Fiji’s agricultural sector, and within it, the sugar industry, has been the driving force behind the country’s development. The sugar industry, however, is facing a number of challenges of which production efficiency is one of them. This paper examines farm productivity, efficiency and profitability in the industry. It suggests that without improving farm level efficiency and productivity the i...

r. Two explanations have been proposed for the stimulation of uptake of one amino acid in the presence of another, a phenomenon which has been demonstrated for some pairs of amino acids in uptake studies with ascites tumor cells. One explanation invokes one carrier transport system and an exchange reaction at the outer surface of the cell. The other requires the presence of two carrier transpor...

ion λx.A In the last case λx. is a binder and free occurrences of x in A become bound . A term in which all variables are bound is said to be closed otherwise it is open. The motivating idea is that closed term represent functions. The intended meaning of AB is the application of function A to argument B while λx.A is the function which for input x returns A. Terms which are the same except for...

Locked nucleic acid (LNA) is a chemically modified nucleic acid with its sugar ring locked in an RNA-like (C3'-endo) conformation. LNAs show extraordinary thermal stabilities when hybridized with DNA, RNA or LNA itself. We performed molecular dynamics simulations on five isosequential duplexes (LNA-DNA, LNA-LNA, LNA-RNA, RNA-DNA and RNA-RNA) in order to characterize their structure, dynamics an...

Intramolecular triple helices have been obtained by folding back twice oligonucleotides formed by decamers bound by non-nucleotide linkers: dA10-linker-dA10-linker-dT10 and dA10-linker-dT10-linker-dA10. We have thus prepared two triple helices with forced third strand orientation, respectively antiparallel (apA*A-T) and parallel (pA*A-T) with respect to the adenosine strand of the Watson-Crick ...

Coastal Bermuda grass (CBG) has been shown to have potential as a biomass feedstock for sugar production. In this study, the effectiveness of ozone pretreatment for CBG to improve the sugar recovery via enzyme hydrolysis was investigated. Raw CBG and autohydrolysistreated CBG were pretreated with ozone at ozone consumption of 1.8 to 26.4 % (w/w) at room temperature. Lignin degradation and hemic...

Silicate nanoparticles with immobilized FRET-based biosensors were developed for the detection of glucose and maltose. Immobilization of the protein biosensor in the nanoparticle was achieved through specific interaction between the hexa-histidine tag of the protein and a calcium-silicate complex of the silica matrix. Encapsulation of the biosensors preserved the affinity for the respective sug...

The modeling, simulation, and experimental verification of several MEMS devices are presented. Simulated results include 3D mode analysis, residual stress effects, thermal expansion, nonlinear deflections, time-varying electrostatic forces, process sensitivities, induced currents, and the transient performance in accelerated reference frames. To simulate the performance of these MEMS devices a ...