Quantitative Measurement of Transmitters in Individual Vesicles in the Cytoplasm of Single Cells with Nanotip Electrodes

The quantification of vesicular transmitter content is important for studying the mechanisms of neurotransmission and malfunction in disease, and yet it is incredibly difficult to measure the tiny amounts of neurotransmitters in the attoliter volume of a single vesicle, especially in the cell environment. We introduce a novel method, intracellular vesicle electrochemical cytometry. A nanotip conical carbon‐fiber microelectrode was used to electrochemically measure the total content of electroactive neurotransmitters in individual nanoscale vesicles in single PC12 cells as these vesicles lysed on the electrode inside the living cell. The results demonstrate that only a fraction of the quantal neurotransmitter content is released during exocytosis. These data support the intriguing hypothesis that the vesicle does not open all the way during the normal exocytosis process, thus resulting in incomplete expulsion of the vesicular contents.     

A-priori evaluations of subgrid-scale terms for large-eddy simulation of compressible turbulent flows

The subgrid-scale terms for different formulations of the energy equation are evaluated from a-priori tests using the direct numerical simulation (DNS) data of a compressible mixing layer at a moderate Mach number of M = 0.65. To extend the generality of the results, the simulations were performed with three different initial conditions for the velocity fields. To examine the impact of strong temperature variations on the subgrid scales, a non-isothermal mixing layer with lower to upper free-stream temperature ratio of 3 is also considered. For cold simulations, with equal free-stream temperatures, the total energy equation is shown to be the best choice in view of the accuracy and the subgrid-scale modelling requirements. For hot simulations, with the free-stream temperature ratio equal to 3, the total enthalpy equation is found to be the best formulation for the energy equation. Furthermore, it is shown that the subgrid-scale pressure dilatation term, which has been largely neglected so far, is of the same order of the subgrid-scale heat flux. Based on the present results, the contribution of the subgrid-scale pressure dilatation can be up to 46% of the total sugbrid-scale activity. Moreover, the time evolutions of the volume-average mean kinetic energy, turbulent kinetic energy, production, dissipation, and pressure dilatation terms are considered. Unlike the subgrid-scale pressure dilatation term, the volume-average pressure dilatation terms are negligible, and compressibility does not affect the large-scale evolutions of the mean and turbulent kinetic energies.     

Lower limits of detection in speciation analysis by coupling high-performance liquid chromatography and chemical-vapor generation

Speciation studies are much more important than total element determination because toxicity of many elements depends on their chemical forms. Nobody can claim that a foodstuff is very dangerous to eat by determining total arsenic due to the possibility that the arsenic could be present in non-toxic forms. Hence, speciation studies are crucial in any matrix relevant to human beings.Trace-element speciation requires sufficiently sensitive procedures to monitor each species at trace levels. One way to increase the sensitivity for elements forming volatile species is coupling high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with chemical-vapor generation (CVG). This review aims to highlight not only development of HPLC-CVG techniques for ultratrace-elemental speciation in a variety of matrices but also their application. In addition, we discuss the advantages and the disadvantages of these techniques.     

A new adaptive fuzzy sliding mode observer for a class of MIMO nonlinear systems

In this paper, a new adaptive fuzzy sliding mode (AFSM) observer is proposed which can be used for a class of MIMO nonlinear systems. In the proposed algorithm, the zero-input dynamics of the plant could be unknown. In this method, a fuzzy system is designed to estimate the nonlinear behavior of the observer. The output of fuzzy rules are tuned adaptively, based on the observer error. The output connection matrix is used to combine the observer errors of individual subsystems. A robust term, which is designed based on the sliding mode theory, is added to the observer to compensate the fuzzy estimation error. The estimation error bound is adjusted by an adaptive law. The main advantage of the proposed observer is that, unlike many of the previous works, the measured outputs is not limited to the first entries of a canonical-form state vector. The proposed observer estimates the closed-loop state tracking error asymptotically, provided that the output gain matrix includes Hurwitz coefficients. The chattering is eliminated by using boundary layers around the sliding surfaces and the observer convergence is proved using a Lyapunov-based approach. The proposed method is applied on a real multilink robot manipulator. The performance of the observer shows its effectiveness in the real world.     

Synthesis,Characterization, and Evaluation of Antibacterial and Antioxidant Activities of Novel Benzoxazinones and Benzoxathiinones

In this work, the new benzoxazinones and benzoxathiinones were synthesized from reaction of alkyl X‐phenylpropiolates and aminophenol (or 2‐mercaptophenol) in the presence of triphenylphosphine. Their antibacterial activities were studied against Gram‐positive bacteria and Gram‐negative bacteria using the disc diffusion method. The obtained results showed that these compounds are more effective against Gram‐positive bacteria than against Gram‐negative bacteria. Also, evaluation of antioxidant activity of the obtained products showed that they have high to excellent antioxidant activity (79.2–93.6%).     

Experimental and theoretical investigations of optical properties of GaN/AlGaN MQW nanostructures. Impact of built-in polarization fields

We report the results from detailed optical spectroscopy from MOCVD grown GaN/AlGaN multiple quantum wells (MQWs), as opposed to most previous studies where MBE was employed by means of photoluminescence (PL) technique. In this paper we will present theoretical and experimental results demonstrating how polarization induced electric fields and bound interface charges in GaN/AlGaN MQWs affect the emission peak energy, PL line shape, as well as the emission line width. Theoretically estimated fields in this work are consistent with experimental data. Transition energy of the heavy hole and electron ground state Ee-hh in GaN/AlGaN MQWs were calculated and it is found that it stays in good agreement with the experimental data.