Design and development of a two‐dimensional system based on hydrophilic and reversed‐phase liquid chromatography with on‐line sample treatment for the simultaneous separation of excreted xenobiotics and endogenous metabolites in urine

In the present work we describe a two‐dimensional liquid chromatographic system (2D‐LC) with detection by mass spectrometry (MS) for the simultaneous separation of endogenous metabolites of clinical interest and excreted xenobiotics deriving from exposure to toxic compounds. The 2D‐LC system involves two orthogonal chromatographic modes, hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography (HILIC) to separate polar endogenous metabolites and reversed‐phase (RP) chromatography to separate excreted xenobiotics of low and intermediate polarity. Additionally, the present proposal has the novelty of incorporating an on‐line sample treatment based on the use of restricted access materials (RAMs), which permits the direct injection of urine samples into the system. The work is focused on the instrumental coupling, studying all possible options and attempting to circumvent the problems of solvent incompatibility between the RAM device and the two chromatographic columns, HILIC and RP. The instrumental configuration developed, RAM‐HILIC‐RPLC‐MS/MS, allows the simultaneous assessment of urinary metabolites of clinical interest and excreted compounds derived from exposure to toxic agents with minimal sample manipulation. Thus, it may be of interest in areas such as occupational and environmental toxicology in order to explore the possible relationship between the two types of compounds. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Stability results for Mountain Pass and Linking type solutions of semilinear problems involving Dirichlet forms

Some stability results for Mountain Pass and Linking type solutions of semilinear problems involving a very general class of Dirichlet forms are stated. The non linear terms are supposed to have a suitable superlinear growth and the family of Dirichlet forms is required to be dominated from below and from above by a fixed diffusion type form. Some concrete examples are also given.     

Semiconvergence in distribution of random closed sets with application to random optimization problems

The paper considers upper semicontinuous behavior in distribution of sequences of random closed sets. Semiconvergence in distribution will be described via convergence in distribution of random variables with values in a suitable topological space. Convergence statements for suitable functions of random sets are proved and the results are employed to derive stability statements for random optimization problems where the objective function and the constraint set are approximated simultaneously. The author is grateful to two anonymous referees for helpful suggestions.     

Symmetric incidence groupoids

In [7] point-reflection geometries were studied which can be derived from commutative kinematic spaces without involutory elements. But the class of point-reflection geometries is larger. For example, elliptic planes with their reflections cannot be derived from commutative kinematic spaces. Here we investigate a larger class of reflection geometries.This paper was sponsored by Vigoni Program 1999.