Colloidal Fluorophore Aggregates for the Selective Detection of Albumins in Solution and on Electrophoresis Gels

We report a fluorescent probe that is highly sensitive and selective for serum albumins. Signal transduction results from the disassembly of fluorescence-quenched aggregates upon binding to human serum albumin (HSA). The probe offers a rapid (≤2 s) fluorometric assay of HSA in phosphate-buffered saline, urine, or blood serum with a high signal-to-noise ratio. It is also useful as a wash-free prestaining reagent for detecting HSA on electrophoresis gels.     

Simple and effective neural coreference resolution for Korean language

We propose an end-to-end neural coreference resolution for the Korean language that uses an attention mechanism to point to the same entity. Because Korean is a head-final language, we focused on a method that uses a pointer network based on the head. The key idea is to consider all nouns in the document as candidates based on the head-final characteristics of the Korean language and learn distributions over the referenced entity positions for each noun. Given the recent success of applications using bidirectional encoder representation from transformer (BERT) in natural language-processing tasks, we employed BERT in the proposed model to create word representations based on contextual information. The experimental results indicated that the proposed model achieved state-of-the-art performance in Korean language coreference resolution.     

Improvement of the lipid oxidative stability of soybean oil-inwater emulsion by addition of daraesoon (shoot of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Actinidia arguta</Emphasis>) and samnamul (shoot of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Aruncus dioicus</Emphasis>) extract

The effect of 75% ethanol extract of daraesoon and samnamul (200 mg/kg) on the lipid oxidation of soybean oil-in-water (4:6, w/w) emulsion containing iron (5 mg/kg) in dark conditions at 25°C was studied by determining headspace oxygen and hydroperoxide contents. Polyphenol, carotenoid, and chlorophyll contents were also evaluated using spectrophotometry. The headspace oxygen contents were higher and hydroperoxide contents were lower (p<0.05) in the emulsions with added daraesoon and samnamul extracts compared with the control emulsion without the extract. The antioxidant activity of the daraesoon and samnamul extracts in the lipid oxidation of the emulsions was comparable to that of dibutylhydroxytoluene at 200mg/kg. Polyphenols, carotenoids, and chlorophylls were degraded during oxidation of the emulsions, possibly due to a role of the antioxidants. The results suggest that contribution to the improved lipid oxidative stability of the emulsion with added samnamul and daraesoon would be due to polyphenols and pigments, respectively.     

Ethyl Gallate Dual-Targeting PTPN6 and PPARγ Shows Anti-Diabetic and Anti-Obese Effects

The emergence of the high correlation between type 2 diabetes and obesity with complicated conditions has led to the coinage of the term “diabesity”. AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) activators and peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPARγ) antagonists have shown therapeutic activity for diabesity, respectively. Hence, the discovery of compounds that activate AMPK as well as antagonize PPARγ may lead to the discovery of novel therapeutic agents for diabesity. In this study, the knockdown of PTPN6 activated AMPK and suppressed adipogenesis in 3T3-L1 cells. By screening a library of 1033 natural products against PTPN6, we found ethyl gallate to be the most selective inhibitor of PTPN6 (K_i = 3.4 μM). Subsequent assay identified ethyl gallate as the best PPARγ antagonist (IC₅₀ = 5.4 μM) among the hit compounds inhibiting PTPN6. Ethyl gallate upregulated glucose uptake and downregulated adipogenesis in 3T3-L1 cells as anticipated. These results strongly suggest that ethyl gallate, which targets both PTPN6 and PPARγ, is a potent therapeutic candidate to combat diabesity.     

Investigation of Ferroelectricity in Poly(methyl vinylidene cyanide)

The ferroelectric and piezoelectric properties of newly synthesized polymer systems have been studied. To date PVDF and its copolymers P(VDF-TrFE) have provided the bulk of the knowledge pertaining to ferroelectricity in polymers. Recently, ultrathin ferroelectric films of P(VDF-TrFE) 70:30 have been fabricated using the Langmuir-Blodgett technique [4]. In this study, various new polymers have been synthesized by chemically altering the PVDF structure. This alteration was performed in order to enhance the amphiphilic nature of the polymer and thus improve the LB film quality and control. Various chemical groups have been used to replace the electropositive hydrogen and electronegative fluorine found in the traditional PVDF chemical structure, including Nitrile, Ester, and Methyl groups. In all cases the resulting chemical structure provides for a net dipole moment directed from the electronegative side of the monomer to the electropositive side. However, to obtain ferroelectricity these microscopic dipoles must first pack in a manner such that a reversible macroscopic dipole is obtained. Both structural and dielectric studies have been performed on a number of newly synthesized systems. The structural properties of these new materials were probed using both temperature-dependent x-ray diffraction and differential scanning calorimetry, while dielectric properties were investigated using electric field and temperature-dependent capacitance and polarization measurements.     

Combined coagulation-disk filtration process as a pretreatment of ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis membrane for wastewater reclamation: an autopsy study of a pilot plant

The effects of the combined coagulation-disk filtration (CC-DF) process on the fouling characteristics and behavior caused by interactions between effluent organic matter (EfOM) and the membrane surfaces of the ultrafiltration (UF) and reverse osmosis (RO) membranes in a pilot plant for municipal wastewater reclamation (MWR) were investigated. The feed water from secondary effluents was treated by the CC-DF process used as a pretreatment for the UF membrane to mitigate fouling formation and the permeate from the CC-DF process was further filtered by two UF membrane units in parallel arrangement and fed into four RO modules in a series connection. The CC-DF process was not sufficient to mitigate biofouling but the UF membrane was effective in mitigating biofouling on the RO membrane surfaces. Fouling of the UF and RO membranes was dominated by hydrophilic fractions of EfOM (e.g., polysaccharide-like and protein-like substances) and inorganic scaling (e.g., aluminum, calcium and silica). The desorbed UF membrane foulants included more aluminum species and hydrophobic fractions than the desorbed RO membrane foulants, which was presumably due to the residual coagulants and aluminum-humic substance complexes. The significant change in the surface chemistry of the RO membrane (a decrease in surface charge and an increase in contact angle of the fouled RO membranes) induced by the accumulation of hydrophilic EfOM onto the negatively charged RO membrane surface intensified the fouling formation of the fouled RO membrane by hydrophobic interaction between the humic substances of EfOM with relatively high hydrophobicity and the fouled RO membranes with decreased surface charge and increased contract angle.     

Electrochemistry and electrochromism of a poly(cyclopentadithiophene) derivative with a viologen pendant

N-Methyl-N′-(6-4H-cyclopenta[2,1-b:3,4-b′]dithiophene-4-ylhexyl)-4,4′-bipyridinium dihexafluorophosphate (CPDT-V²⁺-Me) was synthesized. The monomer was electropolymerized on a glassy carbon or an ITO electrode in a potentiodynamic mode to form the corresponding polymer P(CPDT-V²⁺-Me) on the electrodes. During the electropolymerization, two redox peaks of the viologen (V) moiety increased up to several cycles and then decreased while the redox peak of P(CPDT) moiety still increased. Especially, a new oxidative peak a in the range of ca. −0.4 and 0 V versus Ag/Ag⁺ appeared and increased up to several cycles. Peak a almost disappeared after the redox peaks of the viologen moiety almost disappeared. As a result of cyclic voltammetric study, it was shown that peak a originated from the oxidation of reduced viologen moiety via P(CPDT)-mediated electron transfer mechanism. We also found that the electroactivity of viologen moiety in P(CPDT-V²⁺-Me) decreased significantly when the potential was scanned to the second viologen redox (V⁰/V√⁺). In practical applications, the polymer can be used in the potential range from the first viologen redox to P(CPDT) redox. The polymer turned into highly transparent P(CPDT⁺-V²⁺-Me), blue P(CPDT-V²⁺-Me), dark violet P(CPDT-V√⁺-Me), and violet P(CPDT-V⁰-Me) approximately at 0.8, −0.4, −0.8, and −1.7 V versus Ag/Ag⁺, respectively.