Interference of non-specific peroxidases in the fluorescence detection of superoxide radical by hydroethidine oxidation: a new assay for H<Subscript>2</Subscript>O<Subscript>2</Subscript>

The present study shows that hydroethidine (HE), used for in-vivo qualitative fluorescent detection of superoxide anion, can be also oxidized by H₂O₂ via non-specific peroxidase (horseradish peroxidase and myeloperoxidase) catalysis, forming fluorescent oxidation products. These products give broad excitation/emission peaks (490–495/580–600 nm) near the excitation/emission peaks (475/580 nm) of the HE-superoxide oxidation product, and this may pose serious interference problems to the fluorescent detection of the superoxide radical. The study suggests cautionary use of the HE-superoxide anion assay mainly for detection of reactive oxygen species. A byproduct of this study was the development of a simple and sensitive HE-horseradish peroxidase assay for the in-vitro quantification of H₂O₂ in biological tissues with a sensitivity of 1 mol L^–1.     

New sufficient convergence conditions for the secant method

We provide new sufficient conditions for the convergence of the secant method to a locally unique solution of a nonlinear equation in a Banach space. Our new idea uses Lipschitz-type and center-Lipschitz-type instead of just Lipschitz-type conditions on the divided difference of the operator involved. It turns out that this way our error bounds are more precise than the earlier ones and under our convergence hypotheses we can cover cases where the earlier conditions are violated.     

Inventory Control for Supply Chains with Service Level Constraints: A Synergy between Large Deviations and Perturbation Analysis

We consider a model of a supply chain consisting of n production facilities in tandem and producing a single product class. External demand is met from the finished goods inventory maintained in front of the most downstream facility (stage 1); unsatisfied demand is backlogged. We adopt a base-stock production policy at each stage of the supply chain, according to which the facility at stage i produces if inventory falls below a certain level w _i and idles otherwise. We seek to optimize the hedging vector w=(w ₁,...,w _n ) to minimize expected inventory costs at all stages subject to maintaining the stockout probability at stage 1 below a prescribed level (service level constraint). We make rather general modeling assumptions on demand and production processes that include autocorrelated stochastic processes. We solve this stochastic optimization problem by combining analytical (large deviations) and sample path-based (perturbation analysis) techniques. We demonstrate that there is a natural synergy between these two approaches.     

A New Class of Improved Convex Underestimators for Twice Continuously Differentiable Constrained NLPs

We present a new class of convex underestimators for arbitrarily nonconvex and twice continuously differentiable functions. The underestimators are derived by augmenting the original nonconvex function by a nonlinear relaxation function. The relaxation function is a separable convex function, that involves the sum of univariate parametric exponential functions. An efficient procedure that finds the appropriate values for those parameters is developed. This procedure uses interval arithmetic extensively in order to verify whether the new underestimator is convex. For arbitrarily nonconvex functions it is shown that these convex underestimators are tighter than those generated by the BB method. Computational studies complemented with geometrical interpretations demonstrate the potential benefits of the proposed improved convex underestimators.     

Complex formation in aqueous medium of partially hydrolysed oat cereal proteins with sodium stearoyl-2 lactylate (SSL) lipid surfactant and implications for bile acids activity

Sodium stearoyl-2 lactylate (SSL) lipid surfactant molecules specifically bind partially hydrolysed oat proteins in aqueous medium and significantly enhance the dispersion stability of oat cereal preparations. The proposed complexation is composition dependent and a greater understanding of the role of both oat proteins and lipid surfactant in the effect was gained with data from high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC–UV), viscometry and differential scanning micro calorimetry. The effect of the lipid surfactant on the degree of association is primarily governed by the conformational activity of oat protein molecules related to the extent of protein hydrolysed state, as well as protein unfolded and subsequent aggregated structures. SSL does not dissociate oat proteins into subunits or destroy important hydrophobic contacts already stabilising the protein molecules. Although the exact mode of association is unknown, the present study demonstrates that such interactions occur in a specific manner and suggest selectivity of oat proteins for individual fatty acids. The effect of various amounts of bile acids on SSL–oat protein interaction was also investigated, as a first attempt to investigate the role of lipid surfactant molecules in the known cholesterol-lowering action of oat cereal ingredients and to elucidate favourable conditions by which oat cereal can elicit hypocholesterolemic effects.     

Gauge field fluctuations and first-order phase transition in color superconductivity

We study the gauge field fluctuations in dense quark matter and determine the temperature of the induced first-order phase transition to the color-superconducting phase in weak coupling. We find that the local approximation of the coupling between the gauge potential and the order parameter, employed in the Ginzburg-Landau theory, has to be modified by restoring the full momentum dependence of the polarization function of gluons in the superconducting phase.     

Estimation of the four-wave mixing noise probability-density function by the multicanonical Monte Carlo method

The performance of high-powered wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) optical networks can be severely degraded by four-wave-mixing- (FWM-) induced distortion. The multicanonical Monte Carlo method (MCMC) is used to calculate the probability-density function (PDF) of the decision variable of a receiver, limited by FWM noise. Compared with the conventional Monte Carlo method previously used to estimate this PDF, the MCMC method is much faster and can accurately estimate smaller error probabilities. The method takes into account the correlation between the components of the FWM noise, unlike the Gaussian model, which is shown not to provide accurate results.