A 4.4-megadalton penicillinase plasmid, pWD2, from Neisseria gonorrhoeae was transformed into Escherichia coli. pWD2 was efficiently mobilized by IncP plasmids in E. coli but not by Flac, R1drd-19, or R64drd-11. pWD2 could be isolated as a DNA-protein relaxation complex with properties similar to the well characterized ColE1 complex. The host range of pWD2 was shown to include gonococci, Entero...

This paper proposes series of methods for measuring the similarity of protein structures. In the proposed methods, an original protein structure is transformed into a distance matrix, which is regarded as a two-dimensional image. Then, the similarity of two protein structures is measured by a kind of compression ratio of the concatenated image. We employed several image compression algorithms: ...

Equivalent-linear analysis of earth dams with QUAD4 is a state-of-practice approach which incorporates a cumulative level of knowledge in soil dynamics that is still used today in many organizations. Nevertheless, today’s availability of more advanced nonlinear effective-stress analysis tools has improved significantly our estimates of shaking-induced permanent deformations of earth structures....

The open, independent, and international standards organization Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has chartered a working group. It is named "Codec Encoding for LossLess Archiving and Realtime transmission" (CELLAR) and aims to develop specifications for a lossless audiovisual file format for use in archival environments and transmission. It consists of the combination of the audiovisual c...

In many cases of heavy earthquakes, liquefaction has resulted in serious damages. Existing anisotropy in soil layers results  in some difficulties to realize the reason for these phenomena. Loose sand lenses buried in fine soils are one of the cases which may result in these problems and as a weak point during the earthquake can cause this phenomenon. In this paper, using FLAC 2D software, doub...

Failures of road embankments on discontinuous permafrost commonly occur during thawing of the foundation soil. As an approximation, weak zones created by thawing of discontinuous permafrost can be considered as ‘voids’ within the foundation. Geosynthetic reinforcements have been used to bridge these ‘voids’ and provide support to the embankment fill. This paper presents results of a numerical i...