All issues

The effect of copper ions on the primary processes of photosynthesis in freshwater microalgae Scenedesmus quadricauda was studied using a set of biophysical and mathematical methods. Chlorophyll a fluorescence transients were recorded both in cell suspensions and at the level of single cells after incubation at copper concentrations of 0.1–10 $\mu$M under light and dark conditions. It was found that copper has a dose-dependent effect on the photosynthetic apparatus of microalgae. At low copper concentration (0.1 $\mu$M), a stimulating effect on a number of studied parameters was observed, whereas significant disruption of Photosystem II activity was detected at 10 $\mu$M. The method of analyzing fluorescence of single cells proved to be more sensitive compared to traditional suspension measurements, allowing the detection of heterogeneous cellular responses to the toxicant. Analysis of chlorophyll a fast fluorescence kinetics showed that the JIP-test parameters $\delta_{Ro}$ and $\varphi_{Ro}$ were the most sensitive to copper exposure and were significantly different from the control when exposed not only to high but also to medium (1 $\mu$M) copper concentrations. The decrease in photochemical activity of cells during light incubation was less pronounced compared to dark conditions. The application of data normalization to optical density at $\lambda = 455$ nm significantly increased the sensitivity of the method and accuracy of result interpretation. The use of L₁-regularization (LASSO) by the least angles method (LARS) for the spectral multi-exponential approximation of the fluorescence transients allowed us to reveal their temporal characteristics. Mathematical analysis of the obtained data suggested that copper exposure leads to increased non-photochemical quenching of fluorescence, which serves as a protective mechanism for dissipating excess excitation energy. The revealed heterogeneity of cellular responses to copper action may have important ecological significance, ensuring the survival of part of the population under stress conditions. The obtained data confirm the promise of using fluorescent analysis methods for early diagnosis of heavy metal stress effects on photosynthesizing organisms.

In present work we used the methods of molecular dynamics simulations and quantum chemistry to study the concept, according to which aspartic and glutamic residues play a key role in initiation of helix formation in oligopeptides. It has been shown, that the first turn of the alpha-helix can be organized from various amino acid sequences with Asp and Glu residues on the N-terminus. Thermodynamic properties of such a process were analyzed. The obtained results do not interfere with known experimental and statistical data and they substantially elaborate present views on the processes of early peptide folding stages.

In the paper we construct the model of phase change. Process of hydriding / dehydriding is taken as an example. A single powder particle is considered under the assumption about its symmetry. A ball, a cylinder, and a flat plate are examples of such symmetrical shapes. The model desribes both the "shrinking core"(when the skin of the new phase appears on the surface of the particle) and the "nucleation and growth"(when the skin does not appear till complete vanishing of the old phase) scenarios. The model is the non-classical boundary-value problem with the free boundary and nonlinear Neumann boundary condition. The symmetry assumptions allow to reduce the problem to the single spatial variable. The model was tested on the series of experimental data. We show that the particle shape’s influence on the kinetics is insignificant. We also show that a set of particles of different shapes with size distribution can be approxomated by the single particle of the "average" size and of a simple shape; this justifies using single particle approximation and simple shapes in mathematical models.

The article describes the examples of the analysis of the experimental data spectra for identifying typical structures of processes forming plasma turbulence. The method is based on the original algorithm which is close to the one-sample bootstrap. The base model for description of the fine structure of stochastic processes is finite local-scale normal mixtures. For finding the statistical estimates (maximum likelihood estimates) well known EM algorithm is used. The efficiency of the proposed research technique is demonstrated for a number of spectra’s set obtained in different modes of low-frequency plasma turbulence.

The aim of the work was to study and develop methods of forecasting the dynamics of the human respiratory reactions, based on mathematical modeling. To achieve this goal have been set and solved the following tasks: developed and justified the overall structure and formalized description of the model Respiro-reflex system; built and implemented the algorithm in software models of gas exchange of the body; computational experiments and checking the adequacy of the model-based Lite-ture data and our own experimental studies.

In this embodiment, a new comprehensive model entered partial model modified version of physicochemical properties and blood acid-base balance. In developing the model as the basis of a formalized description was based on the concept of separation of physiologically-fi system of regulation on active and passive subsystems regulation. Development of the model was carried out in stages. Integrated model of gas exchange consisted of the following special models: basic biophysical models of gas exchange system; model physicochemical properties and blood acid-base balance; passive mechanisms of gas exchange model developed on the basis of mass balance equations Grodinza F.; chemical regulation model developed on the basis of a multifactor model D. Gray.

For a software implementation of the model, calculations were made in MatLab programming environment. To solve the equations of the method of Runge–Kutta–Fehlberga. It is assumed that the model will be presented in the form of a computer research program, which allows implements vat various hypotheses about the mechanism of the observed processes. Calculate the expected value of the basic indicators of gas exchange under giperkap Britain and hypoxia. The results of calculations as the nature of, and quantity is good enough co-agree with the data obtained in the studies on the testers. The audit on Adek-vatnost confirmed that the error calculation is within error of copper-to-biological experiments. The model can be used in the theoretical prediction of the dynamics of the respiratory reactions of the human body in a changed atmosphere.

In the last decade along with classical cytotoxic agents, antiangiogenic drugs have been actively used in cancer chemotherapy. They are not aimed at killing malignant cells, but at blocking the process of angiogenesis, i.e., the growth of new vessels in the tumor and its surrounding tissues. Agents that stimulate angiogenesis, in particular, vascular endothelial growth factor, are actively produced by tumor cells in the state of metabolic stress. It is believed that blocking of tumor neovascularization should lead to a shortage of nutrients flow to the tumor, and thus can stop, or at least significantly slow down its growth. Clinical practice on the use of first antiangiogenic drug bevacizumab has shown that in some cases such therapy does not influence the growth rate of the tumor, whereas for other types of malignant neoplasms antiangiogenic therapy has a high antitumor effect. However, it has been shown that along with successful slowing of tumor growth, therapy with bevacizumab can induce directed tumor progression to a more invasive, and therefore more lethal, type. These data require theoretical analysis and rationale for the evolutionary factors that lead to the observation of epithelial-mesenchymal transition. For this purpose we have developed a spatially distributed mathematical model of growth and antiangiogenic therapy of heterogeneous tumor consisting of two subpopulations of malignant cells. One of subpopulations possesses inherent characteristics of epithelial phenotype, i.e., low motility and high proliferation rate, the other one corresponds to mesenchymal phenotype having high motility and low proliferation rate. We have performed the investigation of competition between these subpopulations of heterogeneous tumor in the cases of tumor growth without therapy and under bevacizumab monotherapy. It is shown that constant use of antiangiogenic drug leads to an increase of the region in parameter space, where the dominance of mesenchymal phenotype takes place, i.e., within a certain range of parameters in the absence of therapy epithelial phenotype is dominant but during bevacizumab administration mesenchymal phenotype begins to dominate. This result provides a theoretical basis of the clinically observed directed tumor progression to more invasive type under antiangiogenic therapy.

The paper develops a new mathematical method of the joint signal and noise calculation at the Rice statistical distribution based on combing the maximum likelihood method and the method of moments. The calculation of the sough-for values of signal and noise is implemented by processing the sampled measurements of the analyzed Rician signal’s amplitude. The explicit equations’ system has been obtained for required signal and noise parameters and the results of its numerical solution are provided confirming the efficiency of the proposed technique. It has been shown that solving the two-parameter task by means of the proposed technique does not lead to the increase of the volume of demanded calculative resources if compared with solving the task in one-parameter approximation. An analytical solution of the task has been obtained for the particular case of small value of the signal-to-noise ratio. The paper presents the investigation of the dependence of the sought for parameters estimation accuracy and dispersion on the quantity of measurements in experimental sample. According to the results of numerical experiments, the dispersion values of the estimated sought-for signal and noise parameters calculated by means of the proposed technique change in inverse proportion to the quantity of measurements in a sample. There has been implemented a comparison of the accuracy of the soughtfor Rician parameters’ estimation by means of the proposed technique and by earlier developed version of the method of moments. The problem having been considered in the paper is meaningful for the purposes of Rician data processing, in particular, at the systems of magnetic-resonance visualization, in devices of ultrasonic visualization, at optical signals’ analysis in range-measuring systems, at radar signals’ analysis, as well as at solving many other scientific and applied tasks that are adequately described by the Rice statistical model.

Automatic recognition of personal identity by biometric features is based on unique peculiarities or characteristics of people. Biometric identification process consist in making of reference templates and comparison with new input data. Iris pattern recognition algorithms presents high accuracy and low identification errors percent on practice. Iris pattern advantages over other biometric features are determined by its high degree of freedom (nearly 249), excessive density of unique features and constancy. High recognition reliability level is very important because it provides search in big databases. Unlike one-to-one check mode that is applicable only to small calculation count it allows to work in one-to-many identification mode. Every biometric identification system appears to be probabilistic and qualitative characteristics description utilizes such parameters as: recognition accuracy, false acceptance rate and false rejection rate. These characteristics allows to compare identity recognition methods and asses the system performance under any circumstances. This article explains the mathematical model of iris pattern biometric identification and its characteristics. Besides, there are analyzed results of comparison of model and real recognition process. To make such analysis there was carried out the review of existing iris pattern recognition methods based on different unique features vector. The Python-based software package is described below. It builds-up probabilistic distributions and generates large test data sets. Such data sets can be also used to educate the identification decision making neural network. Furthermore, synergy algorithm of several iris pattern identification methods was suggested to increase qualitative characteristics of system in comparison with the use of each method separately.

Magnetic systems, in which due to competition between the direct Heisenberg exchange and the Dzyaloshinskii –Moriya interaction, magnetic vortex structures — skyrmions appear, were studied using the Metropolis algorithm.

The conditions for the nucleation and stable existence of magnetic skyrmions in two-dimensional magnetic films in the frame of the classical Heisenberg model were considered in the article. A thermal stability of skyrmions in a magnetic film was studied. The processes of the formation of various states in the system at different values of external magnetic fields were considered, various phases into which the Heisenberg spin system passes were recognized. The authors identified seven phases: paramagnetic, spiral, labyrinth, spiralskyrmion, skyrmion, skyrmion-ferromagnetic and ferromagnetic phases, a detailed analysis of the configurations is given in the article.

Two phase diagrams were plotted: the first diagram shows the behavior of the system at a constant $D$ depending on the values of the external magnetic field and temperature $(T, B)$, the second one shows the change of the system configurations at a constant temperature $T$ depending on the magnitude of the Dzyaloshinskii – Moriya interaction and external magnetic field: $(D, B)$.

The data from these numerical experiments will be used in further studies to determine the model parameters of the system for the formation of a stable skyrmion state and to develop methods for controlling skyrmions in a magnetic film.

The influence of the process of initiating a rapid local heat release near surface streamlined by supersonic gas (air) flow on the separation region that occurs during a fast turn of the flow was investigated. This surface consists of two planes that form obtuse angle when crossing, so that when flowing around the formed surface, the supersonic gas flow turns by a positive angle, which forms an oblique shock wave that interacts with the boundary layer and causes flow separation. Rapid local heating of the gas above the streamlined surface simulates long spark discharge of submicrosecond duration that crosses the flow. The gas heated in the discharge zone interacts with the separation region. The flow can be considered two-dimensional, so the numerical simulation is carried out in a two-dimensional formulation. Numerical simulation was carried out for laminar regime of flow using the sonicFoam solver of the OpenFOAM software package.

The paper describes a method for constructing a two-dimensional computational grid using hexagonal cells. A study of grid convergence has been carried out. A technique is given for setting the initial profiles of the flow parameters at the entrance to the computational domain, which makes it possible to reduce the computation time by reducing the number of computational cells. A method for non-stationary simulation of the process of rapid local heating of a gas is described, which consists in superimposing additional fields of increased pressure and temperature values calculated from the amount of energy deposited in oncoming supersonic gas flow on the corresponding fields of values obtained in the stationary case. The parameters of the energy input into the flow corresponding to the parameters of the electric discharge process, as well as the parameters of the oncoming flow, are close to the experimental values.

During analyzing numerical simulation data it was found that the initiation of rapid local heating leads to the appearance of a gas-dynamic perturbation (a quasi-cylindrical shock wave and an unsteady swirling flow), which, when interacting with the separation region, leads to a displacement of the separation point downstream. The paper considers the question of the influence of the energy spent on local heating of the gas, and of the position on the streamlined surface of the place of heating relative to the separation point, on the value of its maximum displacement.