Advances in mechanisms and modifications for rendering yeast thermotolerance.

Thermotolerant Saccharomyces cerevisiae is widely regarded as an attractive strain with which to accomplish the coupling of enzyme saccharification, ethanol fermentation and ethanol distillation in non-grain fuel bioethanol fermentation systems, and it has many advantages for increasing the ethanol yield and reducing production costs. This review provided an overview of the yeast heat-resistant mechanisms from six aspects, including gene expression responses, heat shock proteins, trehalose, ATPase, the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway and heat-induced antioxidant defenses. Innovative methods, such as random and rational strategies for improving yeast thermotolerance, were further discussed, and several special cases were provided.

Consciousness monitoring using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) during high +Gz exposures.

The relationship between human consciousness and oxygen saturation (rSO(2)) in cerebral tissue under high +Gz stress was non-invasively monitored by near-infrared multiple wavelength spectroscopy (NIRS). We studied the drop in rSO(2) levels in human subjects during exposure to various head-to-foot acceleration (+Gz) profiles. These profiles included sustained +Gz plateaus and repeated short duration +Gz pulses of varying duration.

Non-invasive gastric motility monitor: fast electrogastrogram (fEGG).

We propose a new analysis method to extract the motility information from the electrogastrogram signal that has been recorded at a higher sampler rate than the conventional approaches. This technique utilizes a fourth order Butterworth bandpass filter in extracting the 50-80 cycles per minute (cpm) activity that was previously noted to represent the spike activity range of the cutaneous signals of dogs. Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) analyses have been applied to the processed data to compare the detection performance of our fEGG technique to the conventional approaches that use the slow wave as the reference.