Separation of sulfated bile acids by high-performance liquid chromatography

In order to establish a new method for simultaneous determination of sulfated bile acids without deconjugation, separation of 3-sulfates of unconjugated, glyco- and tauroconjugated bile acids by high-performance liquid chromatography has been undertaken. The preliminary experiment indicated that reversed phase chromatography on an ODS SC-02 column using ammonium carbonate aqueous solution/acetonitrile as a mobile phase would be promising. The ratio of peak width to retention time was varied depending upon the salt concentration. The content of water in mobile phase exerted an influence on the capacity ratio to a certain extent, but not on the resolution. The use of 0.5% ammonium carbonate/acetonitrile (26∶8 and 20∶8, v/v) was found to be suitable for complete resolution of sulfated cholate, chenodeoxycholate, deoxycholate, lithocholate and their glyco- and tauro-conjugates.     

Structural changes in carbon aerogels with high temperature treatment

The structural change of carbon aerogels at high temperatures up to 2800°C has been investigated. Change in microtexture of fine particles, which constitute carbon aerogels derived from phenolic resin, was of a typical non-graphitized carbon. The microporosity decreased with an increase of heat-treatment temperature, and disappeared at 2000°C. The mesoporosity still remained even after heat-treatment up to 2800°C, though 50% of mesopore volume was lost because of the fusion of the particles with the change of carbon microtexture.     

A feasibility study of a direct-mapping parallel processing method to solve linear equations in load-flow calculation

With the growing size and complexity of power systems, system analysis—such as transients calculation—takes much time. Hence, fast calculation methods are required. Although parallel processing is a hopeful method, there have been difficulties in the parallel solution of linear equations which appear in power-flow calculations by the Newton-Raphson method. This paper aims at the fast calculation of the power-flow problem by means of parallel processing. In order to improve the suitability to the parallel solution of the differential equation in transients calculation, we assume the use of a direct-mapping parallel processing machine to map directly the network of a power system onto a network of processors. Under this assumption, we propose a new parallel-processing-oriented method in which the linear equation is solved by linear iterations between nodes with Aitken acceleration. We simulate the method on three model power systems and compare this Parallel Iterative Method (PIN) with a Parallel Direct Method (PDM) which uses the banded matrix according to the number of operations required. As a result, we can expect that PIM may solve linear equations faster than PDM with m processors, although the PIM might be inferior to the PDM with m × m processors, where m denotes the half-band width of the banded matrix.     

One-pot sonochemical synthesis of dendron-stabilized gold nanoparticles as promising nano-hybrid with potential impact in biological application

Dihydroxy fatty acid-based (DF) dendron-stabilized gold nanoparticles (AuNps) were synthesized without adding any external reducing or stabilizing agent. Each DHA base dendron (G1, G2, or G3) possesses a single thiol at the focal point and free -OH groups at the other terminal and as a result can be used to reduce AuCl₄⁻ to Au⁰ and stabilize the nascent AuNps by the thiol group. The size and distribution of the AuNp produced can also be correlated with the rate of Au (III) reduction. TEM images vividly demonstrate the specific morphology of gold nanoparticles with different sizes and shapes obtained by using different generations of DF dendrons.     

Force spectroscopy on single polymer incorporated into polymer gels

We conducted the extraction experiments of single polymer incorporated into hydrogels with an atomic force microscope (AFM) as a model for investigating nonspecific intermolecular interactions between macromolecules in a semidilute region at the single molecule level. Small amount of poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) terminated with a thiol group was inserted in poly(acrylamide) gels, and a part of PEG polymer segments on the gel surface was attempted to pull out of the gels with a gold-coated AFM tip. The observed force-distance curves were classified into two kinds of extraction force profiles: a plateau force, which is almost constant irrespective of the tip-surface distance and a nonlinear force, which nonlinearly increases with the extraction length. Characteristic interaction length, L, and force, F, of these extraction force profiles were measured with changing the crosslinker concentration of gels which strongly affects the network structures. As a result, L of these extraction profiles significantly decreased at crosslinker concentrations higher than a standard one at which most gels have been prepared for investigating their physical properties. On the other hand, F showed no obvious difference on the change in crosslinker concentrations both on the plateau and the nonlinear force profiles. The origin of the observed forces was discussed in terms of gel network structures.     

Selective modification of the N-terminal structure of polytheonamide b significantly changes its cytotoxicity and activity as an ion channel

Chemical point mutation: Polytheonamide?B is a naturally occurring polypeptide containing 48 amino acids. It both displays potent cytotoxicity and acts as a monovalent cation channel in?vitro. Chemoselective methods to modify the 44th, N-, and C-terminal residues of the natural product have been developed, and evaluation of the resultant derivatives suggests that the intrinsic activities of the peptide can only be altered by switching its N-terminal substitution.