Theoretical assessment of influential factors and application in chlorinated hydrocarbon detection with membrane interface probe.

The membrane interface probe (MIP) is an efficient and economical in-situ tool for chlorinated hydrocarbon (CH) contaminated site investigation. Given that the interpretation of MIP test is currently limited to a qualitative level, a theoretical model considering multiphase flow and multifield coupling is firstly proposed to simulate MIP test process. This model can consider phase change, membrane effect, adsorption and dissolution of the CH liquid, gas diffusion, and evaporation. Then, the model is used to study the changes in soil temperature and soil CH concentration during MIP test, as well as the influences of soil CH concentration and soil properties (initial water saturation, soil intrinsic permeability, and thermal properties) on MIP response. Finally, a simplified MIP interpretation model is developed based on parametric analysis results and verified against field and laboratory test data. It is found that the soil CH concentration, rather than soil properties, dominates the MIP response. The simplified interpretation model can deliver practical prediction of the CH concentration through the detected results by MIP, which may improve the applicability of MIP.

A Brief Review on Software Tools in Generating Chou's Pseudo-factor Representations for All Types of Biological Sequences.

BACKGROUND: In the post-genome age, it is more urgent to understand the functions of genes and proteins. Since experimental methods are usually costly and time consuming, computational predictions are recognized as an alternative approach. In developing a predictive method for functional genomics and proteomics, one of the most important steps is to represent biological sequences with a fixed length numerical form, which can be further analyzed using machine learning algorithms. Chou's pseudo-amino acid compositions and the pseudo k-nucleotide compositions are algorithms for this purpose. CONCLUSION: Since the appearance of these algorithms, several software tools have been developed as implementations. These software tools facilitate the application of these algorithms. As these software tools are developed with different technologies and for different application scenarios, we will briefly review the technical aspect of these software tools in this short review.