Acinetobacter baumannii (A. baumannii ) is considered a critical healthcare problem for patients in intensive care units due to its high ability to be multidrug-resistant to most commercially available antibiotics. The aim of this study is to develop a colorimetric assay to quantitatively detect the target DNA of A. baumannii based on unmodified gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) from different clinical samples (burns, surgical wounds, sputum, blood and urine). A total of thirty-six A. baumannii clinical isolates were collected from five Iraqi hospitals in Erbil and Mosul provinces within the period from September 2020 to January 2021. Bacterial isolation and biochemical identification of isolates were carried out followed by DNA extraction from 36 isolates and six negative ATCC strains (Salmonalle typhi, Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumonia, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Enterobacter aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aures) and only one positive control ATCC A. baumannii using Phenol/Chloroform method. AuNPs were synthesized using the citrate reduction method and examined by XDR, FTIR, UV-VIS, FE-SEM, and TEM. The optimized colorimetric assay was employed based on unmodified spherical AuNPs and PCR amplification of 16S rRNA intergenic spacer sequences (ITS) with species-specific DNA oligo-targeters. Detection and optimization of A. baumannii amplicons using unmodified AuNPs were performed based on species-specific DNA oligonucleotide. The AuNPs assay was able to colorimetrically detect and distinguish A. baumannii from other ATCC bacterial isolates. The turnaround time of this assay was about 3 hours, including sample preparation and amplification, to show (0.025-6 ngµl-1) as a detection limit of DNA concentration. The efficacy of colorimetric detection was proved to effectively diagnose A. baumannii isolates with high sensitivity, simplicity, and robustness to rapidly diagnose A. baumannii isolates from different clinical samples.
The performance grading system (superpave) has provided means to incorporate binder characteristics with
pavement failure types. It’s a comprehensive system that relates climate, traffic conditions and aging with
critical pavement distress. The objective of this paper is to develop an improved asphalt binder grading
system for Iraq based on the principal of superpave. The country was divided into different zones according
to the highest and lowest temperature ranges and traffic loading. The Performance graded binder proposed
for each zone was compared with some States of USA that have same hot weather of Iraq by using Long
Term Pavement Performance (LTPP v3.1) software. Iraqi asphalt samples were tested using the Supe
Warm asphalt mixture (WMA) and reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) are the most memorable sustainable materials in world of asphalt concrete pavements . This research aims to study the warm asphalt mixture for different types of filler materials such as ordinary cement and limestone dust. Beside, this research focused on the test of emulsified asphalt properties by evaluating the performance of warm asphalt mixture by Marshall Stability properties as well as moisture sensitivity. The results of this experiment provided many important points. First, The cationic emulsified asphalt is suitable with RAP aggregate for production warm asphalt mixtures .Second, The effective mixing procedure for warm asphalt mixtures consists hea
... Show MoreThe catalytic activity of faujasite type NaY catalysts prepared from local clay (kaolin) with different Si/Al ratio was studied using cumene cracking as a model for catalytic cracking process in the temperature range of 450-525° C, weight hourly space velocity (WHSV) of 5-20 h1, particle size ≤75μm and atmospheric pressure. The catalytic activity was investigated using experimental laboratory plant scale of fluidized bed reactor.
It was found that the cumene conversion increases with increasing temperature and decreasing WHSV. At 525° C and WHSV 5 h-1, the conversion was 42.36 and 35.43 mol% for catalyst with 3.54 Si/Al ratio and Catalyst with 5.75 Si/Al ratio, respectively, while at 450° C and at the same WHSV, the conversion w
Drastic threat to the natural system is caused by the uncontrolled release of synthetic pollutants, including azo dyes. This study centered on the decolorization and biodegradation of water soluble azo dye reactive blue (RB) in a batch mode sequential anaerobic-aerobic processes. A local sewage treatment plant was the source where activated sludge was collected to be used as non-adapted mixed culture with both free and the alginate immobilized cells for RB biodegradation. Under anaerobic conditions, the free and immobilized mixed cells were proved to completely decolorize 10 mg/ L of RB within 20 and 30 h, respectively. Alginate- immobilized mixed cells, resulted in 88%, 87%, and 87% maximum COD removals with samples con
... Show MoreIn this work, an inventive photovoltaic evaporative cooling (PV/EC) hybrid system was constructed and experimentally investigated. The PV/EC hybrid system has the prosperous advantage of producing electrical energy and cooling the PV panel besides providing cooled-humid air. Two cooling techniques were utilized: backside evaporative cooling (case #1) and combined backside evaporative cooling with a front-side water spray technique (case #2). The water spraying on the front side of the PV panel is intermittent to minimize water and power consumption depending on the PV panel temperature. In addition, two pad thicknesses of 5 cm and 10 cm were investigated at three different water flow rates of 1, 2, and 3 lpm. In Case #1,
... Show MoreIn this work, the elemental constituents of smoker and nonsmoker
teeth samples of human were analyzed by Laser induced breakdown
spectroscopy method (LIBS). Many elements have been detected in
the healthy teeth samples, the important once are Ca, P, Mg, Fe, Pb
and Na. Many differences were found between (female and male)
teeth in Ca, P, Mg, Na and Pb contents. The concentrations of most
toxic elements were found significantly in the smoker group. The
maximum concentrations of toxic elements such as Pb, Cd and Co
were found in older male age above 60 year. Also, it was found that
the minimum concentrations of trace elements such as Ca, P and Na
exist in this age group. From these results it is clear that the
Two dimensional meso-scale concrete modeling was used in finite element analysis of plain concrete beam subjected to bending. The plane stress 4-noded quadrilateral elements were utilized to model coarse aggregate, cement mortar. The effect of aggregate fraction distribution, and pores percent of the total area – resulting from air voids entrapped in concrete during placement on the behavior of plain concrete beam in flexural was detected. Aggregate size fractions were randomly distributed across the profile area of the beam. Extended Finite Element Method (XFEM) was employed to treat the discontinuities problems result from double phases of concrete and cracking that faced during the finite element analysis of concrete beam. Crac
... Show MoreSoftware Defined Networking (SDN) with centralized control provides a global view and achieves efficient network resources management. However, using centralized controllers has several limitations related to scalability and performance, especially with the exponential growth of 5G communication. This paper proposes a novel traffic scheduling algorithm to avoid congestion in the control plane. The Packet-In messages received from different 5G devices are classified into two classes: critical and non-critical 5G communication by adopting Dual-Spike Neural Networks (DSNN) classifier and implementing it on a Virtualized Network Function (VNF). Dual spikes identify each class to increase the reliability of the classification
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