Materials that can enhance the sensitivity and selectivity of a biosensor are greatly in demand. The nanocomposition of thionine (Th) and graphene can increase the electroconductivity of the working electrode used. Graphene is a very good electrical conductor but is also hydrophobic in nature. Composition with thionine gives it the capability to disperse well in water. Plus, thionine provides the opportunity for DNA probes to be immobilized due to the presence of the amino group in its structure. In this research, the thionine-graphene (Th-G) nanocomposite was synthesized through filtration and characterised using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to distinguish different elements coexist in the nanocomposite and to investigate the microstructure changes of the nanocomposite to confirm the composition. Different elements were analyzed to test the presence of both thionine and graphene in the composition. Physical characterisation through SEM proved the nanocomposition was a success.
Increasing demands in palm oil industry hence resulting the production of palm oil to increase. It is then creating a major problem in disposing the waste to be treat in appropriate ways. The governments are forced to look for alternative technology for the palm oil mill effluent (POME) treatment because the demand of oil increases with the awareness on increasing environmental issue. Therefore, a new technology must be found in order to reduce energy consumption, to meet legal requirements on emission and for cost reduction and also increased quality of water treatment. Membrane Anaerobic System (MAS) is a promising alternative way to overcome these issues. In this study, the efficiency of the MAS performance increases to 99.03% in ten days operation. The application of Monod, Contois and Chen & Hashimoto models were used to analyze the performance of MAS for treating POME. The results from the experiment show the substrate removal model is well fits for estimation of kinetics membrane anaerobic system. Amongst them, the Contois and Monod models predicted the bio-kinetic reactions of the MAS very well with coefficient of determination (R2>97%) values. The MAS bioreactor was creating to be an improvement method as well as successful biological treatment since the graph shows linearized which is good agreement with reported in literature.
This paper presents the application of Solid Phase Micro Extraction (SPME) coupled with Gas Chromatography - Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) and Gas Chromatography - Flame Ionization Detector (GC-FID) in characterizing the agarwood incense. The work involved three types of SPME fibres at 30 minute sampling time. The fibres are 50/30 μm divinylbenzene-carboxen-polydimethysiloxane (DVB-CAR-PDMS), 65 μm polydi methylsiloxane-divinylbenzene (PDMS-DVB) and 85 μm carboxen-polydimethyl siloxane (CAR-PDMS). The results showed that among the many compounds extracted by GC-MS coupled with SPME, six compounds were substantially found in high quality agarwood incense due to their high percentage area (%). They are β-maaliene, α-elemol, β-selinene, 10-epi-γ-eudesmol, agarospirol and caryophellene oxide. The finding offers a new approach for establishing the volatile profile of agarwood incense components as well as for agarwood grading and discrimination.
Magnesium-based polymer gel electrolytes consist of magnesium triflate (MgTf) salt, a mixture of ethylene carbonate (EC) and diethyl carbonate (DEC) solvents as well as cellulose acetate as a polymeric agent were prepared via direct dissolution method. The highest ionic conductivity obtained for MgTf-EC:DEC(1:1) liquid electrolytes was 2.66 x 10-3 S cm-1 and enhanced to 2.73 x 10-3 S cm-1 with the addition of cellulose acetate. These results were in agreement with the activation energy obtained with the lowest value of 0.11. The best explanation on the enhancement in ionic conductivity of PGE is due to the “breathing polymeric chain model”. The plots of conductivity-temperature shown to obey an Arrhenius rule. The electrical properties of the sample with the highest conductivity were analyzed using electrical permittivity-based frequency and temperature dependence in the range of 100 Hz - 1 MHz and 303-373K, respectively. The variation in dielectric permittivity (εr and εi) as a function of frequency at different temperatures exhibited decays at higher frequencies and a dispersive behavior at low frequencies. Based on the observed electrical properties, it can be inferred that this polymer gel electrolyte could be a promising candidate as an electrolyte in electrochemical devices.
In this study, Li1+xAlxTi2-x(PO4)3 (0.0 ≤ x ≤ 0.5) was prepared by acetic acid-assisted sol-gel method. The structural properties of NASICON phosphates material with chemical formula LiTi2(PO4)3 were observed using the Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. NASICON is a family of crystalline phosphate with a general network system consisting of PO4 tetrahedra, thus bands were assigned by vibrations contributed by basic phosphates, in the wavenumber region between 1300 cm-1 and 600 cm-1. Experimental spectra indicated that all Li1+xAlxTi2-x(PO4)3 (0.0 ≤ x ≤ 0.5), heat treated at 600°C and 700°C for 3 hours in air, samples showed the presence of phosphate peaks with shift in frequency as Al3+ is substituted into the structure, and with increasing temperatures. Some bands broadened and overlapped causing it hard to analyze the arising bands. It however determined the existence of NASICON structure in all of the samples under study.
This paper presents on ionic conductivity of MG30-PEMA blend solid polymer electrolytes (SPEs) prepared by solution cast technique. The analysis has shown that conductivity increases with the increasing salt composition. It is observed via x-ray diffraction analysis that the crystallinity of the sample decreased with the amount of salt composition as expected. It is also observed that the dielectric value increases with increasing amount of LiCF3SO3 in the sample. Surface morphology revealed that ion aggregation occurred after optimum conductivity which has lowered the conductivity.
The invention of microarray technology has enabled expression levels of thousands of genes to be monitored at once. This modernized approach has created large amount of data to be examined. Recently, gene regulatory network has been an interesting topic and generated impressive research goals in computational biology. Better understanding of the genetic regulatory processes would bring significant implications in the biomedical fields and many other pharmaceutical industries. As a result, various mathematical and computational methods have been used to model gene regulatory network from microarray data. Amongst those methods, the Bayesian network model attracts the most attention and has become the prominent technique since it can capture nonlinear and stochastic relationships between variables. However, structure learning of this model is NP-hard and computationally complex as the number of potential edges increase drastically with the number of genes. In addition, most of the studies only focused on the predicted results while neglecting the fact that microarray data is a fragmented information on the whole biological process. Hence this study proposed a network-based inference model that combined biological knowledge in order to verify the constructed gene regulatory relationships. The gene regulatory network is constructed using Bayesian network based on low-order conditional independence approach. This technique aims to identify from the data the dependencies to construct the network structure, while addressing the structure learning problem. In addition, three main toolkits such as Ensembl, TFSearch and TRANSFAC have been used to determine the false positive edges and verify reliability of regulatory relationships. The experimental results show that by integrating biological knowledge it could enhance the precision results and reduce the number of false positive edges in the trained gene regulatory network.
Proteases were extracted from starfruit at maturity Index 2 (unripe, light green) and Index 7 (very ripe, orange) and partially purified using acetone and 40% ammonium sulfate precipitations. Higher yield and proteolytic activity were observed for proteases purified using acetone than 40% ammonium sulfate. As for maturity index, yield and protein concentration of proteases from Index 2 were higher than those from Index 7. SDS-PAGE result showed intense bands for acetone proteases while a distinct band at 50 kDa was observed in all the proteases. Enzyme activity decreased during the seven days storage at 4°C with minimum relative activity of 70% achieved for acetone proteases at day seven. This study suggested that acetone precipitation is more effective method for purifying starfruit protease based on the yield and proteolytic activity compared to using 40% ammonium sulphate precipitation. In order to obtain higher protein concentration and proteolytic activity, starfruit at the unripe stage, Index 2 is a better raw material than Index 7 to be used for protease production.
Crab meat is widely consumed in several countries around the world. However, when consumed, crab meat are frequent cause of allergic reactions throughout the world. Scylla serrata is among the most common mud crab in Malaysia. In a previous study two major allergens of mud crab at 36 and 41 kDa was identified. Thus, the aim of this study is to further identify these major allergens by a proteomic approach. Protein extract was prepared and resolved by 2-dimensional electrophoresis (2-DE). Immunoblotting was then performed using reactive sera from patients with crab allergy. Major allergenic spots were then excised from the 2-DE gel and analysed by mass spectrometry. The 2-DE profile of the extract revealed approximately >100 protein spots between pH of 4.00 to 8.00. Mass spectrometry analysis has identified the 36 and 41 kDa proteins as tropomyosin and arginine kinase, respectively. Our findings indicated that tropomyosin and arginine kinase play a major role in allergic reaction to mud crab meat among local patients with crab meat allergy, and should be included in diagnostics and therapeutic strategies of this allergy.
Channel estimation techniques for Multiple-input Multiple-output Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) based on comb type pilot arrangement with least-square error (LSE) estimator was investigated with space-time-frequency (STF) diversity implementation. The frequency offset in OFDM impacts its performance. This was mitigated with the implementation of the presented inter-carrier interference self-cancellation (ICI-SC) techniques and different space-time subcarrier mapping. STF block coding in the system exploits the spatial, temporal and frequency diversity to improve performance. Estimated channel was fed into a decoder which combines the STF decoding together with the estimated channel coefficients using LSE estimator for equalization. The performance of the system is compared by measuring the symbol error rate with a PSK-16 and PSK-32. The results show that subcarrier mapping together with ICI-SC were able to increase the system performance. Introduction of channel estimation was also able to estimate the channel coefficient at only 5dB difference with a perfectly known channel.
Six new Pd(II) and Ni(II) metal complexes of N, O-bidentate (L1, L2) and ONNO-tetradentate (L3) Schiff base ligands have been synthesized. The compounds were characterized via various physicochemical and spectroscopic techniques namely elemental analysis (CHN), FT-IR, 1H and 13C NMR as well as magnetic susceptibility measurement. All complexes showed diamagnetism indicating that they are square planar complexes. Catalytic performance of Pd(L1)2 and Pd(L2)2 were investigated for Heck cross-coupling reaction under optimum operating parameters, monitored using GC-FID for 6 h of reaction time in inert conditions. High catalytic activities of up to 90% were observed in the presence of triethylamine as base and DMA as solvent at 100oC with 1 mmol% catalyst loading. The mechanism of catalyzed Heck reaction is proposed to go through a series of conversion of Pd(0)/Pd(II).
The coordination complexes of Co(II) and Zn(II) with Schiff bases derived from ophenylenediamine and substituted 2-hydroxybenzaldehyde were prepared. All compounds were characterized by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy elemental analyzers. They were analyzed using impedance spectroscopy in the frequency range of 100Hz - 1MHz. L1 and L2 showed higher conductivity compared to their metal
complexes, which had values of 1.37 x 10-7 and 6.13 x 10-8S/cm respectively.
This paper examines the temperature profile of a building material and also a
built space. The study directly examines the influence of solar radiation on
building material and the heat it generated and diffuses into the built space.
Two experiments are presented. The first look at a simple technique for
evaluating heat performance of a building material, and the second evaluates
the performance of a cross-ventilated built space with respect to solar radiation.
The construction industry should move from conventional construction method and adopt the
industrialisation concept, to increase productivity and deliver quality construction end products.
Industrialisation is the combination of a large market to divide into fractions the investment in
strategies and innovation, in return, of simplifying the production and, therefore, reducing the costs.
The introduction of Degree of Industrialisation by Roger-Bruno Richard is critical to the construction
industry. The five degrees of industrialisation are prefabrication, mechanisation, automation, robotics
and reproduction. Richard’s Degree of Industrialisation is in line with the Malaysian government’s
vision to be a developed nation by 2020, to push forward the use of innovative technologies in most
industries including the construction industry. The adoption of industrialisation and innovations in
the Malaysian construction industry has the potential to solve the current problems in the
construction industry. The problems are the inferior quality of products and processes, a poor site
working conditions, low construction productivity, high construction cost, relying on foreign workers
and lack of skill labours. The adoption of industrialisation and innovations promote sustainability in
the construction environment. The objectives of the study are to investigate whether the adoption of
industrialisation in the construction environment promotes sustainability and to identify the current
level of industrialisation of the Malaysian construction industry. The methodologies of the study are
semi-structure interview and observation. The Malaysian construction industry is ready to embrace
industrialisation in construction environment in limited areas and industrialisation promotes
sustainability in the construction environment.
An investigation on the properties of Tenun Pahang fabric performances using alternative yarns was conducted. The studies were made in order to evaluate whether the Tenun Pahang fabric could be produced economically and at the same time maintain the fabric quality. Traditional Tenun Pahang fabric uses silk for both warp and weft. For this project, two alternative yarns were used which were bamboo and modal, which were a little lower in cost compared to silk. These yarns were woven with two variations, one with the yarns as weft only while maintaining the silk warp and the other with both warp and weft using the alternative yarns. Four (4) physical testing and three (3) mechanical testing conducted on the fabric samples. The fabric samples were evaluated including weight, thickness, thread density, crease recovery angle, stiffness and drapability. The results show that modal/silk and bamboo silk fabrics are comparable in terms of stiffness and drapability, hence they have the potential to replace 100% silk Tenun Pahang.
Two Schiff bases, 3-(4-hydroxyphenylimino)-1,3-dihydroindol-2-one (OPI) and 3-(4-Chlorophenylimino)-1,3-dihydroindol-2-one
(CPI) were successfully synthesized through condensation
reactions giving yields of 82% and 63%, respectively. The compounds were characterized via
physical and spectroscopic techniques, namely elemental analysis (C, H, N), 1H and 13C Nuclear
Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and
melting point. The corrosion inhibiting property of the Schiff bases on mild steel in 1 M HCl solution
was investigated by the weight loss (WL) measurements, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy
(EIS) and linear polarization resistance (LPR). The concentrations of the Schiff bases were varied
from 1 x 10-3 M to 1 x 10-5 M. The inhibition efficiencies obtained from all the methods employed were
in good agreement where the percentage of inhibition efficiencies increased with concentration. OPI
showed better inhibition efficiency than CPI with 91 % highest inhibition efficiency at 1 x 10-3 M
additive concentration. This is likely to be caused by the resonance donating effect due to the
presence of the hydroxyl group. The adsorption behaviour obeyed Langmuir isotherm for monolayer
formation.
Leachate (liquid pollutant), which is highly contaminated with organic matter and toxic substances is a major
problem that arised from landfill. Biological methods have proven to be effective to remove organic matters that are
abundant in leachate. This study is intended to compare the used of free mycelia and immobilized mycelia of the
white-rot fungi, Ganoderma australe for the removal of landfill leachate organics. The organics fraction of landfill
leachate was measured by biological oxygen demand (BOD5), and chemical oxygen demand (COD). The experiment
revealed that free mycelia of G. australe showed capability in removing leachate BOD5 but not COD. However, the
use of immobilized G. australe displayed the best result in the removal of BOD5 and COD leachate after 4 weeks of
treatment in flasks with 93.09% and 17.84% percentage removal of BOD5 and COD, respectively. Therefore, G.
australe can be considered potentially useful in the treatment of landfill leachate as they can help in removing BOD
and COD due to their biodegradative abilities.
Vitex trifolia or locally known as lemuni, is well documented for its medicinal properties including
anticancer, antibacterial and wound healing. For years, the leaves and flowers were consumed for antiaging
and general well-being. It is also commonly served as nutraceuticals to post-partum women during
their confinement period. Previous study showed that V. trifolia possesses high antioxidant properties that
could prevent oxidative stress related diseases such as cancer, atherosclerosis, diabetes and many more.
From the literature, V. trifolia leaves are used as poultice for rheumatic pains, sprains, antithelmintics and
inflammations. Meanwhile, the fruits are utilised in amenorrhea. The roots, on the other hand, are used for
the treatment of cough and fever. The plant is known to possess pharmacologically-active constituents such
as the essential oil, halimane-type diterpenes, flavonoids, triterpenes, lignans, iridoids and ecdysteroids.
Review papers were consistently published to justify the non-exhaustive biological exploration of this genus.
Nevertheless, only 11 per cent of the total Vitex species were phytochemically examined. Apart from being
eaten raw or blanched, Vitex is also taken as a food colourant in preparing lemuni rice. The process of
making lemuni rice is quite tedious. First, the leaves and flowers are picked and washed. Both parts are then
ground with water and sieved to give a bluish extract which is then mixed with rice and boiled to cook.
Hence, the Vitex pouch is introduced to provide an easy way to prepare lemuni rice. This packaging is
designed to enclose Vitex samples in a pouch that simply can be placed together with rice and boiled to
cook. Such instant preparation will hopefully promote the consumption of lemuni rice among busy locals.
Future plans include international marketing and production of other Vitex nutritional products.
This paper provides a review on the effect of solar radiation to the different building materials properties.
Solar radiation; watt per meter square [W/m2
] is one of the cause for thermal gain in building envelopes.
Buildings envelopes comprises of various materials. Different materials have different rate of heat
absorption depends on their emissivity and other parameters. The three materials studied in this paper
are concrete, timber and composites materials. According to the radiation heat equation, heat rate are
affected by the surface area of exposed envelope (A) measure in meter (m), emissivity of the building
exposed surface (ε) and the temperature difference between envelope exposed surface (Ts) and
temperature of equivalent atmosphere (Tsky) measure in 0C. Based on the parameters, research
methodology were adopted either by software simulation or test field experimental. Solar radiation
affects the materials in various ways, depends on parameters considered, location of testing and type of
materials.
Pure TiO2 and Cr doped TiO2 (0.1-1.0wt% Cr) nanoparticles were synthesized via sol gel method. This
study focusing on narrowing the TiO2 band gap energies in order to enhance the photocatalytic efficiency
under visible light. The synthesized samples were characterized by X-Ray diffraction method (XRD), field
emmision (FESEM) and also UV-Vis diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS).The photocatalytic activity
under sunlight irradiation was demonstrated by photocatalytic decomposition of methylene blue in water
using UV/Vis spectrophotometer. The XRD analysis of pure TiO2 and doped TiO2 calcined at 500oC
showed a mixture of anatase and rutile phases with decreasing crystallites size from 13.3 nm to 11.6 nm
as the concentration of Cr was increased. The anatase-rutile phase transformation increased from 28.8%
to 57.4%. An indication shows that at 0.75wt% Cr the anatase and rutile phases have equal composition
percentage. This study demonstrated that band gap energy of TiO2 was reduced with Cr doping which
could enhance the photocatalytic efficiency. Sample containing 1.0wt% exhibit the lowest optical band
gap energy at 2.86 eV. The optimum chromium doping concentration was found to be at 0.1 wt% Cr
corresponding to band gap energy of 2.87 eV and degradation rate of 84%.