Development and validation of an LC/MS/MS method for simultaneous determination of shionone and epi‐friedelinol in rat plasma for pharmacokinetic study after oral administration of Aster tataricus extract

A rapid and sensitive liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC/MS/MS) method was developed and validated using spinasterol as the internal standard (IS) for the simultaneous determination of shionone and epi‐friedelinol in rat plasma. Plasma samples were pretreated using liquid–liquid extraction with ethyl ether. Chromatographic separation was achieved on a C₁₈ column (100 × 2.1 mm, 5 μm) with an isocratic elution consisting of acetonitrile–0.1% formic acid water (75:25, v/v) at a flow rate of 0.30 mL/min. Detection was performed under the selected reaction monitoring scan using an electrospray ionization in the positive ion mode. The mass transitions were as follows: m/z 427.4 → 95.1 for shionone, m/z 411.4 → 205.2 for epi‐friedelinol and m/z 395.3 → 105.2 for IS. All calibration curves exhibited good linearity (r > 0.995) over the concentration range for both components. The intra‐ and inter‐day precisions at three QC and lower limit of quantitation levels were both <10.21% in terms of relative standard deviation, and the accuracy ranged from ?7.13 to 8.02% in terms of relative error. The extraction recoveries of the compounds ranged from 82.07 to 89.81%. The developed method was successfully applied to the pharmacokinetic study of shionone and epi‐friedelinol after oral administration of Aster tataricus extract to rats. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Biomimetic design of amphiphilic polycations and surface grafting onto polycarbonate urethane film as effective antibacterial agents with controlled hemocompatibility

The synthetic polycations are ideal candidates as antimicrobial agents, because they resemble natural antimicrobial peptides, but to render hemocompatibility to these materials is a great challenge. Herein, we used 2‐(tert‐butyl‐aminoethyl) methacrylate (TBAEMA), to synthesize its homopolymer and pegylated random and diblock copolymers with polyethyleneglycol methacrylate (PEGMA, M_n = 360 Da) by single‐electron transfer–living radical polymerization (SET‐LRP). In the second step, the secondary amino groups in the precursor polymers were quaternized with iodomethane and bromohexane, to obtain three series of quaternized polymers. The antimicrobial properties of these quaternized polymers were evaluated against Escherichia coli (E. coli), by studying the minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) which ranged between 32 and 200 mg L^?1 and showed higher values for the quaternized random than the diblock copolymers. In addition to, we have also demonstrated the grafting of these polycations onto polycarbonate urethane film surfaces, which showed good killing efficacy against E. coli. Furthermore, the hemolysis of these materials was investigated against human red blood cells, which indicated that except the quaternized homopolymers that showed highest hemolysis, all other amphiphilic polycations exhibited very low hemolytic activity. Therefore, our designed materials with controlled structures and functionality, synthesized from cheaply available resources could serve as useful agents in the field of biomedicines and implantable materials. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Polym. Sci., Part A: Polym. Chem. 2013, 51, 3166–3176     

A multi-stage financial hedging approach for the procurement of manufacturing materials

This paper addresses the problem of mitigating procurement risk that arises from volatile commodity prices by proposing a hedging strategy within a multi-stage time frame. The proposed multi-stage hedging strategy requires a commodity futures position to be correctly initialised and rebalanced with adequate volumes of short/long positions, so as to reduce the volatility in the total procurement cost that would otherwise be generated by varying commodity spot prices. The novelty in the approach is the introduction of the rebalancing of commodity futures position at defined intermediate stages. To obtain an efficient or near optimal multi-stage hedging strategy, a discrete-time stochastic control model (DSCM) is developed. Numerical experiments and Monte Carlo simulation are used to show that the proposed multi-stage hedging strategy compares favourably with the minimal-variance hedge and the one-stage hedge. A close-form optimal solution is also presented for the case when procurement volume and price are independent.     

Improved λ/4 phase-shifted DFB semiconductor laser with spatial hole burning compensation using grating chirp

A λ/4 phase-shifted distributed feedback (DFB) semiconductor laser with a preformed chirped grating used to compensate the spatial hole burning (SHB) induced index change is proposed and analyzed. It shows that compared with the three phase shifted DFB laser which is known for its good performance to eliminate SHB, the proposed SHB compensated laser has better single longitudinal mode property, narrower spectral linewidth and better dynamic characteristics.     

Tunable multichannel drop filters based on the two-dimensional photonic crystal with oval defects

Light propagation through the channel filter based on the two-dimensional photonic crystals with oval-rod defects is studied by the finite-difference time-domain method. In addition to the traditional size tuning, shape alteration of the defects from the usual circle to the ellipse offers a powerful approach to tune the resonant frequency of channel-drop filters based on two-dimensional photonic crystals. It is found that the resonant frequency can be flexibly adjusted only by changing the orientation angle of the oval defects. The sensitivity of the resonant frequency to the alteration of the oval rods’ rotation angle is systematically studied. Because the rotation angles of the ellipse can be continuously adjusted, so the channel drop filter based on this kind of defects with different rotation angles is more suitable to the occasion where a large number of output channel filters is need.