Lack of endoplasmic reticulum 1,2-α-mannosidase activity that trims N-glycan Man9GlcNAc2 to Man8GlcNAc2 isomer B in a manE gene disruptant of Aspergillus oryzae

The gene manE, encoding a probable class I endoplasmic reticulum 1,2-α-mannosidases (ER-Man), was identified from the filamentous fungus Aspergillus oryzae due to similarity to orthologs. It removes a single mannose residue from Man(9)GlcNAc(2), generating Man(8)GlcNAc(2) isomer B. Disruption of manE caused drastic decreases in ER-Man activity in A. oryzae microsomes.     

Electrochemical Oxidation of Alcohols Using Halogen Mediators

The high importance of carbonyl compounds in organic synthesis and fine chemical industries has let the development of efficient and environmentally benign methods for the oxidation of alcohols be an important research field. Electrochemistry would be one of the ideal strategies to achieve green redox processes avoiding the use of chemical oxidants/reductants. Due to the relatively high oxidation potential of alcohols, indirect methods using redox mediators have often been employed for the electrochemical alcohol oxidation. Halide salts would be one of the most traditional but still common mediators owing to the advantage of wide commercial availability and cost-efficiency. This review summarized the electrogenerated active halogen-mediated transformations of prim- sec-, and tert-alcohols from the pioneering works to the recent examples. In addition, recent advances in the direct oxidation of alcohols are also presented.     

Extension of a nuclear reaction calculation code CCONE toward higher incident energies — multiple preequilibrium emission,and spectrum in laboratory system

A nuclear reaction calculation code CCONE, which was developed for nuclear data evaluation for JENDL/AC-2008 and JENDL-4, has been upgraded to improve the prediction accuracy for calculated cross sections at nucleon incident energies higher than 20 MeV. Multiple particle emission, in which nucleons and complex particles up to α-particle are involved, from pre-equilibrium reaction process was implemented based on the sequential-decay calculations for all produced exciton states within the framework of the two-component exciton model. The effect of velocity-change of particle-emitting nuclei on the multiple emission in preequilibrium and compound processes, which was not included in the previous evaluations, was taken into account to obtain spectra in the laboratory system using an average velocity approximation for each composite/compound nucleus. Calculated nucleon emission spectra at nucleon incident energies from 20 to 200 MeV were compared with experimental and evaluated data for the proton- and neutron-induced reactions on ²⁷Al. The present results are in good agreement with experimental data. It was found that their predictions were better than those of JENDL/HE-2007 especially for low emission energies at high incident energies.     

Transfer profile of orally and intramuscularly administered tetrodotoxin to artificial hybrid specimens of the pufferfish Takifugu rubripes and Takifugu porphyreus

Tetrodotoxin (TTX) was administered to artificially hybridized specimens of the pufferfish Takifugu rubripes and Takifugu porphyreus to investigate toxin accumulation in hybrids and TTX transfer/accumulation profiles in the pufferfish body. In test fish administered TTX-containing feed homogenate at a dose of ～400 MU/fish by oral gavage using a syringe (OGA group), the toxin content (MU/g tissue) of the digestive tract rapidly decreased and that of the liver increased from 1 to 24 h after administration. From 24 to 120 h, the toxin content of the liver decreased gradually, and the toxin appeared in the skin. On the other hand, intramuscularly administered TTX (400 MU/fish) was rapidly transferred to the liver and skin via the blood, and only a little toxin remained in the muscle even at 1 h (IMA group). The total amount of toxin remaining in the whole body (% of administered toxin) was 31-45% in the OGA group, and 42-74% in the IMA group; the scores in the OGA group were generally lower than those in the IMA group. In both OGA and IMA groups, the greatest amount of toxin accumulated in the liver (23-52%) after 8 h, followed by the skin (11-21%) after 72 h. The TTX administration experiment, especially using the oral gavage administration method, revealed that skins and livers of 'torama' pufferfish hybrid are endowed with TTX-accumulating ability, but the muscles are not, and that TTX taken up from toxic feed to the pufferfish body is transferred first to the liver and then to the skin via the blood.     

Fast multidimensional directed information analysis

Multidimensional directed information (MDI) analysis is a signal processing method to quantify and visualize the causality of multichannel time series in the form of information flow. MDI analysis is defined as conditional mutual information and needs large calculations. Although MDI is used for electroencephalogram (EEG) analysis, large computation time is a problem. MDI can be calculated without direct probability calculations, assuming that the multichannel time series has Gaussian profiles. However, the amount of calculation increases exponentially with increase in the number of channels. Such large calculations have prevented practical use of MDI analysis in medical fields such as clinical EEG analysis in which many multidimensional time series need to be processed. In this paper, we propose a new calculation approach to drastically decrease the calculation time of MDI analysis. The proposed method makes it possible to decrease the calculation time exponentially for multichannel time series that can be approximated with multidimensional autoregressive models. © 2012 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Compact and Light Supercapacitor Electrodes from a Surface‐Only Solid by Opened Carbon Nanotubes with 2 200 m2 g−1 Surface Area

An approach is presented to make a “surface‐only solid” with a surface area of 2 240 m² g^?1 (1 310 m² cm^?3), corresponding to 85% of the atoms constituting a surface, by opening single‐walled carbon nanotube forests and solids via controlled oxidation. The controllability of the approach is demonstrated by tailoring the hole size to match the guest molecule, for example, nitrogen, fullerene, or solvated ions. These features make the surface‐only solid an ideal vessel for material and energy storage, as demonstrated by its use for electrodes to realize a light and compact supercapacitor with high energy (24.7 W h kg^?1) and power (98.9 kW kg^?1) densities, exceeding those of activated carbon (16.9 W h kg^?1 and 35.7 kW kg^?1).     

Coupled-wave analysis of vector holograms. 3. Effects of intrinsic distribution of optical axis in anisotropic media

We investigated theoretically the interference of two counterpropagating polarized light beams in optically anisotropic media whose optical axis is in the film plane and is gradually rotated around the thickness direction. Results indicated that pure polarization modulation without intensity variation is obtained in the inhomogeneous media when the total angle of the rotation is much smaller than the total retardation. Reflective anisotropic gratings recorded by the polarization modulation were formulated as the perturbation of the dielectric tensor, and diffraction properties were studied using coupled-wave analysis (CWA) and a numerical method. By assuming that the period of the intrinsic distribution is substantially larger than that of the induced one, we demonstrated that CWA estimates the diffraction efficiency and the polarization state of the diffracted light with high accuracy.     

Adhesion property of SiOx-doped Diamond-like Carbon Films Deposited on Polycarbonate by Inductively Coupled Plasma Chemical Vapor Deposition

SiO_x-DLC (diamond-like coating) films as candidates for protection coating of polymers were prepared by using a pulse-biased inductively coupled plasma chemical vapor deposition system with acetylene, tetramethylsilane and oxygen gasses. Effects of the gas composition and O₂ plasma pre-treatment on adhesion of the SiO_x-DLC films were investigated. Adhesion strength of Si-DLC films (with 0% oxygen) was almost the same to that of undoped DLC films. By employing O₂-plasma pre-treatment, adhesion strength of the Si-DLC films was considerably improved, while that of the undoped DLC films was not. The SiO_x-DLC films with the carbon to oxygen (O/C) ratio of 0.15 showed adhesion strength as high as that of the Si-DLC films on the O₂-plasma pre-treated substrate. However, further improvement of adhesion strength of the SiO_x-DLC was not realized by employing the O₂-plasma pre-treatment. On the other hand, the SiO_x-DLC films showed favorable feature of high deposition rate and large optical band gap although higher O/C ratio (> 0.15) brought about poor adhesion strength of the films.