Unveiling the elusive role of tetraethyl orthosilicate hydrolysis in ionic-liquid-templated zeolite synthesis

Despite previous reports showing that crystallization kinetics affects zeolite phase selectivity because zeolites are metastable species in their synthesis solution rather than thermodynamic end points, the critical kinetics-controlling parameter is yet to be determined. This work elucidated the effect of tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS) hydrolysis before hydrothermal treatment on the final zeolite phase selectivity in the ionic liquid-templated synthesis of 10-membered ring zeolites (MFI- or TON-type zeolites). The results showed that the dissolved silica concentration in the synthesis solution, which is controlled by varying the TEOS hydrolysis temperature and addition rate, induced heterogeneous nuclear growth. Specifically, in 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium ([BMIM]Br)-directed syntheses, the high and low concentrations of dissolved silica species led to MFI and TON zeolite formation, respectively. The experimental results are supported by silica polymerization modeling using the Reaction Ensemble Monte Carlo method and theoretical calculations on composite building unit formation. The results are valuable for understanding the nucleation mechanism in zeolite crystallization.     

Heritability of Stroop and flanker performance in 12-year old children

Background  

There is great interest in appropriate phenotypes that serve as indicator of genetically transmitted frontal (dys)function, such as ADHD. Here we investigate the ability to deal with response conflict, and we ask to what extent performance variation on response interference tasks is caused by genetic variation. We tested a large sample of 12-year old monozygotic and dizygotic twins on two well-known and closely related response interference tasks; the color Stroop task and the Eriksen flanker task. Using structural equation modelling we assessed the heritability of several performance indices derived from those tasks.     

The contribution of high frequencies to human brain activity underlying horizontal localization of natural spatial sounds

Background  

In the field of auditory neuroscience, much research has focused on the neural processes underlying human sound localization. A recent magnetoencephalography (MEG) study investigated localization-related brain activity by measuring the N1m event-related response originating in the auditory cortex. It was found that the dynamic range of the right-hemispheric N1m response, defined as the mean difference in response magnitude between contralateral and ipsilateral stimulation, reflects cortical activity related to the discrimination of horizontal sound direction. Interestingly, the results also suggested that the presence of realistic spectral information within horizontally located spatial sounds resulted in a larger right-hemispheric N1m dynamic range. Spectral cues being predominant at high frequencies, the present study further investigated the issue by removing frequencies from the spatial stimuli with low-pass filtering. This resulted in a stepwise elimination of direction-specific spectral information. Interaural time and level differences were kept constant. The original, unfiltered stimuli were broadband noise signals presented from five frontal horizontal directions and binaurally recorded for eight human subjects with miniature microphones placed in each subject's ear canals. Stimuli were presented to the subjects during MEG registration and in a behavioral listening experiment.     

The 3D structure of thuricin CD, a two-component bacteriocin with cysteine sulfur to α-carbon cross-links

Thuricin CD is an antimicrobial factor that consists of two peptides, Trn-α and Trn-β, that exhibit synergistic activity against drug resistant strains of Clostridium difficile. Trn-α and Trn-β each possess three sulfur to α-carbon thioether bridges for which the stereochemistry is unknown. This report presents the three-dimensional solution structures of Trn-α and Trn-β. Structure calculations were performed for the eight possible stereoisomers of each peptide based on the same NMR data. The structure of the stereoisomer that best fit the experimental data was chosen as the representative structure for each peptide. It was determined that Trn-α has L-stereochemistry at Ser21 (α-R), L-stereochemistry at Thr25 (α-R), and D-stereochemistry at Thr28 (α-S) (an LLD isomer). Trn-β was also found to be the LLD isomer, with L-stereochemistry at Thr21 (α-R), L-stereochemistry at Ala25 (α-R), and D-stereochemistry at Tyr28 (α-S).