Taguchi orthogonal design assisted immobilization of Candida rugosa lipase onto nanocellulose-silica reinforced polyethersulfone membrane: physicochemical characterization and operational stability

Cellulose - A greener processing route to replace the current environmentally-unfriendly esterification technique to produce biofuels such as pentyl valerate (PeVa) was explored. This study...     

Preparation of Anatase Hollow TiO2 Spheres and Their Photocatalytic Activity in the Photodegradation of Chlorpyrifos

Hollow anatase titania (TiO₂) spheres were synthesized using fructose and tetrabutyl titanate (Ti(OC₄H₉)₄, TBT) as the precursors via the conventional hard template method. The morphological, structural and thermal properties of the products were characterized using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, X‐ray diffraction (XRD), thermogravimetric and differential thermal analysis (TG‐DTA), Brunauer? Emmett? Teller (BET) surface area analysis and diffuse reflectance ultraviolet visible (DR UV? Vis) spectroscopy. XRD revealed that the hollow TiO₂ prepared was in the anatase phase and the BET surface area measured was about 22 m² g^?1. The photocatalytic activity of the synthesized hollow anatase TiO₂ in the photodecomposition of chlorpyrifos was 18.67 % higher than that obtained using commercial TiO₂.     

Capillary electrophoresis for the analysis of antidepressant drugs: A review

Depression is a common mental disorder that may lead to major mental health problems, and antidepressant drugs have been used as a treatment of choice to mitigate symptoms of major depressive disorders by ameliorating the chemical imbalances of neurotransmitters in brain. Since abusing antidepressant drugs such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and tricyclic antidepressant drugs can cause severe adverse effects, continuous toxicological monitoring of the parent compounds as well as their metabolites using numerous analytical methods appears pertinent. Among them, capillary electrophoresis has been popularly utilized since the method has a lot of advantages viz. using small amounts of sample and solvents, ease of operation, and rapid analysis. This review paper brings a survey of more than 30 papers on capillary electrophoresis of antidepressant drugs published approximately from 1999 until 2018. It focuses on the reported capillary electrophoresis techniques and their applications and challenges for determining antidepressant drugs and their metabolites. It is organized according to the commonly used capillary zone electrophoresis method, followed by non‐aqueous capillary electrophoresis and micellar electrokinetic chromatography, with details on breakthrough findings. Where available, information is given about the background electrolyte used, detector utilized, and sensitivity obtained.     

Membrane Computing to Enhance Time Efficiency of Minimum Dominating Set

Graph theory is widely used in numerous fields, such as, engineering, physics, social and biological sciences; linguistics etc. The minimum dominating set (MDS) problem is one of the main problems of algorithmic graph theory and has numerous applications especially in graph mining. Since it is NP-hard to solve the MDS problem approximately, much work has been dedicated to central and distributed approximation algorithms for restricted graph classes. In recent research exponential time \(O(k^{n})\) algorithms are used for some graph classes for solving the MDS problem. In the approach of using the algorithmic tile self-assembly model, the MDS problem has been solved in \(O(n^{2})\) steps. On the other hand, in the area of membrane computing, P systems introduce two levels of parallelism: every membrane works concurrently with other membranes,and, rules are applied in parallel in each membrane. This paper introduces an algorithm based on the parallelism feature of the P systems model for solving the MDS problem in linear time O(n).