An infectious parvovirus B19 (B19V) genotype 2 variant was identified as a high-titer contaminant in a human plasma donation. Genome analysis revealed a 138-bp insertion within the p6 promoter. The inserted sequence was represented by an additional 30 bp from the end of the inverted terminal repeat adjacent to a 108-bp element found also, in inverted orientation, at the extreme right end of the...

[1] Deep aquifers are potential long-term storage sites for anthropogenic CO2 emissions. The retention time and environmental safety of the injected CO2 depend on geologic and physical factors and on the chemical reactions between the CO2, the aquifer water, and the host rocks. The pH buffer capacity of the aquifer water and the acid neutralization potential of the host rocks are important fact...

The Richmond Mine of the Iron Mountain copper deposit contains some of the most acid mine waters ever reported. Values of pH have been measured as low as -3.6, combined metal concentrations as high as 200 g/liter, and sulfate concentrations as high as 760 g/liter. Copious quantities of soluble metal sulfate salts such as melanterite, chalcanthite, coquimbite, rhomboclase, voltaite, copiapite, a...

A slaughterhouse by-product, bovine blood hemoglobin (Hb), has been reported as an adequate flocculant. However, the dark brown/red color originated from heme prosthetic group of Hb severely limited its widespread adoption. To improve flocculation efficiency and expand applications, we removed by acidified acetone, carboxymethyl cellulose, hydrogen peroxide oxidation. These heme-depleted Hbs (a...

It is difficult to realize adaptive control for some complex nonlinear processes which are operated in different environments and when operation conditions are changed frequently. In this paper we propose an identifier-based adaptive control (or indirect adaptive control). The identifier uses two effective tools: multiple models and neural networks. A hysteresis switching algorithm is applied t...

In this study, we introduce and investigate a class of neural architectures of Polynomial Neural Networks (PNNs), discuss a comprehensive design methodology and carry out a series of numeric experiments. PNN is a flexible neural architecture whose structure (topology) is developed through learning. In particular, the number of layers of the PNN is not fixed in advance but becomes generated on t...

The identification of nonlinear systems by artificial neural networks has been successfully applied in many applications. In this context, the radial basis function neural network (RBF-NN) is a powerful approach for nonlinear identification. A RBF neural network has an input layer, a hidden layer and an output layer. The neurons in the hidden layer contain Gaussian transfer functions whose outp...

The reaction of bacteriophage T4 with l-fluoro-2,4-dinitrobenzene resulted in a covalent binding of 2,4-dinitrophenyl (D N P) determinants to the phage. From the kinetics of inactivation re­ flecting the coupling process it is concluded that attachment of more than one D N P group to the critical site(s) of the phage is required for inactivation (multi-hit reaction). Contrary to this the neutra...

Control based on multiple models (MM) is an effective strategy to cope with structural and parametric uncertainty of systems with highly nonlinear dynamics. It relies on a set of local models describing different operating modes of the system. Therefore, the performance is strongly depends on the distribution of the models in the defined operating space. In this paper, the problem of on-line co...