinear mapping module are employed to obtain the space/temperature/time-related thermal conductivity via the transient temperature in Chapter 5. Finally, in Chapter 6, a series of the latest advanced frameworks and the corresponding physics applications are introduced. As deep learning techniques are experiencing vigorous development in computational physics, more people desire related reading materials. This book is intended for graduate students, professional practitioners, and researchers who are interested in DL for computational physics.

Now and in the future, the ever-growing demand for drinking water will lead many cities to implement indirect water reuse programs, where wastewater effluent becomes part of the drinking water sources. Pollution of those sources with emerging contaminants (micropollutants) such as endocrine disrupting compounds, pharmaceutically active compounds, pesticides and personal care products is a fact known worldwide. In this thesis, nanofiltration (NF) and reverse osmosis (RO) are demonstrated to be appropriate technologies for removing a large number of micropollutants; however, the performance of NF and RO can be questioned because there are limited tools that optimise quantification of the removal of contaminants. Therefore, in this thesis, by means of the use of multivariate data analysis techniques, removal quantification is effectively determined and more understanding of the separation of micropollutants by membranes is achieved.

The book is an indispensable companion to all students of biology, but particularly those enrolled in courses concerning experimental design, data analysis, hypothesis testing, research methods, or any practical project work.

Life in Space explores the many aspects and outcomes of NASA's research in life sciences, a little-understood endeavor that has often been overlooked in histories of the space agency. Maura Mackowski details NASA's work in this field from spectacular promises made during the Reagan era to the major new directions set by George W. Bush's Vision for Space Exploration in the early twenty-first century. At the first flight of NASA's space shuttle in 1981, hopes ran high for the shuttle program to achieve its potential of regularly transporting humans, cargo, and scientific experiments between Earth and the International Space Station. Mackowski describes different programs, projects, and policies initiated across NASA centers and headquarters in the following decades to advance research into human safety and habitation, plant and animal biology, and commercial biomaterials. Mackowski illuminates these ventures in fascinating detail by drawing on rare archival sources, oral histories, interviews, and site visits. While highlighting significant achievements and innovations such as space radiation research and the Neurolab Spacelab Mission, Mackowski reveals frustrations-lost opportunities, stagnation, and dead ends-stemming from frequent changes in presidential administrations and policies. For today's dreams of lunar outposts or long-term spaceflight to become reality, Mackowski argues, a robust program in space life sciences is essential, and the history in this book offers lessons to help prevent leaving more expectations unfulfilled.

Presenting an area of research that intersects with and integrates diverse disciplines, including molecular biology, applied informatics, and statistics, among others, Bioinformatics for Omics Data: Methods and Protocols collects contributions from expert researchers in order to provide practical guidelines to this complex study. Divided into three convenient sections, this detailed volume covers central analysis strategies, standardization and data-management guidelines, and fundamental statistics for analyzing Omics profiles, followed by a section on bioinformatics approaches for specific Omics tracks, spanning genome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome levels, as well as an assortment of examples of integrated Omics bioinformatics applications, complemented by case studies on biomarker and target identification in the context of human disease. Written in the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology (TM) series format, chapters contain introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials and reagents, step-by-step, readily reproducible laboratory protocols, and notes on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls. Authoritative and accessible, Bioinformatics for Omics Data: Methods and Protocols serves as an ideal guide to scientists of all backgrounds and aims to convey the appropriate sense of fascination associated with this research field.

Describes landmark experiments in cell biology and biochemistry Discusses the "How" and "Why" of historically important experiments Includes primary, original data and graphs Emphasizes biological techniques, which helps understand how many of the experiments performed were possible. Documents, chronologically, how each result fed into the next experiments.

Substance Abuse and Addiction Research: Methodology, Mechanisms, and Therapeutics is an up-to-date, comprehensive, practical book on research methodologies for substance abuse and addiction that is intended for researchers and consumers of research information at all levels. The book is divided into four major sections, including an Introduction, Research Methodology for clinical trials, animal research and retrospective studies, Mechanisms of Abuse and Addiction, and Investigative Therapeutics: Designing and Measuring Outcomes. It serves a source for addressing all aspects of research design, methods and analysis within the context of the field of opioids, alcohol and other substances. The book covers what is known in the field of quantitative and qualitative research methods, provides future directions, and introduces new models for investigation. It is organized around a translational science framework, with the contents addressing substance use/addiction research in the context of epidemiology, etiology, intervention efficacy and effectiveness, and implementation of evidence-informed interventions.

More than 850 individuals partly forgotten by name, but sometimes found in historical writings, together with many well known or recently deceased persons are presented in terms of bio-data, short career highlights, and main advances made to the profession with a short biography of the main writings. If available, a portrait is also included. Hydraulicians in Europe, Volume 2 is a continuation of the first volume, both in outline and in coverage and pagination. Volumes 1 and 2 include more than 1500 biographies.

• Describes the endemic plants used in traditional medicine • Includes the chemical and bioactive compounds from desertic medicinal plants • Addresses the analytic techniques to determine chemical and bioactive compounds • Represents an effort to keep the ethnobiological knowledge of communities

Clinical Management of Pediatric COVID-19: An International Perspective and Practical Guide provides the most current international research and clinical characteristics of pediatric patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection. Coverage ranges from epidemiology including origin, route of transmission, incubation period, mortality and susceptibility risk factors; to pathogenesis, including difference between the adult and pediatric populations. Diagnosis is covered with special attention to the difference between adult and pediatric patients as well as the differences between newborns, children and adolescents. The book presents current complications, including multisystemic inflammatory syndrome as well as treatment therapies including antiviral and immunomodulatory therapies for this age group. Finally, immunization efficacy and safety are examined. This is the perfect reference to provide guidance to pediatricians on the diagnosis and treatment of SARS-CoV-2, as well as a valuable source of the latest research about the pediatric population for further study.

The COVID-19 Pandemic: A Global High-Tech Challenge at the Interface of Science, Politics, and Illusions discusses COVID-19 as the first pandemic in the Internet era and our current reality of continuous reports, news, and updates. Since its beginning, we were daily bombarded with news of what was happening around the world. There was no global political leadership. The United States was politically partially paralyzed. Russia and China hoped to gain diplomatic profile worldwide, but their vaccines are of limited efficacy, and trust in their clinical data is rightly low. The European Union did not order enough vaccines in time, but sued a large manufacturer for delivery delays. Now it is setting up yet another bureaucratic institution. At least the pharmaceutical or life science industry paved the way out, but is not enthusiastically praised for it. It would be too easy and superficial to blame mistakes of governments and leaders on stupidity. Idiocy exists, but we have to go deeper to understand how illusions and blind spots in today's common perception and science, inertia, arrogance, conflicts of interest, competition of individuals, and states and institutions for public recognition have contributed to a multitude of flawed assessments and direct mistakes. Healthcare professionals and anyone interested in an in-depth understanding of humankind's response to the COVID-19 challenge will not get around the key conclusions of this book.

Clinical Decision Support and Beyond: Progress and Opportunities in Knowledge-Enhanced Health and Healthcare, now in its third edition, discusses the underpinnings of effective, reliable, and easy-to-use clinical decision support systems at the point of care as a productive way of managing the flood of data, knowledge, and misinformation when providing patient care. Incorporating CDS into electronic health record systems has been underway for decades; however its complexities, costs, and user resistance have lagged its potential. Thus it is of utmost importance to understand the process in detail, to take full advantage of its capabilities. The book expands and updates the content of the previous edition, and discusses topics such as integration of CDS into workflow, context-driven anticipation of needs for CDS, new forms of CDS derived from data analytics, precision medicine, population health, integration of personal monitoring, and patient-facing CDS. In addition, it discusses population health management, public health CDS and CDS to help reduce health disparities. It is a valuable resource for clinicians, practitioners, students and members of medical and biomedical fields who are interested to learn more about the potential of clinical decision support to improve health and wellness and the quality of health care.

Whole new areas of immunological research are emerging from the analysis of experimental data, going beyond statistics and parameter estimation into what an applied mathematician would recognise as modelling of dynamical systems. Stochastic methods are increasingly important, because stochastic models are closer to the Brownian reality of the cellular and sub-cellular world.

This book is a collection of carefully reviewed papers presented during the HP-SEE User Forum, the meeting of the High-Performance Computing Infrastructure for South East Europe s (HP-SEE) Research Communities, held in October 17-19, 2012, in Belgrade, Serbia. HP-SEE aims at supporting and integrating regional HPC infrastructures; implementing solutions for HPC in the region; and making HPC resources available to research communities in SEE, region, which are working in a number of scientific fields with specific needs for massively parallel execution on powerful computing resources. HP-SEE brings together research communities and HPC operators from 14 different countries and enables them to share HPC facilities, software, tools, data and research results, thus fostering collaboration and strengthening the regional and national human network; theproject specifically supports research groups in the areas of computational physics, computational chemistry and the life sciences. The contributions presented in this book are organized in four main sections: computational physics; computational chemistry; the life sciences; and scientific computing and HPC operations.

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This book provides a uniform framework describing how fuzzy rough granular neural network technologies can be formulated and used in building efficient pattern recognition and mining models. It also discusses the formation of granules in the notion of both fuzzy and rough sets. Judicious integration in forming fuzzy-rough information granules based on lower approximate regions enables the network to determine the exactness in class shape as well as to handle the uncertainties arising from overlapping regions, resulting in efficient and speedy learning with enhanced performance. Layered network and self-organizing analysis maps, which have a strong potential in big data, are considered as basic modules,. The book is structured according to the major phases of a pattern recognition system (e.g., classification, clustering, and feature selection) with a balanced mixture of theory, algorithm, and application. It covers the latest findings as well as directions for future research, particularly highlighting bioinformatics applications. The book is recommended for both students and practitioners working in computer science, electrical engineering, data science, system design, pattern recognition, image analysis, neural computing, social network analysis, big data analytics, computational biology and soft computing.

Many, if not all, essential biological processes require selective interactions between proteins. Complex signaling systems require sequential, ordered protein-protein interactions at essentially all levels of the signaling cascade. For example, peptide hormones interact with selective membrane receptor proteins, and autophosphorylation of the receptor then recruits other key regulatory proteins that initiate kinase cascades in which each phosphorylation event requires selective recognition of the protein substrate. The ultimate signaling effect, in many cases, is the regulation of RNA polymerase II-directed transcr- tion in the nucleus, a process that involves numerous, multiprotein complexes important for transcription initiation, elongation, termination, and reinitiation. Defining, characterizing, and understanding the relevance of these protein- protein interactions is an arduous task, but substantial inroads have been made over the past 20 years. The development of more recent methodologies, such as mammalian expression systems, immunopurification schemes, expression cloning strategies, surface plasmon resonance (BiaCore), and nanosequencing technologies, has contributed a wealth of new insights into these complex multiprotein mechanisms and clearly accelerated the discovery process. Arguably, the yeast two-hybrid system has been one of the predominant and most powerful tools in this discovery process.

This work introduces a new method for analysing measured signals: nonlinear mode decomposition, or NMD. It justifies NMD mathematically, demonstrates it in several applications and explains in detail how to use it in practice. Scientists often need to be able to analyse time series data that include a complex combination of oscillatory modes of differing origin, usually contaminated by random fluctuations or noise. Furthermore, the basic oscillation frequencies of the modes may vary in time; for example, human blood flow manifests at least six characteristic frequencies, all of which wander in time. NMD allows us to separate these components from each other and from the noise, with immediate potential applications in diagnosis and prognosis. Mat Lab codes for rapid implementation are available from the author. NMD will most likely come to be used in a broad range of applications.

Living beings require constant information processing for survival. In cells, information is being processed and propagated at various levels, from the gene regulatory network to chemical pathways, to the interaction with the environment. How this is achieved and how information is coded is still poorly understood. For example, what a cell interprets as information in the temporal level of an mRNA and what is interpreted as noise remains an open question. Recently, information theoretical methods and other tools, developed in the context of engineering and natural sciences, have been applied to study diverse biological processes. This book covers the latest findings on how information is processed in various biological processes, ranging from information processing and propagation in gene regulatory networks to information processing in natural language. An overview is presented of the state-of-the-art in information processing in biological systems and the opinion of current leaders in this research field on future research directions.

"Biology can inform public policy in a number of ways. This volume explores the linkage of the life sciences with policy (what the book refers to as biopolicy). It features two points of departure: the implications of the neurosciences for public policy; and the implications of evolutionary theory for policy-making. The first part of the book provides an introduction to the subject of biopolicy as well as the relevance of the brain sciences and evolutionary theory for this subject. The second part considers several case studies of how these points of departure inform our knowledge of policy. Among case studies provided here are the implications for distribution of wealth, the roots of foreign policy, violent behavior, policy decision-making, and the like. In the final analysis, this book provides examples of how the life sciences can inform public policy choices. Research in Biopolitics is the only book series that focuses specifically on the relationship between biology and politics, and provides contemporary research for practitioners, including anthropologists, sociologists, economists, biopolitical researchers, as well as students of law and political science.

Key Features: Describes feedstock evaluation and the effects of elemental, chemical and fractional composition. Details reactor types and bed types. Explores the process options and parameters involved. Assesses coke formation and additives. Considers next generation processes and developments.