An industrial research area of high activity in recent years has been the development of pressure sensitive adhesive (PSA) products that do not interfere with the processing of post-consumer waste. The problem of PSA contamination is arguably the most important technical challenge in expanding the use of recycled fiber. The presence of PSAs in recovered paper creates problems that reduce the efficiency of recycling and papermaking operations and diminish product quality. The widespread use of PSAs engineered to avoid these problems, often referred to as environmentally benign PSAs, could greatly increase the commercial viability of utilizing secondary fiber. Much of the research efforts in this area have focused on the development of PSAs that are designed for enhanced removal with cleaning equipment currently utilized by recycling plants. Most removal occurs at the pressure screens with the size and shape of residual contaminants in the process being the primary criteria for their separation. A viable approach for developing environmentally benign PSAs is their reformulation to inhibit fragmentation. The reduction of adhesives to small particles occurs almost exclusively during repulping; a process in which water and mechanical energy are used to swell and reduce paper products to their constituent fiber. Engineering PSA …

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For this study, a high throughput method for identifying and testing regulatory elements was examined. In addition, the validity of promoters predicted by FirstEF was tested. It was found that by combining computer based promoter and first exon predictions from FirstEF (Davuluri et al., 2001) with PCR-based cloning to generate luciferase reporter constructs, and by testing reporter activity in cultured mammalian cells plated in a 96 well format one could identify promoter activity in a relatively high throughput manner. The data generated in this study suggest that FirstEF predictions are sometimes incorrect. Therefore, having a strategy for defining which FirstEF predicted promoters to test first may accelerate the process. Initially testing promoters that are at a confirmed transcription start site for a gene, at a possible alternate transcription start site or in a region of conserved sequence would be the best candidates, while promoters predicted in gene desert regions may not be as easy to confirm. The luciferase assay lent itself very well to the high throughput search, however the subcloning did not always go smoothly. The numerous steps that this traditional subcloning method requires were time consuming and increased the opportunities for errors. A faster method that skips many …