Screening methods and recent developments in the detection of anticoccidials

This article presents a review of the current trends in the analysis of coccidiostats in various matrices, focusing principally on screening and rapid methods. Coccidiosis is an infectious disease having a high negative impact on the animal industry. Drugs are therefore necessary to prevent and/or to combat this disease. However, it is also of crucial importance that these veterinary drugs do not enter the human food chain. European legislation has therefore established the boundaries for the use of coccidiosats and has also addressed the unavoidable problem of cross-contamination of the feed, mainly caused by the use of the same production lines. Consequently there is a need for analytical methods and/or analytical strategies for the monitoring and control of the residues of anticoccidials, both in feed and in the resulting matrices for human consumption. In the frame of the European collaborative project CONffIDENCE, such attempts to establish the required analytical tools were made, which required beforehand a review of the state of the art in this domain. Aiming at this objective, in this review we consider the most interesting publications since 2000. In essence, both a rapid approach with mainly immunoassays and chromatographic methods were developed. To date, the obstacle to routine use of the first approach has been its inability to detect more than two compounds simultaneously, but recent developments in flow cytometry have made it possible to detect six coccidiostats at once. On the other hand, an increasingly popular approach for detecting multiple coccidiostats simultaneously is liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry. There remains a need to adapt these analytical methods to legislative requirements.     

Branching in Polyethylenes. Study by High Resolution Nuclear Magnetic Resonance

The values of the CH₃/CH₂ ratios measured from accumulated NMR spectra of polyethylenes samples are in good agreement with those obtained from conventional IR techniques. Because NMR does not require calibration, systematic errors could be less important. Owing to the estimated values of the CH/CH₃ ratios, tetrasubstituted carbon atoms are present in all the high-pressure polyethylene specimens.     

Electrodeposited copolymer electrolyte into nanostructured titania electrodes for 3D Li-ion microbatteries

The electrochemical synthesis of a copolymer electrolyte (PEO-PMMA) into titania nanotubes is described and studied. Compared with the electrochemical systems based on solid electrolytes deposited by top-down techniques, the copolymer/titania nanotube material reveals high electrochemical performance, opening new perspectives for the fabrication of 3D all-solid-state microbatteries.     

Dissipative periodic systems and symmetric interpolation in Schur classes

Matrix-valued functions analytic and contractive in the open unit disk (Schur functions) play an important role in system theory. They represent transfer functions of causal time-invariant dissipative systems. In this paper we show how a Schur function can still be associated to a k-periodic system. This function satisfies a certain symmetry condition (conditions (1.7) for k=2 and (4.4) for general k). We study a general bitangential interpolation problem for the Schur functions satisfying this symmetry condition.     

A classification of thin shell theories

This paper gives a modern mathematical analysis of the relationships between several, different linear shell theories. It also discusses the asymptotic role played by membrane theory. It presents theorems on the existence and uniqueness of solutions of membrane equations depending on the concavity of the surface.     

Strong weak interactions

We study the intriguing and attractive possibility that the standard model Higgs particle is very heavy or does not exist at all and that, as a consequence, a spectrum of vector boson bound states emerges.     

Synthesis of (E)-β-fluoromethyleneglutamic acid

A potential dual-enzyme activated inhibitor of γ-aminobutyric acid transaminase, ($\text{E}$)-β-fluoromethyleneglutamic acid, was prepared from ethyl 3,3-dimethylacrylate in 11 steps.