A new enantioselective synthesis of β-amino acids

Enantioselective hydrogenation of some α,β-unsaturated nitriles and their corresponding methyl esters bearing a phthalimidomethyl substituent at the α-carbon using Rh-DuPHOS catalysts afforded β-amino acid precursors with modest e.e.s of up to 48%. Hydrogenation of the α,β-unsaturated methyl esters using a Ru-BINAP catalyst gave higher e.e.s of up to 84%. Method development for the determination of the enantiomeric excesses of these derivatives using chiral HPLC is also reported.     

predForm-Site: Formylation site prediction by incorporating multiple features and resolving data imbalance

Formylation is one of the newly discovered post-translational modifications in lysine residue which is responsible for different kinds of diseases. In this work, a novel predictor, named predForm-Site, has been developed to predict formylation sites with higher accuracy. We have integrated multiple sequence features for developing a more informative representation of formylation sites. Moreover, decision function of the underlying classifier have been optimized on skewed formylation dataset during prediction model training for prediction quality improvement. On the dataset used by LFPred and Formator predictor, predForm-Site achieved 99.5% sensitivity, 99.8% specificity and 99.8% overall accuracy with AUC of 0.999 in the jackknife test. In the independent test, it has also achieved more than 97% sensitivity and 99% specificity. Similarly, in benchmarking with recent method CKSAAP_FormSite, the proposed predictor significantly outperformed in all the measures, particularly sensitivity by around 20%, specificity by nearly 30% and overall accuracy by more than 22%. These experimental results show that the proposed predForm-Site can be used as a complementary tool for the fast exploration of formylation sites. For convenience of the scientific community, predForm-Site has been deployed as an online tool, accessible at http://103.99.176.239:8080/predForm-Site.     

An ensemble learning framework for potential miRNA-disease association prediction with positive-unlabeled data

To explore the pathogenic mechanisms of MicroRNA (miRNA) on diverse diseases, many researchers have concentrated on discovering the potential associations between miRNA and disease using machine learning methods. However, the prediction accuracy of supervised machine learning methods is limited by lacking of experimentally-validated uncorrelated miRNA-disease pairs. Without these negative samples, training a highly accurate model is much more difficult. Different from traditional miRNA-disease prediction models using randomly selected unknown samples as negative training samples, we propose an ensemble learning framework to solve this positive-unlabeled (PU) learning problem. The framework incorporates two steps, i.e., a novel semi-supervised Kmeans (SS-Kmeans) to extract reliable negative samples from unknown miRNA-disease pairs and subagging method to generate diverse training sample sets to make full use of those reliable negative samples for ensemble learning. Combined with effective random vector functional link (RVFL) network as prediction model, the proposed framework showed superior prediction accuracy comparing with other popular approaches. A case study on lung and gastric neoplasms further confirms the framework’s efficacy at identifying miRNA disease associations.     

图的距离不大于β的任意两点可区别的边染色

本文提出了图的距离不大于β的任意两点可区别的边染色,即D(β)-点可区别的边染色(简记为D(β)-VDPEC)．并得到了一些特殊图类,如圈、完全图、完全二部图、扇、轮、树以及一些联图的D(β)-点可区别的边色数,文后提出了相关的猜想．     

Hierarchical and probabilistic quantum state sharing via a non-maximally entangled stateHierarchical and probabilistic quantum state sharing via a non-maximally entangled stateHierarchical and probabilistic quantum state sharing via a non-maximally entangled state

A scheme that probabilistically realizes hierarchical quantum state sharing of an arbitrary unknown qubit state with a four-qubit non-maximally entangled 丨X） state is presented in this paper. In the scheme, the sender Alice distributes a quantum secret with a Bell-state measurement and publishes her measurement outcomes via a classical channel to three agents who are divided into two grades. One agent is in the upper grade, while the other two agents are in the lower grade. Then by introducing an ancillary qubit, the agent of the upper grade only needs the assistance of any one of the other two agents for probabilistically obtaining the secret, while an agent of the lower grade needs the help of both the other two agents by using a controlled-NOT operation and a proper positive operator-valued measurement instead of the usual projective measurement. In other words, the agents of two different grades have different authorities to reconstruct Alice＇s secret in a probabilistic manner. The scheme can also be modified to implement the threshold-controlled teleportation.     

Discrete fractional logistic map and its chaos

A discrete fractional logistic map is proposed in the left Caputo discrete delta’s sense. The new model holds discrete memory. The bifurcation diagrams are given and the chaotic behaviors are numerically illustrated.     

Three‐unit semicircles curve: A compact 3D graphical representation of DNA sequences based on classifications of nucleotides

A new three‐dimensional graphical representation of DNA sequences, three‐unit semicircles (TUS)‐curve, which maps a given sequence into a dot sequences embedded in three‐unit semicircles, is proposed based on three biclassifications of nucleotides. TUS‐curve has the merit of compactness and could avoid the degeneracy and loss of information. The geometrical center of the curve, which indicates the distribution of base frequencies of the corresponding DNA sequence, is extracted and applied to analyze the similarity of various species. Phylogenetic tree of 11 species based on their first exons of β‐globin genes showed that the TUS‐curve is a powerful tool to get valuable biological information. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Quantum Chem, 2011     

Numerical simulation of solitons switching and propagating in asymmetric directional couplers

A numerical investigation, based on the use of split step Fourier transformation algorithm, of all-optical solitons switching in asymmetric directional couplers is presented. The numerical algorithm is described in details. The analysis highlights the influence of the different effective mode area, the phase- and group–velocity mismatch, the different dispersion between two cores on the switching and propagation of short pulses. The investigation indicates that the phase velocity mismatch and the different effective mode area can reduce the coupling length while the different group velocity and the different dispersion between two cores do not change the coupling length. We have also found that the increase of effective mode area ratio can lead to an increase of the switching threshold power but improve significantly the switching steepness, the increase of the phase velocity mismatch can cause a decrease of the switching threshold power but degrade the switching steepness, the increase of the ratio of dispersion can result in a decrease of the switching threshold power and vary the switching steepness, the increase of group velocity mismatch can give rise to an increase of the switching threshold power but improve obviously the switching steepness. Furthermore, the group velocity mismatch can induce solitons pulse to walk off or stretch in the asymmetric directional coupler.     

Structural,magnetic and optical properties of vanadium doped zinc oxide: Systematic first-principles investigations

The electronic structural, magnetic and optical properties of pure and V-doped ZnO are investigated by first-principles calculations based on the density functional theory. With the introduction of V atoms, the spin-splitting near the Fermi level leads to a net magnetic moment of the system. A significant possibility of room temperature ferromagnetism (RTFM) originated from the Ruderman–Kittel–Kassuya–Yosida (RKKY) exchange is predicted. Oxygen vacancy is positive to enhance the ferromagnetism while zinc vacancy is negative. With respect to the optical properties, the presence of V atoms was found to have an obvious influence on the transmittivity, especially in the low energy region. A slight V-doping can keep a high optical transmission and smoothly modulate the optical bandgap.     

Salient region detection using background priors

In this paper, we introduce a novel salient region detection algorithm by using background priors. Because of the fact that superpixel is perceptually more meaningful than pixel, and which can reduce the complexity of image processing, we use the superpixel algorithm to reprocess original images. In addition, we hold the point that the colors in the image boundary could mainly represent all background colors, hence we compute the color contrast between the intern colors and the boundary colors. Since the nearer the patches are close to center, the more they affect other patches, we propose a new distribution-based model. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.