Impact of High-Pressure Homogenization on the Cell Integrity of Tetradesmus obliquus and Seed Germination

Microalgae have almost unlimited applications due to their versatility and robustness to grow in different environmental conditions, their biodiversity and variety of valuable bioactive compounds. Wastewater can be used as a low-cost and readily available medium for microalgae, while the latter removes the pollutants to produce clean water. Nevertheless, since the most valuable metabolites are mainly located inside the microalga cell, their release implies rupturing the cell wall. In this study, Tetradesmus obliquus grown in 5% piggery effluent was disrupted using high-pressure homogenization (HPH). Effects of HPH pressure (100, 300, and 600 bar) and cycles (1, 2 and 3) were tested on the membrane integrity and evaluated using flow cytometry and microscopy. In addition, wheat seed germination trials were carried out using the biomass at different conditions. Increased HPH pressure or number of cycles led to more cell disruption (75% at 600 bar and 3 cycles). However, the highest increase in wheat germination and growth (40–45%) was observed at the lowest pressure (100 bar), where only 46% of the microalga cells were permeabilised, but not disrupted. Non-treated T. obliquus cultures also revealed an enhancing effect on root and shoot length (up to 40%). The filtrate of the initial culture also promoted shoot development compared to water (21%), reinforcing the full use of all the process fractions. Thus, piggery wastewater can be used to produce microalgae biomass, and mild HPH conditions can promote cell permeabilization to release sufficient amounts of bioactive compounds with the ability to enhance plant germination and growth, converting an economic and environmental concern into environmentally sustainable applications.     

N,N′‐Bis(2‐tosyl­amino­benzyl­idene)‐1,2‐ethanedi­amine

The structure of the title compound, C₃₀H₃₀N₄O₄S₂, is highly conditioned in the solid state by two strong N—H?N interactions. The values of the distances between the aminic N atoms [5.865 (3) Å] and the iminic N atoms [2.930 (4) Å], in conjunction with the long distance between the S atoms of the two tosyl groups [7.673 (1) Å], suggest that when the molecule acts as a ligand it will provide a single cavity for N₄ coordination to the metal centre.     

Discriminating Bacterial Infection from Other Causes of Fever Using Body Temperature Entropy Analysis

Body temperature is usually employed in clinical practice by strict binary thresholding, aiming to classify patients as having fever or not. In the last years, other approaches based on the continuous analysis of body temperature time series have emerged. These are not only based on absolute thresholds but also on patterns and temporal dynamics of these time series, thus providing promising tools for early diagnosis. The present study applies three time series entropy calculation methods (Slope Entropy, Approximate Entropy, and Sample Entropy) to body temperature records of patients with bacterial infections and other causes of fever in search of possible differences that could be exploited for automatic classification. In the comparative analysis, Slope Entropy proved to be a stable and robust method that could bring higher sensitivity to the realm of entropy tools applied in this context of clinical thermometry. This method was able to find statistically significant differences between the two classes analyzed in all experiments, with sensitivity and specificity above 70% in most cases.     

Charge‐Induced Unzipping of Isolated Proteins to a Defined Secondary Structure

Here we present a combined experimental and theoretical study on the secondary structure of isolated proteins as a function of charge state. In infrared spectra of the proteins ubiquitin and cytochrome c, amide I (C=O stretch) and amide II (N–H bend) bands can be found at positions that are typical for condensed‐phase proteins. For high charge states a new band appears, substantially red‐shifted from the amide II band observed at lower charge states. The observations are interpreted in terms of Coulomb‐driven transitions in secondary structures from mostly helical to extended C₅‐type hydrogen‐bonded structures. Support for this interpretation comes from simple energy considerations as well as from quantum chemical calculations on model peptides. This transition in secondary structure is most likely universal for isolated proteins that occur in mass spectrometric experiments.     

Minimal sets in monotone and sublinear skew-product semiflows I: The general case

The dynamics of a general monotone and sublinear skew-product semiflow is analyzed, paying special attention to the long-term behavior of the strongly positive semiorbits and to the minimal sets. Four possibilities arise depending on the existence or absence of strongly positive minimal sets and bounded semiorbits, as well as on the coexistence or not of bounded and unbounded strongly positive semiorbits. Previous results are unified and extended, and scenarios which are impossible in the autonomous or periodic cases are described.     

Purity assessment using the mass balance approach for inorganic in-house certified reference material production at Inmetro

Accreditation and Quality Assurance - The production of Certified Reference Materials (CRMs) is one of the essential activities of the National Institute of Metrology, Quality and Technology...     

Some physico-chemical characteristics of amino-acid derivatives containing rest of 1,2,4-triazole-3,4-di-substituted with potential antitumoral activity

Abstract

Dipeptide derivatives from p-aminobenzoyl-phenylglycine and p-aminobenzoyl-phenylalanine were grafted on 1,2,4-triazole heterocycle in order to get new substances with potential biological activity. The compounds synthetized and characterized in this paper have a structure that fits in the antimetabolites category, products used to treat malignant tumors. The presence of several bioactive groups in the same molecule permits us to study the chemical structure - biological activity correlation based on computational analyses using SPARTAN’14 software. Some correlations between the molecular parameters established with Spartan’14 software are evidenced in this paper.     

Multi-scale simulation reveals that an amino acid substitution increases photosensitizing reaction inputs in Rhodopsins

Evaluating the availability of molecular oxygen (O₂) and energy of excited states in the retinal binding site of rhodopsin is a crucial challenging first step to understand photosensitizing reactions in wild-type (WT) and mutant rhodopsins by absorbing visible light. In the present work, energies of the ground and excited states related to 11-cis-retinal and the O₂ accessibility to the β-ionone ring are evaluated inside WT and human M207R mutant rhodopsins. Putative O₂ pathways within rhodopsins are identified by using molecular dynamics simulations, Voronoi-diagram analysis, and implicit ligand sampling while retinal energetic properties are investigated through density functional theory, and quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical methods. Here, the predictions reveal that an amino acid substitution can lead to enough energy and O₂ accessibility in the core hosting retinal of mutant rhodopsins to favor the photosensitized singlet oxygen generation, which can be useful in understanding retinal degeneration mechanisms and in designing blue-lighting-absorbing proteic photosensitizers.     

“Locus” and “Trace” in Cabrigéomètre: relationships between geometric and functional aspects in a study of transformations

The present text describes and characterises the tools “Locus” and “Trace” of Cabri-géomètre II, in relations to a study of geometric transformation, more precisely, the passage from the notion of transformation of figures to the notion of applications¹ that map points on the plane onto the plane itself. In particular it discusses how the conception of image of a figure under a transformation can evolve—through interaction in a “milieu” organised around Cabri-géomètre—such that students move from views of figure-images as undecomposible entities to see them as sets of image-points. Moreover, the study allowed the identification that the notion of trajectory (in a dynamic interpretation) has an important role in this conceptually difficult passage and that dynamic geometry environment renovate this notion.