Docking MOF crystals on graphene support for highly selective electrocatalytic peroxide production

Tailoring the reaction kinetics is the central theme of designer electrocatalysts,which enables the selective conversion of abundant and inert atmospheric species into useful products.Here we show a supporting effect in tuning the electrocatalytic kinetics of oxygen reduction reaction(ORR)from four-electron to two-electron mechanism by docking metalloporphyrin-based metal-organic frameworks(MOFs)crystals on graphene support,leading to highly selective peroxide production with faradaic efficiency as high as 93.4%.A magic angle of 38.1°tilting for the co-facial alignment was uncovered by electron diffraction tomography,which is attributed to the maximization of n-n interaction for mitigating the lattice and symmetry mismatch between MOF and graphene.The facilitated electron migration and oxygen chemisorption could be ascribed to the supportive effect of graphene that disperses of the electron state of the active center,and ultimately regulates rate-determining step.     

Detection of Germline Variants in 450 Breast/Ovarian Cancer Families with a Multi-Gene Panel Including Coding and Regulatory Regions

With the progress of sequencing technologies, an ever-increasing number of variants of unknown functional and clinical significance (VUS) have been identified in both coding and non-coding regions of the main Breast Cancer (BC) predisposition genes. The aim of this study is to identify a mutational profile of coding and intron-exon junction regions of 12 moderate penetrance genes (ATM, BRIP1, CDH1, CHEK2, NBN, PALB2, PTEN, RAD50, RAD51C, RAD51D, STK11, TP53) in a cohort of 450 Italian patients with Hereditary Breast/Ovarian Cancer Syndrome, wild type for germline mutation in BRCA1/2 genes. The analysis was extended to 5′UTR and 3′UTR of all the genes listed above and to the BRCA1 and BRCA2 known regulatory regions in a subset of 120 patients. The screening was performed through NGS target resequencing on the Illumina platform MiSeq. 8.7% of the patients analyzed is carriers of class 5/4 coding variants in the ATM (3.6%), BRIP1 (1.6%), CHEK2 (1.8%), PALB2 (0.7%), RAD51C (0.4%), RAD51D (0.4%), and TP53 (0.2%) genes, while variants of uncertain pathological significance (VUSs)/class 3 were identified in 9.1% of the samples. In intron-exon junctions and in regulatory regions, variants were detected respectively in 5.1% and in 32.5% of the cases analyzed. The average age of disease onset of 44.4 in non-coding variant carriers is absolutely similar to the average age of disease onset in coding variant carriers for each proband’s group with the same cancer type. Furthermore, there is not a statistically significant difference in the proportion of cases with a tumor onset under age of 40 between the two groups, but the presence of multiple non-coding variants in the same patient may affect the aggressiveness of the tumor and it is worth underlining that 25% of patients with an aggressive tumor are carriers of a PTEN 3′UTR-variant. This data provides initial information on how important it might be to extend mutational screening to the regulatory regions in clinical practice.     

Spectroelectrochemistry of Quantum Dots

Spectroelectrochemistry (SEC) is a set of techniques with many advantages in the study and characterization of materials. Although SEC has not yet been widely used to study quantum dots (QDs), the information extracted from SEC experiments about these nanostructures is very useful. Most of the works that use SEC to study QDs are high‐quality pieces of research. This review intends to show how to perform SEC in an easy way and what information can be obtained using these techniques. Most of the examples shown in this review are related to semiconductor and carbon QDs. After a brief introduction, some optoelectronic properties of QDs and the main SEC techniques are described. The capabilities of SEC for the study of QDs are illustrated with examples extracted from literature. Finally, the needs of SEC to become a user‐friendly technique and its evolution to become more powerful are commented in the last section of the review.     

Fate and effects of Camembert cheese micro-organisms in the human colonic microbiota of healthy volunteers after regular Camembert consumption

The objective of this study was to determine i) if Camembert cheese micro-organisms could be detected in fecal samples after regular consumption by human subjects and ii) the consequence of this consumption on global metabolic activities of the host colonic microbiota. An open human protocol was designed where 12 healthy volunteers were included: a 2-week period of fermented products exclusion followed by a 4-weeks Camembert ingestion period where 2x40 g/day of Camembert cheese was consumed. Stools were collected from the volunteers before consumption, twice during the ingestion period (2nd and 4th week) and once after a wash out period of 2 weeks. During the consumption of Camembert cheese, high levels of Lactococcus lactis and Leuconostoc mesenteroides were measured in fecal samples using real-time quantitative PCR, reaching median values of 8.2 and 7.5 Log(10) genome equivalents/g of stool. For Ln. mesenteroides, persistence was observed 15 days after the end of Camembert consumption. The survival of Geotrichum candidum was also assessed and the fecal concentration reached a median level of 7.1 Log(10) CFU/g in stools. Except a decreasing trend of the nitrate reductase activity, no significant modification was shown in the metabolic activities during this study.     

Facile preparation of glycine-based mesoporous graphitic carbons with embedded cobalt nanoparticles

Journal of Materials Science - A simple route has been developed for the preparation of mesoporous graphitic carbons with embedded cobalt nanoparticles just using glycine as a nitrogen source,...     

Double emulsions (W/O/W): physical characteristics and perceived intensity of salty taste

This study addressed the correlation between physical characteristics of double emulsions and sensory perception, as the microstructure of these systems may provide the mechanism to understanding the initial cause of the altered salty taste. Thus, double emulsions (W/O/W) were prepared using different volumes of the internal aqueous phase while maintaining the same fat and sodium contents in the evaluated systems. Polyglycerol polyricinoleate (PGPR) and tween 80 were used as hydrophobic and hydrophilic emulsifiers, respectively. After preparation, the samples were stored at 25 °C for 4 days and submitted to analysis of optical microscopy, distribution and polydispersity of the oil droplets size, electrical conductivity, rheological behaviour and sensorial analysis. It was found that the use of different emulsifier concentrations (PGPR) did not influence the physical characteristics of the emulsions with the same formulation, but emulsions with different internal aqueous phase concentrations presented different results. These distinct characteristics may have influenced sensorial perception, as the emulsion with higher internal phase concentration was considered saltier. Thus, it can be concluded that structural differences of the double emulsions can be used to decrease the sodium contents without perceivable changes in salty taste.     

Incorporating wheelchair users in people detection

Multimedia Tools and Applications - A wheelchair users detector is presented to extend people detection, providing a more general solution to detect people in environments such as houses adapted...     

Crowdsourcing for data management

The discovery of informative itemsets is a fundamental building block in data analytics and information retrieval. While the problem has been widely studied, only few solutions scale. This is particularly the case when (1) the data set is massive, calling for large-scale distribution, and/or (2) the length k of the informative itemset to be discovered is high. In this paper, we address the problem of parallel mining of maximally informative k-itemsets (miki) based on joint entropy. We propose PHIKS (Parallel Highly Informative \(\underline{K}\)-ItemSet), a highly scalable, parallel miki mining algorithm. PHIKS renders the mining process of large-scale databases (up to terabytes of data) succinct and effective. Its mining process is made up of only two efficient parallel jobs. With PHIKS, we provide a set of significant optimizations for calculating the joint entropies of miki having different sizes, which drastically reduces the execution time, the communication cost and the energy consumption, in a distributed computational platform. PHIKS has been extensively evaluated using massive real-world data sets. Our experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our proposal by the significant scale-up obtained with high itemsets length and over very large databases.