Exponentiated Teissier distribution with increasing, decreasing and bathtub hazard functions.

This article introduces a two-parameter exponentiated Teissier distribution. It is the main advantage of the distribution to have increasing, decreasing and bathtub shapes for its hazard rate function. The expressions of the ordinary moments, identifiability, quantiles, moments of order statistics, mean residual life function and entropy measure are derived. The skewness and kurtosis of the distribution are explored using the quantiles. In order to study two independent random variables, stress-strength reliability and stochastic orderings are discussed. Estimators based on likelihood, least squares, weighted least squares and product spacings are constructed for estimating the unknown parameters of the distribution. An algorithm is presented for random sample generation from the distribution. Simulation experiments are conducted to compare the performances of the considered estimators of the parameters and percentiles. Three sets of real data are fitted by using the proposed distribution over the competing distributions.

A new class of distributions as a finite functional mixture using functional weights.

In this paper, we introduce a new family of distributions whose probability density function is defined as a weighted sum of two probability density functions; one is defined as a warped version of the other. We focus our attention on a special case based on the exponential distribution with three parameters, a dilation transformation and a weight with polynomial decay, leading to a new life-time distribution. The explicit expressions of the moments generating function, moments and quantile function of the proposed distribution are provided. For estimating the parameters, the method of maximum likelihood estimation is used. Two applications with practical data sets are given.

Role of benzyl alcohol in the prevention of heat-induced aggregation and inactivation of hen egg white lysozyme.

The aim of the study was to investigate the stability of a model protein, lysozyme, in the presence of the commonly used preservative benzyl alcohol. Techniques including lytic assay, size exclusion chromatography, circular dichroism, differential scanning calorimetry, native polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and dynamic light scattering were used to study the overall stability of lysozyme in the presence of benzyl alcohol. The stability of lysozyme against thermal stress was higher in the presence of benzyl alcohol. In the presence of 0.5%, 0.9% and 2% v/v benzyl alcohol, the enzyme showed 33%, 42% and 75% residual activity, respectively, when exposed to 75 degrees C for 2 h, as compared to the 22% activity of control sample. A gradual increase in the size of aggregates was observed for the control sample relative to the samples containing benzyl alcohol, as a result of loss of monomer concentration. The effect was found to be concentration-dependent with 2% benzyl alcohol showing maximum prevention of heat-induced unfolding and aggregation. This effect is remarkable since the thermal transition temperature of the enzyme decreases in the presence of benzyl alcohol. Benzyl alcohol favours the thermal denaturation of lysozyme but stabilizes the lysozyme against the heat-induced aggregation.