Template/surfactant free and UV light irradiation assisted fabrication of Mn-Co oxides composite nanorings: Structure and synthesis mechanism

A facile, green, cost effective, and template or surfactant free strategy via a two-step route i.e. UV irradiation followed by dissolution-growth for the controlled synthesis of Mn-Co composite nanorings at room temperature was proposed. The nanorings structures and the process were systematically studied via TEM, HRTEM, EDX and XRD. Bir-MnO_2 nanosheets first formed through the direct photolysis of KMnO_4 under UV light irradiation. This was followed by a dissolution-growth process via the dissolution of Bir-MnO_2 nanosheets by the generated H~+ from the redox reaction between the added Co(NO_3)_2 and residual KMnO_4, as well as the accompanied formation of CoOOH, and Mn-Co composite nanorings. It was found that a balance between the dissolution and growth rate was needed. Suitable pH, KMnO_4 presence and the starting nanosheets like Bir-MnO_2 were the key factors for the formation of nanorings. The obtained Mn-Co nanorings/TiO_2 showed enhanced efficiency for the catalytic oxidation of HCHO. Based on the above understandings, it is believed that the developed dissolution-growth method can be adopted for the designing and preparation of other Mn-Co composite nanostructures which can be further applied for environmental pollution remediation.     

A Study of Value‐at‐Risk Based on M‐Estimators of the Conditional Heteroscedastic Models

In this paper, we investigate the performance of a class of M‐estimators for both symmetric and asymmetric conditional heteroscedastic models in the prediction of value‐at‐risk. The class of estimators includes the least absolute deviation (LAD), Huber's, Cauchy and B‐estimator, as well as the well‐known quasi maximum likelihood estimator (QMLE). We use a wide range of summary statistics to compare both the in‐sample and out‐of‐sample VaR estimates of three well‐known stock indices. Our empirical study suggests that in general Cauchy, Huber and B‐estimator have better performance in predicting one‐step‐ahead VaR than the commonly used QMLE. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Lysine estimation with the modified Udy-dye binding method in hexaploid wheat

Summary Lysine content in bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L. m. Thell) was determined by a modified Udy-dye binding method and was compared with that obtained from the amino acid analyzer. The values obtained from the 2 methods were correlated and the co-efficient was found to be +0.91 at 0.450 mg/ml dye concentration. The modified method is quick, less expensive and quite helpful for screening lysine at earlier generation in wheat breeding for improved grain quality content.The author is grateful to Dr V.A. Johnson, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA, for supplying wheat cultivars with known protein and lysine values.     

Developing pharmacological therapies for Alzheimer disease

Alzheimer disease (AD), while chronic and progressive with an average progression of 7 – 10 years, is both multifactorial and heterogeneous. Thus, AD offers a large window of opportunity and a large number of therapeutic targets to inhibit it. The selection of a therapeutic target, however, is one of the biggest challenges in developing a pharmacological treatment of this multifactorial disease. Inhibition of a pivotal downstream event is likely to benefit more patients than inhibition of an upstream event in AD pathogenesis. Neurofibrillary degeneration of abnormally hyperphosphorylated tau offers such a pivotal therapeutic target. Abnormal hyperphosphorylation of tau and not its aggregation into filaments appears to be the most deleterious step in neurofibrillary degeneration. Tau can be abnormally hyperphosphorylated by downregulation of protein phosphatase-2A activity or by upregulation of more than one tau kinase. Restoration of the phosphatase activity which is downregulated in AD brain or inhibition of GSK-3β and cdk5, which are required for AD-type abnormal hyperphosphorylation of tau, are among the most promising therapeutic strategies.     

Analysis of biomarkers for the cross-linkage of formaldehyde with bovine serum albumin peptides

Formaldehyde, a well-known environmental toxic hazard, has been found to produce endogenously via semicarbazide-sensitive amine oxidase-catalyzed oxidative deamination of methylamine. In diabetes, the activity of SSAO has been found to increase with a subsequent increase in endogenous formaldehyde production. It has been postulated that SSAO-induced production of formaldehyde may be involved in the alteration of protein structure, which may subsequently cause protein deposition associated with chronic pathological disorders. Formaldehyde has also been found to react （cross-link） with amino group of the N-terminal amino acid residue and with the side-chains of arginine, cysteine, histidine and lysine residues. Therefore, formaldehyde may be responsible, at least in part, for protein cross-linkage, oxidative stress and cytotoxicity. The cross-linking of formaldehyde with bovine serum albumin was studied using LC-MS and Mascot database. The peptides sequence for control BSA （untreated） digested with trypsin was matched in the online database search query by exporting the MS/MS data to online MASCOT database. In this way, a total of twenty-seven peptides were matched in the database search query. These twenty-seven peptides were then searched manually in all of the tryptic BSA samples treated with different concentrations of FA that were incubated in different time intervals. Six formaldehyde-treated BSA peptides （FKDLGEEHFK, HLVDEPQNLIK, KVPQVSTPTLVEVSR, RPCFSALTPDETYVPK, LVNELTEFAK, DAFLGSFLYEYSR） were found to be the possible markers for formaldehyde-protein/peptides adducts.     

Structural and optical properties of Cr doped ZnO crystalline thin films deposited by reactive electron beam evaporation technique

ZnO and Cr-doped ZnO thin films are grown on to glass substrates using reactive electron beam(e-beam) evaporation technique.Variation of structural,morphological,and optical properties with Cr doping is investigated.X-ray diffraction(XRD) studies show that the films are polycrystalline in nature with single phase.Energy dispersive spectroscopy(EDS) results demonstrate that Cr ions are substitutionally incorporated into ZnO.Atomic force microscopy(AFM) reveals that the films present a compact surface and root mean squared(RMS) roughness increased with Cr contents.The optical band gap energy Eg of the films has been determined using Transmission data by spectrophotometer and ellipsometry.The band gap energy found to be decreased with increasing Cr doping concentration.The optical constants(refractive index,extinction coefficient) are calculated using ellipsometry and found to increase with Cr doping concentration.     

De novo assembly and genotyping of variants using colored de Bruijn graphs

Detecting genetic variants that are highly divergent from a reference sequence remains a major challenge in genome sequencing. We introduce de novo assembly algorithms using colored de Bruijn graphs for detecting and genotyping simple and complex genetic variants in an individual or population. We provide an efficient software implementation, Cortex, the first de novo assembler capable of assembling multiple eukaryotic genomes simultaneously. Four applications of Cortex are presented. First, we detect and validate both simple and complex structural variations in a high-coverage human genome. Second, we identify more than 3 Mb of sequence absent from the human reference genome, in pooled low-coverage population sequence data from the 1000 Genomes Project. Third, we show how population information from ten chimpanzees enables accurate variant calls without a reference sequence. Last, we estimate classical human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genotypes at HLA-B, the most variable gene in the human genome.     

Structural,morphological, Raman,optical, magnetic,and antibacterial characteristics of CeO<Subscript>2</Subscript> nanostructures

In this study, CeO₂ nanostructures were synthesized by a soft chemical method. A hydrothermal treatment was observed to lead to an interesting morphological transformation of the nanoparticles into homogeneous microspheres composed of nanosheets with an average thickness of 40 nm. Structural analysis revealed the formation of a single-phase cubic fluorite structure of CeO₂ for both samples. A Raman spectroscopic study confirmed the XRD results and furthermore indicated the presence of a large number of oxygen vacancies in the nanosheets. These oxygen vacancies led to room-temperature ferromagnetism (RTFM) of the CeO₂ nanosheets with enhanced magnetic characteristics. Amazingly, the nanosheets exhibited substantially greater antibacterial activity than the nanoparticles. This greater antibacterial activity was attributed to greater exposure of high-surface-energy polar surfaces and to the presence of oxygen vacancies.     

Neighborhood topological effect on grain topology-size relationship in three-dimensional polycrystalline microstructures

A new grain topology-size relationship in three-dimensional(3D)polycrystalline microstructures has recently been established by considering the effects of non-random first nearest neighbor grains.In this contribution,a generalized form for this relationship is presented by considering the interactions of kth(k=1,2,3…)nearest neighbor grains,and large scale Monte Carlo-Potts model simulation is used to investigate the general neighborhood topological effect on the topology-size relationship.The results show that,unlike their first nearest neighbors(k=1),the topological correlations of 3D grains with their kth layers(k 2)of nearest-neighbors may have trivial effect on the topology-size relationship.