Jozimine A2: The First Dimeric Dioncophyllaceae‐Type Naphthylisoquinoline Alkaloid,with Three Chiral Axes and High Antiplasmodial Activity

A new dimeric naphthylisoquinoline alkaloid, jozimine A₂ ( 2 ), was isolated from the root bark of an Ancistrocladus species from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Its absolute stereostructure was determined by chemical, spectroscopic, and chiroptical methods, and confirmed by X‐ray crystallography. Jozimine A₂ ( 2 ) is one of the as yet very rare naphthylisoquinoline dimers whose central biaryl axis is rotationally hindered. Moreover, it is the first natural dimer of a Dioncophyllaceae‐type alkaloid, that is, lacking oxygen functions at C6, and bearing R configurations at C3 in its two isoquinoline portions. Despite this decreased steric hindrance, the outer biaryl axes are chiral, too, so that jozimine A₂ ( 2 ) has three consecutive stereogenic axes and, together with the four stereogenic centers, seven elements of chirality and is C₂‐symmetric. The new dimer exhibits excellent, and specific, antiplasmodial activity. To further confirm its stereostructure and for likewise testing the bioactivities of its (unnatural) atropo‐diastereomer, compound 2 was prepared by semi‐synthesis from the co‐occurring (and likewise synthetically available) dioncophylline A ( 5 ), along with its atropo‐diastereomer, 3′‐epi‐ 2 .     

Status of deceleration and laser spectroscopy of highly charged ions at HITRAP

Heavy few-electron ions are relatively simple systems in terms of electron structure and offer unique opportunities to conduct experiments under extremely large electromagnetic fields that exist around their nuclei. However, the preparation of highly charged ions (HCI) has remained the major challenge for experiments. As an extension of the existing GSI accelerator facility, the HITRAP facility was conceived as a multi-stage decelerator for HCI produced at high velocity. It is designed to prepare bunches of around 10⁵ HCI and to deliver them at low energies to various experiments. One of these experiments is SpecTrap, aiming for laser spectroscopy of trapped, cold HCI. We present the latest results on deceleration of ions in a radio-frequency quadrupole, synchrotron cooling of electrons in a trap as a preparation step for the prospective electron cooling of the HCI decelerated in HITRAP, as well as laser cooling of singly charged Mg ions for sympathetic cooling of HCI in SpecTrap.     

Mechanical properties of bulk single crystalline nanoporous gold investigated by millimetre-scale tension and compression testing

In this work, the mechanical behaviour of millimetre-scale, bulk single crystalline, nanoporous gold at room temperature is reported for the first time. Tension and compression tests were performed with a custom-designed test system that accommodates small-scale samples. The absence of grain boundaries in the specimens allowed measurement of the inherent strength of millimetre-scale nanoporous gold in tension. The elastic modulus and strength values in tension and compression were found to be significantly lower than values measured with nanoindentation-based techniques and previously reported in the literature, but close to those reported for millimetre-scale polycrystalline samples tested using traditional compression techniques. Fracture toughness was found to be very low, in agreement with the macroscopic brittleness of nanoporous gold, but this is due to the localization of deformation to a narrow zone of ligaments, which individually exhibit significant plasticity and necking.     

Projecting the Bethe�CSalpeter Equation onto the Light-Front and Back: A Short Review

The technique of projecting the four-dimensional two-body Bethe?CSalpeter equation onto the three-dimensional Light-Front hypersurface, combined with the quasi-potential approach, is briefly illustrated, by placing a particular emphasis on the relation between the projection method and the effective dynamics of the valence component of the Light-Front wave function. Some details on how to construct the Fock expansion of both (a) the Light-Front effective interaction and (b) the electromagnetic current operator, satisfying the proper Ward?CTakahashi identity, will be presented, addressing the relevance of the Fock content in the operators living onto the Light-Front hypersurface. Finally, the generalization of the formalism to the three-particle case will be outlined.     

Glaucoma classification based on visual pathway analysis using diffusion tensor imaging

Most of the existing methods for diagnosing glaucoma analyze the eye with a main focus on the retina, despite the transsynaptic nature of the fiber degeneration caused by glaucoma. Thus, they ignore a significant part of the visual system represented by the visual pathway in the brain. The advances in neuroimaging, especially diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), enable the identification and characterization of white matter fibers. In this work, we propose a system based on DTI analysis of the visual pathway fibers in the optic radiation for detecting and discriminating different glaucoma entities. The optic radiation is identified semi-automatically. DTI provides information about the fiber orientation as well as a set of derived parameters describing the degree of diffusion anisotropy and diffusivity. Features for each DTI derived measure are extracted from a specified region of interest on the optic radiation. The features are grouped into three sets: Histogram, co-occurrence matrices, and Laws features. For feature selection, the features are ranked using a support vector machine classifier. The highest ranked features are used for classification. A support vector machine classifier is used for classification in a 10-fold cross validation setup. The system is applied to three age-matched subjects’ categories containing 27 healthy, 39 primary open angle glaucoma (POAG), and 18 normal tension glaucoma (NTG) subjects. The discrimination accuracy between healthy and glaucoma (POAG and NTG) subjects is 94.1% with an area under the ROC of 0.97. Classification accuracy of 92.4% is obtained for the normal and the POAG groups while it increased to 100% in case of healthy and NTG groups. In addition, the system could differentiate between glaucoma types (POAG and NTG) with an accuracy of 98.3%. A complementary analysis was performed to estimate the selection bias in the obtained accuracy. The bias ranged from 10% to 20% depending on the group pair under consideration. The classification results indicate the high performance of the system compared to retina-based glaucoma detection systems. The proposed approach utilizes visual pathway analysis rather than the conventional eye analysis which presents a new trend in glaucoma detection. Analyzing the entire visual system could provide significant information that can improve the glaucoma examination flow and treatment.     

Isothiourea‐Mediated Asymmetric O‐ to C‐Carboxyl Transfer of Oxazolyl Carbonates: Structure–Selectivity Profiles and Mechanistic Studies

The structural motif within a series of tetrahydropyrimidine‐based isothioureas necessary for generating high asymmetric induction in the asymmetric Steglich rearrangement of oxazolyl carbonates is fully explored, with crossover and dynamic ¹⁹F NMR experiments used to develop a mechanistic understanding of this transformation.     

Electroweak corrections to monojet production at the Tevatron and the LHC

The first LHC results seem to disfavor, from the point of view of naturalness, any constrained MSSM realization with universal conditions at the SUSY-breaking scale. A more motivated scenario is given by split-family SUSY, in which the first two generations of squarks are heavy, compatible with a U(2)³ flavor symmetry. We consider this flavor symmetry to be broken at a very high scale and study the consequences at low energies through its RGE evolution. Initial conditions compatible with a split scenario are found, and the preservation of correlations from minimal U(2)³ breaking are checked. The various chiral operators in ΔF=2 processes are analyzed, and we show that, due to LHC gluino bounds, the (LL)(RR) operators cannot always be neglected. Finally, we also study a possible extension of the U(2)³ model compatible with the lepton sector.