A potential pentaerythritol-based bio-lubricants from 10-undecylenic acid: Its physico-chemical assessment

In this study, renewable, non-toxic, sulphur free bio-lubricants are synthesized as alternative for fossil fuels. We utilized a bio-derived 10-undecylenic acid (UDA) and pentaerythritol (PE) as raw materials to synthesize bio-lubricants by two-step chemical processes like esterification and followed by epoxidation reactions. And achieved a UDA-PE epoxide yielded 73.4%. The formation of UDA-PE ester and UDA-PE epoxide was confirmed by spectral analysis such as NMR (¹H and ¹³C), FTIR and mass spectra, Physico-chemical and basic lubricant properties by standard American Society for Testing and Materials methods (ASTM). The results showed that the products of UDA-PE ester and UDA-PE epoxide had high viscosity index (262 and 200), good pour points (−29 °C to −15 °C), high flash points (296 °C and 301 °C) respectively and these met the ISO VG (International Organization for Standardization-Viscosity grade) 22 and 220 standard values. In general, both synthesized products are plausible to be employed as bio-lubricant in industrial application.     

New azo derivative and their divalent metal ion complexes: Synthesis,characterization, and evaluation of their antibacterial activity

A new azo derivative 3-((4-H1benzo[d]imidazole-2-yl)-4-hydroxy benzaldehyde was prepared by reaction of benzimidazole derivative with 4-hydroxy benzaldehyde. The all-final compounds were diagnosis and determined the structure of these compounds using a variety of spectroscopic methods, including 1H-NMR, FT-IR, UV-Vis, mass spectrometry magnetic susceptibility and atomic absorption spectroscopy. The results showed that all metal ion complexes have an octahedral shape. Antimicrobial activity of the ligand and its metal ion complex had been tested against some selected microorganism such Streptococcus pyogenes a species of Gram-positive and Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a common bacterium gram-negative, all prepared compounds displayed a strong antibacterial activity. Taken together, the results of the current study indicated that the new Azo derivative and their divalent metal ion complexes could be used as a future strategy for other biomedical applications.     

Irradiation of Fe–Mn@SiO2 with microwave energy enhanced its Fenton-like catalytic activity for the degradation of methylene blue

Research on Chemical Intermediates - The application of microwave energy in the synthesis of catalytic materials has been indicated to induce desirable effects that lead to improved activity....     

Prediction of an outcome using NETwork Clusters (NET-C)

Birth weight is a key consequence of environmental exposures and metabolic alterations and can influence lifelong health. While a number of methods have been used to examine associations of trace element (including essential nutrients and toxic metals) concentrations or metabolite concentrations with a health outcome, birth weight, studies evaluating how the coexistence of these factors impacts birth weight are extremely limited. Here, we present a novel algorithm NETwork Clusters (NET-C), to improve the prediction of outcome by considering the interactions of features in the network and then apply this method to predict birth weight by jointly modelling trace element and cord blood metabolite data. Specifically, by using trace element and/or metabolite subnetworks as groups, we apply group lasso to estimate birth weight. We conducted statistical simulation studies to examine how both sample size and correlations between grouped features and the outcome affect prediction performance. We showed that in terms of prediction error, our proposed method outperformed other methods such as (a) group lasso with groups defined by hierarchical clustering, (b) random forest regression and (c) neural networks. We applied our method to data ascertained as part of the New Hampshire Birth Cohort Study on trace elements, metabolites and birth outcomes, adjusting for other covariates such as maternal body mass index (BMI) and enrollment age. Our proposed method can be applied to a variety of similarly structured high-dimensional datasets to predict health outcomes.     

An ensemble learning framework for potential miRNA-disease association prediction with positive-unlabeled data

To explore the pathogenic mechanisms of MicroRNA (miRNA) on diverse diseases, many researchers have concentrated on discovering the potential associations between miRNA and disease using machine learning methods. However, the prediction accuracy of supervised machine learning methods is limited by lacking of experimentally-validated uncorrelated miRNA-disease pairs. Without these negative samples, training a highly accurate model is much more difficult. Different from traditional miRNA-disease prediction models using randomly selected unknown samples as negative training samples, we propose an ensemble learning framework to solve this positive-unlabeled (PU) learning problem. The framework incorporates two steps, i.e., a novel semi-supervised Kmeans (SS-Kmeans) to extract reliable negative samples from unknown miRNA-disease pairs and subagging method to generate diverse training sample sets to make full use of those reliable negative samples for ensemble learning. Combined with effective random vector functional link (RVFL) network as prediction model, the proposed framework showed superior prediction accuracy comparing with other popular approaches. A case study on lung and gastric neoplasms further confirms the framework’s efficacy at identifying miRNA disease associations.     

Synthesis and evaluation of N-(4-(substituted)-3-(trifluoromethyl) phenyl) isobutyramides and their N-ethyl analogous as anticancer,anti-angiogenic & antioxidant agents: In vitro and in silico analysis

N-(4-(substituted)-3-(trifluoromethyl) phenyl) isobutyramides and their N-ethyl analogues (flutamides) are versatile scaffolds with a wide spectrum of biological activities. A series of new N-(4-(substituted)-3-(trifluoromethyl) phenyl) isobutyramides (8a-t) and their N-ethyl analogous (9a-t) were synthesized and characterized. The inhibitory potential of the synthesized compounds on the viability of three human cancer cell lines HEP3BPN 11 (liver), MDA-MB 453 (breast), and HL 60 (leukemia) were assessed. Among all the compounds 8 L, 8q, 9n and 9p showed higher inhibitory activity on the viability of HL 60 than the standard methotrexate. These lead molecules were then tested for their potential to inhibit the activity of proangiogenic cytokines. The compound 9n showed significantly better inhibition against two cytokines viz. TNFα and Leptin as compared to the standard suramin, while 9p has activity comparable to suramin against IGF1, VEGF, FGFb, and Leptin. The 8q is found to be strong antiangiogenic agent against IGF1, VEGF and TGFβ; while 8 L has showed activity against TNFα, VEGF, and Leptin inhibition. Furthermore antioxidant potential of 8a–t and 9a-t compounds was screened using DPPH, OH and SOR radical scavenging activities. The OH radical scavenging activity of 8c and DPPH activities of 9n as well as 9o are significant as compared to respective standards ascorbic acid and α-tocopherol. The 8c, 9p and 9 h have also exhibited potential antioxidant activity. Additionally, we present in silico molecular docking data to provide the structural rationale of observed TNFα inhibition against newly synthesized compounds. Overall, the synthesized flutamide derivatives have not only anticancer activity, but also possess dual inhibitory effect (anti-angiogenesis and antioxidant) and hence can act as a promising avenue to develop further anticancer agents.     

Structural and immunogenicity analysis of reconstructed ancestral and consensus P48/45 for cross-species anti malaria transmission-blocking vaccine

The development of the anti-malaria vaccine holds a promising future in malaria control. One of the anti-malaria vaccine strategies known as the transmission-blocking vaccine (TBV) is to inhibit the parasite transmission between humans and mosquitoes by targeting the parasite gametocyte. Previously, we found that P48/45 included in the 6-Cysteine protein family shared by Plasmodium sp. We also detected vaccine properties possessed by all human-infecting Plasmodium and could be used as a cross-species anti-malaria vaccine. In this study, we investigated the efficacy of P48/45 through the ancestral and consensus reconstruction approach. P48/45 phylogenetic and time tree analysis was done by RAXML and BEAST2. GRASP server and Ugene software were used to reconstruct ancestral and consensus sequences, respectively. The protein structural prediction was made by using a psipred and Rosetta program. Each protein characteristic of P48/45 was analyzed by assessing hydrophobicity and Post-Translational Modification sites. Meanwhile, the Epitope sequence for B-cell, T-cell, and HLA was determined using an immunoinformatics approach. Lastly, molecular docking simulation was done to determine native binding interactions of P48/45-P230. The result showed a distinct protein characteristic of ancestral and consensus sequences. The immunogenicity analysis revealed the number of epitopes in the ancestral sequence is greater than the consensus sequence. The study also found a conserved epitope located in the binding site and consists of specific Post-Translational Modification sites. Hence, our research provides detailed insight into ancestral and consensus P48/45 efficacy for the cross-species anti-malaria vaccine.     

Heat capacity and thermodynamic functions of nano-TiO2 rutile in relation to bulk-TiO2 rutile

Several conflicting reports have suggested that the thermodynamic properties of materials change with respect to particle size. To investigate this, we have measured the constant pressure heat capacities of three 7 nm TiO₂ rutile samples containing varying amounts of surface-adsorbed water using a combination of adiabatic and semi-adiabatic calorimetric methods. These samples have a high degree of chemical, phase, and size purity determined by rigorous characterization. Molar heat capacities were measured from T = (0.5 to 320) K, and data were fitted to a sum of theoretical functions in the low temperature (T < 15 K) range, orthogonal polynomials in the mid temperature range (10 > T/K > 75), and a combination of Debye and Einstein functions in the high temperature range (T > 35 K). These fits were used to generate $\mathit{Cp}\text{,}{\text{m}}^{\circ }$, ${\mathrm{\Delta }}_0^{\text{T}}{S}_{\text{m}}^{\circ }$, ${\mathrm{\Delta }}_0^{\text{T}}{H}_{\text{m}}^{\circ }$, and ${\phi }_{\text{m}}^{\circ }$ values at selected temperatures between (0.5 and 300) K for all samples. Standard molar entropies at T = 298.15 K were calculated to be (62.066, 59.422, and 58.035) J · K⁻¹ · mol⁻¹ all with a standard uncertainty of 0.002·${\mathrm{\Delta }}_0^{\text{T}}{S}_{\text{m}}^{\circ }$ for samples TiO₂·0.361H₂O, TiO₂·0.296H₂O, and TiO₂·0.244H₂O, respectively. These and other thermodynamic values were then corrected for water content to yield bare nano-TiO₂ thermodynamic properties at T = 298.15 K, and we show that the resultant thermodynamic properties of anhydrous TiO₂ rutile nanoparticles equal those of bulk TiO₂ rutile within experimental uncertainty. Thus we show quantitatively that the difference in thermodynamic properties between bulk and nano-TiO₂ must be attributed to surface adsorbed water.     

A DFT study of formaldehyde adsorption on functionalized graphene nanoribbons

Density functional theory (DFT) based ab initio calculations were done to monitor the formaldehyde (CHOH) adsorptive behavior on pristine and Ni-decorated graphene sheet. Structural optimization indicates that the formaldehyde molecule is physisorbed on the pristine sheet via partly weak van der Waals attraction having the adsorption energy of about −15.7 kcal/mol. Metal decorated sheet is able to interact with the CHOH molecule, so that single Ni atoms prefer to bind strongly at the bridge site of graphene and each metal atom bound on sheet may adsorb up to four CHOH. The findings also show that the Ni decoration on graphene surface results in some changes in electronic properties of the sheet and its E_g is remained unchanged after adsorption of CHOH molecules. It is noteworthy to say that no bond cleavage was observed for the adsorption of CHOH on Ni-decorated graphene.     

Binary operations and lattice structure for a model of matching with contracts

We consider a restricted model of many-to-one matching with contracts and we order the set of stable allocations according both to the unanimous-for-doctors partial ordering and Blair’s partial ordering for hospitals. We define two binary operations to calculate the least upper bound and greatest lower bound for each pair of elements of this set in a simple way. By using these operations, we show that the set of stable allocations has dual lattice structures, thus reflecting an expected counterposition of interests between both sides of the market.