Graduate Research Symposium 2015

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    Quantification and a Molecular Dynamics Study of Viral Membrane Lipids through Plasmon Coupling Microscopy
    (2015-03-31) Feizpour, Amin; Reinhard, Björn
    Phosphatidylserine (PS) and monosialotetrahexosylganglioside (G_M1) are examples of two host-derived lipids in the membrane of enveloped virus particles that are known to contribute to virus attachment, uptake, and ultimately dissemination. A quantitative characterization of their contribution to the functionality of the virus requires information about their relative concentrations in the viral membrane. Here, a gold nanoparticle (NP) binding assay for probing relative PS and G_M1 lipid concentrations in the outer leaflet of different HIV-1 and Ebola virus-like particles (VLPs) using sample sizes of less than 3×10^6 particles is introduced. The assay evaluates both scattering intensity and resonance wavelength and determines relative NP densities through plasmon coupling as a measure for the target lipid concentrations in the NP-labeled VLP membrane. In addition, the mechanical properties of the viral membrane have been found to be contributing to the efficient reproduction cycle of the virus. Membrane fluidity which is a function of temperature and membrane composition is one of the crucial factors in viral activity. We have used temporally-resolved microscopy on silver NPs to track these molecular dynamics.
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    Symmetry breaking and friction in few layer phosphorene
    (2015-03-31) Christopher, Jason; Koenig, Steven; Ziletti, Angelo; Wen, Bo; Han, Vitto; Dean, Cory; Özyilmaz, Barbaros; Swan, Anna; Goldberg, Bennett
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    Recursive Hardware-as-a-Service (rHaaS) and Fast Provisioning
    (2015-03-31) Tikale, Sahil; Reavey, Mike; Kamfonik, Laura; Li, Quentin; Denhardt, Ian; Hennessey, Jason; Krieger, Orran
    Hardware as a Service (HaaS) is a new service being developed by the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) to allow physical servers to be allocated to clients in the same way that virtual servers are in existing IaaS clouds. This poster describes the new recursive HaaS project and the fast provisioning customization we are developing. Recursive HaaS allows a HaaS service to be layered on top of an existing one. It will allow testing of new features at performance and scale without affecting the production service. It will also allow clients to host their own HaaS on top of a base HaaS to provide, potentially customized, services to their users. An example customization we are developing is a fast provisioning service that can be used between tenants that have some degree of trust in each other. It will allow nodes to be moved between customers (and a service installed) in seconds, rather than the minutes required by base HaaS.