Identification and quantification of the antipsychotics risperidone,aripiprazole, pipamperone and their major metabolites in plasma using ultra‐high performance liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry

The antipsychotics risperidone, aripiprazole and pipamperone are frequently prescribed for the treatment in children with autism. The aim of this study was to validate an ultra‐high performance liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry method for the quantification of these antipsychotics in plasma. An ultra‐high performance liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry assay was developed for the determination of the drugs and metabolites. Gradient elution was performed on a reversed‐phase column with a mobile phase consisting of ammonium acetate, formic acid in methanol or in Milli‐Q ultrapure water at a flow rate of 0.5 mL/min. The method was validated according to the US Food and Drug Administration guidelines. The analytes were found to be stable enough after reconstitution and injection of only 5 μL improved the accuracy and precision in combination with the internal standard. Calibration curves of all five analytes were linear. All analytes were stable for at least 72 h in the autosampler and the high quality control of 9‐OH‐risperidone was stable for 48 h. The method allows quantification of all analytes. The advantage of this method is the combination of a minimal injection volume, a short run‐time, an easy sample preparation method and the ability to quantify all analytes in one run. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Organic Syntheses Without Solvent: Preparation of Alkoxyphthalimides and of Alkoxylamines

Alkoxyphthalimides are prepared by alkylation of N-hydroxyphthalimide under solid-liquid phase transfer catalysis without solvent. When conversion of alkoxyphthalimides into alkoxylamines is nearly complete, neat hydrazine hydrate is added at room temperature.     

A new level‐dependent coarse grid correction scheme for indefinite Helmholtz problems

In this paper, we construct and analyze a level‐dependent coarse grid correction scheme for indefinite Helmholtz problems. This adapted multigrid (MG) method is capable of solving the Helmholtz equation on the finest grid using a series of MG cycles with a grid‐dependent complex shift, leading to a stable correction scheme on all levels. It is rigorously shown that the adaptation of the complex shift throughout the MG cycle maintains the functionality of the two‐grid correction scheme, as no smooth modes are amplified in or added to the error. In addition, a sufficiently smoothing relaxation scheme should be applied to ensure damping of the oscillatory error components. Numerical experiments on various benchmark problems show the method to be competitive with or even outperform the current state‐of‐the‐art MG‐preconditioned Krylov methods, for example, complex shifted Laplacian preconditioned flexible GMRES. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Electrophoretic deposition of bacterial cells

The possibility to use alternating current electrophoretic deposition (AC-EPD) to deposit living cells in the form of Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli on stainless steel was assessed. The experimental results revealed that these bacteria can be successfully deposited on metallic surfaces from demineralized water and sucrose based solutions using asymmetric unbalanced electric fields. Cell viability of the deposited bacteria was influenced by the strain and deposition medium.     

A new statistical method for the automated detection of peaks in UV-DAD chromatograms of a sample mixture

One of the major issues within the context of the fully automated development of chromatographic methods consists of the automated detection and identification of peaks coming from complex samples such as multi-component pharmaceutical formulations or stability studies of these formulations. The same problem can also occur with plant materials or biological matrices. This step is thus critical and time-consuming, especially when a Design of Experiments (DOE) approach is used to generate chromatograms. The use of DOE will often maximize the changes of the analytical conditions in order to explore an experimental domain. Unfortunately, this generally provides very different and “unpredictable” chromatograms which can be difficult to interpret, thus complicating peak detection and peak tracking (i.e. matching peaks among all the chromatograms). In this context, Independent Components Analysis (ICA), a new statistically based signal processing methods was investigated to solve this problem. The ICA principle assumes that the observed signal is the resultant of several phenomena (known as sources) and that all these sources are statistically independent. Under those assumptions, ICA is able to recover the sources which will have a high probability of representing the constitutive components of a chromatogram. In the present study, ICA was successfully applied for the first time to HPLC–UV-DAD chromatograms and it was shown that ICA allows differentiation of noise and artifact components from those of interest by applying clustering methods based on high-order statistics computed on these components. Furthermore, on the basis of the described numerical strategy, it was also possible to reconstruct a cleaned chromatogram with minimum influence of noise and baseline artifacts. This can present a significant advance towards the objective of providing helpful tools for the automated development of liquid chromatography (LC) methods. It seems that analytical investigations could be shortened when using this type of methodologies.     

Closed bosonic strings in background gauge fields

The coupling to abelian background gauge fields of closed bosonic strings compactified on a torus is considered. There exist specific field configurations for which the theory cannot be defined consistently, in spite of the fact that the field equations of motion are then solved exactly. This critical behaviour is related to a breakdown of local and global world-sheet symmetries, as well as of spacetime unitarity. A physical interpretation of this phenomenon is proposed. The issue of spacetime duality is also discussed. This symmetry is shown to be partially broken for generic background field configurations.     

Continuous bordering of matrices and continuous matrix decompositions

Summary. Let be the set of all real -matrices of rank . We prove that for there are no continuous vector fields such that the bordered matrix is regular for all . This result has some relevance for the numerical analysis of steady state bifurcation. As a by-product we show that there is no nonvanishing continuous vector field with for all , where is the set of all matrices of rank deficiency one. This implies that there is no singular value decomposition of depending continuously on in any matrix set which contains . As another application we prove that in general there is no global analytic singular value decomposition for analytic matrix valued functions of more than one real variable. Received October 6, 1993 / Revised version received July 18, 1994