239 research outputs found
Woodside Energy Ltd. Cossack Pioneer Facility Engineering Team
No full textCossack Pioneer is a floating production storage and offloading vessel located 112 km North West of Karratha. This report details the work performed during a 16 week internship with Woodside Energy Ltd working in the Cossack Pioneer Facility Engineering Team. This Perth based team provides engineering support to the production facility. The report incorporates a description of the facility and topsides process and discusses the systems used for process control.
The earlier work performed during the internship focussed on small engineering design and control system modifications for the instrumentation and control group within the facility engineering team. Partway through the internship focus changed and the challenging role of Facility Control Engineer for Cossack Pioneer was assumed during the absence of the facility Senior Control Engineer. The report provides discussion of learning outcomes acheived and experience gained during the internship
Corrigendum to Developing a Sustainability Indicator Set for Measuring Green Infrastructure Performance
No full textThere was only one correction in corresponding author. It should be Parisa Pakzad
Living alpha-olefin polymerization by cationic zirconium and hafnium complexes containing chelating diamidopyridine ligands
No full textThesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Chemistry, 2002.Vita.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 196-199).This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.by Parisa Mehrkhodavandi.Ph.D
Increased cytotoxicity of cisplatin in SK-MEL 28 melanoma cells upon down-regulation of melanoma inhibitor of apoptosis protein
No full textBACKGROUND: Malignant melanoma is a highly metastatic cutaneous cancer and typically refractory to chemotherapy. Deregulated apoptosis has been identified as a major cause of cancer drug resistance, and upregulated expression of the inhibitor of apoptosis protein melanom, an inhibitor of apoptosis (ML-IAP) is frequent in melanoma. METHODS: Based on the conclusion that ML-IAP expression contributes to a malignant phenotype, we down-regulated the ML-IAP mRNA using sequence optimized antisense oligonucleotides. RESULTS: As measured by real-time PCR, oligonucleotides M706 and M711 inhibited ML-IAP mRNA expression by 47% and 52%, respectively in the highly metastatic and drug resistant SK-MEL28 cell line. Oligonucleotide M706, which was previously evaluated in G361 cells as the most efficient inhibitor of ML-IAP expression, was chosen to compare cell viability and drug sensitivity of these two melanoma cell lines with different p53 functionality. Protein expression was reduced by oligonucleotide M706 to 49% of the normal level and resulted in a dose-dependent specific reduction of cell viability with a maximum of 39% at 600 nM. Typical morphological changes showed that loss of viability was mainly due to cell death. In combination experiments, the use of oligonucleotide M706 resulted in a two-fold increase of cisplatin cytotoxicity at different concentrations of oligonucleotide and cisplatin (P<0.05). This is in line with our previous findings in G361 melanoma cell line, in which oligonucleotide M706 caused a 3-fold increase in cisplatin cytotoxicity. CONCLUSION: Our data suggest the use of ML-IAP antisense oligonucleotides to overcome drug resistance in metastatic melanoma, in spite of its p53 status
Antisense-mediated melanoma inhibitor of apoptosis protein downregulation sensitizes G361 melanoma cells to cisplatin
No full textMalignant melanoma is an aggressive form of skin cancer that is highly resistant to conventional therapies. The melanoma inhibitor of apoptosis protein is a potent inhibitor of apoptosis and is overexpressed in melanoma cells, but undetectable in most normal tissues including melanocytes. We designed 20-mer phosphorothioate antisense oligonucleotides complementary to five putatively single-stranded sites on the melanoma inhibitor of apoptosis protein mRNA and investigated their ability to sensitize G361 melanoma cells to cisplatin. Inhibition of melanoma inhibitor of apoptosis protein mRNA and protein expression were measured by real-time polymerase chain reaction and immunoblotting. Cell viability and apoptosis were quantitated by colorimetric viability assays and by annexin V staining, respectively. Oligonucleotide M706 was identified as the most efficient antisense sequence which downregulated melanoma inhibitor of apoptosis protein mRNA and protein levels in G361 cells by 68 and 78%, respectively. The specificity of target downregulation was confirmed using scrambled sequence control oligonucleotides that only marginally decreased melanoma inhibitor of apoptosis protein expression. Whereas downregulation of melanoma inhibitor of apoptosis protein moderately inhibited cell growth by 26%, in combination with cisplatin, this resulted in a supra-additive effect with almost 57% reduction in G361 cell viability compared with cisplatin alone (17%) (P<0.05). Cell death was mainly due to apoptosis as demonstrated by a 3- to 4-fold increase in annexin V-positive cells and typical morphological changes compared with controls. In summary, we describe a new antisense oligonucleotide that efficiently downregulates melanoma inhibitor of apoptosis protein expression and sensitizes melanoma cells to cisplatin
Isolating, characterizing, and engineering novel Cu-proteins and peroxidases
No full textMetalloproteins are a fascinating class of proteins that function at the heart of several important biological processes including photosynthesis, respiration, and nitrogen fixation. It is even more amazing, considering that nature uses a small set of tertiary structures and metal centers to perform all these different functions with efficiency and selectivity. How nature tunes the activity within these scaffolds has been the area of research for many years. The goal of this work is to understand the underlying mechanisms of such tuning with a special focus on the role of subtle changes of residues in the secondary coordination sphere of the metal ion, an underexplored area of study. I use protein engineering techniques not only to shed light on the mechanisms underlying such changes, but also to design new functionalities within our scaffold proteins and to enhance their properties for specific purposes, such as fuel generation.
This work is divided into three main sections. In the first, I focus on characterizing a novel metalloprotein, N. mar_1307, from the organism Nitrosopumilus maritimus. While the protein shares a protein fold and Type 1 copper coordination site with other common electron transfer cupredoxins, the lack of an axial residue creates an open binding position in the Cu center, leading to a novel enzymatic function, NO oxidation. The purification, characterization, and activity assays of the protein are described in detail in chapter 2.
The second and major focus of this work is on tuning the reduction potential of azurin, a common electron transfer protein. In chapter 3 I demonstrate that how by making mutations around the Cu site, and replacing Cu with Ni I can obtain an azurin variant with a reduction potential of nearly 1V, the highest potential that can be observed under physiological conditions, along with other variants with negative potentials. Chapter 4 describes the characterization of a series of Phe114 mutants that were used to understand the role of this critical secondary sphere residue in tuning the reduction potential of the Cu site. Chapter 5 demonstrates the Marcus inverted region of electron transfer in a series of azurin variants with different reduction potentials. Finally, I show my initial attempts toward the design of a high-throughput screening platform for the directed evolution of azurin in chapter 6.
In chapters 7 and 8, I focus on the design of novel functionalities in one of our model scaffolds, cytochrome c peroxidase (CcP). Chapter 7 describes the work done to enhance the Mn(II) oxidation activity in a designed model of manganese peroxidase within the CcP scaffold based on modifications of the second coordination sphere around the Mn(II) binding site. In chapter 8 I report the design and characterization of a novel CcP variant that shows catalase-like activity in “as-purified” form and forms a heme-protein crosslink in the heme-bound form.Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'Closed Access', the embargo will last until 2017-12-01The student, Parisa Hosseinzadeh, accepted the attached license on 2015-09-17 at 11:09.The student, Parisa Hosseinzadeh, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2015-09-17 at 11:57.This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2015-10-08 at 14:46.DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #8686 on 2016-03-02 at 14:11:52Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-02T20:57:17Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2
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Correction: Recent Advances in Atmospheric Chemistry of Mercury
No full textThe published paper [1] has been updated to remove instances of copied text from otherpublications [2–6]. Changes have been made throughout the paper, with the most significant alterationsmade in Sections 2.1, 2.4, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, and 4.The authors wish to provide the following explanation. Ref. [1] is a review article that was invitedfor the journal Atmosphere. The author Lin Si took the lead in writing the article, although this is thefirst time she has undertaken writing a review paper. Sections copied were cited, and a number ofthem were taken from Parisa A. Ariya’s previously published articles. The authors offered to retractthe paper. As scientists we are seeker of the truth, and our integrity and ethics are the most preciousgifts that we leave to future next generations.This Correction was deemed necessary to avoid the impression that the text presented in [1]was the original work of the authors. The Editorial Office accepts that the authors did not intend tomisrepresent the work, however, the original wording did not make it sufficiently clear that a numberof passages were direct quotations.We wish to thank the authors for their cooperation and apologize to readers that this case was notdetected earlier. Atmosphere routinely checks submitted manuscripts for duplication, but issues weremissed in this case due to human error
The politics of the night: feminine writing and mother-daughter relations in Djuna Barnes, Angela Carter, and Shahrnush Parsipur
No full text© 2018 Dr Parisa ShiranThis thesis uses Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference and Maurice Blanchot’s orphic philosophy of literature to examine representations of night in the fiction of three women novelists, Djuna Barnes, Angela Carter and Shahrnush Parsipur. Performing a feminist psychoanalytical reading of Blanchot, I reveal the various ways in which his poststructuralist literary theory rests upon and reflects the phallocentric constitution of the symbolic whereby linguistic signification (the production of the literary work) depends upon the loss of the mother (Eurydice), and the nocturnal exteriority of maternal-female sexual difference. If literature is the impossible movement towards the darkness of maternal origin (the other night), then it is twice as impossible for the female author to move towards the prelinguistic night of maternal origin because of the incest taboo and the phallocentric relegation of maternal-female sexuality to the unconscious. Through a combination of feminist psychoanalysis and literary criticism, the thesis proposes that a feminine literary category marked by maternal-female sexuality is a near-impossibility. However, I go beyond a feminist appropriation of Blanchot’s concept of the other night in order to explain the political relevance of the author’s sex in writing. The thesis also has a comparative dimension because the night is a key concept in Persian literature and in Sufism. In so far as Parsipur’s imagery of the pre-Oedipal night takes on a mystical shape very different from that of Barnes and Carter, the thesis reveals the cultural formation of the unconscious across different socio-cultural geographies in world literature
Systematic Review Approaches to Information Security Investment
No full textInformation security is an extremely important aspect of information systems. A lot of research has been done in the field of technological security of information, but with the development of security needs, attention has been paid to the role of management in information security. Economic valuation of investment in the information security of organizations is one of the issues of management in this field. In this research, to examine the issue of evaluating investment in information security and finding suitable methods for it, a systematic review of the approaches in information security investment has been done. Other goals of this study are to study the evolution of approaches used in the years 2006 to 2017. In order to carry out this systematic review of all studies in the field of information security investment using the research keywords, extracted Springer, IEEE-Explore, Web of Science, Science Direct databases, ultimately 146 articles related to This topic have been investigated. The research findings identified eight main approaches (game theory, risk-based approach, decision support systems, Utility maximization, rate of return on investment, Net Present Value, expected utility theory, real options theory). According to the results of this research there has been more interested in using game theory in recent years
The catalyst role of school architecture in enhancing children's environmental behavior
No full textThe interrelationships between school design and children learning are well established. Less evident is
the relationship between sustainable school design and the level of environmental behaviour of the
children in attendance. Newly erected primary schools in Australia have been broadly graded as either sustainable or conventional. This paper evaluates the impact of both sustainable and conventional school design on children’s environmental behaviour, and examines the correlation between school design and children’s environmental behaviour. 624 children, aged 10-12 years old, completed a survey. This sample, from seven selected primary schools in Victoria (Australia), includes four conventional schools and three sustainable ones. The survey was developed according to GEB (General Ecological Behavior) scale and a few more school specific variables. The outcome of the survey was analyzed using an independent sample t-test and two-way between groups ANOVA in order to assess environmental behavior differences of children in both sustainable and conventional schools taking into account factors that either explicitly and/or implicitly impact on
their behavior such as sustainable school design, teachers’ environmental behavior and parents’
environmental behavior. The results show statistically significant differences in environmental behavior of children in sustainable schools and those in conventional schools. Comparing the means of children’s environmental behavior indicates that children in sustainable schools posses higher levels of pro-environmental behavior than children in conventional schools. The paper highlights the strong relationships between school design and children’s environmental behavior, and expands recognition of the role of environmentally sensitive school design not only to improve learning environments but more specifically to engage children ecologically with their immediate built environment
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