Miami University

About: Miami University is a education organization based out in Oxford, Ohio, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 9949 authors who have published 19598 publications receiving 568410 citations. The organization is also known as: Miami of Ohio & Miami-Ohio.

The siderophore-mediated iron acquisition systems of Acinetobacter baumannii ATCC 19606 and Vibrio anguillarum 775 are structurally and functionally related.

Abstract: The Acinetobacter baumannii type strain, ATCC 19606, secretes acinetobactin, a catechol siderophore highly related to the iron chelator anguibactin produced by the fish pathogen Vibrio anguillarum (Listonella anguillarum). This paper reports the initial characterization of the genes and gene products involved in the acinetobactin-mediated iron-acquisition process. Insertional mutagenesis resulted in the isolation of several derivatives whose ability to grow in medium containing the iron chelator 2,2'-dipyridyl was affected. One of the insertions disrupted a gene encoding a predicted outer-membrane protein, named BauA, highly similar to FatA, the receptor for ferric anguibactin. Immunological relatedness of BauA with FatA was confirmed by Western blot analysis. Another transposon insertion was mapped to a gene encoding a protein highly similar to FatD, the permease component of the anguibactin transport system. Further DNA sequencing and nucleotide sequence analysis revealed that these A. baumannii 19606 genes are part of a polycistronic locus that contains the bauDCEBA ORFs. While the translation products of bauD, -C, -B and -A are highly related to the V. anguillarum FatDCBA iron-transport proteins, the product of bauE is related to the ATPase component of Gram-positive ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transport systems. This entire locus is flanked by genes encoding predicted proteins related to AngU and AngN, V. anguillarum proteins required for the biosynthesis of anguibactin. These protein similarities, as well as the structural similarity of anguibactin and acinetobactin, suggested that these two siderophores could be utilized by both bacterial strains, a possibility that was confirmed by siderophore utilization bioassays. Taken together, these results demonstrate that these pathogens, which cause serious infections in unrelated hosts, express very similar siderophore-mediated iron-acquisition systems.

Organization, structure and evolution of the CYP2 gene cluster on human chromosome 19.

Abstract: The cytochrome P450 superfamily of mixed-function oxygenases has been extensively studied due to its many critical metabolic roles, and also because it is a fascinating example of gene family evolution. The cluster of genes on human chromosome 19 from the CYP2A, 2B, and 2F subfamilies has been previously described as having a complex organization and many pseudogenes. We describe the discovery of genes from three more CYP2 subfamilies inside the cluster, and assemble a complete map of the region. We comprehensively review the organization, structure, and expression of genes from all six subfamilies. A general hypothesis for the evolution of this complex gene cluster is also presented.

Cooperative Task Scheduling for Computation Offloading in Vehicular Cloud

Abstract: Technological evolutions in the automobile industry, especially the development of connected and autonomous vehicles, have granted vehicles more computing, storage, and sensing resources. The necessity of efficient utilization of these resources leads to the vision of vehicular cloud computing (VCC), which can offload the computing tasks from the edge or remote cloud to enhance the overall efficiency. In this paper, we study the problem of computation offloading through the vehicular cloud (VC), where computing missions from edge cloud can be offloaded and executed cooperatively by vehicles in VC. Specifically, computing missions are further divided into computing tasks with interdependency and executed in different vehicles in the VC to minimize the overall response time. To characterize the instability of computing resources resulting from the high vehicular mobility, a mobility model focusing on vehicular dwell time is utilized. Considering the heterogeneity of vehicular computing capabilities and the interdependency of computing tasks, we formulate an optimization problem for task scheduling, which is NP-hard. For low complexity, a modified genetic algorithm based scheduling scheme is designed where integer coding is used rather than binary coding, and relatives are defined and employed to avoid infeasible solutions. In addition, a task load based stability analysis of the VCC system is presented for the cases where some vehicles within the VC are offline. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the utilization of computing resources while guaranteeing low latency and system stability.