Production of Xylose from Meranti Wood Sawdust by Dilute Acid Hydrolysis

Xylitol production by bioconversion of xylose can be economically interesting if the raw material can be recovered from a cheap lignocellulosic biomass (LCB). Meranti wood sawdust (MWS) is a renewable and low-cost LCB that can be used as a promising and economic source of xylose, a starting raw material for the manufacture of several specialty chemicals, especially xylitol. This study aimed to optimize the hydrolysis process of MWS and to determine the influence of temperature, H₂SO₄ concentration, and residence time on xylose release and on by-product formation (glucose, arabinose, acetic acid, furfural, hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), and lignin degradation products (LDPs)). Batch hydrolysis was conducted under various operating conditions, and response surface methodology was adopted to achieve the highest xylose yield. Xylose production was highly affected by temperature, acid concentration, and residence time. The optimum temperature, acid concentration, and time were determined to be 124 °C, 3.26 %, and 80 min, respectively. Under these optimum conditions, xylose yield and selectivity were attained at 90.6 % and 4.05 g/g, respectively.     

Water treatment: functional nanomaterials and applications from adsorption to photodegradation

Global efforts for engineering desired materials which are able to treat the water sources still are ongoing in the bench level methods. Considering adsorbent and photocatalytic materials as the main reliable candidates still are encountering with struggles because of many challenges that restrict their large-scale application. This review comprehensively considered the recent advanced materials water treatment methods which involve to magnetic, activated carbon, carbon nanotubes (CNTs), graphene (G), graphene oxide (GO), (Graphene) quantum dots, carbon nanorods, carbon nano-onions, and reduced graphene oxide (RGO), zeolite, silica and clay-based nanomaterials. The adsorption and photocatalytic properties of these nanomaterials introduced them as highly potent option for heavy metal ions and organic dyes removal and photocatalytic degradation. High specific surface area in conjugation with presenting higher kinetics of adsorption and decomposition are the main characteristics of these materials which make them appropriate to treat wastewater even in ultralow concentration of the pollutants. Considering the mechanistic aspects of the adsorption and photocatalytic decomposition process, challenges and opportunities were other subjects that have been highlighted for the discussed nanomaterials. In term of the adsorption approaches, the mechanism of adsorptions and their influence on the maximum adsorption capacity were discussed and also for photocatalyst approach the radical active spices and their role in kinetic and efficiency of the organic pollutant decomposition were provided a deep discussion.     

Total synthesis of deamido bleomycin a(2), the major catabolite of the antitumor agent bleomycin

Metabolic inactivation of the antitumor antibiotic bleomycin is believed to be mediated exclusively via the action of bleomycin hydrolase, a cysteine proteinase that is widely distributed in nature. While the spectrum of antitumor activity exhibited by the bleomycins is believed to reflect the anatomical distribution of bleomycin hydrolase within the host, little has been done to characterize the product of the putative inactivation at a chemical or biochemical level. The present report describes the synthesis of deamidobleomycin demethyl A(2) (3) and deamido bleomycin A(2) (4), as well as the respective aglycones. These compounds were all accessible via the key intermediate N(alpha)-Boc-N(beta)-[1-amino-3(S)-(4-amino-6-carboxy-5-methylpyrimidin-2-yl)propion-3-yl]-(S)-beta-aminoalanine tert-butyl ester (16). Synthetic deamido bleomycin A(2) was shown to be identical to the product formed by treatment of bleomycin A(2) with human bleomycin hydrolase, as judged by reversed-phase HPLC analysis and (1)H NMR spectroscopy. Deamido bleomycin A(2) was found to retain significant DNA cleavage activity in DNA plasmid relaxation assays and had the same sequence selectivity of DNA cleavage as bleomycin A(2). The most significant alteration of function noted in this study was a reduction in the ability of deamido bleomycin A(2) to mediate double-strand DNA cleavage, relative to that produced by BLM A(2).     

Rapidity density distributions in antiproton-proton collisions

Data on the density of charged particles in rapidity space for annihilation and non-annihilation p?p interactions at 7.3 and 12 GeV/c are reported. It is shown that the central rapidity density for non-annihilation processes is a simple linear function of $\text{ln}\text{(}\text{s}\text{)}$ from these low energies up to p?p collider energies ($\text{s}\text{=540}\text{GeV}$). Significant differences in density distributions for p?p and e^?e⁺ annihilations at comparable energies are found.     

Practical aspects of shimming a high resolution magic angle spinning probe

High resolution magic angle spinning (HRMAS) has become an extremely versatile tool to study heterogeneous systems. HRMAS relies on magic angle spinning of the sample to average out to zero magnetic susceptibility differences in the sample and to obtain resonance linewidths approaching those of liquid state NMR. Shimming such samples therefore becomes an important issue. By analyzing the different sources of magnetic field perturbations present in a sample under MAS conditions, we propose a simple protocol to obtain optimum shim settings in HRMAS. In the case of aqueous samples, we show that the lock level cannot be used as a reliable indicator of the quality of the shims at high spinning speeds. This effect is explained by the presence of temperature gradients imparted by the sample rotation.     

Ambient noise cross correlation in free space: theoretical approach

It has been experimentally demonstrated that the Green's function between two points could be recovered using the cross-correlation function of the ambient noise measured at these two points. This paper investigates the theory behind this result in the simple case of a homogeneous medium with attenuation.     

On quadratic fields with large 3-rank

Davenport and Heilbronn defined a bijection between classes of binary cubic forms and classes of cubic fields, which has been used to tabulate the latter. We give a simpler proof of their theorem then analyze and improve the table-building algorithm. It computes the multiplicities of the general cubic discriminants (real or imaginary) up to in time and space , or more generally in time and space for a freely chosen positive . A variant computes the -ranks of all quadratic fields of discriminant up to with the same time complexity, but using only units of storage. As an application we obtain the first real quadratic fields with , and prove that is the smallest imaginary quadratic field with -rank equal to .

     

High‐throughput characterization of pattern formation in symmetric diblock copolymer films

Surface‐pattern formation in thin block copolymer films was investigated by utilizing a high‐throughput methodology to validate the combinatorial measurement approach and to demonstrate the value of the combinatorial method for scientific investigation. We constructed measurement libraries from images of subregions of block copolymer films having gradients in film thickness and a range of molecular mass, M. A single gradient film covers a wide range of film morphologies and contains information equivalent to a large number of measurements of films having a fixed thickness, h. Notably, the scale of the surface patterns is generally much larger than the molecular dimensions so that the interpretation of the patterns is more subtle than ordering in bulk block copolymer materials, and there is no predictive theory of this type of surface‐pattern formation. We observed a succession of surface patterns that repeat across the film with increasing h [extended smooth regions, regions containing circular islands, labyrinthine (“spinodal”) patterns, holes, and smooth regions again]. The extended smooth regions and the labyrinthine patterns appear to be novel features revealed by our combinatorial study, and these patterns occurred as bands of h that were quantized by integral multiples of the bulk lamellar period, L_o. The magnitude of the height gradient influenced the width of the bands, and the smooth regions occupied an increasing fraction of the film‐surface area with an increasing film gradient. The average size of the spinodal patterns, λ, was found to scale as λ ～ L or λ ～ M^?1.65 and reached a limiting size at long annealing times. The hole and island features had a size comparable to λ, and their size likewise decreased with increasing M. The smooth regions were attributed to an increase in the surface‐chain density in the outer brushlike block copolymer layer with increasing h, and the scaling of λ with M was interpreted in terms of the increasing surface elasticity with M. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Polym Sci Part B: Polym Phys 39: 2141–2158, 2001