Changes in Intestinal Permeability Ex Vivo and Immune Cell Activation by Three Commonly Used Emulsifiers

Food additives such as emulsifiers are used in increasing quantities in the food industry. The aim of this study was to compare three different emulsifiers (polysorbate 80 (P80), carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC), and β-lactoglobulin (β-lac) with regards to their effect on the stimulation of immune cells and intestinal permeability. The immune stimulatory effects were studied in the myeloid cell line MUTZ-3-cells, while the change in intestinal permeability was studied in the Caco-2 cell line and ex vivo in the Ussing chamber system using small intestinal fragments from rats. The tested concentrations of the emulsifiers ranged from 0.02% up to 1%, which are concentrations commonly used in the food industry. The results showed that P80 affected both the myeloid cells and the intestinal permeability more than CMC (p < 0.05) and β-lac (p < 0.05) at the highest concentration. CMC was found to neither affect the permeability in the intestine nor the MUTZ-3 cells, while β-lac changed the permeability in the total part of the small intestine in rats. These findings indicate that P80 might be more cytotoxic compared to the other two emulsifiers.     

Metal-insulator crossover in high T c cuprates: A gauge field approach

A metal-insulator crossover appears in the experimental data for in-plane resistivity of underdoped cuprates and a range of superconducting cuprates in the presence of a strong magnetic field suppressing superconductivity. We propose an explanation for this phenomenon based on a gauge field theory approach to the t-J model. In this approach, based on a formal spin-charge separation, the low energy effective action describes gapful spinons (with a theoretically derived doping dependence of the gap m _s ² ∼ δ| ln δ|) and holons with finite Fermi surface (ɛF ∼ tδ) interacting via a gauge field whose basic effect on the spinons is to bind them into overdamped spin waves, shifting their gap by a damping term linear in T, which causes the metal-insulator crossover. The presence of a magnetic field perpendicular to the plane acts by increasing the damping, in turn producing a big positive transverse in-plane magnetoresistance at low T, as experimentally observed.     

Efficient synthesis of phospholipids from glycidyl phosphates.

New efficient routes to enantiopure phospholipids, starting from (S)-glycidol, are described. Lysophosphatidic acids and phosphatidic acids were obtained in good overall yields from (S)-glycidol, in only three and four steps, respectively. Moreover, the strategy can also be used to produce phosphatidylcholines in three steps. Using dialkylphosphoramidites, (S)-glycidol was phosphorylated to give (R)-1-O-glycidyl dialkyl phosphates. Regiospecific epoxide opening, using hexadecanol or cesium palmitate, followed by phosphate deprotection, provided lysophosphatidic acids. 2-O-Esterification prior to phosphate deprotection provided 1,2-O-diacyl and 1-O-alkyl-2-O-acyl phosphatidic acids. Phosphorylation of (S)-glycidol using phosphorus oxychloride followed by in situ treatment with choline tosylate produced (R)-glycidyl phosphocholine. Subsequent nucleophilic opening of the epoxide using cesium palmitate produced 1-O-palmitoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine, which has been used in syntheses of phosphatidylcholines.     

Stabilization energies of charged multiexciton complexes calculated at configuration interaction level

Recombination and stabilization energies of multiexcitons confined in positively and negatively charged semiconductor InGaAs/GaAs quantum dot (QD) samples have been studied by employing large-scale configuration interaction (CI) calculations. The CI calculations show that at most six electrons or two holes can be confined in the QD. Multiply charged multiexciton complexes with up to five excess electrons or two excess holes are also found to be stable, even when a few electron–hole pairs are present in the QD. The chemical potential functions for charged QD samples do not possess the pronounced stepped form as obtained for the corresponding neutral multiexciton complexes. The negatively and the positively charged excitons (negative and positive trions) lie lower in energy as compared to a neutral exciton and a single non-interacting charge carrier in the lowest single-particle state of another quantum dot. The other charged multiexciton complexes studied are not confined with respect to the corresponding neutral multiexciton and a non-interacting charge carrier. To include the contributions from the heavy-hole light-hole (HH–LH) coupling, a perturbative treatment of the band-mixing effects was implemented. The perturbation-theory calculations show that the HH–LH coupling does not shift the energies in the present InGaAs/GaAs QD sample.     

A perturbation evaluation of the saturation in the classical FEL theory

A classical theory of the free electron laser theory is based on pendulum equations in the Bambini-Renieri moving frame. We calculate the lowest order saturation term by a straightforward perturbation expansion.     

Comparing numerical methods for stiff systems of O.D.E:s

This paper describes a technique for comparing numerical methods that have been designed to solve stiff systems of ordinary differential equations. The basis of a fair comparison is discussed in detail. Measurements of cost and reliability are made over a collection of 25 carefully selected problems. The problems have been designed to show how certain major factors affect the performance of a method. The technique is applied to five methods, of which three turn out to be quite good, including one based on backward differentiation formulas, another on second derivative formulas, and a third on extrapolation. However, each of the three has a weakness of its own, which can be identified with particular problem characteristics.     

Feature detection and alignment of hyphenated chromatographic-mass spectrometric data. Extraction of pure ion chromatograms using Kalman tracking

In this paper we present a new method, called TracMass, for analyzing data obtained using hyphenated chromatography-mass spectrometry (XC/MS). The method uses a Kalman filter to extract pure, noise-free ion chromatograms by exploiting the latent second order structure in the XC/MS data. TracMass differs from current state-of-the-art methodologies, which extract chromatograms by binning along the m/z axis and further processes the data in various ways, e.g. by baseline correction, component detection algorithm, peak detection, and curve resolution to extract molecular features. The proposed method was validated by analyzing two plasma datasets: one derived from 99 quality control samples where TracMass extracted 8880 Pure Ion Chromatograms (PICs) present in > or =90 of the samples. The second dataset was spiked with two different internal standard mixtures to test differential expression analysis. Here TracMass found 20000 PICs present in 10 samples, all differentially expressed analytes, and also a previously unreported discriminating metabolite. Finding as many PICs as possible is in this context essential to ensure that even small differentiating features are found (if they exist). The resulting data representation from TracMass (PICs) can be used directly for statistical analysis, and the method is fast (approximately 5min/sample), with few adjustable parameters.     

Expanding the Landscape of Diterpene Structural Diversity through Stereochemically Controlled Combinatorial Biosynthesis

Plant‐derived diterpenoids serve as important pharmaceuticals, food additives, and fragrances, yet their low natural abundance and high structural complexity limits their broader industrial utilization. By mimicking the modularity of diterpene biosynthesis in plants, we constructed 51 functional combinations of class I and II diterpene synthases, 41 of which are “new‐to‐nature”. Stereoselective biosynthesis of over 50 diterpene skeletons was demonstrated, including natural variants and novel enantiomeric or diastereomeric counterparts. Scalable biotechnological production for four industrially relevant targets was accomplished in engineered strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae.