Ultrafast,electric field-induced fingers in an anticlinic liquid crystal

Propagating fingers of synclinic liquid crystalline phase were observed to invade the anticlinic phase for applied electric fields E larger than a characteristic threshold field E_th. The front velocity was found to be highly non-linear in E, with enormous velocities of at least 10 cm s^-1, and perhaps as high as 400 cm s^-1 for the maximum applied field. These are by far the largest velocities ever observed for a liquid crystal. The results are discussed theoretically, including the possibilities of a field-dependent molecular interaction coefficient and shear thinning.     

Synthesis and characterization of 4‐vinyl pyridine‐grafted Teflon‐PFA film for water technologies

To get highly reactive polymeric materials for selective studies of enzyme immobilization, water purification, separation, and enrichment technologies, we attempted to graft 4‐vinyl pyridine (4‐VP) onto Teflon‐PFA by simultaneous γ‐ray initiation. The resulting graft copolymers were quaternized by treatment with some alkylating agents. Optimum conditions for grafting were evaluated through the variation of the total dose of radiation, the amount of water, and the monomer concentration. The effect of the solvent composition (H₂O/MeOH) was also studied. In the presence of MeOH, grafting occurred less often and was nonselective as 4‐VP was incorporated on both sides in comparison with highly selective grafting in an aqueous medium. The percentages of the grafting, total conversion, and grafting efficiency and the rates of the polymerization, grafting, and homopolymerization were also evaluated. Some other monomers such as methacrylic acid, methyl methacrylate, maleic acid, acrylonitrile, and vinyl imidazole were not incorporated onto the backbone film under the optimum grafting reaction conditions evaluated for the grafting of 4‐VP. Although some grafting occurred, the graft yield was too low to be considered of any significance. The grafted films were quaternized with benzyl chloride, and quaternized and unquaternized films were used for the immobilization of lipase. The former showed high activity with lipase and has potential for development as a bioreactor. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Polym Sci A: Polym Chem 38: 4506–4518, 2000     

Potential Antiviral Action of Alkaloids

Viral infections and outbreaks have become a major concern and are one of the main causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. The development of successful antiviral therapeutics and vaccines remains a daunting challenge. The discovery of novel antiviral agents is a public health emergency, and extraordinary efforts are underway globally to identify safe and effective treatments for different viral diseases. Alkaloids are natural phytochemicals known for their biological activities, many of which have been intensively studied for their broad-spectrum of antiviral activities against different DNA and RNA viruses. The purpose of this review was to summarize the evidence supporting the efficacy of the antiviral activity of plant alkaloids at half-maximum effective concentration (EC₅₀) or half-maximum inhibitory concentration (IC₅₀) below 10 μM and describe the molecular sites most often targeted by natural alkaloids acting against different virus families. This review highlights that considering the devastating effects of virus pandemics on humans, plants, and animals, the development of high efficiency and low-toxicity antiviral drugs targeting these viruses need to be developed. Furthermore, it summarizes the current research status of alkaloids as the source of antiviral drug development, their structural characteristics, and antiviral targets. Overall, the influence of alkaloids at the molecular level suggests a high degree of specificity which means they could serve as potent and safe antiviral agents waiting for evaluation and exploitation.     

An Overview of Variational Autoencoders for Source Separation,Finance, and Bio-Signal Applications

Autoencoders are a self-supervised learning system where, during training, the output is an approximation of the input. Typically, autoencoders have three parts: Encoder (which produces a compressed latent space representation of the input data), the Latent Space (which retains the knowledge in the input data with reduced dimensionality but preserves maximum information) and the Decoder (which reconstructs the input data from the compressed latent space). Autoencoders have found wide applications in dimensionality reduction, object detection, image classification, and image denoising applications. Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) can be regarded as enhanced Autoencoders where a Bayesian approach is used to learn the probability distribution of the input data. VAEs have found wide applications in generating data for speech, images, and text. In this paper, we present a general comprehensive overview of variational autoencoders. We discuss problems with the VAEs and present several variants of the VAEs that attempt to provide solutions to the problems. We present applications of variational autoencoders for finance (a new and emerging field of application), speech/audio source separation, and biosignal applications. Experimental results are presented for an example of speech source separation to illustrate the powerful application of variants of VAE: VAE, β-VAE, and ITL-AE. We conclude the paper with a summary, and we identify possible areas of research in improving performance of VAEs in particular and deep generative models in general, of which VAEs and generative adversarial networks (GANs) are examples.     

Homochiral 4-azalysine building blocks: syntheses and applications in solid-phase chemistry

Anomalous amino acids not only play central roles as mimics of natural amino acids but also offer opportunities as unique building blocks for combinatorial chemistry. This paper describes the chiral syntheses and solid-phase applications of a versatile atypical amino acid, 4-azalysine (2,6-diamino-4-azahexanoic acid) 1. The syntheses of differentially protected 4-azalysine derivatives 28a-e have been developed by two efficient and inexpensive routes that start either from Garner's aldehyde 16 or the chiron (S)-N(alpha)-Cbz-2,3-diaminopropionic acid 23. Both approaches employ the convergent modular concept and exploit reductive amination of aldehydes with amines as the key step for the fusion of the two segments. In the first route, the overall process inverts the chirality of the starting material, L-serine, and thus provides an excellent route to the unnatural D-isomers. The alternative route starting from L-asparagine provides a shorter and high-yielding route to orthogonally protected 4-azalysine derivatives. The corresponding N(2)-Fmoc-4-azalysines 31a-e, readily derived from the key intermediate 27, are compatible with the Fmoc-based solid-phase peptide synthesis (SPPS) and solid-phase organic chemistry (SPOC) protocols. Furthermore, the utility and versatility of another key structure, tris-Boc-4-azalysine 2 in the engineering of novel high-loading dendrimeric polystyrene resins 33 and 36, have been demonstrated. Following derivatization with the Rink amide linker 34, the stability and robustness of these resin-bound dendrimers 35 and 37 in the synthesis of small molecules using a range of reaction conditions (e.g., Mitsunobu and Suzuki reactions) have been effectively illustrated.     

Deperturbation and assignment of the vibronically tangled spectrum of pyrene in a biphenyl matrix

We apply the technique of the Green's function to the vibronically tangled spectrum of pyrene in a biphenyl matrix. We can deperturb the spectrum mathematically and readily assign the resulting weighted density of states. The analysis is reasonably successful and agrees with ground-state data and estimates of the excited-state frequencies previously made by others.     

Effect of iminic nitrogen substituents on [4+2] versus [3+2] cycloaddition pathways in reactions of nitrosoalkenes with simple acyclic imines: an experimental and theoretical investigation

The results of experimental and theoretical investigations on the mechanism of competitive [3+2] versus [4+2] cycloaddition reactions of simple acyclic imines with nitrosoalkenes are reported. The effect of substituents on the iminic nitrogen in influencing the cycloaddition pathways has been meticulously explored.