A ship travelling in sub-freezing conditions may encounter sea spray, rain, fog or snow freezing onto various parts of it. Such ship icing is a well-known threat for those individuals who have served on ships operating in a cold marine climate. As de-icing techniques may be energy consuming, accurate prediction of icing is also desirable from a financial point of view. Throughout the last 60 years ...

The main focus of this thesis is the diagnostics of ion beams in helicon plasma devices with expanding magnetic field, and running in an inductive mode. These ion beams are closely connected to the concept of current-free double layers (CFDL). We started by investigating how to best interpret the measurements from a Retarding Field Energy Analyzer (RFEA) through 3-dimensional particle-in-cell ...

Antibiotic resistance is a topic that concerns everyone, and by 2050 deaths due to antibiotic resistant bacteria may surpass number of deaths due to cancer. The OXA-class of antibiotic resistance enzymes is a formidable threat, but has not received the same attention as other resistance enzymes. The goal of the project was to understand antibiotic resistance enzymes at an atomic scale and to develop ...

With the accelerated advances in sequencing technology the last decade, the field of metagenomics has progressed immensely. Sampling and sequencing of metagenomic data is now prevalent, and publicly available data sets from mundane soil and water environments to exotic niche habitats such as geothermal hot springs are readily available through sequence data repositories such as the European Nucleotide ...

With pharma R & D witnessing rising cost, high attrition rates and an overall decline in productivity in recent times, newer approaches are needed for more efficient early phase drug discovery. This thesis describes a new approach, “biofocussed chemoprospecting”. The essence of the approach is to use diverse, yet “bio-like” compounds for efficient hit-finding, along with property filtering and ...

Enzymes are protein molecules that accelerate, or “catalyze”, specific chemical reactions. The reacting molecules, or substrates, bind to the enzyme which then enables their effective conversion into different product molecules. Virtually all metabolic processes in the cell need enzymes to occur at speeds fast enough to maintain life. The kinases are a large group of phosphotransferases, i.e. enzymes ...

Bioinformatics has seen an extreme data growth in later years due to the reduction in cost per megabase of sequencing, which today is around 1/400,000th of the cost in 2001. This reduction in cost enables new types of studies, such as searching for novel enzymes in marine environments using metagenomic approaches. However, it also leads to an increase in volume of data, which shifts overall cost ...

Synergistic theoretical and experimental approaches to challenging chemical problems have become more and more widespread, due to the availability of efficient and accurate ab initio quantum chemical models. Limitations to such an approach do, however, still exist. The vast majority of chemical phenomena happens in complex environments, where the molecule of interest can interact with a large number ...

This thesis focuses on metallo-β-lactamases (MBLs) enzymes that break down a wide variety of antibiotics. Bacteria harboring genes expressing MBLs are antibiotic resistant. If the MBL genes are found on mobile genetic elements, the spread of the genes between bacteria becomes easier. To date, there are no MBL inhibitors available for blocking the enzyme activity, and thus there is an urgent need to ...

The research focuses on the characterization of wind flow over complex terrain of Nygårdsfjell and numerical wind flow modelling. In the context to research focus, the main contributions of this research thesis are within the following areas: Characterization of wind flow at the Nygårdsfjell wind farm, situated in the arctic circle in Norway. Wind data is collected from the anemometers installed on ...