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- Title
- PEGYLATION OF FIBRONECTIN AND ITS FUNCTIONAL DOMAINS: EFFECT ON STABILITY AND BIOLOGICAL ACTIVITY
- Creator
- Zhang, Chen
- Date
- 2013, 2013-07
- Description
-
Delayed wound healing in many chronic wounds has been linked to the lack of extracellular matrix (ECM) support and the degradation of...
Show moreDelayed wound healing in many chronic wounds has been linked to the lack of extracellular matrix (ECM) support and the degradation of fibronectin (FN) by an abnormally high protease level. The ECM is important in wound healing because it provides physical and chemical cues that direct tissue growth and development. FN is a key ECM protein that attracts and binds different molecules and cells and thereby supports biological responses associated with wound healing. The goal of my study is two fold: (1) To create an ECM analogue based on a composite of polyethylene glycol (PEG) hydrogels and FN binding domains and (2) To stabilize FN against proteolytic degradation by conjugating it to PEG. To address the first goal, I used Michael addition chemistry to covalently link the cell-binding domain of FN, III9−10, to PEG diacrylate and cross-linked the conjugate to PEG hydrogels. The conjugation of PEG to III9−10 was through cysteines in the affinity tag Glutathione S Transferase (GST). The conjugate of GST-III9−10 and PEG was characterized by: (i) Circular dichroism studies to determine secondary structure, (ii) Sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) to determine molecular weight, and (iii) Ellmans reagent to determine the efficiency of PEG conjugation to GST-III9−10. The conjugate of PEG and GST-III9−10 had comparable secondary structure to GST-III9−10. SDS-PAGE studies showed that up to three PEG molecules were attached to one GST-III9−10 molecule. The efficiency of PEG conjugation was greater than 90% and occurred within 30 minutes after PEG diacrylate addition. Adhesion assays were used as a metric of biological activity. These assays demonstrated that on a molar basis cell adhesion and spreading were significantly higher on PEG hydrogels with GST-III9−10 than those with the commonly used arginine-glycine-aspartic acid (RGD) peptide. Scaffold rigidity is an important biological cues that influence xi cell responses. However, a comparative study of rigidity on GST-III9−10 and RGD functionalized PEG hydrogels demonstrated that differences in rigidity could not account for differences in cell adhesion and spreading between RGD and GST-III9−10 functionalized PEG hydrogels. Thus as ECM analogues, GST-III9−10 functionalized hydrogels provide more robust biochemical cues than RGD functionalized hydrogels. Studies of PEG hydrogel composites with mixtures of III9−10 and a fibronectin binding domain demonstrated that biological responses of adhesion and spreading and extracellular matrix assembly could be controlled by varying the ratio of these two domains and the rigidity of the PEG hydrogels. FN was stabilized against proteolytic degradation by covalent attaching it to PEG or by PEGylating it. FN was first isolated from human plasma by gelatin affinity chromatography and then PEGylated using two methods. The first method is to PEGylate human plasma fibronectin (HPFN) at cysteine residues with 3.4 kDa PEG diacrylate. The second method is to PEGylate HPFN at lysine residues on the surface with 2-10 kDa PEG Succinimidyl carboxy methyl esters. Cysteine PEGylation of HPFN was first carried out because cysteines are concentrated in the amino- terminus of HPFN which leaves two-thirds of the molecule, including the cell-binding domain, unperturbed. PEGylation of HPFN on cysteines resulted in a molecule that supported cell adhesion, spreading, focal adhesion formation and cell migration in a comparable manner to native HPFN. Moreover, PEGylated HPFN was incorporated into the ECM in a similar manner to native HPFN when present in the culture media but not when coated on a surface indicating that PEGylation on cysteines modified some biological activity of HPFN. Additionally, HPFN PEGylated by this manner could not bind denatured collagen or gelatin. The gelatin-binding domain is at the site of cysteine PEGylation. The second approach for PEGylation of HPFN was through lysine residues xii on the surface of the protein. This approach was used because it targeted different amino acid residues in FN. The length of PEG and extent of PEGylation have been reported to influence biological activity of proteins. In the second approach, both PEG length and extent were varied. HPFN completely PEGylated on lysines residues was significantly more proteolytically stable than native HPFN but had reduced cell attachment and spreading. Furthermore, cell spreading and attachment on surfaces conjugated with this lysine PEGylated HPFN decreased with increasing PEG length. Partially PEGylated HPFN was synthesized by masking the cell and gelatin binding domains during PEGylation. The partially PEGylated HPFN supported cell adhesion and spreading in a similar manner to native HPFN and was more proteolytically stable. For the partially PEGylated HPFN, the size of PEG poly had no significant influence on the attachment and spreading of cells. These studies are the first attempt by any laboratory to stabilize FN against proteolytic degradation while retaining activity and show the feasibility of this approach as a potential therapeutic approach. The work presented here shows a two-prong approach by which the problem of ECM degradation and deficiency chronic wound healing can be addressed. The first approach for addressing ECM deficiency is through a scaffold design methodology. The novelty of the scaffold approach is that it uses the cell-binding domains of FN instead of the often-used RGD peptide. I demonstrate that a PEG hydrogel with the cell-binding domain produces a more robust biological response in cells than a PEG hydrogel with the RGD peptide. I also demonstrate that varying different functional domains of fibronectin can be used to controllably stimulate multiple biological responses. The second approach demonstrates a method by which FN, a key ECM protein, is stabilized against proteolytic degradation without perturbing its activity. These studies of creating PEG-FN conjugates are the first of their kind. Collectively, the data that I present in this thesis will lead to novel therapeutic methods for treating chronic wounds.
PH.D in Chemical Engineering, December 2012
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- Title
- Kaon Freeze-out Dynamics in √sNN=200 GeV Au+Au Collisions at RHIC, Proceedings of the XLIII International Symposium on Multiparticle Dynamics
- Creator
- Šumbera, Michal
- Date
- 2013-09-15, 2013-09-15
- Publisher
- IIT Press
- Description
-
Measurements of three-dimensional correlation functions of like-sign low transverse momentum kaon pairs from Au+Au collisions at top RHIC...
Show moreMeasurements of three-dimensional correlation functions of like-sign low transverse momentum kaon pairs from Au+Au collisions at top RHIC energy √sNN =200 GeV are presented. The extracted kaon source function is narrower than the pion one and does not have the long tail along the pair transverse momentum direction. This indicates a much smaller role of long-lived resonance decays and/or of the emission duration on kaon emission. Three-dimensional Gaussian shape of the kaon source function can be adequately reproduced by Therminator simulations with resonance contributions taken into account. Comparison to pion data at the same energy reveals that the kaon Gaussian radii in the outward and sideward directions scale with the transverse mass mT. In the longitudinal direction, unlike at lower SPS energies, the Gaussian radii do not seem to follow the exact mT scaling between kaons and pions.
Sponsorship: IIT College of Science, High Energy Physics Division of Argonne National Laboratory
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- Title
- ACTION RECOGNITION USING SPATIO-TEMPORAL FEATURE EXTRACTION
- Creator
- Mesmakhosroshahi, Maral
- Date
- 2012-04-24, 2012-05
- Description
-
The importance of automatically recognition of human activities and it's ap- plications increase as the technology is growing fast these days....
Show moreThe importance of automatically recognition of human activities and it's ap- plications increase as the technology is growing fast these days. In this thesis we focus on the action recognition techniques using 3D feature extraction techniques and try to improve the performance of the available feature extraction methods to have more accurate action classi cation. This thesis is based on spatio-temporal feature extraction techniques that can be extension of two dimensional feature extractions. At rst, 3D corner detector and 3D blob detector, two popular interest point detectors that successfully extended to spatio-temporal domain are reviewed. 3D corner detector is an extension of Harris corner detector which is proposed for corner detection in space-time and 3D blob detector is the 3D version of Hessian blob detector. A method is proposed to improve the robustness of 3D corner detectors against illumination variances based on the application of sigmoid function in contrast stretching. These interest points need to be described by feature vectors. In this part also a review on the SIFT descriptor and it's 3D extension is done. Another 3D feature descriptor discussed in this thesis is Cuboid. In the feature description part a new method is proposed based on the 3D SIFT feature descriptor by changing the binning method of the gradient orientation histogram to a non-uniform binning scheme. Using these non-uniform bins increases the accuracy of action classi cation by focusing on the areas near the interest points. Action classi cation is done using bag of features and supervised learning techniques. For making a dictionary of features, feature vectors are clustered by K-means clustering method and support vector machine is used for classi cation of human activities.
M.S. in Electrical Engineering, May 2012
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- Title
- The study of the formation of chromates
- Creator
- Kaplon, H., Schiffman, H. M.
- Date
- 2009, 1921
- Publisher
- Armour Institute of Technology
- Description
-
http://www.archive.org/details/studyofformation00kapl
Thesis (B.S.)--Armour Institute of Technology; Bibliography: leaf 30
- Title
- Charles A. Smith Charter School for Urban Agriculture and the Culinary Arts
- Creator
- Spicer, Ben
- Date
- 2010-07-30
- Title
- Catalyst for Economic Development, Washington Park, Chicago, IL
- Creator
- Burkhart, Joel
- Date
- 2010-07-29
- Title
- Space|Place: CharlottePage_Master's Project_BoardPamphlets
- Creator
- Page, Charlotte
- Date
- 5/4/2011, 2011-05
- Description
-
A commentary on Education: examination of the experience of the subject (space) in relation to the object (place).
Sponsorship: Conger-Austin,...
Show moreA commentary on Education: examination of the experience of the subject (space) in relation to the object (place).
Sponsorship: Conger-Austin, Susan
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- Title
- AGENT-BASED MODELING OF ANGIOGENESIS: EXPLORATION OF THE EFFECTS OF VEGF DELIVERY STRATEGIES ON PROMOTING ANGIOGENESIS
- Creator
- Xiao, Nan
- Date
- 2015, 2015-05
- Description
-
This is a dissertation about three-dimensional agent-based modeling (ABM) of angiogenesis within porous scaffold. Tissue engineering...
Show moreThis is a dissertation about three-dimensional agent-based modeling (ABM) of angiogenesis within porous scaffold. Tissue engineering technology provides great benefits for humanity in maintaining healthy tissue formation and disease rehabilitation. However, biomedical experiments, especially animal experiments, are very costly, timeconsuming and high technological level of equipment required. The computational modeling can provide an efficient alternative to biomedical experiments in strategy design and assist clinical research. To simulate the angiogenesis process, an agent-based model was developed using java-based Repast toolkit. The purpose of this research is to explore the effects of different Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor (VEGF) delivery methods in promoting angiogenesis. The work here includes four parts: a) model verification by comparing simulation results with experimental results; b) exploration of different VEGF delivery methods by changing total dose and release rate; c) exploration of the effects of prevascularized strategies; d) development of a tissue cell VEGF secretion model. The simulation results showed that: angiogenesis can be promoted by increasing VEGF total dose or decreasing releasing rate; prevascularized scaffolds can improve new vascular network formation and result in better invasion depth; pre-seeded tissue cells in the scaffold can provide a continuous source of VEGF and promote angiogenesis. This ABM can provide a good reference for the design of biomedical applications.
M.S. in Chemical Engineering, May 2015
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- Title
- A STEP TOWARD SUPPORTING LONG-RUNNING APPLICATIONS WITH REAL-TIME CONSTRAINTS ON HYBRID CLOUDS
- Creator
- Wu, Hao
- Date
- 2017, 2017-05
- Description
-
The advancement of computer and network technology has brought the world into a new computer cloud era. The ”pay-as-you-go” business model and...
Show moreThe advancement of computer and network technology has brought the world into a new computer cloud era. The ”pay-as-you-go” business model and the service oriented models allow users to have ”unlimited” resources if needed and free from infrastructure maintenance and software upgrades. Cloud services are currently among the top-ranked high growth areas in computing and are seeing an acceleration in enterprise adoption with the worldwide market predicted to reach more than $270b in 2020. According to Google, currently more than 95% of the web services are deployed on cloud.Many di↵erent types of applications are deployed on computer clouds. However, due to inherent performance uncertainty within computer clouds, as of today, applications with real-time and high QoS constraints still operate on traditional computer systems and are not able to benefit from elastic computer clouds.. The thesis focuses on both theoretical analysis and real system implementation on the problem of guaranteeing real-time application’s deadline requirement while minimizing the application’s execution cost on hybrid clouds. Four major problems have been addressed towards moving applications with real-time constraint on hybrid computer clouds. 1). A minimal slack time and minimal distance (MSMD) scheduling algorithm is developed to minimize the resources needed to guarantee an application’s end-to-end deadline requirement using computer clouds. 2). A VM Instance Hour Minimization (IHM) algorithm is developed to reduce the application’s execution cost for given schedules. The proposed IHM algorithm can be integrated with common scheduling algorithm used in the literature. In addition, we also evaluated the feasibility of utilizing spot instance to further reduce the application’s execution cost while not sacrificing QoS guarantees. 3). A reference model for virtual machine launching overhead is developed to predict both system utilization and timing overhead during the VM launching process. 4). A hybrid cloud management tool that integrates the developed algorithms and reference model is developed to support running long-running applications with real-time constraints on hybrid clouds.
Ph.D. in Computer Science, May 2017
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- Title
- PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS AND OPTIMIZATION OF LARGE-SCALE SCIENTIFIC APPLICATIONS
- Creator
- Wu, Jingjin
- Date
- 2013, 2013-07
- Description
-
Scientific applications are critical for solving complex problems in many areas of research, and often require a large amount of computing...
Show moreScientific applications are critical for solving complex problems in many areas of research, and often require a large amount of computing resources in terms of both runtime and memory. Massively parallel supercomputers with ever increasing computing power are being built to satisfy the need of large-scale scientific applications. With the advent of petascale era, there is an enlarged gap between the computing power of supercomputers and the parallel scalability of many applications. To take full advantage of the massive parallelism of supercomputers, it is indispensable to improve the scalability of large-scale scientific applications through performance analysis and optimization. This thesis work is motivated by cell-based AMR (Adaptive Mesh Refinement) cosmology simulations, in particular, the Adaptive Refinement Tree (ART) application. Performance analysis is performed to identify its scaling bottleneck, a performance emulator is designed for efficient evaluation of different load balancing schemes, and topology mapping strategies are explored for performance improvements. More importantly, the exploration of topology mapping mechanisms leads to a generic methodology for network and multicore aware topology mapping, and a set of efficient mapping algorithms for popular topologies. These have been implemented in a topology mapping library – TOPOMap, which can be used to support MPI topology functions.
PH.D in Computer Science, July 2013
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- Title
- Children's Center for Learning and Joy - Final Presentation
- Creator
- Rao, Sijun
- Date
- 5/13/2011, 2011-05
- Description
-
This project provide children with the learning chance they can not get in regular schools. The environment help them develop multiple...
Show moreThis project provide children with the learning chance they can not get in regular schools. The environment help them develop multiple intelligences.
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- Title
- Test of a 25 hp type "e" Smith anthracite suction gas producer
- Creator
- Brown, P. K, Wald, M. D, Wintercorn, J
- Date
- 2009, 1913
- Publisher
- Armour Institute of Technology
- Description
-
http://www.archive.org/details/testof25hptypees00brow
Thesis (B.S.)--Armour Institute of Technology, 1913 B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, 1913
- Title
- Room For Growth
- Creator
- Mckenzie, Jennifer
- Date
- 2011, 2011-05
- Description
-
The project is a resource center for formally incarcerated people returning to civil society. Many transitional facilities are overrun with...
Show moreThe project is a resource center for formally incarcerated people returning to civil society. Many transitional facilities are overrun with the great flux of people reentering society every year. Room for Growth project proposes to stabalize this group of people by offering another option of counseling centers, housing and work training facilities in the Washington Park neighborhood of Chicago.
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- Title
- The time factor in the operation of dry pipe sprinkler system
- Creator
- Metz, F. W., Moore, W. W., Schultz, W. E.
- Date
- 2009, 1911
- Publisher
- Armour Institute of Technology
- Description
-
http://www.archive.org/details/timefactorinoper00metz
Thesis (B.S.)--Armour Institute of Technology
- Title
- Reviving the Lost Art: Reviving the lost art
- Creator
- Nguyen, Chung Thuy
- Date
- 2011-04, 2011-05
- Description
-
The goal of the project is to celebrate the craftsmanship of lacquer painting and to revive the lacquer village in a new urban context
- Title
- High Performance Green Homes (sequence unknown), IPRO 317 - Deliverables
- Creator
- Bhat, Adnan, Campbell, Brittanie, Cink, Jefferey, Gutstein, Yehuda, Hadi, Shuaib, Hafdi, Kamal, Hasan, Hasan, Kenig, Elezar, Lipski, Brian, Lollino, Luca, Margolis, Jordan, Nigamatzyanov, Tagir, Patel, Hiren, Patel, Neal, Shehada, Hazem, Toops, Melissa, Trauner, Crystal, Zgourdah, Mourad
- Date
- 2009-12
- Description
-
The purpose of this project is to show how a team committed to helping people help save the world can leapfrog today's best designs. As...
Show moreThe purpose of this project is to show how a team committed to helping people help save the world can leapfrog today's best designs. As opposed to the tradition of minimum design standards that just meeting the building code, highest practical design standards are the focus. True sustainability is the goal of this project, including; Zero Carbon Emissions, Net Zero Energy, 100% Solar Power, 10 times the traditional design life, 1/10th the maintenance, rot proof, termite proof, fire proof, hurricane and earthquake resistant. The project team, using cutting edge technology, will develop all aspects of a start-up design and build company to promote High Performance Green Homes. This project will provide a great opportunity for IIT students to experience a challenging and interesting project and to significantly contribute to a better world.
Sponsorship: Jimmy Eng
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- Title
- Orthotics and Prosthetics in Latin America (sequence unknown), IPRO 309 - Deliverables: IPRO 309 Poster F09
- Creator
- Ashley, Trevor, Claxton, Matt, Conover, Stephen, Gotanco, Francis, Mathai, Alexander, Nizich, Adam, Park, Yong, Quikr, Kerry, Ray, Monmayuri, Vasquez, Raul
- Date
- 2009-12
- Description
-
The overall goal of our IPRO team is to create a program for delivering orthotics and prosthetics that is sustainable. This will be...
Show moreThe overall goal of our IPRO team is to create a program for delivering orthotics and prosthetics that is sustainable. This will be accomplished by improving the quality of the product by increasing availability of funding, improving cost effectiveness of prosthetics, and promoting awareness of treatment available.
Deliverables for IPRO 309: Orthotics and Prosthetics in Latin America for the fall 2009 semester.
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- Title
- Space|Place
- Creator
- Page, Charlotte
- Date
- 5/4/2011, 2011-05
- Description
-
A commentary on Education: examination of the experience of the subject (space) in relation to the object (place).
Sponsorship: Conger-Austin,...
Show moreA commentary on Education: examination of the experience of the subject (space) in relation to the object (place).
Sponsorship: Conger-Austin, Susan
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- Title
- Gerry-meandering: An Assessment of the Congressional District Model of Depository Allocation (preprint): AhrensGriffinfinalpreprint
- Creator
- Ahrens, Aric G., Griffin, Luke A.
- Date
- 2003-06
- Description
-
The preprint of a published article dealing with the effect of allocating Federal Depositories by Congressional district. Conclusions drawn...
Show moreThe preprint of a published article dealing with the effect of allocating Federal Depositories by Congressional district. Conclusions drawn include the fact that due to redistricting that occurs after each decennial census, over time some districts may have within their boundaries a greater number than the two depositories that Congressional district allocation was intended to produce. Likewise, over time shifting boundaries of districts have created districts that have no depositories whatsoever.
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- Title
- Mixed-Use High Rise in Streeterville Area
- Creator
- Alexander, Koenadi
- Date
- 2010-07-29