Bioremediation of toluene and naphthalene: development and validation of a GC-FID method for their monitoring

Bioremediation of toluene and naphthalene in liquid cultures of bacteria grown in the presence of these aromatic compounds as unique sources of carbon was investigated by gas chromatography (GC). For this purpose, a method based on the use of GC with flame ionization detection was developed and validated. Validation was carried out in terms of limit of detection (LOD), limit of quantitation (LOQ), linearity, precision and trueness. In the case of naphthalene, LOD and LOQ values of 0.43 and 0.72 mg kg(-1) were achieved. Linearity was established over one order of magnitude in the range of interest, i.e. 10-100 mg kg(-1). Excellent precision was obtained both in terms of intra-day repeatability and between-day precision on two concentration levels (RSD% lower than 0.5%). A recovery of 97.9 +/- 0.2% (n=3) was calculated by addition of 640 mg kg(-1) of naphthalene to the Bushnell & Haas mineral salts basal solution containing the micro-organisms. Findings clearly showed a reduction of the naphthalene content equal to 50% and 75% after two and four weeks of contact with the micro-organisms, whereas a lower degradation was shown in the case of toluene. Finally bioremediation activity was ascribed to two different microbial populations, Bordetella Petrii and Bacillus Sphericus, which survived in the polluted medium.     

Study on fluorimetric properties of 1,2-dihydro-2,2,4-trimethylquinoline

The title compound, 1,2-dihydro-2,2,4-trimethylquinoline (TMQ), is a quinoline family member and is among others used to prevent the oxidative degradation of polymers. TMQ has been characterized by its fluorescence emission. In this work the effects of solvent, acidity, continuous irradiation and the influence of some interferents upon the fluorescence intensity of TMQ were investigated. Under the selected conditions (in propan-1-ol solution at λ_excitation/λ_emission = 334 nm/412 nm), the fluorescence intensity is proportional to the concentration of TMQ over the range 0.05–5 μg ml^?1 with a correlation coefficient of 0.9963. The proposed method was applied to the determination of TMQ in synthetic mixtures of polymer additives and specific rubber samples.     

Thermodynamic study of Cd(II) complex formation with tripodal N-donor ligands in DMSO

The complex formation of Cd(II) with N-donor ligands in dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO) is investigated by means of potentiometry and titration calorimetry. The ligands considered in this work are tripodal polyamines and polypyridines: 2,2′,2″-triaminotriethylamine (TREN), tris(2-(methylamino)ethyl)amine (Me₃TREN), tris(2-(dimethylamino)ethyl)amine (Me₆TREN), tris[(2-pyridyl)methyl]amine (TPA) and 6,6′-bis-[bis-(2-pyridylmethyl)aminomethyl]-2,2′-bipyridine (BTPA). These ligands are characterized by a systematic modification of the donor groups to relate their structure to the thermodynamics of the complexes formed. The TREN and Me₃TREN ligands form highly stable species. The stability of the complex formed with the fully methylated Me₆TREN is much lower than with other polyamines and the enthalpic and entropic terms suggest an incomplete coordination to the metal ion. In general, the TPA ligand forms complexes less stable than TREN and Me₃TREN as a result of the combination of higher structural rigidity of TPA and lower basicity of pyridine moiety with respect to primary and secondary amines. Pyridine-containing ligands display, in general, a less unfavorable formation entropy than tripodal polyamines here considered. In particular, TPA forms a more stable 1:1 species with respect to Me₆TREN due to the entropic term, being the enthalpy less negative. The ligand BTPA is able to form only a monometallic complex, where the metal ion is likely to be encapsulated as indicated by the obtained thermodynamic parameters.     

Third-Order Phase Transition: Random Matrices and Screened Coulomb Gas with Hard Walls

Journal of Statistical Physics - Consider the free energy of a d-dimensional gas in canonical equilibrium under pairwise repulsive interaction and global confinement, in presence of a volume...     

Transition and post-transition metal ion chemistry of dibenzo-substituted,mixed-donor macrocycles incorporating five donor atoms

The transition and post-transition metal ion chemistry of a wide range of potentially pentadentate dibenzo-substituted macrocyclic ligands incorporating nitrogen, oxygen and/or sulfur donors is reviewed and shown to result in a diverse range of structural types. Aspects of metal ion recognition, bulk membrane transport, systems incorporating appended chromophores, a sulfate binding system, induced Cu(I)/Cu(II) redox switching, coordination polymers, and unsymmetric macrocyclic ligand systems are all discussed.     

Determination of isoascorbic acid in fish tissue by hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography–ultraviolet detection

A new hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatographic (HILIC) method for the simultaneous determination of isoascorbic (IAA) and ascorbic acid (AA) was developed. The separation of IAA and AA was studied in various HILIC stationary phases and the influence of the composition of the mobile phase, the ionic strength and the column temperature to the chromatographic characteristics is presented. The final method used an aminopropyl column under isocratic elution with acetonitrile–100 mM ammonium acetate solution (90:10, v/v) at a flow rate of 0.4 mL/min and a detection wavelength of 240 nm. This method was validated and the calibration curves were found to be linear in the range of 1.0–65 μg/mL for both IAA and AA. The method limit of detection for IAA determination in fish tissue was 2.3 μg/g. Inter-day precision (as %RSD_R) was ranged between 0.56% and 8.3% at three concentration levels, whereas the respected recoveries ranged between 82% and 98%. This method was applied to the determination of IAA (as additive E315) in frozen redfish samples. The hyphenation of the HILIC separation with a tandem mass spectrometer was also studied and the problems encountered with negative electrospray ionization under HILIC separation conditions are discussed.     

An SPME–GC–MS method using an octadecyl silica fibre for the determination of the potential angiogenesis modulators 17β-estradiol and 2-methoxyestradiol in culture media

A simple and easily automable method based on solid-phase microextraction followed by gas chromatographic–mass spectrometric analysis was developed for the determination of two potential angiogenesis modulators 17β-estradiol (17-BE) and 2-methoxyestradiol (2-MEOE) in culture media. Trifluoroacetic anhydride was used as the derivatising agent. A homemade octadecyl silica coating, characterised by a coating thickness of 72 ± 10 μm and a good thermal stability until 250 °C, was prepared. Experimental design was used to optimise the extraction conditions in terms of derivatisation time, derivatisation temperature and time of extraction. As for method validation, lower limits of quantification of 0.17 and 0.015 μg/l for 17β-estradiol and 2-methoxyestradiol, respectively, were obtained. Finally, the capabilities of the developed fibres were evaluated for the analysis of the investigated analytes developed by granulosa cells in culture media maintained under normoxic, hypoxic and anoxic conditions, in order to better elucidate their possible role in the angiogenic process. An increase of the production of both 17-BE and 2-MEOE in hypoxic and anoxic conditions seems to be related to the effect of oxygen deprivation.     

Solvent effect on the thermodynamics of Ag(I) coordination to tripodal polypyridine ligands

An investigation on the thermodynamics of complex formation between Ag(I) ion and two tripodal ligands tris[(2-pyridyl)methyl]amine (TPA) and 6,6′-bis-[bis-(2-pyridylmethyl)aminomethyl]-2,2′-bipyridine (BTPA) has been carried out in the aprotic solvents dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO) and dimethylformamide (DMF) by means of potentiometry and titration calorimetry. The results for TPA are compared with those already obtained for other aliphatic tripodal polyamines. In general, the TPA ligand forms complexes less stable than 2,2′,2″-triaminotriethylamine (TREN) and tris(2-(methylamino)ethyl)amine (Me₃TREN) as a result of the combination of higher structural rigidity of TPA and lower σ-donor ability of pyridinic moieties with respect to primary and secondary amines. The same trend is found if the stability of Ag(I) complex with TPA is compared with that of tris(2-(dimethylamino)ethyl)amine (ME₆TREN), despite the pyridinic nitrogen is formally a tertiary one. Theoretical calculations run to explain the reasons of this weaker interaction indicate that this difference is due to solvation, rather than to steric or σ-donor effects. The ligand BTPA is able to form bimetallic species whose relative stability is largely influenced by the different solvation of Ag(I) ion in DMSO and DMF rather than by the difference in the dielectric constants of these two media.     

Compound matrices: properties,numerical issues and analytical computations

This paper studies the possibility to calculate efficiently compounds of real matrices which have a special form or structure. The usefulness of such an effort lies in the fact that the computation of compound matrices, which is generally noneffective due to its high complexity, is encountered in several applications. A new approach for computing the Singular Value Decompositions (SVD’s) of the compounds of a matrix is proposed by establishing the equality (up to a permutation) between the compounds of the SVD of a matrix and the SVD’s of the compounds of the matrix. The superiority of the new idea over the standard method is demonstrated. Similar approaches with some limitations can be adopted for other matrix factorizations, too. Furthermore, formulas for the n − 1 compounds of Hadamard matrices are derived, which dodge the strenuous computations of the respective numerous large determinants. Finally, a combinatorial counting technique for finding the compounds of diagonal matrices is illustrated.