| |
| |
|
Effect of low doses of herbicide paraquat on antioxidant defense in Drosophila
SÁBOVÁ, Michala
Disruption of cell equilibrium between production of free radicals and antioxidant defence is named oxidative stress. The main component of antioxidant mechanism is activity of antioxidant enzymes, which include superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase. In this study we evaluated the effect of herbicide paraquat on response of SOD and catalase, their transcription level and locomotion activity in Drosophila melanogaster. We exposed the flies to a wide range of paraquat concentration. Our results revealed that transcript and enzymatic levels of both SOD and catalase have a similar biphasic dose response with the peaks at 2,5 ?M paraquat concentration, resembling hormetic effect. Then, males were more sensitive than females. However, females had an increased locomotion activity. We found that paraquat susceptibility is increased in males and mating flies. Therefore, this study supports hypothesis of stress sensitivity elevation as a physiological cost of reproduction.
|
|
Total contents and speciation of arsenic and selenium in plants growing in soils with different physico-chemical properties
Tremlová, Jana ; Száková, Jiřina (advisor) ; Vymazal, Jan (referee)
This dissertation thesis deals with uptake, accumulation and transformation of arsenic and selenium in plants growing on soils with different chemico-physical soil properties. The contents of arsenic were investigated in 99 wild plant species, coming from 27 different families and 6 different vegetables growing in arsenic contaminated soils. The results suggest that there are species-specific mechanisms which protects certain plants from the excessive uptake of arsenic from the soil. On the other hand, there are plants using a strategy of accumulation, which theoretically may increase the risk of arsenic entry into the food chain, whether through grazing cattle and wildlife or through consumption of vegetables growing on arsenic contaminated soils. The most prevalent arsenic compounds are AsV and AsIII. Other arsenic compounds occure as minor species. An important finding was detection of arsenobetaine in Plantago lanceolata L. and Carex praecox Schreb ..
The contents of selenium were examined in 73 species of wild plants, coming from 29 different families. The results suggest that naturally low levels of selenium in the soil of selected locations along with a low capability of selenium uptake via collected plant species lead to the low content of selenium in plant biomass which may contribute to selenium deficient throughout the food chain. Foliar application of selenate on wild plant communities and on some types of vegetables in our case Brassica oleracea var. italica can have a positive impact on increasing the selenium content in the aboveground biomass of these plants and by extension, increase the selenium content in the human diet. Dominant selenium compounds in the aboveground biomass of the analyzed plants were SeVI and selenomethionine, with variable proportion of other commonly occurring organic selenium compounds, which is mainly affected by plant species.
|
|
Photocatalytic Decomposition of Wastewater from the Production of Explosives
Brom, Petr ; Brožek, Vlastimil ; Březina, Václav ; Hlína, Michal ; Mastný, L. ; Novák, M.
Water stabilized plasma generator WSP® H-500, operating on the principle of Gerdien arc was used for the photocatalytic decomposition of furazan- and picraminate-based explosives. The generator emits intensive radiation in the range of 300-660 nm, which allows not only to activate photocatalysts based on TiO2, but also other semiconductor oxides with a narrower band gap, such as tungsten oxide. The photocatalytic decomposition of sewage and slurries containing the potassium salt of 4-hydroxy-4,6-dihydro-5,7- dinitrobenzofurazane-3-oxide (KDNBF) or sodium picraminate (NaC6H4N3O5) was performed using the anatase paste and newly developed photocatalyst produced by the company Precheza a.s. The photocatalytic reactor was built using a quartz tube coil with an internal volume of 650 ml, with a nominal size of the irradiated area of 7.5 dm2 (value reduced by the area of the gaps between coil turns) to enable the flow the processing solution or suspension of up to 10 l / min. The centre of the coil is exposed to the plasma jet with the intensity\nof 80 kW; of which 15 kW is transformed into the light radiation. 11% of the radiation output was used for the presented experiments. The time of exposition was 45 mins and 20 l of solution were treated. In the case of KDNBF, 90% of the compound was decomposed. Moreover, 100% of sodium picraminate were decomposed after 15 minutes into low-molecular inorganic compounds. Advantage of the assembly is the ability to treat highly dangerous chemical compounds in a closed cycle and test selective catalyst
|
|
Optical low dispersion rezonator as length sensor using optical frequency comb
Pravdová, Lenka ; Hucl, Václav ; Lešundák, Adam ; Lazar, Josef ; Číp, Ondřej
Ultra-high precis measurements are domain of lasers interferometers. An optical resonator measuring method using broad spectrum of radiation of an optical frequency comb was designed and experimentally verified at our workplace. The measuring of a quantity – a distance of resonator mirrors – is provided by its conversion to the value of repetition frequency of the pulse laser with mode-locked optical frequency comb. In this paper the comparison of the absolute scale of the optical resonator with an incremental interferometer scale is introduced. The incremental interferometer is implemented for verification of the optical resonator scale. The double beam incremental interferometer is operating at the wavelength of 633 nm and the measuring mirror with piezo actuator is used as one of its reflectors. It turns out that the major error signal is the reflection of the periodic nonlinearity of the incremental resonator scale. The relative resolution of our method reaches values up to 10-9 while maintaining measuring scale.
|
| |
|
Automatic system for gauge blocks calibration optimized for legal length metrology
Buchta, Zdeněk ; Šarbort, Martin ; Čížek, Martin ; Hucl, Václav ; Řeřucha, Šimon ; Pikálek, Tomáš ; Dvořáčková, Š. ; Dvořáček, F. ; Kůr, J. ; Konečný, P. ; Lazar, Josef ; Číp, Ondřej
This paper presents a contactless system for automatic and contactless gauge blocks calibration based on combination of laser interferometry and low-coherence interferometry. In the presented system, the contactless measurement of the absolute gauge block length is done as a single-step operation without any change in optical setup during the measurement. The optical setup is combined with compact gauge block changer with capacity 126 gauge blocks, which makes the resulting system fully automatic. \nThe paper also presents in detail a set of optimization steps which have been done in order to transform the original experimental setup into the automatic system which meets legal length metrology requirements. To prove the measurement traceability, we conducted a set of gauge block length measurement comparing data from the optimized system and the established reference system and TESA–UPC operated in Czech Metrology Institute laboratory.
|
|
Network Architecture and Interconnection of Embedded Systems
Trchalík, Roman ; Drábek, Vladimír (referee) ; Srovnal, Vilém (referee) ; Švéda, Miroslav (advisor)
The thesis focuses on the architecture of embedded systems. It summarizes the current state of accepted standards from IEEE 1451 family, which deals with creating an environment for the sensors and their involvement in various networks. These standards describe the open, network-independent communication architecture for a sensor-based system. One of the main outcomes of this work is the architectures presented as case studies, which can be used as design patters for embedded applications. They are demonstrated on ZigBee technology suitable mainly for small devices with very low power consumption. Based on these studies the new design of universal gateway was proposed. Its major advantage is that it allows interconnection of the endpoints based on different sensor network technologies. Additionally, the thesis deals with modifying the routing protocol of ZigBee network in order to reduce power consumption required to transmit one data packet.
|
|
Optimization of network flow monitoring
Žádník, Martin ; Lhotka,, Ladislav (referee) ; Matoušek, Radomil (referee) ; Sekanina, Lukáš (advisor)
The thesis deals with optimization of network flow monitoring. Flow-based network traffic processing, that is, processing packets based on some state information associated to the flows which the packets belong to, is a key enabler for a variety of network services and applications. The number of simultaneous flows increases with the growing number of new services and applications. It has become a challenge to keep a state per each flow in a network device processing high speed traffic. A flow table, a structure with flow states, must be stored in a memory hierarchy. The memory closest to the processing is known as a flow cache. Flow cache management plays an important role in terms of its effective utilization, which affects the performance of the whole system. This thesis focuses on an automated design of cache replacement policy optimized to a deployment on particular networks. A genetic algorithm is proposed to automate this process. The genetic algorithm generates and evaluates evolved replacement policies by a simulation on obtained traffic traces. The proposed algorithm is evaluated by designing replacement policies for two variations of the cache management problem. The first variation is an evolution of the replacement policy with an overall low number of state evictions from the flow cache. The second variation represents an evolution of the replacement policy with a low number of evictions belonging to large flows only. Optimized replacement policies for both variations are found while experimenting with various encoding of the replacement policy and genetic operators. The newly evolved replacement policies achieve better results than other tested policies. The evolved replacement policy lowers the overall amount of evictions by ten percent in comparison with the best compared policy. The evolved replacement policy focusing on large flows lowers the amount of their evictions two times. Moreover, no eviction occurs for most of the large flows (over 90%). The evolved replacement policy offers better resilience against flooding the flow cache with large amount of short flows which are typical side effects of scanning or distributed denial of service activities. An extension of the replacement policy is also proposed. The extension complements the replacement policy with an additional information extracted from packet headers. The results show further decrease in the number of evictions when the extension is used.
|
guest ::
