Water hyacinth ( Eichhornia crassipes) is a rapid-growing freshwater vascular plant that has been used to remove heavy metals in contaminated water. But the transportation and distribution of the absorbed heavy metal in the plant are not clear. In this study, water hyacinth was exposed to cadmium (Cd, 10 microM, pulse) and then transferred to a Cd-free solution (chase). The Cd content in the tissues was measured, and the Cd-binding complexes were isolated and identified. We found that (1) in two days, up to 80% of the Cd in the solution was absorbed by the plant, and the Cd could not be released back to the growth solution in the chase period; (2) approximately 1 mg of Cd was accumulated in the water hyacinth/g of dry weight in this condition; (3) invading Cd was bound rapidly as the low-molecular-weight (LMW) complex serving as the transient form for further sequestration; (4) the LMW complex in water hyacinth contained no phytochelatins and was different from the LMW complex in fission yeast; (5) the Cd absorbed in the plant was essentially stored in the high-molecular-weight (HMW) form after 1 week; (6) a small fraction of the absorbed Cd was found in the upper part of the plant (stem and leaves) in the form of complexes; (7) the HMW complex was composed of phytochelatins PC 3 and PC 4 primarily, with only a small amount of PC 2; (8) a rare PC-related peptide was found in the HMW complex that might be derived from PC 3. These observations contribute to the further understanding of water hyacinth in serving as an efficient and reliable accumulator for heavy metals.

IEEE802.11s draft proposes a new medium access control (MAC) function-mesh deterministic access (MDA), which is mainly used for single-channel wireless mesh local area network (LAN). In single-channel environment, collisions between control packets and data packets may occur very often. In order to provide higher performance and network capacity for wireless mesh LAN, this article develops an algorithm for MDA to work well on multi-channel wireless mesh LAN. To reduce the hardware requirements in design, a mesh point (MP) only equips single transceiver to support multi-channel environment. To completely avoid the collision between control packets and data packets, the interval of the meshed delivery traffic indication message is first divided into contention period and data transmission period. We newly define a neighbor MP status table for MPs to support multi-channel environment. The mechanism of reserving MDA opportunity (MDAOP) adopts the four-way-handshaking mode to reduce hidden node problem; we propose channel load first random fit and multi-channel best fit mechanisms to select MDAOP. We also propose a multi-channel MDA (MMDA) algorithm to improve the overall performance of wireless mesh LAN in multi-channel environment. The theoretical analysis gives the upper limit of the throughput for MMDA. The simulation experiments clearly show the results in multi-channel wireless mesh LAN environment that MMDA performs better than the enhanced distributed channel access in throughput, average waiting time, and packet drop ratio both in the saturated and non-saturated mode.

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Abstract. The function of medium access control (MAC) protocol and the capacity of physical layer sufficiently affect the system performance in the wireless networks. In this research, we propose a MAC protocol based on direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) for the wireless networks to guarantee quality-of-service (QoS) which depend on physical layer information, named the cross layer time slot reservation (CLTSR) protocol. A channel is divided into control and data channels to transmit control and data packets in the corresponding control and data frames, respectively. The data frame is further subdivided into several time slots; each time slot can transmit different traffic types such as constant bit rate (CBR), variable bit rate (VBR), and available bit rate (ABR). Each station maintains the available spreading code (ASC) table to understand which time slots and spreading codes have been reserved. CLTSR will allocate time slots and the spreading code for the data frame by using the fixed time slot allocation (FTSA) or the mixed time slot allocation (MTSA). The QoS can be guaranteed by providing the reservation of time slots and the spreading code. A Markov model is applied to analyze the CLTSR DS-CDMA system; the analytical and simulation results show that the proposed CLTSR performs has been improved.