Fate of corrosion products released from stainless steel in marine sediments and seawater. Part 2. Sequim Bay clayey silt

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Schmidt, R.L.

1982-04-01

This report describes laboratory experiments in which neutron-activated 347 stainless steel specimens were exposed to clayey silt from Sequim Bay, Washington. The properties and trace metal geochemistry of the sediment and the amounts of corrosion products that were released under oxic and reduced conditions and their distribution among different chemical fractions of the sediment are discussed. The distributions of Cr, Mn, Fe, Ni and Cu among different chemical forms in the Sequim Bay sediment show that DTPA removed <10% of extractable Cr, Fe and Mn, approx. 20% of extractable Ni and approx. 30% of extractable Cu. The inorganic fraction (materialmore » soluble in 2.5% acetic acid) accounted for approx. 30% of total extractable Mn and approx. 10% or less of Cr, Fe, Ni and Cu. Major portions of Cr and Cu, and a large amount of Fe were in the organic fraction. Extractable Mn, Fe and Ni were associated with hydrous oxides likely as coatings on the mineral substrate of the sediment. No Co was detectable in any of the extracts. (PSB)« less

Application of large volume injection GC-MS to analysis of organic compounds in the extracts and leachates of municipal solid waste incineration fly ash

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Korenkova, Eva; Matisova, Eva; Slobodnik, Jaroslav

2006-07-01

Organic solvent and water extracts of fly ash from a Milan (Italy) municipal solid waste incinerator (MSWI) were analyzed by large volume injection-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (LVI-GC-MS) with programmable temperature vaporizer (PTV). Using injection volumes of 10-100 {mu}l, typically over a hundred compounds were detected in organic solvent extracts and ca. 35% of them could be tentatively identified from their electron impact ionization mass spectra. A protocol for the determination of the maximum amount of a potential environmental pollutant available for leaching (availability test) was developed for four selected target compounds: pentachlorobenzene (PeCB), hexachlorobenzene (HxCB), o-terphenyl (o-TPH) and m-terphenyl (m-TPH). Keymore » parameters, extraction time and liquid-to-solid ratio (L/S), were studied in more detail. Recoveries of PeCB, HxCB and o-TPH spiked into the fly ash samples at two concentration levels ranged from 38% to 53% for freshly spiked and from 14% to 40% for 40-day aged fly ash. Recoveries of m-TPH were 8% to 11% from freshly spiked and less than 3% from aged spiked fly ash. The native amounts in Milan MSWI fly ash, determined in an interlaboratory exercise using the developed protocol, were 31 ng/g PeCB, 34 ng/g HxCB, 72 ng/g o-TPH and 4.4 ng/g m-TPH. A separate methodology was developed for the determination of compounds extracted from fly ash by water (leaching test). Following 8-h sonication at L/S 20, the leached amounts of PeCB, HxCB and o-TPH were 1.1, 3.1 and 6.0 ng/g fly ash, respectively.« less

A rapid and practical strategy for the determination of platinum, palladium, ruthenium, rhodium, iridium and gold in large amounts of ultrabasic rock by inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry combined with ultrasound extraction

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhang, Gai; Tian, Min

2015-04-01

This proposed method regulated the determination of platinum, palladium, ruthenium, rhodium, iridium and gold in platinum-group ores by nickel sulfide fire assay—inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES) combined with ultrasound extraction for the first time. The quantitative limits were 0.013-0.023μg/g. The samples were fused to separate the platinum-group elements from matrix. The nickel sulfide button was then dissolved with hydrochloric acid and the insoluble platinum-group sulfide residue was dissolved with aqua regia by ultrasound bath and finally determined by ICP-OES. The proposed method has been applied into the determination of platinum-group element and gold in large amounts of ultrabasic rocks from the Great Dyke of Zimbabwe.

[Histomorphometric evaluation of ridge preservation after molar tooth extraction].

PubMed

Zhan, Y L; Hu, W J; Xu, T; Zhen, M; Lu, R F

2017-02-18

To evaluate bone formation in human extraction sockets with absorbed surrounding walls augmented with Bio-Oss and Bio-Gide after a 6-month healing period by histologic and histomorphometric analyses. Six fresh molar tooth extraction sockets in 6 patients who required periodontally compromised moral tooth extraction were included in this study. The six fresh extraction sockets were grafted with Bio-Oss particle covered with Bio-Gide. The 2.8 mm×6.0 mm cylindric bone specimens were taken from the graft sites with aid of stent 6 months after the surgery. Histologic and histomorphometric analyses were performed. The histological results showed Bio-Oss particles were easily distinguished from the newly formed bone, small amounts of new bone were formed among the Bio-Oss particles, large amounts of connective tissue were found. Intimate contact between the newly formed bone and the small part of Bio-Oss particles was present. All the biopsy cylinders measurement demonstrated a high inter-individual variability in the percentage of the bone, connective tissues and Bio-Oss particles. The new bone occupied 11.54% (0-28.40%) of the total area; the connective tissues were 53.42% (34.08%-74.59%) and the Bio-Oss particles were 35.04% (13.92%-50.87%). The percentage of the particles, which were in contact with bone tissues, amounted to 20.13% (0-48.50%). Sites grafted with Bio-Oss particles covered with Bio-Gide were comprised of connective tissues and small amounts of newly formed bone surrounding the graft particles.

A highly efficient method for extracting next-generation sequencing quality RNA from adipose tissue of recalcitrant animal species.

PubMed

Sharma, Davinder; Golla, Naresh; Singh, Dheer; Onteru, Suneel K

2018-03-01

The next-generation sequencing (NGS) based RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) and transcriptome profiling offers an opportunity to unveil complex biological processes. Successful RNA-Seq and transcriptome profiling requires a large amount of high-quality RNA. However, NGS-quality RNA isolation is extremely difficult from recalcitrant adipose tissue (AT) with high lipid content and low cell numbers. Further, the amount and biochemical composition of AT lipid varies depending upon the animal species which can pose different degree of resistance to RNA extraction. Currently available approaches may work effectively in one species but can be almost unproductive in another species. Herein, we report a two step protocol for the extraction of NGS quality RNA from AT across a broad range of animal species. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

THE CHEMISTRY OF THE LIVER IN ACUTE YELLOW ATROPHY

PubMed Central

Wells, H. Gideon

1907-01-01

From the liver of a young man who died of typical, " idiopathic" acute yellow atrophy of the liver, after an illness of six weeks, there were isolated and identified the following amino acids: Histidin, lysin, tyrosin, leucin, glycocoll, alanin, prolin, glutaminic acid, aspartic acid. These were found free in extracts of the liver, and presumably represent products of the autolysis of liver cells, although the amount of soluble non-protein nitrogen present in the extracts was so large as to suggest that there must be some other source for these substances. Small quantities of free proteoses and peptones, and of xanthin and hypoxanthin, were also found in the extracts. In the insoluble proteins of the liver the proportion of diamino acids was decreased slightly as compared with normal livers. The proportion of protein phosphorus was increased, probably because of active regenerative proliferation, while the sulphur was normal in amount. Iron was increased because of the large quantity of blood in the liver and the hematogenous pigmentation of the liver cells. Gelatigenous material was increased both absolutely and relatively, because of the loss of parenchyma and the proliferation of the stroma. The proportion of water to solids was much increased, there having been a loss of over two-thirds of the entire parenchymatous elements of the liver. The amount of fat, lecithin and cholesterin was not far from that normal for the liver. PMID:19867115

Screening for anti-inflammatory activity of 12 Arnica (Asteraceae) species assessed by inhibition of NF-kappaB and release of human neutrophil elastase.

PubMed

Ekenäs, Catarina; Zebrowska, Anna; Schuler, Barbara; Vrede, Tobias; Andreasen, Katarina; Backlund, Anders; Merfort, Irmgard; Bohlin, Lars

2008-12-01

Several species in the genus Arnica have been used in traditional medicine to treat inflammatory-related disorders. Extracts of twelve Arnica species and two species closely related to arnica ( Layia hieracioides and Madia sativa) were investigated for inhibition of human neutrophil elastase release and inhibition of transcription factor NF-kappaB. Statistical analyses reveal significant differences in inhibitory capacities between extracts. Sesquiterpene lactones of the helenanolide type, of which some are known inhibitors of human neutrophil elastase release and NF-kappaB, are present in large amounts in the very active extracts of A. montana and A. chamissonis. Furthermore, A. longifolia, which has previously not been investigated, shows a high activity similar to that of A. montana and A. chamissonis in both bioassays. Sesquiterpene lactones of the xanthalongin type are present in large amounts in A. longifolia and other active extracts and would be interesting to evaluate further. COX-2:cyclooxygenase 2 EMSA:electrophoretic mobility shift assay fMLP: N-formyl-methionyl-leucyl-phenylalanine HaCaT:human keratinocyte HNE:human neutrophil elastase IkappaB:inhibitory subunit of kappaB iNOS:inducible nitric oxide synthase NF-kappaB:nuclear factor kappaB PAF:platelet activating factor STL:sesquiterpene lactone TNF-alpha:tumor necrosis factor alpha.

Aptamer functionalized magnetic nanoparticles for effective extraction of ultratrace amounts of aflatoxin M1 prior its determination by HPLC.

PubMed

Khodadadi, Mohammad; Malekpour, Akbar; Mehrgardi, Masoud A

2018-06-09

Aptamers, due to the inherently high selectivity towards target analytes, are promising candidate for surface modification of the nanoparticles. Therefore, aptamer-functionalized magnetic nanoparticles (AMNPs) was prepared and used to develop a magnetic solid-phase extraction procedure for clean-up of milk and dairy products samples before measuring the aflatoxin M1 (AFM1) contents by the high-performance liquid chromatography. The prepared sorbent was characterized by different instrumental methods such as FT-IR, FESEM, TEM, EDX and AGFM. The AMNPs was used in extraction and pre-concentration of ultratrace amounts AFM1 from local milk samples. The amount of sorbent, elution volume, extraction time, and salt addition were optimized. Based on the results, calibration plot is linear over the 0.3 to 1 ng·L -1 and 5 to 50 ng·L -1 AFM1 concentration ranges. The limits of detection of the developed method were obtained 0.2 ng·L -1 which is the smallest value that has been reported up to now. The results show that this new superior sorbent has a large potential to simplify the complex matrix of the samples and can used for detection, preconcentration and accurate determination of ultratrace amounts of the AFM1 from milk and dairy products. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Development of a magnetic solid-phase extraction coupled with high-performance liquid chromatography method for the analysis of polyaromatic hydrocarbons.

PubMed

Ma, Yan; Xie, Jiawen; Jin, Jing; Wang, Wei; Yao, Zhijian; Zhou, Qing; Li, Aimin; Liang, Ying

2015-07-01

A novel magnetic solid phase extraction coupled with high-performance liquid chromatography method was established to analyze polyaromatic hydrocarbons in environmental water samples. The extraction conditions, including the amount of extraction agent, extraction time, pH and the surface structure of the magnetic extraction agent, were optimized. The results showed that the amount of extraction agent and extraction time significantly influenced the extraction performance. The increase in the specific surface area, the enlargement of pore size, and the reduction of particle size could enhance the extraction performance of the magnetic microsphere. The optimized magnetic extraction agent possessed a high surface area of 1311 m(2) /g, a large pore size of 6-9 nm, and a small particle size of 6-9 μm. The limit of detection for phenanthrene and benzo[g,h,i]perylene in the developed analysis method was 3.2 and 10.5 ng/L, respectively. When applied to river water samples, the spiked recovery of phenanthrene and benzo[g,h,i]perylene ranged from 89.5-98.6% and 82.9-89.1%, respectively. Phenanthrene was detected over a concentration range of 89-117 ng/L in three water samples withdrawn from the midstream of the Huai River, and benzo[g,h,i]perylene was below the detection limit. © 2015 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Extraction of bromelain from pineapple peels.

PubMed

Ketnawa, S; Chaiwut, P; Rawdkuen, S

2011-08-01

Large amount of pineapple peels (by-products) is left over after processing and they are a potential source for bromelain extraction. Distilled water (DI), DI containing cysteine and ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) (DI-CE), sodium phosphate buffer pH 7.0 (PB) and PB containing cysteine and EDTA (PB-CE) were used as extractants for bromelain from the pineapple peels. The highest bromelain activity was obtained when it was extracted with PB-CE (867 and 1032 units for Nang Lae and Phu Lae cultv, respectively). The PB could maintain the pH of the extract (pH 5.1-5.7) when compared with others. Under sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, the extract showed protein bands in the range 24-28 kDa. The protein band with a molecular weight of ∼28 kDa exposed the clear zone on blue background under the casein-substrate gel electrophoresis. The effects of the bromelain extract on the protein patterns of beef, chicken and squid muscles were also determined. Trichloroacetic acid soluble peptide content of all the treated muscles increased when the amount of bromelain extract increased. Decrease in myosin heavy chains and actin was observed in all the muscle types when bromelain extract was used. The best extractant for bromelain from pineapple peels was PB-CE. Moreover, bromelain extract could be used as a muscle food tenderizing agent in food industries.

Analysis of soil moisture extraction algorithm using data from aircraft experiments

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Burke, H. H. K.; Ho, J. H.

1981-01-01

A soil moisture extraction algorithm is developed using a statistical parameter inversion method. Data sets from two aircraft experiments are utilized for the test. Multifrequency microwave radiometric data surface temperature, and soil moisture information are contained in the data sets. The surface and near surface ( or = 5 cm) soil moisture content can be extracted with accuracy of approximately 5% to 6% for bare fields and fields with grass cover by using L, C, and X band radiometer data. This technique is used for handling large amounts of remote sensing data from space.

Automatic Feature Extraction from Planetary Images

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Troglio, Giulia; Le Moigne, Jacqueline; Benediktsson, Jon A.; Moser, Gabriele; Serpico, Sebastiano B.

2010-01-01

With the launch of several planetary missions in the last decade, a large amount of planetary images has already been acquired and much more will be available for analysis in the coming years. The image data need to be analyzed, preferably by automatic processing techniques because of the huge amount of data. Although many automatic feature extraction methods have been proposed and utilized for Earth remote sensing images, these methods are not always applicable to planetary data that often present low contrast and uneven illumination characteristics. Different methods have already been presented for crater extraction from planetary images, but the detection of other types of planetary features has not been addressed yet. Here, we propose a new unsupervised method for the extraction of different features from the surface of the analyzed planet, based on the combination of several image processing techniques, including a watershed segmentation and the generalized Hough Transform. The method has many applications, among which image registration and can be applied to arbitrary planetary images.

LC-MS-based quantification method for Achyranthes root saponins.

PubMed

Kawahara, Yuki; Hoshino, Tatsuro; Morimoto, Hidetaka; Shinizu, Tomofumi; Narukawa, Yuji; Fuchino, Hiroyuki; Kawahara, Nobuo; Kiuchi, Fumiyuki

2016-01-01

A liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC-MS) method was developed for simultaneous quantitative analysis of Achyranthes root saponins: chikusetsusaponins IVa (1) and V (2), achyranthosides B (3), C (4), D (5), E (6), and G (7), sulfachyranthosides B (8) and D (9), and betavulgarosides II (10) and IV (11). Satisfactory separation of the saponins was achieved with the use of a volatile ion-pair reagent (dihexyl ammonium acetate) on a phenyl-hexylated silica gel column, and the amounts of saponins extracted under three different conditions were determined. When Achyranthes root was extracted with water at room temperature, achyranthosides B (3) and D (5) were the major saponins, and smaller amounts of other saponins (4, 6-11) were present. However, the amounts of chikusetsusaponins (1 and 2) were negligible. Under the condition to make a standard decoction of a Kampo formula, the major saponins were achyranthosides B (3), C (4), and D (5), and small amounts of chikusetsusaponins IVa (1) and V (2) appeared, whereas prolonged heating largely increased the amounts of chikusetsusaponins. This method can be used for quality control of Achyranthes root.

Significant Enrichment of Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids (PUFAs) in the Lipids Extracted by Supercritical CO2 from the Livers of Australian Rock Lobsters (Jasus edwardsii).

PubMed

Nguyen, Trung T; Zhang, Wei; Barber, Andrew R; Su, Peng; He, Shan

2015-05-13

Australian rock lobster (Jasus edwardsii) liver contains approximately 24.3% (w/w) lipids, which can contain a high amount of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs). However, this material has been found to be contaminated with arsenic (240 mg/kg) and cadmium (8 mg/kg). The high level of contaminants in the raw material and the large amount of PUFAs in the lipids prove a significant challenge in the extraction of high-quality lipids from this byproduct by conventional methods. Supercritical carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) extraction is a highly promising technology for lipid extraction with advantages including low contamination and low oxidation. The technique was optimized to achieve nearly 94% extraction of lipids relative to conventional Soxhlet extraction in Australian rock lobster liver at conditions of 35 MPa and 50 °C for 4 h. The extracted lipids are significantly enriched in PUFAs at 31.3% of total lipids, 4 times higher than those in the lipids recovered by Soxhlet extraction (7.8%). Specifically, the concentrations of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) in SC-CO2 extraction are 7 times higher than those obtained by Soxhlet extraction. Moreover, very small amounts of toxic heavy metals such as lead (Pb), arsenic (As), mercury (Hg), and cadmium (Cd) were detected in the SC-CO2-extracted lipids, 0.5-27 times lower than those in the Soxhlet-extracted lipids, which are 40-200 times lower than the regulatory limit maximum values. The low levels of contaminants and the high proportion of PUFAs (dominated by DHA and EPA) found in the SC-CO2-extracted lipids from Australian rock lobster liver suggest that the material could potentially be used as a valuable source of essential fatty acids for human consumption.

Novel Fluorinated Tensioactive Extractant Combined with Flotation for Decontamination of Extractant Residual during Solvent Extraction

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wu, Xue; Chang, Zhidong; Liu, Yao; Choe, Chol Ryong

2017-12-01

Solvent-extraction is widely used in chemical industry. Due to the amphiphilic character, a large amount of extractant remains in water phase, which causes not only loss of reagent, but also secondary contamination in water phase. Novel fluorinated extractants with ultra-low solubility in water were regarded as effective choice to reduce extractant loss in aqueous phase. However, trace amount of extractant still remained in water. Based on the high tensioactive aptitude of fluorinated solvent, flotation was applied to separate fluorinated extractant remaining in raffinate. According to the data of surface tension measurement, the surface tension of solution was obviously decreased with the addition of fluorinated extractant tris(2,2,3,3,4,4,5,5-octafluoropentyl) phosphate (FTAP). After flotation, the FTAP dissolved in water can be removed as much as 70%, which proved the feasibility of this key idea. The effects of operation time, gas velocity, pH and salinity of bulk solution on flotation performance were discussed. The optimum operating parameters were determined as gas velocity of 12ml/min, operating time of 15min, pH of 8.7, and NaCl volume concentration of 1.5%, respectively. Moreover, adsorption process of FTAP on bubble surface was simulated by ANSYS VOF model using SIMPLE algorithm. The dynamic mechanism of flotation was also theoretically investigated, which can be considered as supplement to the experimental results.

Comparisons between conventional, ultrasound-assisted and microwave-assisted methods for extraction of anthraquinones from Heterophyllaea pustulata Hook f. (Rubiaceae).

PubMed

Barrera Vázquez, M F; Comini, L R; Martini, R E; Núñez Montoya, S C; Bottini, S; Cabrera, J L

2014-03-01

This work reports a comparative study about extraction methods used to obtain anthraquinones (AQs) from stems and leaves of Heterophyllae pustulata Hook (Rubiáceae). One of the conventional procedures used to extract these metabolites from a vegetable matrix is by successive Soxhlet extractions with solvents of increasing polarity: starting with hexane to eliminate chlorophylls and fatty components, following by benzene and finally ethyl acetate. However, this technique shows a low extraction yield of total AQs, and consumes large quantities of solvent and time. Ultrasound-assisted extraction (UAE) and microwave-assisted extraction (MAE) have been investigated as alternative methods to extract these compounds, using the same sequence of solvents. It was found that UAE increases the extraction yield of total AQs and reduces the time and amount of solvent used. Nevertheless, the combination UAE with benzene, plus MAE with ethyl acetate at a constant power of 900 W showed the best results. A higher yield of total AQs was obtained in less time and using the same amount of solvent that UAE. The optimal conditions for this latter procedure were UAE with benzene at 50 °C during 60 min, followed by MAE at 900 W during 15 min using ethyl acetate as extraction solvent. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Extracts of Phenolic Compounds from Seeds of Three Wild Grapevines—Comparison of Their Antioxidant Activities and the Content of Phenolic Compounds

PubMed Central

Weidner, Stanisław; Powałka, Anna; Karamać, Magdalena; Amarowicz, Ryszard

2012-01-01

Phenolic compounds were extracted from three wild grapevine species: Vitis californica, V. riparia and V. amurensis seeds using 80% methanol or 80% acetone. The total content of phenolic compounds was determined utilizing the Folin-Ciocalteu’s phenol reagent while the content of tannins was assayed with the vanillin and BSA precipitation methods. Additionally, the DPPH free radical scavenging activity and the reduction power of the extracts were measured. The RP-HPLC method was applied to identify the phenolic compounds in the extracts, such as phenolic acids and catechins. The seeds contained large amounts of tannins, catechins and gallic acid and observable quantities of p-coumaric acid. The total content of phenolic compounds and tannins was similar in the extracts from V. californica and V. riparia seeds. However, the total content of total phenolic compounds and tannins in the extracts from V. californica and V. riperia seeds were about two-fold higher than that in the extracts from V. amurensis seeds. Extracts from seeds of the American species (V. californica and V. riparia) contained similarly high concentrations of tannins, whereas extracts from seeds of V. amurensis had approximately half that amount of these compounds. The content of catechin and epicatechin was similar in all extracts. The highest DPPH• anti-radical scavenging activity was observed in the acetonic and methanolic extracts of V. californica and V. riparia seeds— while the acetonic extract from the V. californica seeds was the strongest reducing agent. PMID:22489161

A biomedical information system for retrieval and manipulation of NHANES data.

PubMed

Mukherjee, Sukrit; Martins, David; Norris, Keith C; Jenders, Robert A

2013-01-01

The retrieval and manipulation of data from large public databases like the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) may require sophisticated statistical software and significant expertise that may be unavailable in the university setting. In response, we have developed the Data Retrieval And Manipulation System (DReAMS), an automated information system to handle all processes of data extraction and cleaning and then joining different subsets to produce analysis-ready output. The system is a browser-based data warehouse application in which the input data from flat files or operational systems are aggregated in a structured way so that the desired data can be read, recoded, queried and extracted efficiently. The current pilot implementation of the system provides access to a limited amount of NHANES database. We plan to increase the amount of data available through the system in the near future and to extend the techniques to other large databases from CDU archive with a current holding of about 53 databases.

Extracting Communities from Complex Networks by the k-Dense Method

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Saito, Kazumi; Yamada, Takeshi; Kazama, Kazuhiro

To understand the structural and functional properties of large-scale complex networks, it is crucial to efficiently extract a set of cohesive subnetworks as communities. There have been proposed several such community extraction methods in the literature, including the classical k-core decomposition method and, more recently, the k-clique based community extraction method. The k-core method, although computationally efficient, is often not powerful enough for uncovering a detailed community structure and it produces only coarse-grained and loosely connected communities. The k-clique method, on the other hand, can extract fine-grained and tightly connected communities but requires a substantial amount of computational load for large-scale complex networks. In this paper, we present a new notion of a subnetwork called k-dense, and propose an efficient algorithm for extracting k-dense communities. We applied our method to the three different types of networks assembled from real data, namely, from blog trackbacks, word associations and Wikipedia references, and demonstrated that the k-dense method could extract communities almost as efficiently as the k-core method, while the qualities of the extracted communities are comparable to those obtained by the k-clique method.

Ultrasonic Removal of Mucilage for Pressurized Liquid Extraction of Omega-3 Rich Oil from Chia Seeds (Salvia hispanica L.).

PubMed

Castejón, Natalia; Luna, Pilar; Señoráns, Francisco J

2017-03-29

Chia (Salvia hispanica L.) seeds contain an important amount of edible oil rich in omega-3 fatty acids. Fast and alternative extraction techniques based on polar solvents, such as ethanol or water, have become relevant for oil extraction in recent years. However, chia seeds also contain a large amount of soluble fiber or mucilage, which makes difficult an oil extraction process with polar solvents. For that reason, the aim of this study was to develop a gentle extraction method for mucilage in order to extract chia oil with polar solvents using pressurized liquids and compare with organic solvent extraction. The proposed mucilage extraction method, using an ultrasonic probe and only water, was optimized at mild conditions (50 °C and sonication 3 min) to guarantee the omega-3 oil quality. Chia oil extraction was performed using pressurized liquid extraction (PLE) with different solvents and their mixtures at five different extraction temperatures (60, 90, 120, 150, and 200 °C). Optimal PLE conditions were achieved with ethyl acetate or hexane at 90 °C in only 10 min of static extraction time (chia oil yield up to 30.93%). In addition, chia oils extracted with nonpolar and polar solvents by PLE were analyzed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) to evaluate fatty acid composition at different extraction conditions. Chia oil contained ∼65% of α-linolenic acid regardless of mucilage extraction method, solvent, or temperature used. Furthermore, tocopherols and tocotrienols were also analyzed by HPLC in the extracted chia oils. The mucilage removal allowed the subsequent extraction of the chia oil with polar or nonpolar solvents by PLE producing chia oil with the same fatty acid and tocopherol composition as traditional extraction.

Influence of different extraction methods on the yield and linalool content of the extracts of Eugenia uniflora L.

PubMed

Galhiane, Mário S; Rissato, Sandra R; Chierice, Gilberto O; Almeida, Marcos V; Silva, Letícia C

2006-09-15

This work has been developed using a sylvestral fruit tree, native to the Brazilian forest, the Eugenia uniflora L., one of the Mirtaceae family. The main goal of the analytical study was focused on extraction methods themselves. The method development pointed to the Clevenger extraction as the best yield in relation to SFE and Soxhlet. The SFE method presented a good yield but showed a big amount of components in the final extract, demonstrating low selectivity. The essential oil extracted was analyzed by GC/FID showing a large range of polarity and boiling point compounds, where linalool, a widely used compound, was identified. Furthermore, an analytical solid phase extraction method was used to clean it up and obtain separated classes of compounds that were fractionated and studied by GC/FID and GC/MS.

A Semantic Graph Query Language

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Kaplan, I L

2006-10-16

Semantic graphs can be used to organize large amounts of information from a number of sources into one unified structure. A semantic query language provides a foundation for extracting information from the semantic graph. The graph query language described here provides a simple, powerful method for querying semantic graphs.

Automatic Extraction of Planetary Image Features

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Troglio, G.; LeMoigne, J.; Moser, G.; Serpico, S. B.; Benediktsson, J. A.

2009-01-01

With the launch of several Lunar missions such as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and Chandrayaan-1, a large amount of Lunar images will be acquired and will need to be analyzed. Although many automatic feature extraction methods have been proposed and utilized for Earth remote sensing images, these methods are not always applicable to Lunar data that often present low contrast and uneven illumination characteristics. In this paper, we propose a new method for the extraction of Lunar features (that can be generalized to other planetary images), based on the combination of several image processing techniques, a watershed segmentation and the generalized Hough Transform. This feature extraction has many applications, among which image registration.

Encapsulation of biological active phenolic compounds extracted from wine wastes in alginate-chitosan microbeads.

PubMed

Moschona, Alexandra; Liakopoulou-Kyriakides, Maria

2018-04-23

Grapes (Vitis vinifera) are produced in large amounts worldwide and mostly are used for winemaking. Their untreated wastes are rich in valuable secondary metabolites, such as phenolics. Thus, in this study, white and red wine wastes (Malagouzia and Syrah variety) were investigated for their added value phenolics, which were analysed by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and electrospray ionisation-mass spectrometry (ESI/MS) and subsequently encapsulated in several polymers. Extracts from all wastes gave high amounts of total phenolics (13 ± 2.72-22 ± 2.69 mg g -1 ) and possessed high antioxidant activity (67-97%). In addition to their significant antibacterial activity against gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria, interesting results were also obtained from their anti-inflammatory and antiplatelet activity, in vitro. Encapsulation of the extracts was selective, leaving out most of sugars and other organic compounds when alginate-chitosan was used. Encapsulation efficiency recorded for all extracts ranged from 55% to 79%. Release studies were also performed in several solutions aiming in their commercial use in food and pharmaceutical industries.

Potential effects of large-scale offshore tidal energy extraction in the Pentland Firth on North Sea biogeochemistry

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

van der Molen, Johan; Ruardij, Piet; Greenwood, Naomi

2016-04-01

Final results are presented of a model study to assess the potential wider area effects of large-scale tidal energy extraction in the Pentland Firth on the biogeochemistry. The coupled hydrodynamics-biogeochemistry model GETM-ERSEM-BFM was used in a shelf-wide application with a parameterisation of the effects of power extraction by tidal turbines on fluid momentum. Three secenario runs were carried out: a reference run without turbines, an 800 MW extraction run corresponding to current licenses, and an academic 8 GW extraction run. The changes simulated with the 800 MW extraction were negligible. The academic 8 GW extraction resulted in reductions in tidal elevations along the east coast of the UK that would be measurable (several cm.), and associated reductions in bed-shear stresses. These resulted in reductions in SPM concentrations, increased primary production, and increased biomass of zooplankton and benthic fauna. The effects were most pronounced in the shallow seas surrounding The Wash, with changes of up to 10%. These results indicate that, should tidal power generation substantially beyond the currently licensed amount be planned, either concentrated in one location or spread over multiple locations along the coast, further investigations are advisable.

Effects of produced water on soil characteristics, plant biomass, and secondary metabolites

USDA-ARS?s Scientific Manuscript database

The Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana contains the United States’ largest coal reserve. The area produces large amounts of natural gas through extraction from water-saturated coalbeds. Determining the impacts of coalbed natural gas-produced efflux water on crops is important when considering...

MERCURY IN STAMP SAND DISCHARGES: IMPLICATIONS FOR LAKE SUPERIOR MERCURY CYCLING

EPA Science Inventory

Approximately a half billion tons of waste rock from the extraction of native copper and silver ores was discharged into the Lake Superior basin. Stamping was the method of choice to recover these metals from the surrounding poor rock. This process created large amounts of extre...

Educational Data Mining Acceptance among Undergraduate Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wook, Muslihah; Yusof, Zawiyah M.; Nazri, Mohd Zakree Ahmad

2017-01-01

The acceptance of Educational Data Mining (EDM) technology is on the rise due to, its ability to extract new knowledge from large amounts of students' data. This knowledge is important for educational stakeholders, such as policy makers, educators, and students themselves to enhance efficiency and achievements. However, previous studies on EDM…

Profiling Oman education data using data mining approach

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Alawi, Sultan Juma Sultan; Shaharanee, Izwan Nizal Mohd; Jamil, Jastini Mohd

2017-10-01

Nowadays, with a large amount of data generated by many application services in different learning fields has led to the new challenges in education field. Education portal is an important system that leads to a better development of education field. This research paper presents an innovative data mining techniques to understand and summarizes the information of Oman's education data generated from the Ministry of Education Oman "Educational Portal". This research embarks into performing student profiling of the Oman student database. This study utilized the k-means clustering technique to determine the students' profiles. An amount of 42484-student records from Sultanate of Oman has been extracted for this study. The findings of this study show the practicality of clustering technique to investigating student's profiles. Allowing for a better understanding of student's behavior and their academic performance. Oman Education Portal contain a large amounts of user activity and interaction data. Analyses of this large data can be meaningful for educator to improve the student performance level and recognize students who needed additional attention.

Bioactive compounds and antioxidant potential for polyphenol-rich cocoa extract obtained by agroindustrial residue.

PubMed

Gabbay Alves, Taís Vanessa; Silva da Costa, Russany; Aliakbarian, Bahar; Casazza, Alessandro Alberto; Perego, Patrizia; Pinheiro Arruda, Mara Silvia; Carréra Silva Júnior, José Otávio; Converti, Attilio; Ribeiro Costa, Roseane Maria

2017-11-10

Processing of cocoa (Theobroma cacao L.) beans responsible for agricultural exports leads to large amounts of solid waste that were discarded, however, this one presents high contents of metabolites with biological activities. The major objective of this study was to valorise cocoa agroindustrial residue obtained by hydraulic pressing for extract rich in antioxidants. For it, the centesimal composition of residue was investigated, the green extraction was carried out from the residue after, the bioactive compounds, sugar contents and screaming by HPTLC were quantified for extract. The extract has a total polyphenol content of 229.64 mg/g and high antioxidant activity according to ABTS 225.0 μM/g. HTPLC analysis confirmed the presence in the extract, residue of terpenes, sesquiterpenes, flavonoids and antioxidant activity. These results, as a whole, suggest that the extract from the cocoa residue has interesting characteristics to alternative crops with potential industrial uses.

Mathematical model of simple spalling formation during coal cutting with extracting machine

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gabov, V. V.; Zadkov, D. A.

2018-05-01

A single-mass model of a rotor shearer is analyzed. It is shown that rotor mining machines has large inertia moments and load dynamics. An extraction module model with selective movement of the cutting tool is represented. The peculiar feature of such extracting machines is fluid power drive cutter mechanism. They can steadily operate at large shear thickness, and locking modes are not an emergency for them. Comparing with shearers they have less inertional mass, but slower average cutting speed, and its momentary values depend on load. Basing on the equation of hydraulic fuel consumption balance the work of fluid power drive of extracting module cutter mechanism together with hydro pneumatic accumulator is analyzed. Spalling formation model during coal cutting with fluid power drive cutter mechanism and potential energy stores are suggested. Matching cutter speed with the speed of main crack expansion and amount of potential energy consumption, cutter load is determined only by ultimate stress at crack pole and friction. Tests of an extracting module cutter in real size model proved the stated theory.

Application of response surface methodology to optimise supercritical carbon dioxide extraction of volatile compounds from Crocus sativus.

PubMed

Shao, Qingsong; Huang, Yuqiu; Zhou, Aicun; Guo, Haipeng; Zhang, Ailian; Wang, Yong

2014-05-01

Crocus sativus has been used as a traditional Chinese medicine for a long time. The volatile compounds of C. sativus appear biologically active and may act as antioxidants as well as anticonvulsants, antidepressants and antitumour agents. In order to obtain the highest possible yield of essential oils from C. sativus, response surface methodology was employed to optimise the conditions of supercritical fluid carbon dioxide extraction of the volatile compounds from C. sativus. Four factorswere investigated: temperature, pressure, extraction time and carbon dioxide flow rate. Furthermore, the chemical compositions of the volatile compounds extracted by supercritical fluid extraction were compared with those obtained by hydro-distillation and Soxhlet extraction. The optimum extraction conditions were found to be: optimised temperature 44.9°C, pressure 34.9 MPa, extraction time 150.2 min and CO₂ flow rate 10.1 L h⁻¹. Under these conditions, the mean extraction yield was 10.94 g kg⁻¹. The volatile compounds extracted by supercritical fluid extraction and Soxhlet extraction contained a large amount of unsaturated fatty acids. Response surface methodology was successfully applied for supercritical fluid CO₂ extraction optimisation of the volatile compounds from C. sativus. The study showed that pressure and CO₂ flow rate had significant effect on volatile compounds yield produced by supercritical fluid extraction. This study is beneficial for the further research operating on a large scale. © 2013 Society of Chemical Industry.

Chemical characterisation of dredged sediments in relation to their potential use in civil engineering.

PubMed

Zuliani, Tea; Mladenovič, Ana; Ščančar, Janez; Milačič, Radmila

2016-04-01

During capital and/or maintenance dredging operations, large amounts of material are produced. Instead of their discharge, dredged sediments may be a valuable natural resource if not contaminated. One of the possible areas of application is civil engineering. In the present work, the environmental status of seaport dredged sediment was evaluated in order to investigate its potential applicability as a secondary raw material. Sediments were analysed for element concentrations in digested samples, aqueous extracts and fractions from sequential extraction; for fluoride, chloride and sulphate concentrations in aqueous extracts; and for tributyltin (TBT). Granulometric and mineralogical compositions were also analysed. The elemental impact was evaluated by calculation of the enrichment factors. The total element concentrations determined showed moderate contamination of the dredged sediments as was confirmed also by their moderate enrichment factors, presumably as a result of industrial and port activities. Elemental concentrations in the aqueous extract were very low and therefore do not represent any hazard for the environment. The water-soluble element concentrations were under the threshold levels set by the EU Directive on the landfill of waste, on the basis of which the applicability of dredged sediments in civil engineering is evaluated, while the content of chloride and sulphate were above the threshold levels. It was found out that due to the large amounts of sediment available, civil engineering applications such as the construction of embankments and backfilling is the most beneficial recycling solution at present.

Comparison of salting-out and sugaring-out liquid-liquid extraction methods for the partition of 10-hydroxy-2-decenoic acid in royal jelly and their co-extracted protein content.

PubMed

Tu, Xijuan; Sun, Fanyi; Wu, Siyuan; Liu, Weiyi; Gao, Zhaosheng; Huang, Shaokang; Chen, Wenbin

2018-01-15

Homogeneous liquid-liquid extraction (h-LLE) has been receiving considerable attention as a sample preparation method due to its simple and fast partition of compounds with a wide range of polarities. To better understand the differences between the two h-LLE extraction approaches, salting-out assisted liquid-liquid extraction (SALLE) and sugaring-out assisted liquid-liquid extraction (SULLE), have been compared for the partition of 10-hydroxy-2-decenoic acid (10-HDA) from royal jelly, and for the co-extraction of proteins. Effects of the amount of phase partition agents and the concentration of acetonitrile (ACN) on the h-LLE were discussed. Results showed that partition efficiency of 10-HDA depends on the phase ratio in both SALLE and SULLE. Though the partition triggered by NaCl and glucose is less efficient than MgSO 4 in the 50% (v/v) ACN-water mixture, their extraction yields can be improved to be similar with that in MgSO 4 SALLE by increasing the initial concentration of ACN in the ACN-water mixture. The content of co-extracted protein was correlated with water concentration in the obtained upper phase. MgSO 4 showed the largest protein co-extraction at the low concentration of salt. Glucose exhibited a large protein co-extraction in the high phase ratio condition. Furthermore, NaCl with high initial ACN concentration is recommended because it produced high extraction yield for 10-HDA and the lowest amount of co-extracted protein. These observations would be valuable for the sample preparation of royal jelly. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Removal of Heavy Metal Contamination from Peanut Skin Extracts by Waste Biomass Adsorbents

USDA-ARS?s Scientific Manuscript database

Each year, 3.6 million pounds of peanuts are harvested in the United States. Consequent processing, however, generates large amounts of waste biomass as only the seed portion of the fruit is consumed. The under-utilization of waste biomass is a lost economic opportunity to the industry. In particula...

Applications of KHZ-CW Lidar in Ecological Entomology

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Malmqvist, Elin; Brydegaard, Mikkel

2016-06-01

The benefits of kHz lidar in ecological entomology are explained. Results from kHz-measurements on insects, carried out with a CW-lidar system, employing the Scheimpflug principle to obtain range resolution, are presented. A method to extract insect events and analyze the large amount of lidar data is also described.

Educational System Efficiency Improvement Using Knowledge Discovery in Databases

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lukaš, Mirko; Leškovic, Darko

2007-01-01

This study describes one of possible way of usage ICT in education system. We basically treated educational system like Business Company and develop appropriate model for clustering of student population. Modern educational systems are forced to extract the most necessary and purposeful information from a large amount of available data. Clustering…

Complete wetting of graphene by biological lipids

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Luan, Binquan; Huynh, Tien; Zhou, Ruhong

2016-03-01

Graphene nanosheets have been demonstrated to extract large amounts of lipid molecules directly out of the cell membrane of bacteria and thus cause serious damage to the cell's integrity. This interesting phenomenon, however, is so far not well understood theoretically. Here through extensive molecular dynamics simulations and theoretical analyses, we show that this phenomenon can be categorized as a complete wetting of graphene by membrane lipids in water. A wetting-based theory was utilized to associate the free energy change during the microscopic extraction of a lipid with the spreading parameter for the macroscopic wetting. With a customized thermodynamic cycle for detailed energetics, we show that the dispersive adhesion between graphene and lipids plays a dominant role during this extraction as manifested by the curved graphene. Our simulation results suggest that biological lipids can completely wet the concave, flat or even convex (with a small curvature) surface of a graphene sheet.Graphene nanosheets have been demonstrated to extract large amounts of lipid molecules directly out of the cell membrane of bacteria and thus cause serious damage to the cell's integrity. This interesting phenomenon, however, is so far not well understood theoretically. Here through extensive molecular dynamics simulations and theoretical analyses, we show that this phenomenon can be categorized as a complete wetting of graphene by membrane lipids in water. A wetting-based theory was utilized to associate the free energy change during the microscopic extraction of a lipid with the spreading parameter for the macroscopic wetting. With a customized thermodynamic cycle for detailed energetics, we show that the dispersive adhesion between graphene and lipids plays a dominant role during this extraction as manifested by the curved graphene. Our simulation results suggest that biological lipids can completely wet the concave, flat or even convex (with a small curvature) surface of a graphene sheet. Electronic supplementary information (ESI) available: The movie showing the simulation trajectory for the extraction of lipids from the membrane. See DOI: 10.1039/C6NR00202A

A Customized Attention-Based Long Short-Term Memory Network for Distant Supervised Relation Extraction.

PubMed

He, Dengchao; Zhang, Hongjun; Hao, Wenning; Zhang, Rui; Cheng, Kai

2017-07-01

Distant supervision, a widely applied approach in the field of relation extraction can automatically generate large amounts of labeled training corpus with minimal manual effort. However, the labeled training corpus may have many false-positive data, which would hurt the performance of relation extraction. Moreover, in traditional feature-based distant supervised approaches, extraction models adopt human design features with natural language processing. It may also cause poor performance. To address these two shortcomings, we propose a customized attention-based long short-term memory network. Our approach adopts word-level attention to achieve better data representation for relation extraction without manually designed features to perform distant supervision instead of fully supervised relation extraction, and it utilizes instance-level attention to tackle the problem of false-positive data. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach is effective and achieves better performance than traditional methods.

Application of PLE for the determination of essential oil components from Thymus vulgaris L.

PubMed

Dawidowicz, Andrzej L; Rado, Ewelina; Wianowska, Dorota; Mardarowicz, Marek; Gawdzik, Jan

2008-08-15

Essential plants, due to their long presence in human history, their status in culinary arts, their use in medicine and perfume manufacture, belong to frequently examined stock materials in scientific and industrial laboratories. Because of a large number of freshly cut, dried or frozen plant samples requiring the determination of essential oil amount and composition, a fast, safe, simple, efficient and highly automatic sample preparation method is needed. Five sample preparation methods (steam distillation, extraction in the Soxhlet apparatus, supercritical fluid extraction, solid phase microextraction and pressurized liquid extraction) used for the isolation of aroma-active components from Thymus vulgaris L. are compared in the paper. The methods are mainly discussed with regard to the recovery of components which typically exist in essential oil isolated by steam distillation. According to the obtained data, PLE is the most efficient sample preparation method in determining the essential oil from the thyme herb. Although co-extraction of non-volatile ingredients is the main drawback of this method, it is characterized by the highest yield of essential oil components and the shortest extraction time required. Moreover, the relative peak amounts of essential components revealed by PLE are comparable with those obtained by steam distillation, which is recognized as standard sample preparation method for the analysis of essential oils in aromatic plants.

Considering context: reliable entity networks through contextual relationship extraction

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

David, Peter; Hawes, Timothy; Hansen, Nichole; Nolan, James J.

2016-05-01

Existing information extraction techniques can only partially address the problem of exploiting unreadable-large amounts text. When discussion of events and relationships is limited to simple, past-tense, factual descriptions of events, current NLP-based systems can identify events and relationships and extract a limited amount of additional information. But the simple subset of available information that existing tools can extract from text is only useful to a small set of users and problems. Automated systems need to find and separate information based on what is threatened or planned to occur, has occurred in the past, or could potentially occur. We address the problem of advanced event and relationship extraction with our event and relationship attribute recognition system, which labels generic, planned, recurring, and potential events. The approach is based on a combination of new machine learning methods, novel linguistic features, and crowd-sourced labeling. The attribute labeler closes the gap between structured event and relationship models and the complicated and nuanced language that people use to describe them. Our operational-quality event and relationship attribute labeler enables Warfighters and analysts to more thoroughly exploit information in unstructured text. This is made possible through 1) More precise event and relationship interpretation, 2) More detailed information about extracted events and relationships, and 3) More reliable and informative entity networks that acknowledge the different attributes of entity-entity relationships.

Liquid by-products from fish canning industry as sustainable sources of ω3 lipids.

PubMed

Monteiro, Ana; Paquincha, Diogo; Martins, Florinda; Queirós, Rui P; Saraiva, Jorge A; Švarc-Gajić, Jaroslava; Nastić, Nataša; Delerue-Matos, Cristina; Carvalho, Ana P

2018-08-01

Fish canning industry generates large amounts of liquid wastes, which are discarded, after proper treatment to remove the organic load. However, alternative treatment processes may also be designed in order to target the recovery of valuable compounds; with this procedure, these wastewaters are converted into liquid by-products, becoming an additional source of revenue for the company. This study evaluated green and economically sustainable methodologies for the extraction of ω3 lipids from fish canning liquid by-products. Lipids were extracted by processes combining physical and chemical parameters (conventional and pressurized extraction processes), as well as chemical and biological parameters. Furthermore, LCA was applied to evaluate the environmental performance and costs indicators for each process. Results indicated that extraction with high hydrostatic pressure provides the highest amounts of ω3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (3331,5 mg L -1 effluent), apart from presenting the lowest environmental impact and costs. The studied procedures allow to obtain alternative, sustainable and traceable sources of ω3 lipids for further applications in food, pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries. Additionally, such approach contributes towards the organic depuration of canning liquid effluents, therefore reducing the overall waste treatment costs. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Development of soft extraction method for structural characterization of boreal forest soil proteins with MALDI-TOF/MS

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kanerva, Sanna; Ketola, Raimo A.; Kitunen, Veikko; Smolander, Aino; Kotiaho, Tapio

2010-05-01

Nitrogen (N) is usually the nutrient restricting productivity in boreal forests. Forest soils contain a great amount of nitrogen, but only a small part of it is in mineral form. Most part of soil N is bound in the structures of different organic compounds such as proteins, peptides, amino acids and more stabilized, refractory compounds. Due to the fact that soil organic N has a very important role in soil nutrient cycling and in plant nutrition, there is a need for more detailed knowledge of its chemistry in soil. Conventional methods to extract and analyze soil organic N are usually very destructive for structures of higher molecular weight organic compounds, such as proteins. The aim of this study was to characterize proteins extracted from boreal forest soil by "soft" extraction methods in order to maintain their molecular structure. The organic layer (F) from birch forest floor containing 78% of organic matter was sieved, freeze dried, pulverized, and extracted with a citrate or phosphate buffer (pH 6 or 8). Sequential extraction with the citrate or phosphate buffer and an SDS buffer (pH 6.8), slightly modified from the method of Chen et al. (2009, Proteomics 9: 4970-4973), was also done. Proteins were purified from the soil extract by extraction with buffered phenol and precipitated with methanol + 0.1M ammonium acetate at -20°C. Characterization of proteins was performed with matrix assisted laser desorption ionization - time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF/MS) and the concentration of total proteins was measured using Bradford's method. Bovine serum albumin (BSA) was used as a positive control in the extractions and as a standard protein in Bradford's method. Our results showed that sequential extraction increased the amount of extracted proteins compared to the extractions without the SDS-buffer; however, it must be noted that the use of SDS-buffer very probably increased denaturization of proteins. Purification of proteins from crude soil extracts by phenol extraction was essential prior to measurement of total proteins; there seemed to be a lot of compounds in crude soil extracts that interfere with the analysis of total proteins, causing overestimation in protein concentration. pH of the buffer solution did not seem to be very crucial for the extractability of soil natural proteins, but at the higher pH, the amount of interfering compounds increased. However, the recovery of BSA added was clearly higher at the higher pH. When the protein precipitates were analyzed with MALDI-TOF/MS, a large curve, most likely formed from wide peaks of several compounds, indicate that most of the compounds in the precipitate were <15 kDa or ~20-50 kDa in molecular weight. It seems that in order to identify individual proteins from mass spectra, a separation of compounds with varying molecular weight is needed before the MALDI-TOF/MS analysis. Due to the fact that a relatively high amount of BSA added was not recovered by the extractions and that the intensity of the signals observed in mass spectra was low, it is questionable whether it is possible to extract soil natural proteins effectively from soils containing a high amount of organic matter without destructing the structures of proteins.

The effect of the polymerization initiator and light source on the elution of residual Bis-GMA and TEGDMA monomers: A study using liquid chromatography with UV detection.

PubMed

Denis, Aline B; Diagone, Cristina A; Plepis, Ana M G; Viana, Rommel B

2015-12-05

A method for the extraction and quantification of two residual monomers, bisphenol glycidyl dimethacrylate (Bis-GMA) and triethylene glycol dimethacrylate (TEGDMA), that were evaluated using high efficiency liquid chromatography with UV detection was developed and validated in this study. Three types of solvents were applied in the extraction of the monomers (methanol, ethanol and acetonitrile), where the highest extraction efficiency was obtained using acetonitrile. The different resins were prepared by photoactivation of Bis-GMA and TEGDMA monomers. Additionally, the effects of the addition of two photoinitiators (camphorquinone (CQ) and phenyl propanodione (PPD) and that of a co-initiator (N,N-dimethyl-p-toluidine) were also analyzed. When only the CQ photoinitiator was used, a smaller amount of residual monomers was obtained, whereas a larger amount was obtained with PPD. When the two photoinitiators were used in the same matrix, however, no significant changes were observed in relation to the amount of residual TEGDMA monomers. For the addition of the co-initiator, there were no large changes in the extraction of residual monomers. The effect of the two photoactivation sources (halogen lamp and LED) led to small differences in the elution of the two monomers, although all of the resins differed significantly when photoactivated with a LED. Quantum chemical calculations using Density Functional Theory were carried out to characterize several molecular properties of each monomer. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Optimum oil production planning using infeasibility driven evolutionary algorithm.

PubMed

Singh, Hemant Kumar; Ray, Tapabrata; Sarker, Ruhul

2013-01-01

In this paper, we discuss a practical oil production planning optimization problem. For oil wells with insufficient reservoir pressure, gas is usually injected to artificially lift oil, a practice commonly referred to as enhanced oil recovery (EOR). The total gas that can be used for oil extraction is constrained by daily availability limits. The oil extracted from each well is known to be a nonlinear function of the gas injected into the well and varies between wells. The problem is to identify the optimal amount of gas that needs to be injected into each well to maximize the amount of oil extracted subject to the constraint on the total daily gas availability. The problem has long been of practical interest to all major oil exploration companies as it has the potential to derive large financial benefit. In this paper, an infeasibility driven evolutionary algorithm is used to solve a 56 well reservoir problem which demonstrates its efficiency in solving constrained optimization problems. Furthermore, a multi-objective formulation of the problem is posed and solved using a number of algorithms, which eliminates the need for solving the (single objective) problem on a regular basis. Lastly, a modified single objective formulation of the problem is also proposed, which aims to maximize the profit instead of the quantity of oil. It is shown that even with a lesser amount of oil extracted, more economic benefits can be achieved through the modified formulation.

Changes in polysaccharide and protein composition of cell walls in grape berry skin (Cv. Shiraz) during ripening and over-ripening.

PubMed

Vicens, Anysia; Fournand, David; Williams, Pascale; Sidhoum, Louise; Moutounet, Michel; Doco, Thierry

2009-04-08

Polysaccharide modification is the most fundamental factor that affects firmness of fruit during ripening. In grape, because of the lack of information on the modifications occurring in cell wall polysaccharides in skins, but also because this tissue contains large amounts of organoleptic compounds for winemaking, a study was performed on the evolution and extractability of polysaccharides from grape skins of Shiraz cultivar throughout ripening. A HEPES/phenol extraction technique was used to analyze Shiraz grape cell wall material isolated from skins of berries harvested from one to ten weeks after veraison. Total amounts in cell wall polysaccharides remained constant during ripening (4.2 mg/berry). A slight decrease in galactose content of insoluble polysaccharides was observed, as well as a significant de-esterification of methoxylated uronic acids, indicating that some modifications occur in cell wall polysaccharides. The water-soluble fraction represented a very small fraction of the whole polysaccharides, but its amounts increased more than 2-fold between the first and the last sample. Isolated cell walls were also analyzed for their protein composition. Last, hydroalcoholic extractions in model-wine solution were also performed on fresh skins. This extracted fraction was very similar to the water-soluble one, and increased during the entire period. By comparison with polysaccharide modifications described in flesh cell wall in previous works, it can be assumed that the moderate skin polysaccharide degradation highlights the protective role of that tissue.

Proposition and Organization of an Adaptive Learning Domain Based on Fusion from the Web

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chaoui, Mohammed; Laskri, Mohamed Tayeb

2013-01-01

The Web allows self-navigated education through interaction with large amounts of Web resources. While enjoying the flexibility of Web tools, authors may suffer from research and filtering Web resources, when they face various resources formats and complex structures. An adaptation of extracted Web resources must be assured by authors, to give…

The industry of wildcrafting, gathering, and harvesting of NTFPs: an insider's perspective

Treesearch

Barb Letchworth

2001-01-01

The natural products industry has been undergoing a tremendous amount of change in the past few years. Large corporations including pharmaceutical companies, food and drug store chains, and even department stores have been adding medicinal herbs to their offerings. We can find anything from naturally raw bulk herbs, to standardized extracts, to time-released...

Automated Methods to Extract Patient New Information from Clinical Notes in Electronic Health Record Systems

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zhang, Rui

2013-01-01

The widespread adoption of Electronic Health Record (EHR) has resulted in rapid text proliferation within clinical care. Clinicians' use of copying and pasting functions in EHR systems further compounds this by creating a large amount of redundant clinical information in clinical documents. A mixture of redundant information (especially outdated…

Microfluidic Extraction of Biomarkers using Water as Solvent

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Amashukeli, Xenia; Manohara, Harish; Chattopadhyay, Goutam; Mehdi, Imran

2009-01-01

A proposed device, denoted a miniature microfluidic biomarker extractor (mu-EX), would extract trace amounts of chemicals of interest from samples, such as soils and rocks. Traditionally, such extractions are performed on a large scale with hazardous organic solvents; each solvent capable of dissolving only those molecules lying within narrow ranges of specific chemical and physical characteristics that notably include volatility, electric charge, and polarity. In contrast, in the mu-EX, extractions could be performed by use of small amounts (typically between 0.1 and 100 L) of water as a universal solvent. As a rule of thumb, in order to enable solvation and extraction of molecules, it is necessary to use solvents that have polarity sufficiently close to the polarity of the target molecules. The mu-EX would make selection of specific organic solvents unnecessary, because mu-EX would exploit a unique property of liquid water: the possibility of tuning its polarity to match the polarity of organic solvents appropriate for extraction of molecules of interest. The change of the permittivity of water would be achieved by exploiting interactions between the translational states of water molecules and an imposed electromagnetic field in the frequency range of 300 to 600 GHz. On a molecular level, these interactions would result in disruption of the three-dimensional hydrogen-bonding network among liquid-water molecules and subsequent solvation and hydrolysis of target molecules. The mu-EX is expected to be an efficient means of hydrolyzing chemical bonds in complex macromolecules as well and, thus, enabling analysis of the building blocks of these complex chemical systems. The mu-EX device would include a microfluidic channel, part of which would lie within a waveguide coupled to an electronically tuned source of broad-band electromagnetic radiation in the frequency range from 300 to 600 GHz (see figure). The part of the microfluidic channel lying in the waveguide would constitute an interaction volume. The dimensions of the interaction volume would be chosen in accordance with the anticipated amount of solid sample material needed to ensure extraction of sufficient amount of target molecules for detection and analysis. By means that were not specified at the time of reporting the information for this article, the solid sample material would be placed in the interaction volume. Then the electromagnetic field would be imposed within the waveguide and water would be pumped through the interaction volume to effect the extraction.

Effect of suppression of arabinoxylan synthetic genes in wheat endosperm on chain length of arabinoxylan and extract viscosity.

PubMed

Freeman, Jackie; Lovegrove, Alison; Wilkinson, Mark David; Saulnier, Luc; Shewry, Peter Robert; Mitchell, Rowan Andrew Craig

2016-01-01

Arabinoxylan (AX) is the dominant component within wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) endosperm cell walls, accounting for 70% of the polysaccharide. The viscosity of aqueous extracts from wheat grain is a key trait influencing the processing for various end uses, and this is largely determined by the properties of endosperm AX. We have previously shown dramatic effects on endosperm AX in transgenic wheat by down-regulating either TaGT43_2 or TaGT47_2 genes (orthologues to IRX9 and IRX10 in Arabidopsis, respectively) implicated in AX chain extension and the TaXAT1 gene responsible for monosubstitution by 3-linked arabinose. Here, we use these transgenic lines to investigate the relationship between amounts of AX in soluble and insoluble fractions, the chain-length distribution of these measured by intrinsic viscosity and the overall effect on extract viscosity. In transgenic lines expressing either the TaGT43_2 or TaGT47_2 RNAi transgenes, the intrinsic viscosities of water-extractable (WE-AX) and of a water-insoluble alkaline-extracted fraction (AE-AX) were decreased by between 10% and 50% compared to control lines. In TaXAT1 RNAi lines, there was a 15% decrease in intrinsic viscosity of WE-AX but no consistent effect on that of AE-AX. All transgenic lines showed decreases in extract viscosity with larger effects in TaGT43_2 and TaGT47_2 RNAi lines (by up to sixfold) than in TaXAT1 RNAi lines (by twofold). These effects were explained by the decreases in amount and chain length of WE-AX, with decreases in amount having the greater influence. Extract viscosity from wheat grain can therefore be greatly decreased by suppression of single gene targets. © 2015 The Authors. Plant Biotechnology Journal published by Society for Experimental Biology and The Association of Applied Biologists and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

A study of extraction process and in vitro antioxidant activity of total phenols from Rhizoma Imperatae.

PubMed

Zhou, Xian-rong; Wang, Jian-hua; Jiang, Bo; Shang, Jin; Zhao, Chang-qiong

2013-01-01

The study investigated the extraction method of Rhizoma Imperatae and its antioxidant activity, and provided a basis for its rational development. The extraction method of Rhizoma Imperatae was determined using orthogonal design test and by total phenol content, its hydroxyl radical scavenging ability was measured by Fenton reaction, and potassium ferricyanide reduction method was used to determine its reducing power. The results showed that the optimum extraction process of Rhizoma Imperatae was a 50-fold volume of water, 30 °C, three times of extraction with 2 h each. Its IC50 for scavenging of hydroxyl radicals was 0.0948 mg/mL, while IC50 of ascorbic acid was 0.1096 mg/mL; in the ferricyanide considerable reduction method, the extract exhibited reducing power comparable to that of the ascorbic acid. The study concluded that Rhizoma Imperatae extract contains relatively large amount of polyphenols, and has a good anti-oxidation ability.

[Study on ultrafine vibration extraction technology of Rhizoma Chuanxiong].

PubMed

Dai, Long

2009-04-01

To explore the best ultrafine vibration extraction technology of Rhizoma Chuanxiong. Using the content of ligustrazine hydrochloride and ferulic acid as determination indexes, quadrature test was used to choose extraction times, time, solvent amount and to compare with the result of conventional extraction technology. The best condition of the Rhizoma chuanxiong was with 90% ethanol of 4 times volume, extracting 2 times in 25 degrees C, 15 minutes each time. Comparing with conventional extraction technology, extraction time of UVET was 1/6, solvent amount was 4/7, the extraction rate of marker components was 1.19 and 1.09 times, respectivley. UVET can improve the extracting rate of effective constituents, reduce the time and solvent amount and be used in industrialization.

Improvement of lipid yield from microalgae Spirulina platensis using ultrasound assisted osmotic shock extraction method

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Adetya, NP; Hadiyanto, H.

2018-01-01

Microalgae Spirulina sp. has been identified as potential source of natural food supplement and food colorant. The high water content of microalgae (70-90%) causes an obstacle in biomass dehydration which requires large amounts of energy, eventually damaging the lipid in the microalgae. Therefore, the lipid must be extracted by using a suitable method which complies to wet biomass conditions. One of the methods is applying osmotic shock. This study was aimed to investigate the influence of osmotic agent (NaCl) concentration (10-30%) and extraction time (20-50 min) on yield of lipid and also to determine the optimal conditions in the extraction process through response surface methodology. The extraction was conducted at a temperature of 40°C under ultrasound frequency of 40 kHz. The result showed that the optimum yield lipid obtained was 6.39% in 16.98% NaCl concentration for 36 minutes 10 seconds.

Application of an automatic thermal desorption-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry system for the analysis of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in airborne particulate matter.

PubMed

Gil-Moltó, J; Varea, M; Galindo, N; Crespo, J

2009-02-27

The application of the thermal desorption (TD) method coupled with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) to the analysis of aerosol organics has been the focus of many studies in recent years. This technique overcomes the main drawbacks of the solvent extraction approach such as the use of large amounts of toxic organic solvents and long and laborious extraction processes. In this work, the application of an automatic TD-GC-MS instrument for the determination of particle-bound polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) is evaluated. This device offers the advantage of allowing the analysis of either gaseous or particulate organics without any modification. Once the thermal desorption conditions for PAH extraction were optimised, the method was verified on NIST standard reference material (SRM) 1649a urban dust, showing good linearity, reproducibility and accuracy for all target PAHs. The method has been applied to PM10 and PM2.5 samples collected on quartz fibre filters with low volume samplers, demonstrating its capability to quantify PAHs when only a small amount of sample is available.

The effects of Yucca shidigera extract on the reduction of ammonia concentration in Lake Koumoundourou

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Dimitriou, Elias; Markogianni, Vassiliki; Yu, Xiaoxi

2013-04-01

Increasing concentrations of nutrients in Lakes is a common problem worldwide, nowadays and has significant impacts on their trophic status and thus on the ecosystem's health. Koumoundourou Lake is a shallow, semi-saline Lake, located in the industrial zone of Attica, Greece. The particular water body receives significant pressures from the nearby industries, from uncontrolled disposal of urban waste and from large number of birds that find a shelter there during the winter time (due to the extinction of most of the rest of Attica wetlands). This study investigates the efficiency of a particular restoration measure for the reduction of ammonia by using a plant extract. Particularly, Yucca shidigera has been proved effective in reducing ammonia in aquaculture and therefore, this study aims to investigate if the effects of Yucca extract could be similar in Lake Koumoundourou and determine the appropriate amount of Yucca extract, necessary to restore the water quality at the desirable levels. Six treatments (two replications per treatment) for 180 hours were conducted, in which three different levels of Ammonium chloride (varying between 0 and 6mg/l) and five different concentrations of Yucca (varying between 0 and 2 mg/l) were added in the lake water (in experimental tanks). As far as the effects of Yucca extract on water quality are concerned, it is initially considered that it stimulates the reduction of dissolved oxygen (DO) since its concentration dropped faster in the treatments with added Yucca than the treatments with no Yucca at all, despite the amount of the added Ammonia. Concentration of ammonia-nitrogen kept dropping until hour 48 from the beginning of the experiment, indicating that the efficacy of Yucca extract removing ammonia last for about 48 hours, irrespectively of the amount of yucca extract added. Additionally, the relationship between the added Yucca extract and the removed ammonia concentration is proportional. Thus, it is concluded that the application of Yucca extract can be a promising way to treat lakes with high ammonia levels due to human induced or natural (birds' faeces) pollution.

Highly entangled states with almost no secrecy.

PubMed

Christandl, Matthias; Schuch, Norbert; Winter, Andreas

2010-06-18

In this Letter we illuminate the relation between entanglement and secrecy by providing the first example of a quantum state that is highly entangled, but from which, nevertheless, almost no secrecy can be extracted. More precisely, we provide two bounds on the bipartite entanglement of the totally antisymmetric state in dimension d×d. First, we show that the amount of secrecy that can be extracted from the state is low; to be precise it is bounded by O(1/d). Second, we show that the state is highly entangled in the sense that we need a large amount of singlets to create the state: entanglement cost is larger than a constant, independent of d. In order to obtain our results we use representation theory, linear programming, and the entanglement measure known as squashed entanglement. Our findings also clarify the relation between the squashed entanglement and the relative entropy of entanglement.

Reverse isotope dilution method for determining benzene and metabolites in tissues

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Bechtold, W.E.; Sabourin, P.J.; Henderson, R.F.

1988-07-01

A method utilizing reverse isotope dilution for the analysis of benzene and its organic soluble metabolites in tissues of rats and mice is presented. Tissues from rats and mice that had been exposed to radiolabeled benzene were extracted with ethyl acetate containing known, excess quantities of unlabeled benzene and metabolites. Butylated hydroxytoluene was added as an antioxidant. The ethyl acetate extracts were analyzed with semipreparative reversed-phase HPLC. Isolated peaks were collected and analyzed for radioactivity (by liquid scintillation spectrometry) and for mass (by UV absorption). The total amount of each compound present was calculated from the mass dilution of themore » radiolabeled isotope. This method has the advantages of high sensitivity, because of the high specific activity of benzene, and relative stability of the analyses, because of the addition of large amounts of unlabeled carrier analogue.« less

The polyphenolics in the aqueous extract of Psidium guajava kinetically reveal an inhibition model on LDL glycation.

PubMed

Chen, Kuan-Chou; Chuang, Chao-Ming; Lin, Li-Yun; Chiu, Wen-Ta; Wang, Hui-Er; Hsieh, Chiu-Lan; Tsai, Tsuimin; Peng, Robert Y

2010-01-01

Guava [Psidium guajava L. (Myrtaceae)] budding leaf extract (PE) has shown tremendous bioactivities. Previously, we found seven major compounds in PE, i.e., gallic acid, catechin, epicatechin, rutin, quercetin, naringenin, and kaempferol. PE showed a potentially active antiglycative effect in an LDL (low density lipoprotein) mimic biomodel, which can be attributed to its large content of polyphenolics. The glycation and antiglycative reactions showed characteristic distinct four-phase kinetic patterns. In the presence of PE, the kinetic coefficients were 0.000438, 0.000060, 0.000, and -0.0001354 ABS-mL/mg-min, respectively, for phases 1 to 4. Computer simulation evidenced the dose-dependent inhibition model. Conclusively, PE contains a large amount of polyphenolics, whose antiglycative bioactivity fits the inhibition model.

A sustainable woody biomass biorefinery.

PubMed

Liu, Shijie; Lu, Houfang; Hu, Ruofei; Shupe, Alan; Lin, Lu; Liang, Bin

2012-01-01

Woody biomass is renewable only if sustainable production is imposed. An optimum and sustainable biomass stand production rate is found to be one with the incremental growth rate at harvest equal to the average overall growth rate. Utilization of woody biomass leads to a sustainable economy. Woody biomass is comprised of at least four components: extractives, hemicellulose, lignin and cellulose. While extractives and hemicellulose are least resistant to chemical and thermal degradation, cellulose is most resistant to chemical, thermal, and biological attack. The difference or heterogeneity in reactivity leads to the recalcitrance of woody biomass at conversion. A selection of processes is presented together as a biorefinery based on incremental sequential deconstruction, fractionation/conversion of woody biomass to achieve efficient separation of major components. A preference is given to a biorefinery absent of pretreatment and detoxification process that produce waste byproducts. While numerous biorefinery approaches are known, a focused review on the integrated studies of water-based biorefinery processes is presented. Hot-water extraction is the first process step to extract value from woody biomass while improving the quality of the remaining solid material. This first step removes extractives and hemicellulose fractions from woody biomass. While extractives and hemicellulose are largely removed in the extraction liquor, cellulose and lignin largely remain in the residual woody structure. Xylo-oligomers, aromatics and acetic acid in the hardwood extract are the major components having the greatest potential value for development. Higher temperature and longer residence time lead to higher mass removal. While high temperature (>200°C) can lead to nearly total dissolution, the amount of sugars present in the extraction liquor decreases rapidly with temperature. Dilute acid hydrolysis of concentrated wood extracts renders the wood extract with monomeric sugars. At higher acid concentration and higher temperature the hydrolysis produced more xylose monomers in a comparatively shorter period of reaction time. Xylose is the most abundant monomeric sugar in the hydrolysate. The other comparatively small amounts of monomeric sugars include arabinose, glucose, rhamnose, mannose and galactose. Acetic acid, formic acid, furfural, HMF and other byproducts are inevitably generated during the acid hydrolysis process. Short reaction time is preferred for the hydrolysis of hot-water wood extracts. Acid hydrolysis presents a perfect opportunity for the removal or separation of aromatic materials from the wood extract/hydrolysate. The hot-water wood extract hydrolysate, after solid-removal, can be purified by Nano-membrane filtration to yield a fermentable sugar stream. Fermentation products such as ethanol can be produced from the sugar stream without a detoxification step. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Periplasmic localization of a GroES homologue in Escherichia coli transformed with groESx cloned from Legionella-like endosymbionts in Amoeba proteus.

PubMed

Lee, J E; Ahn, T I

2000-10-01

Escherichia coli MC4100 transformed with a groE homologous operon cloned from X-bacteria accumulated large amounts of the gene product when cultured at 30 or 37 degrees C. Heat shock for 10-30 min at 42 degrees C or ethanol (5%) shock for 2 h increased GroESx levels to about twice that in E. coli grown at 30 degrees C. The subcellular localization of GroESx in transformed E. coli was determined by several subcellular fractionation methods, by the analysis of extracted proteins in SDS polyacrylamide gels and by assays of marker enzymes. The GroESx protein was detected in both the periplasmic and cytoplasmic extracts and a large amount of the protein was accumulated in the periplasm. The GroEL protein and recombinant beta-galactosidase were exclusively localized in the cytoplasmic fraction, eliminating the possibility that periplasmic GroESx might be due to simple overproduction. N-terminal amino acid sequencing confirmed that the protein resolved on a 2-D gel was GroESx. This work represents the first report of the periplasmic location of GroES homologues in E. coli.

Determination of dioxin-like polychlorinated biphenyls in 1 mL whole blood using programmable temperature vaporization large volume injection coupled to gas chromatogram and high-resolution mass spectrometry.

PubMed

Shen, Haitao; Guan, Rongfa; Li, Jingguang; Zhang, Lei; Ren, Yiping; Xu, Xiaomin; Song, Yang; Zhao, Yunfeng; Han, Jianlong; Wu, Yongning

2013-03-12

A sensitive method based on programmable temperature vaporization large volume injection coupled to gas chromatogram and high-resolution mass spectrometry (PTV-GC-HRMS) has been developed for the determination of ultra trace levels of dioxin-like polychlorinated biphenyls (DL PCBs) in small amounts of human blood. Blood samples (1mL) were first extracted by column extraction and then purified with column chromatorgraphies. Final extracts (20μL) were introduced to the PTV injector under the solvent vent mode and detected by GC-HRMS (SIM mode). PTV parameters were observed by changing one factor at a time (practical conditions: vent flow: 50mLmin(-1), vent pressure: 0kPa and vent time: 0.1min), recoveries of most PCB congeners ranged from 55.1% to 108%, and method detection limits were in the range of 0.11-1.63pgg(-1). Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Development and use of Fourier self deconvolution and curve-fitting in the study of coal oxidation

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Pierce, J.A.

1986-01-01

Techniques have been developed for modeling highly overlapped band multiplets. The method is based on a least-squares fit of spectra by a series of bands of known shape. Using synthetic spectra, it was shown that when bands are separated by less than their full width at half height (FWHH), valid analytical data can only be obtained after the width of each component band is narrowed by Fourier self deconvolution (FSD). The optimum method of spectral fitting determined from the study of synthetic spectra was then applied to the characterization of oxidized coals. A medium volatile bituminous coal which was airmore » oxidized at 200/sup 0/C for different lengths of time, was extracted with chloroform. A comparison of the infrared spectra of the whole coal and the extract indicated that the extracted material contains a smaller amount of carbonyl, ether, and ester groups, while the aromatic content is much higher. Oxidation does not significantly affect the aromatic content of the whole cola. Most of the aromatic groups in the CHCl/sub 3/ extract show evidence of reaction, however. The production of relatively large amounts of intramolecular aromatic anhydrides is seen in the spectrum of the extract of coals which have undergone extensive oxidation,while there is only a slight indication of this anhydride in the whole coal.« less

Needle trap extraction for GC analysis of formic and acetic acids in aqueous solution.

PubMed

Lee, Xinqing; Huang, Daikuan; Lou, Dawei; Pawliszyn, Janusz

2012-07-01

Formic and acetic acids are ubiquitous in the environment, food, and most of the natural products. Extraction of the acids from aqueous solution is required for their isotope analysis by the gas chromatography-isotope ratio mass spectrometry. To this objective, we have previously developed a purge-and-trap technique using the dynamic solid-phase microextraction technology, the NeedlEX. The extraction efficiency, however, remains unexamined. Here, we address this question using the flame ionization detector and isotope ratio mass spectrometer while comparing it with that of the CAR/PDMS fiber. The results show that the NeedlEX is applicable at a wide range of concentration through coordination of purge volume given the minimum amount 3.7 ng and 1.8 ng of formic and acetic, respectively, is extracted. The efficiency of NeedlEX was 6-7 times lower than the fiber at 1000 μg/mL depending on the analyte. It is, however, superior to the latter at 10 μg/mL or less owing to its lower detection limit. The extraction efficiency of both acids is equivalent in molar amount. This is, however, disguised by the different response of the flame ionization detector. The isotope ratio mass spectrometor overcomes this problem but is compromised by relatively large errors. These results are particularly useful for isotopic analysis of carboxylic acids. © 2012 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Current technologies and new insights for the recovery of high valuable compounds from fruits by-products.

PubMed

Ferrentino, Giovanna; Asaduzzaman, Md; Scampicchio, Matteo Mario

2018-02-11

The recovery of high valuable compounds from food waste is becoming a tighten issue in food processing. The large amount of non-edible residues produced by food industries causes pollution, difficulties in the management, and economic loss. The waste produced during the transformation of fruits includes a huge amount of materials such as peels, seeds, and bagasse, whose disposal usually represents a problem. Research over the past 20 years revealed that many food wastes could serve as a source of potentially valuable bioactive compounds, such as antioxidants and vitamins with increasing scientific interest thanks to their beneficial effects on human health. The challenge for the recovery of these compounds is to find the most appropriate and environment friendly extraction technique able to achieve the maximum extraction yield without compromising the stability of the extracted products. Based on this scenario, the aim of the current review is twofold. The first is to give a brief overview of the most important bioactive compounds occurring in fruit wastes. The second is to describe the pro and cons of the most up-to-dated innovative and environment friendly extraction technologies that can be an alternative to the classical solvent extraction procedures for the recovery of valuable compounds from fruit processing. Furthermore, a final section will take into account published findings on the combination of some of these technologies to increase the extracts yields of bioactives.

SEPARATION OF URANIUM FROM THORIUM AND PROTACTINIUM

DOEpatents

Musgrave, W.K.R.

1959-06-30

This patent relates to the separation of uranium from thorium and protactinium; such mixtures of elements usually being obtained by neutron irradiation of thorium. The method of separating the constituents has been first to dissolve the mixture of elements in concertrated nitric acid and then to remove the protactinium by absorption on manganese dioxide and the uranium by solvent extraction with ether. Prior to now, comparatively large amounts of thorium were extracted with the uranium. According to the invention this is completely prevented by adding sodium diethyldithiocarbamate to the mixture of soluble nitrate salts. The organic salt has the effect of reacting only with the uranyl nitrate to form the corresponding uranyl salt which can then be selectively extracted from the mixture with amyl acetate.

Separation of Active Compounds from Food by-Product (Cocoa Shell) Using Subcritical Water Extraction.

PubMed

Jokić, Stela; Gagić, Tanja; Knez, Željko; Šubarić, Drago; Škerget, Mojca

2018-06-11

Large amounts of residues are produced in the food industries. The waste shells from cocoa processing are usually burnt for fuel or used as a mulch in gardens to add nutrients to soil and to suppress weeds. The objectives of this work were: (a) to separate valuable compounds from cocoa shell by applying sustainable green separation process—subcritical water extraction (SWE); (b) identification and quantification of active compounds, sugars and sugar degradation products in obtained extracts using HPLC; (c) characterization of the antioxidant activity of extracts; (d) optimization of separation process using response surface methodology (RSM). Depending on applied extraction conditions, different concentration of theobromine, caffeine, theophylline, epicatechin, catechin, chlorogenic acid and gallic acid were determined in the extracts obtained by subcritical water. Furthermore, mannose, glucose, xylose, arabinose, rhamnose and fucose were detected as well as their important degradation products such as 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (5-HMF), furfural, levulinic acid, lactic acid and formic acid.

Tenebrio molitor Extracts Modulate the Response to Environmental Stressors and Extend Lifespan in Caenorhabditis elegans.

PubMed

Won, Seong-Min; Cha, Hye-Uk; Yi, Sun Shin; Kim, Sung-Jo; Park, Sang-Kyu

2016-09-08

Tenebrio molitor are large insects and their larvae are consumed as food in many countries. The nutritional composition of T. molitor has been studied and contains high amounts of proteins, unsaturated fatty acids, and valuable minerals. However, the bioactivity of T. molitor has not been fully understood. We examined the effects of T. molitor extracts on resistance to oxidative stress and organism's lifespan using Caenorhabditis elegans as a model system. The response to heat shock and ultraviolet (UV) irradiation was monitored in vivo. The extracts from T. molitor showed significant effects on resistance to oxidative stress and UV irradiation and extend both mean and maximum lifespan of C. elegans. The number of progeny produced significantly increased in animals supplemented with T. molitor extracts. In addition, the expression of hsp-16.2 and sod-3 was markedly upregulated by supplementation with T. molitor extracts. These findings suggest that T. molitor extracts can increase response to stressors and extend lifespan by the induction of longevity assurance genes in C. elegans.

Rapid determination of caffeine in one drop of beverages and foods using drop-to-drop solvent microextraction with gas chromatography/mass spectrometry.

PubMed

Shrivas, Kamlesh; Wu, Hui-Fen

2007-11-02

A simple and rapid sample cleanup and preconcentration method for the quantitative determination of caffeine in one drop of beverages and foods by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) has been proposed using drop-to-drop solvent microextraction (DDSME). The best optimum experimental conditions for DDSME were: chloroform as the extraction solvent, 5 min extraction time, 0.5 microL exposure volume of the extraction phase and no salt addition at room temperature. The optimized methodology exhibited good linearity between 0.05 and 5.0 microg/mL with correlation coefficient of 0.980. The relative standard deviation (RSD) and limits of detection (LOD) of the DDSME/GC/MS method were 4.4% and 4.0 ng/mL, respectively. Relative recovery of caffeine in beverages and foods were found to be 96.6-101%, which showing good reliability of this method. This DDSME excludes the major disadvantages of conventional method of caffeine extraction, like large amount of organic solvent and sample consumption and long sample pre-treatment process. So, this approach proves that the DDSME/GC/MS technique can be applied as a simple, fast and feasible diagnosis tool for environmental, food and biological application for extremely small amount of real sample analysis.

Relationship between masticatory performance using a gummy jelly and masticatory movement.

PubMed

Uesugi, Hanako; Shiga, Hiroshi

2017-10-01

The purpose of this study was to clarify the relationship between masticatory performance using a gummy jelly and masticatory movement. Thirty healthy males were asked to chew a gummy jelly on their habitual chewing side for 20s, and the parameters of masticatory performance and masticatory movement were calculated as follows. For evaluating the masticatory performance, the amount of glucose extraction during chewing of a gummy jelly was measured. For evaluating the masticatory movement, the movement of the mandibular incisal point was recorded using the MKG K6-I, and ten parameters of the movement path (opening distance and masticatory width), movement rhythm (opening time, closing time, occluding time, and cycle time), stability of movement (stability of path and stability of rhythm), and movement velocity (opening maximum velocity and closing maximum velocity) were calculated from 10 cycles of chewing beginning with the fifth cycle. The relationship between the amount of glucose extraction and parameters representing masticatory movement was investigated and then stepwise multiple linear regression analysis was performed. The amount of glucose extraction was associated with 7 parameters representing the masticatory movement. Stepwise multiple linear regression analysis showed that the opening distance, closing time, stability of rhythm, and closing maximum velocity were the most important factors affecting the glucose extraction. From these results it was suggested that there was a close relation between masticatory performance and masticatory movement, and that the masticatory performance could be increased by rhythmic, rapid and stable mastication with a large opening distance. Copyright © 2017 Japan Prosthodontic Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Information Extraction from Unstructured Text for the Biodefense Knowledge Center

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Samatova, N F; Park, B; Krishnamurthy, R

2005-04-29

The Bio-Encyclopedia at the Biodefense Knowledge Center (BKC) is being constructed to allow an early detection of emerging biological threats to homeland security. It requires highly structured information extracted from variety of data sources. However, the quantity of new and vital information available from every day sources cannot be assimilated by hand, and therefore reliable high-throughput information extraction techniques are much anticipated. In support of the BKC, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, together with the University of Utah, are developing an information extraction system built around the bioterrorism domain. This paper reports two important pieces ofmore » our effort integrated in the system: key phrase extraction and semantic tagging. Whereas two key phrase extraction technologies developed during the course of project help identify relevant texts, our state-of-the-art semantic tagging system can pinpoint phrases related to emerging biological threats. Also we are enhancing and tailoring the Bio-Encyclopedia by augmenting semantic dictionaries and extracting details of important events, such as suspected disease outbreaks. Some of these technologies have already been applied to large corpora of free text sources vital to the BKC mission, including ProMED-mail, PubMed abstracts, and the DHS's Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection (IAIP) news clippings. In order to address the challenges involved in incorporating such large amounts of unstructured text, the overall system is focused on precise extraction of the most relevant information for inclusion in the BKC.« less

NEMO: Extraction and normalization of organization names from PubMed affiliations.

PubMed

Jonnalagadda, Siddhartha Reddy; Topham, Philip

2010-10-04

Today, there are more than 18 million articles related to biomedical research indexed in MEDLINE, and information derived from them could be used effectively to save the great amount of time and resources spent by government agencies in understanding the scientific landscape, including key opinion leaders and centers of excellence. Associating biomedical articles with organization names could significantly benefit the pharmaceutical marketing industry, health care funding agencies and public health officials and be useful for other scientists in normalizing author names, automatically creating citations, indexing articles and identifying potential resources or collaborators. Large amount of extracted information helps in disambiguating organization names using machine-learning algorithms. We propose NEMO, a system for extracting organization names in the affiliation and normalizing them to a canonical organization name. Our parsing process involves multi-layered rule matching with multiple dictionaries. The system achieves more than 98% f-score in extracting organization names. Our process of normalization that involves clustering based on local sequence alignment metrics and local learning based on finding connected components. A high precision was also observed in normalization. NEMO is the missing link in associating each biomedical paper and its authors to an organization name in its canonical form and the Geopolitical location of the organization. This research could potentially help in analyzing large social networks of organizations for landscaping a particular topic, improving performance of author disambiguation, adding weak links in the co-author network of authors, augmenting NLM's MARS system for correcting errors in OCR output of affiliation field, and automatically indexing the PubMed citations with the normalized organization name and country. Our system is available as a graphical user interface available for download along with this paper.

Industrial applications of hot dry rock geothermal energy

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Duchane, D. V.

1992-07-01

Geothermal resources in the form of naturally occurring hot water or steam have been utilized for many years. While these hydrothermal resources are found in many places, the general case is that the rock at depth is hot, but does not contain significant amounts of mobile fluid. An extremely large amount of geothermal energy is found around the world in this hot dry rock (HDR). Technology has been under development for more than twenty years at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States and elsewhere to develop the technology to extract the geothermal energy from HDR in a form useful for electricity generation, space heating, or industrial processing. HDR technology is especially attractive for industrial applications because of the ubiquitous distribution of the HDR resource and the unique aspects of the process developed to recover it. In the HDR process, as developed at Los Alamos, water is pumped down a well under high pressure to open up natural joints in hot rock and create an artificial geothermal reservoir. Energy is extracted by circulating water through the reservoir. Pressurized hot water is returned to the surface through the production well, and its thermal energy is extracted for practical use. The same water is then recirculated through the system to mine more geothermal heat. Construction of a pilot HDR facility at Fenton Hill, NM, USA, has recently been completed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. It consists of a large underground reservoir, a surface plant, and the connecting wellbores. This paper describes HDR technology and the current status of the development program. Novel industrial applications of geothermal energy based on the unique characteristics of the HDR energy extraction process are discussed.

Effect of Ultrasound in Soybean Protein Extraction

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fukase, Hirokazu; Ohdaira, Etsuzo; Masuzawa, Nobuyoshi; Ide, Masao

1994-05-01

Application of ultrasound for accelerating the extraction of nutriments in food processing has been attempted. However, conditions of exposure to ultrasound were not clear in previous studies. This paper reports on the relationship between the ultrasonic pressure and the amount of extracted protein from soybeans. Experiments were conducted using a beaker, in which the ultrasonic fields were precisely measured. Soybean flakes suspended in water were put in the beaker and placed in a water tank. The amount of extracted protein in water upon ultrasonic exposure was calculated by the Kjeldahl method. It was found that the amount of extracted protein increased in proportion to ultrasonic pressure up to the total amount of soybean protein soluble in water. Furthermore, this paper describes the denaturation of the protein produced by the ultrasonic cavitation.

Woody residues and solid waste wood available for recovery in the United States, 2002

Treesearch

David B. McKeever; Robert H. Falk

2004-01-01

Large amounts of woody residues and solid wood waste are generated annually in the United States from the extraction of timber from forests, from forestry cultural operations, in the conversion of forest land to nonforest uses, in the initial processing of roundwood timber into usable products, in the construction and demolition of buildings and structures, and in the...

Inventories of woody residues and solid wood waste in the United States, 2002

Treesearch

David B. McKeever

2004-01-01

Large amounts of woody residues and wood waste are generated annually in the United States. In 2002, an estimated 240 million metric tons was generated during the extraction of timber from the Nation’s forests, from forestry cultural operations, in the conversion of forest land to nonforest uses, in the initial processing of roundwood timber into usable products, in...

Long term effects of fire on carbon and nitrogen pools and fluxes in the arctic permafrost and subarctic forests (ARCTICFIRE)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pumpanen, Jukka; Köster, Kajar; Aaltonen, Heidi; Köster, Egle; Zhou, Xuan; Zhang-Turpeinen, Huizhong; Heinonsalo, Jussi; Palviainen, Marjo; Sun, Hui; Biasi, Christina; Bruckman, Viktor; Prokushkin, Anatoly; Berninger, Frank

2017-04-01

Boreal forests, which are to a large extent located on permafrost soils, are a crucial part of the climate system because of their large soil carbon (C) pool. Even small change in this pool may change the terrestrial C sink in the arctic into a source with a consequent increase in CO2 concentrations. About 1% of boreal forests are exposed to fire annually, which affects the soil and permafrost under them. Thawing of permafrost increases the depth of the active layer containing large C and N stocks. In addition to temperature, the decomposition of soil organic matter depends on its chemical composition which may also be affected by fires. Part of the soil organic matter is turned into pyrogenic C and N resistant to decomposition. We studied the effect of forest fires on soil greenhouse gas fluxes (CO2, CH4 and N2O)and biogenic volatile organic compound fluxes using portable chambers. The amount of easily decomposable and recalcitrant fractions in soil organic matter were determined with water, ethanol and acid extraction, and the natural 13C and 15N abundances as well as chemical quality with Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) were studied. Also, changes in microbial community structure and composition were analyzed with next generation pyrosequencing. Our preliminary results indicate that soil CO2 effluxes were significantly decreased immediately after the fire, and the recovery to pre-fire level took several decades. Soils were a small sink of CH4 and a source of N2O in all age classes, and the CH4 uptake was increased and N2O fluxes decreased still 20 years following the fire. A clear vertical distribution was observed in the amount of extractable soil organic matter the amount of extractable organic matter being highest in the soil surface layers and decreasing with depth. The natural 13C and 15N abundances and FTIR spectra and changes in microbial community composition are still under analysis.

Large-Scale Membrane- and Lignin-Modified Adsorbent-Assisted Extraction and Preconcentration of Triazine Analogs and Aflatoxins

PubMed Central

Hu, Shun-Wei; Chen, Shushi

2017-01-01

The large-scale simultaneous extraction and concentration of aqueous solutions of triazine analogs, and aflatoxins, through a hydrocarbon-based membrane (e.g., polyethylene, polyethylene/polypropylene copolymer) under ambient temperature and atmospheric pressure is reported. The subsequent adsorption of analyte in the extraction chamber over the lignin-modified silica gel facilitates the process by reducing the operating time. The maximum adsorption capacity values for triazine analogs and aflatoxins are mainly adsorption mechanism-dependent and were calculated to be 0.432 and 0.297 mg/10 mg, respectively. The permeation, and therefore the percentage of analyte extracted, ranges from 1% to almost 100%, and varies among the solvents examined. It is considered to be vapor pressure- and chemical polarity-dependent, and is thus highly affected by the nature and thickness of the membrane, the discrepancy in the solubility values of the analyte between the two liquid phases, and the amount of adsorbent used in the process. A dependence on the size of the analyte was observed in the adsorption capacity measurement, but not in the extraction process. The theoretical interaction simulation and FTIR data show that the planar aflatoxin molecule releases much more energy when facing toward the membrane molecule when approaching it, and the mechanism leading to the adsorption. PMID:28398252

Large-Scale Membrane- and Lignin-Modified Adsorbent-Assisted Extraction and Preconcentration of Triazine Analogs and Aflatoxins.

PubMed

Hu, Shun-Wei; Chen, Shushi

2017-04-11

The large-scale simultaneous extraction and concentration of aqueous solutions of triazine analogs, and aflatoxins, through a hydrocarbon-based membrane (e.g., polyethylene, polyethylene/polypropylene copolymer) under ambient temperature and atmospheric pressure is reported. The subsequent adsorption of analyte in the extraction chamber over the lignin-modified silica gel facilitates the process by reducing the operating time. The maximum adsorption capacity values for triazine analogs and aflatoxins are mainly adsorption mechanism-dependent and were calculated to be 0.432 and 0.297 mg/10 mg, respectively. The permeation, and therefore the percentage of analyte extracted, ranges from 1% to almost 100%, and varies among the solvents examined. It is considered to be vapor pressure- and chemical polarity-dependent, and is thus highly affected by the nature and thickness of the membrane, the discrepancy in the solubility values of the analyte between the two liquid phases, and the amount of adsorbent used in the process. A dependence on the size of the analyte was observed in the adsorption capacity measurement, but not in the extraction process. The theoretical interaction simulation and FTIR data show that the planar aflatoxin molecule releases much more energy when facing toward the membrane molecule when approaching it, and the mechanism leading to the adsorption.

Emerging Roles of Ganoderma Lucidum in Anti-Aging

PubMed Central

Wang, Jue; Cao, Bin; Zhao, Haiping; Feng, Juan

2017-01-01

Ganoderma lucidum is a white-rot fungus that has been viewed as a traditional Chinese tonic for promoting health and longevity. It has been revealed that several extractions from Ganoderma lucidum, such as Ethanol extract, aqueous extract, mycelia extract, water soluble extract of the culture medium of Ganoderma lucidum mycelia, Ganodermasides A, B, C, D, and some bioactive components of Ganoderma lucidum, including Reishi Polysaccharide Fraction 3, Ganoderma lucidum polysaccharides I, II, III, IV, Ganoderma lucidum peptide, Ganoderma polysaccharide peptide, total G. lucidum triterpenes and Ganoderic acid C1 could exert lifespan elongation or related activities. Although the use of Ganoderma lucidum as an elixir has been around for thousands of years, studies revealing its effect of lifespan extension are only the tip of the iceberg. Besides which, the kinds of extractions or components being comfrimed to be anti-aging are too few compared with the large amounts of Ganoderma lucidum extractions or constituients being discovered. This review aims to lay the ground for fully elucidating the potential mechanisms of Ganoderma lucidum underlying anti-aging effect and its clinical application. PMID:29344411

Effect of Andrographis paniculata leaf extract on wound healing in rats.

PubMed

Al-Bayaty, Fouad Hussain; Abdulla, Mahmood Ameen; Abu Hassan, Mohamed Ibrahim; Ali, Hapipah Mohd

2012-01-01

This work was carried out to study the effect of topical application of Andrographis paniculata on the rate of wound enclosure and its histological features. A wound was created in four groups of rat in posterior neck region. Blank placebo was applied topically to the wounds of Group 1. Groups 2 and 3 were dressed with placebo containing 5% and 10% extracts of A. paniculata, respectively. Intrasite gel was applied topically to the wounds of Group 4. Macroscopical examination revealed that the rate of wound healing was significantly accelerated in the wound dressed with A. paniculata extract compared to the blank placebo. The wounds dressed with 10% extract or Intrasite gel healed earlier compared to the wounds dressed with placebo containing 5% A. paniculata extract. Histologically, wounds dressed with A. paniculata extracts showed markedly less scar width and contained large amounts of fibroblast proliferation. More collagen and less angiogenesis with absence of inflammatory cells were seen for wounds dressed with 10% A. paniculata compared to the blank placebo. Conclusion, A. paniculata extracts significantly enhanced rate of wound healing in rats.

Emerging Roles of Ganoderma Lucidum in Anti-Aging.

PubMed

Wang, Jue; Cao, Bin; Zhao, Haiping; Feng, Juan

2017-12-01

Ganoderma lucidum is a white-rot fungus that has been viewed as a traditional Chinese tonic for promoting health and longevity. It has been revealed that several extractions from Ganoderma lucidum , such as Ethanol extract, aqueous extract, mycelia extract, water soluble extract of the culture medium of Ganoderma lucidum mycelia, Ganodermasides A, B, C, D, and some bioactive components of Ganoderma lucidum , including Reishi Polysaccharide Fraction 3, Ganoderma lucidum polysaccharides I, II, III, IV, Ganoderma lucidum peptide, Ganoderma polysaccharide peptide, total G. lucidum triterpenes and Ganoderic acid C1 could exert lifespan elongation or related activities. Although the use of Ganoderma lucidum as an elixir has been around for thousands of years, studies revealing its effect of lifespan extension are only the tip of the iceberg. Besides which, the kinds of extractions or components being comfrimed to be anti-aging are too few compared with the large amounts of Ganoderma lucidum extractions or constituients being discovered. This review aims to lay the ground for fully elucidating the potential mechanisms of Ganoderma lucidum underlying anti-aging effect and its clinical application.

A method for the solvent extraction of low-boiling-point plant volatiles.

PubMed

Xu, Ning; Gruber, Margaret; Westcott, Neil; Soroka, Julie; Parkin, Isobel; Hegedus, Dwayne

2005-01-01

A new method has been developed for the extraction of volatiles from plant materials and tested on seedling tissue and mature leaves of Arabidopsis thaliana, pine needles and commercial mixtures of plant volatiles. Volatiles were extracted with n-pentane and then subjected to quick distillation at a moderate temperature. Under these conditions, compounds such as pigments, waxes and non-volatile compounds remained undistilled, while short-chain volatile compounds were distilled into a receiving flask using a high-efficiency condenser. Removal of the n-pentane and concentration of the volatiles in the receiving flask was carried out using a Vigreux column condenser prior to GC-MS. The method is ideal for the rapid extraction of low-boiling-point volatiles from small amounts of plant material, such as is required when conducting metabolic profiling or defining biological properties of volatile components from large numbers of mutant lines.

Extraction and analysis of carotenoids from the New Zealand sea urchin Evechinus chloroticus gonads.

PubMed

Garama, Daniel; Bremer, Phil; Carne, Alan

2012-01-01

Sea urchin gonad (roe) is a highly valued food in Japan and North America. Gonad price is strongly influenced by quality, with appearance, especially colour being a major determinant. Previous attempts to extract a carotenoid profile from the New Zealand sea urchin species Evechinus chloroticus have been challenging due to the large amount of lipid present in the gonad. A carotenoid extraction and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) analysis method was developed to reduce lipid contamination by incorporating a saponification and lipid cold precipitation in the extraction procedure. This method enabled greater carotenoid purity and enhanced analysis by HPLC. Echinenone was found to be the main carotenoid present in all E. chloroticus gonads. Dark coloured gonads contained higher levels of fucoxanthin/fucoxanthinol, β-carotene and xanthophylls such as astaxanthin and canthaxanthin. This information on the modification and deposition of carotenoids will help in the development of diets to enhance gonad colour.

[Image Feature Extraction and Discriminant Analysis of Xinjiang Uygur Medicine Based on Color Histogram].

PubMed

Hamit, Murat; Yun, Weikang; Yan, Chuanbo; Kutluk, Abdugheni; Fang, Yang; Alip, Elzat

2015-06-01

Image feature extraction is an important part of image processing and it is an important field of research and application of image processing technology. Uygur medicine is one of Chinese traditional medicine and researchers pay more attention to it. But large amounts of Uygur medicine data have not been fully utilized. In this study, we extracted the image color histogram feature of herbal and zooid medicine of Xinjiang Uygur. First, we did preprocessing, including image color enhancement, size normalizition and color space transformation. Then we extracted color histogram feature and analyzed them with statistical method. And finally, we evaluated the classification ability of features by Bayes discriminant analysis. Experimental results showed that high accuracy for Uygur medicine image classification was obtained by using color histogram feature. This study would have a certain help for the content-based medical image retrieval for Xinjiang Uygur medicine.

Antioxidant White Grape Seed Phenolics: Pressurized Liquid Extracts from Different Varieties

PubMed Central

Garcia-Jares, Carmen; Vazquez, Alberto; Lamas, Juan P.; Pajaro, Marta; Alvarez-Casas, Marta; Lores, Marta

2015-01-01

Grape seeds represent a high percentage (20% to 26%) of the grape marc obtained as a byproduct from white winemaking and keep a vast proportion of grape polyphenols. In this study, seeds obtained from 11 monovarietal white grape marcs cultivated in Northwestern Spain have been analyzed in order to characterize their polyphenolic content and antioxidant activity. Seeds of native (Albariño, Caiño, Godello, Loureiro, Torrontés, and Treixadura) and non-native (Chardonnay, Gewurtzträminer, Pinot blanc, Pinot gris, and Riesling) grape varieties have been considered. Low weight phenolics have been extracted by means of pressurized liquid extraction (PLE) and further analyzed by LC-MS/MS. The results showed that PLE extracts, whatever the grape variety of origin, contained large amounts of polyphenols and high antioxidant activity. Differences in the varietal polyphenolic profiles were found, so a selective exploitation of seeds might be possible. PMID:26783956

Predator size and the suitability of a common prey.

PubMed

Erickson, Kristin S; Morse, D H

1997-02-01

 Although a predator's mass should influence the suitability of its prey, this subject has received little direct attention. We studied the capture and processing of an abundant syrphid fly Toxomerus marginatus (c. 4 mg) by 0.6- to 40-mg juvenile crab spiders Misumena vatia (Thomisidae) to determine how profitability, relative profitability (profitability/predator mass), overall gain in mass, and relative gain in mass differed with predator mass, and whether foraging changed concurrently. In multi-prey experiments, the smallest successful spiders (0.6-3.0 mg) extracted less mass from flies, and did so more slowly, than large spiders. This gain was proportionately similar to that of 10- to 40-mg spiders with access to many Toxomerus. However, many small spiders failed to capture flies. When we gave spiders only a single Toxomerus, the smallest ones again extracted mass more slowly than the large ones and increased in mass less than the large ones, but increased in mass proportionately more than large ones. Relative gain in mass from a single prey decreased with increasing spider mass. Spiders larger than 10 mg all extracted similar amounts of mass from a single Toxomerus at similar rates, but varied in time spent between captures. Thus, Toxomerus changes with spider mass from a large, hard-to-capture bonanza to a small, easy-to-capture item of low per capita value. However, Toxomerus is common enough that large spiders can capture it en masse, thereby compensating for its decline in per capita value.

Surface area generation and droplet size control in solvent extraction systems utilizing high intensity electric fields

DOEpatents

Scott, Timothy C.; Wham, Robert M.

1988-01-01

A method and system for solvent extraction where droplets are shattered by a high intensity electric field. These shattered droplets form a plurality of smaller droplets which have a greater combined surface area than the original droplet. Dispersion, coalescence and phase separation are accomplished in one vessel through the use of the single pulsing high intensity electric field. Electric field conditions are chosen so that simultaneous dispersion and coalescence are taking place in the emulsion formed in the electric field. The electric field creates a large amount of interfacial surface area for solvent extraction when the droplet is disintegrated and is capable of controlling droplet size and thus droplet stability. These operations take place in the presence of a counter current flow of the continuous phase.

Radiomics: Extracting more information from medical images using advanced feature analysis

PubMed Central

Lambin, Philippe; Rios-Velazquez, Emmanuel; Leijenaar, Ralph; Carvalho, Sara; van Stiphout, Ruud G.P.M.; Granton, Patrick; Zegers, Catharina M.L.; Gillies, Robert; Boellard, Ronald; Dekker, André; Aerts, Hugo J.W.L.

2015-01-01

Solid cancers are spatially and temporally heterogeneous. This limits the use of invasive biopsy based molecular assays but gives huge potential for medical imaging, which has the ability to capture intra-tumoural heterogeneity in a non-invasive way. During the past decades, medical imaging innovations with new hardware, new imaging agents and standardised protocols, allows the field to move towards quantitative imaging. Therefore, also the development of automated and reproducible analysis methodologies to extract more information from image-based features is a requirement. Radiomics – the high-throughput extraction of large amounts of image features from radiographic images – addresses this problem and is one of the approaches that hold great promises but need further validation in multi-centric settings and in the laboratory. PMID:22257792

[Pharmaceutical and formulation aspects of Petroselinum crispum extract].

PubMed

Pápay, Zsófia Edit; Kósa, Annamária; Boldizsár, Imre; Ruszkai, Akos; Balogh, Emese; Klebovich, Imre; Antal, István

2012-01-01

Parsley (Petroselinum crispum L.) is a very popular spice and vegetable in Europe, it is widely spread and easy to grow. It's herb and fruits are known to be diuretic, smooth muscle relaxant and hepatoprotective. The most important identified active ingredients are flavonoids, cumarins and vitamin C. Apigenin and its glycosides are the main flavonoids in parsley, it can be found relatively large amounts in the leaves. The bioactive flavonoid apigenin has antiinflammatory, antioxidant and anticancer activities. The objectives of this study were the preparation and detemination of the apigenin content of the parsley extract and the formulation using inert pellets by layering the apigenin in fluid-bed process.

Transport of large breakdown products of dietary protein through the gut wall.

PubMed Central

Hemmings, W A; Williams, E W

1978-01-01

Ferritin or tritium labelled immunoglobulin G may, by electron microscopy, be demonstrated entering, within, and leaving the epithelial cells. Quantitative studies using various proteins labelled with radioiodine show that large amounts of protein bound radioactivity may be demonstrated in the tissues after feeding the labelled protein to adult rats by stomach tube. The molecular size of this material as determined by sugar gradient ultracentrifugation of tissue extracts ranges when IgG is fed from 50,000-20,000 Daltons. The material retains its ability to react as antigen with antisera specific to the original molecule: precipitation reactions may be obtained in gels and quantitative studies show that cnosiderable amounts of the protein-bound radioactivity are still specifically precipitable. Such studies have been carried out with alpha-gliadin as well as bovine IgG. At 100 days old rats may absorb as much as 40% of a dose of bovine IgG in the form of these large molecular breakdown products. PMID:680603

Laboratory production in vivo of infectious human papillomavirus type 11.

PubMed Central

Kreider, J W; Howett, M K; Leure-Dupree, A E; Zaino, R J; Weber, J A

1987-01-01

Human papillomaviruses (HPV) induce among patients natural lesions which produce small amounts of virus. Infection of human cell cultures does not lead to the multiplication of virus, which also does not replicate in experimental animals. We have developed a unique system for the laboratory production of HPV type 11 (HPV-11). Fragments of human neonatal foreskin were infected with an extract of naturally occurring human vulvar condylomata and grafted beneath the renal capsule of athymic mice. Later (3 to 5 months), condylomatous cysts developed from those grafts. Nuclei of koilocytotic cells contained large amounts of capsid antigen and intranuclear virions. The experimentally induced condylomata were homogenized, and the virions were extracted and used to infect another generation of human foreskin grafts in athymic mice. The HPV-11 DNA content and infectivity of the natural and experimental condylomata were similar. Extracts of experimental condylomata were subjected to differential ultracentrifugation and sedimentation in CsCl density gradients. A single, opalescent band was visible at a density of 1.34 g/ml. It contained HPV virions with HPV-11 DNA. This report is the first demonstration of the laboratory production of an HPV. Images PMID:3027386

An exploratory investigation of polar organic compounds in waters from a lead–zinc mine and mill complex

USGS Publications Warehouse

Rostad, Colleen E.; Schmitt, Christopher J.; Schumacher, John G.; Leiker, Thomas J.

2011-01-01

Surface water samples were collected in 2006 from a lead mine-mill complex in Missouri to investigate possible organic compounds coming from the milling process. Water samples contained relatively high concentrations of dissolved organic carbon (DOC; greater than 20 mg/l) for surface waters but were colorless, implying a lack of naturally occurring aquatic humic or fulvic acids. Samples were extracted by three different types of solid-phase extraction and analyzed by electrospray ionization/mass spectrometry. Because large amounts of xanthate complexation reagents are used in the milling process, techniques were developed to extract and analyze for sodium isopropyl xanthate and sodium ethyl xanthate. Although these xanthate reagents were not found, trace amounts of the degradates, isopropyl xanthyl thiosulfonate and isopropyl xanthyl sulfonate, were found in most locations sampled, including the tailings pond downstream. Dioctyl sulfosuccinate, a surfactant and process filtering aid, was found at concentrations estimated at 350 μg/l at one mill outlet, but not downstream. Release of these organic compounds downstream from lead-zinc mine and milling areas has not previously been reported. A majority of the DOC remains unidentified.

Microwave-assisted extraction of rutin and quercetin from the stalks of Euonymus alatus (Thunb.) Sieb.

PubMed

Zhang, Fan; Yang, Yi; Su, Ping; Guo, Zhenku

2009-01-01

Euonymus alatus (Thunb.) has been used as one of traditional Chinese medicines for several thousand years. Conventional methods for the extraction of rutin and quercetin from E. alatus, including solvent extraction, Soxhlet extraction and heat reflux extraction are characterised by long extraction times and consumption of large amounts of solvents. To develop a simple and rapid method for the extraction of rutin and quercetin from the stalks of Euonymus alatus (Thunb.) Sieb using microwave-assisted extraction (MAE) technique. MAE experiments were performed with a multimode microwave extraction system. The experimental variables that affect the MAE process, such as the concentration of ethanol solution, extractant volume, microwave power and extraction time were optimised. Yields were determined by HPLC. The results were compared with that obtained by classical Soxhlet and ultrasonic-assisted extraction (UAE). From the optimised conditions for MAE of rutin and quercetin it can be concluded that the solvent is 50% ethanol (v/v) solution, the extractant volume is 40 mL, microwave power is 170 W and irradiation time is 6 min. Compared with Soxhlet extraction and ultrasonic extraction, microwave extraction is a rapid method with a higher yield and lower solvent consumption. The results showed that MAE can be used as an efficient and rapid method for the extraction of the active components from plants.

Bioaccessibility of Fukushima-Accident-Derived Cs in Soils and the Contribution of Soil Ingestion to Radiation Doses in Children.

PubMed

Takahara, Shogo; Ikegami, Maiko; Yoneda, Minoru; Kondo, Hitoshi; Ishizaki, Azusa; Iijima, Masashi; Shimada, Yoko; Matsui, Yasuto

2017-07-01

Ingestion of contaminated soil is one potential internal exposure pathway in areas contaminated by the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident. Doses from this pathway can be overestimated if the availability of radioactive nuclides in soils for the gastrointestinal tract is not considered. The concept of bioaccessibility has been adopted to evaluate this availability based on in vitro tests. This study evaluated the bioaccessibility of radioactive cesium from soils via the physiologically-based extraction test (PBET) and the extractability of those via an extraction test with 1 mol/L of hydrochloric acid (HCl). The bioaccessibility obtained in the PBET was 5.3% ± 1%, and the extractability in the tests with HCl was 16% ± 3%. The bioaccessibility was strongly correlated with the extractability. This result indicates the possibility that the extractability in HCl can be used as a good predictor of the bioaccessibility with PBET. In addition, we assessed the doses to children from the ingestion of soil via hand-to-mouth activity based on our PBET results using a probabilistic approach considering the spatial distribution of radioactive cesium in Date City in Fukushima Prefecture and the interindividual differences in the surveyed amounts of soil ingestion in Japan. The results of this assessment indicate that even if children were to routinely ingest a large amount of soil with relatively high contamination, the radiation doses from this pathway are negligible compared with doses from external exposure owing to deposited radionuclides in Fukushima Prefecture. © 2016 Society for Risk Analysis.

Evaluation of nucleus segmentation in digital pathology images through large scale image synthesis

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhou, Naiyun; Yu, Xiaxia; Zhao, Tianhao; Wen, Si; Wang, Fusheng; Zhu, Wei; Kurc, Tahsin; Tannenbaum, Allen; Saltz, Joel; Gao, Yi

2017-03-01

Digital histopathology images with more than 1 Gigapixel are drawing more and more attention in clinical, biomedical research, and computer vision fields. Among the multiple observable features spanning multiple scales in the pathology images, the nuclear morphology is one of the central criteria for diagnosis and grading. As a result it is also the mostly studied target in image computing. Large amount of research papers have devoted to the problem of extracting nuclei from digital pathology images, which is the foundation of any further correlation study. However, the validation and evaluation of nucleus extraction have yet been formulated rigorously and systematically. Some researches report a human verified segmentation with thousands of nuclei, whereas a single whole slide image may contain up to million. The main obstacle lies in the difficulty of obtaining such a large number of validated nuclei, which is essentially an impossible task for pathologist. We propose a systematic validation and evaluation approach based on large scale image synthesis. This could facilitate a more quantitatively validated study for current and future histopathology image analysis field.

Evaluation of Amount of Blood in Dry Blood Spots: Ring-Disk Electrode Conductometry.

PubMed

Kadjo, Akinde F; Stamos, Brian N; Shelor, C Phillip; Berg, Jordan M; Blount, Benjamin C; Dasgupta, Purnendu K

2016-06-21

A fixed area punch in dried blood spot (DBS) analysis is assumed to contain a fixed amount of blood, but the amount actually depends on a number of factors. The presently preferred approach is to normalize the measurement with respect to the sodium level, measured by atomic spectrometry. Instead of sodium levels, we propose electrical conductivity of the extract as an equivalent nondestructive measure. A dip-type small diameter ring-disk electrode (RDE) is ideal for very small volumes. However, the conductance (G) measured by an RDE depends on the depth (D) of the liquid below the probe. There is no established way of computing the specific conductance (σ) of the solution from G. Using a COMSOL Multiphysics model, we were able to obtain excellent agreement between the measured and the model predicted conductance as a function of D. Using simulations over a large range of dimensions, we provide a spreadsheet-based calculator where the RDE dimensions are the input parameters and the procedure determines the 99% of the infinite depth conductance (G99) and the depth D99 at which this is reached. For typical small diameter probes (outer electrode diameter ∼ <2 mm), D99 is small enough for dip-type measurements in extract volumes of ∼100 μL. We demonstrate the use of such probes with DBS extracts. In a small group of 12 volunteers (age 20-66), the specific conductance of 100 μL aqueous extracts of 2 μL of spotted blood showed a variance of 17.9%. For a given subject, methanol extracts of DBS spots nominally containing 8 and 4 μL of blood differed by a factor of 1.8-1.9 in the chromatographically determined values of sulfate and chloride (a minor and major constituent, respectively). The values normalized with respect to the conductance of the extracts differed by ∼1%. For serum associated analytes, normalization of the analyte value by the extract conductance can thus greatly reduce errors from variations in the spotted blood volume/unit area.

A simplified radiometabolite analysis procedure for PET radioligands using a solid phase extraction with micellar medium.

PubMed

Nakao, Ryuji; Halldin, Christer

2013-07-01

A solid phase extraction method has been developed for simple and high-speed direct determination of PET radioligands in plasma. This methodology makes use of a micellar medium and a solid-phase extraction cartridge for displacement of plasma protein bound radioligand and separation of PET radioligands from their radiometabolites without significant preparation. The plasma samples taken from monkey or human during PET measurements were mixed with a micellar eluent containing an anionic surfactant sodium dodecyl sulphate and loaded onto SPE cartridges. The amount of radioactivity corresponding to parent radioligand (retained on the cartridge) and its radioactive metabolites (eluted with micellar eluent) was measured. Under the optimized conditions, excellent separation of target PET radioligands from their radiometabolites was achieved with a single elution and short run-time of 1 min. This method was successfully applied to study the metabolism for (11)C-labelled radioligands in human or monkey plasma. The amount of parent PET radioligands estimated by micellar solid phase extraction strongly corresponded with that determined by radio-LC. The improved throughput permitted the analysis of a large number of plasma samples (up to 13 samples per one PET study) for accurate estimation of metabolite-corrected input function during quantitative PET imaging studies. Solid phase extraction together with micellar medium is fast, sensitive and easy to use, and therefore it is an attractive alternative method to determine relative composition of PET radioligands in plasma. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A new procedure for processing extracted teeth for immediate grafting in post-extraction sockets. An experimental study in American Fox Hound dogs.

PubMed

Calvo-Guirado, José Luis; Cegarra Del Pino, Pilar; Sapoznikov, Lari; Delgado Ruiz, Rafael Arcesio; Fernández-Domínguez, Manuel; Gehrke, Sérgio Alexandre

2018-05-01

To investigate freshly extracted dental particulate used to graft post-extraction sockets in dogs, comparing new bone formation at experimental and control sites. Bilateral premolars P2, P3, P4 and first mandibular molars were extracted atraumatically from six American Fox Hound dogs. The teeth were ground immediately using a 'Smart Dentin Grinder'. The dentin particulate was sieved to ensure a grain size of 300-1200μm and immersed in an alcohol cleanser to dissolve organic debris and bacteria, followed by washing in sterile saline buffer solution. The animals were divided into two groups randomly: group 'A' (control) samples were left to heal without any extraction socket grafting procedure; group 'B' (experimental) sockets were filled with the autogenous dentin particulate graft. The rate of tissue healing and the quantity of bone formation were evaluated using histological and histomorphometric analyses at 60 and 90 days post-grafting. The type of bone generated was categorized as woven (immature bone) or lamellar bone (mature bone). Substantially more bone formation was found in Group B (experimental) than Group A (control) at 60 and 90 days (p<0.05). Less immature bone was identified in the dentin grafted group (25.7%) than the control group (5.9%). Similar differences were also observed at 90 days post grafting. Autogenous dentin particulate grafted immediately after extractions may be considered a useful biomaterial for socket preservation, protecting both buccal and lingual plates, generating large amounts of new woven bone formation after 60 days, and small amounts of lamellar bone after 90 days healing. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.

Multi-criteria optimization for ultrasonic-assisted extraction of antioxidants from Pericarpium Citri Reticulatae using response surface methodology, an activity-based approach.

PubMed

Zeng, Shanshan; Wang, Lu; Zhang, Lei; Qu, Haibin; Gong, Xingchu

2013-06-01

An activity-based approach to optimize the ultrasonic-assisted extraction of antioxidants from Pericarpium Citri Reticulatae (Chenpi in Chinese) was developed. Response surface optimization based on a quantitative composition-activity relationship model showed the relationships among product chemical composition, antioxidant activity of extract, and parameters of extraction process. Three parameters of ultrasonic-assisted extraction, including the ethanol/water ratio, Chenpi amount, and alkaline amount, were investigated to give optimum extraction conditions for antioxidants of Chenpi: ethanol/water 70:30 v/v, Chenpi amount of 10 g, and alkaline amount of 28 mg. The experimental antioxidant yield under the optimum conditions was found to be 196.5 mg/g Chenpi, and the antioxidant activity was 2023.8 μmol Trolox equivalents/g of the Chenpi powder. The results agreed well with the second-order polynomial regression model. This presented approach promised great application potentials in both food and pharmaceutical industries. © 2013 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Acoustic emission signal processing for rolling bearing running state assessment using compressive sensing

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liu, Chang; Wu, Xing; Mao, Jianlin; Liu, Xiaoqin

2017-07-01

In the signal processing domain, there has been growing interest in using acoustic emission (AE) signals for the fault diagnosis and condition assessment instead of vibration signals, which has been advocated as an effective technique for identifying fracture, crack or damage. The AE signal has high frequencies up to several MHz which can avoid some signals interference, such as the parts of bearing (i.e. rolling elements, ring and so on) and other rotating parts of machine. However, acoustic emission signal necessitates advanced signal sampling capabilities and requests ability to deal with large amounts of sampling data. In this paper, compressive sensing (CS) is introduced as a processing framework, and then a compressive features extraction method is proposed. We use it for extracting the compressive features from compressively-sensed data directly, and also prove the energy preservation properties. First, we study the AE signals under the CS framework. The sparsity of AE signal of the rolling bearing is checked. The observation and reconstruction of signal is also studied. Second, we present a method of extraction AE compressive feature (AECF) from compressively-sensed data directly. We demonstrate the energy preservation properties and the processing of the extracted AECF feature. We assess the running state of the bearing using the AECF trend. The AECF trend of the running state of rolling bearings is consistent with the trend of traditional features. Thus, the method is an effective way to evaluate the running trend of rolling bearings. The results of the experiments have verified that the signal processing and the condition assessment based on AECF is simpler, the amount of data required is smaller, and the amount of computation is greatly reduced.

Extraction of trace amounts of mercury with sodium dodecyle sulphate-coated magnetite nanoparticles and its determination by flow injection inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectrometry.

PubMed

Faraji, Mohammad; Yamini, Yadollah; Rezaee, Mohammad

2010-05-15

A new method for solid-phase extraction and preconcentration of trace amounts Hg(II) from environmental samples was developed by using sodium dodecyle sulphate-coated magnetite nanoparticles (SDS-coated Fe(3)O(4) NPs) as a new extractant. The procedure is based on the adsorption of the analyte, as mercury-Michler's thioketone [Hg(2)(TMK)(4)](2+) complex on the negatively charged surface of the SDS-coated Fe(3)O(4) NPs and then elution of the preconcentrated mercury from the surface of the SDS-coated Fe(3)O(4) NPs prior to its determination by flow injection inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectrometry. The effects of pH, TMK concentration, SDS and Fe(3)O(4) NPs amounts, eluent type, sample volume and interfering ions on the recovery of the analyte were investigated. Under optimized conditions, the calibration curve was linear in the range of 0.2-100ngmL(-1) with r(2)=0.9994 (n=8). The limit of detection for Hg(II) determination was 0.04ngmL(-1). Also, relative standard deviation (R.S.D.) for the determination of 2 and 50ngmL(-1) of Hg(II) was 5.2 and 4.7% (n=6), respectively. Due to the quantitative extraction of Hg(II) from 1000mL of the sample solution an enhancement factor as large as 1230-fold can be obtained. The proposed method has been validated using a certified reference materials, and also the method has been applied successfully for the determination of Hg(II) in aqueous samples.

Domain-independent information extraction in unstructured text

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Irwin, N.H.

Extracting information from unstructured text has become an important research area in recent years due to the large amount of text now electronically available. This status report describes the findings and work done during the second year of a two-year Laboratory Directed Research and Development Project. Building on the first-year`s work of identifying important entities, this report details techniques used to group words into semantic categories and to output templates containing selective document content. Using word profiles and category clustering derived during a training run, the time-consuming knowledge-building task can be avoided. Though the output still lacks in completeness whenmore » compared to systems with domain-specific knowledge bases, the results do look promising. The two approaches are compatible and could complement each other within the same system. Domain-independent approaches retain appeal as a system that adapts and learns will soon outpace a system with any amount of a priori knowledge.« less

Structural features and complement-fixing activity of pectin from three Brassica oleracea varieties: white cabbage, kale, and red kale.

PubMed

Samuelsen, Anne Berit; Westereng, Bjørge; Yousif, Osman; Holtekjølen, Ann Katrin; Michaelsen, Terje E; Knutsen, Svein H

2007-02-01

Leaves of different cabbage species are used both as food and as wound healing remedies in traditional medicine. This supposed wound healing activity might be connected to presence of immunomodulating water soluble polysaccharides. To study this, three different cabbage varieties, white cabbage (W), kale (K), and red kale (RK), were pretreated with 80% ethanol and then extracted with water at 50 degrees C and 100 degrees C for isolation of polysaccharide-containing fractions. The fractions were analyzed for monosaccharide composition, glycosidic linkages, Mw distribution, protein content, and phenolic compounds and then tested for complement-fixing activity. All fractions contained pectin type polysaccharides with linkages corresponding to homogalacturonan and hairy regions. Those extracted at 50 degrees C contained higher amounts of neutral side chains and were more active in the complement-fixation test than those extracted at 100 degrees C. The fractions can be ranged by decreasing activity: K-50 > RK-50 > W-50 approximately = K-100 > RK100 approximately = W-100. Studies on structure-activity relationships (SAR) employing multivariate statistical analysis strongly suggest that the magnitude of the measured activity is influenced by the content of certain side chains in the polymers. High activity correlates to large neutral side chains with high amounts of (1-->6)- and (1-->3,6)-linked Gal and low amounts of (1-->4)-linked GalA but not on molecular weight distribution of the polymers.

Bioleaching of electronic scrap by mixed culture of moderately thermophilic microorganisms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ivǎnuş, D.; ǎnuş, R. C., IV; Cǎlmuc, F.

2010-06-01

A process for the metal recovery from electronic scrap using bacterial leaching was investigated. A mixed culture of moderately thermophilic microorganisms was enriched from acid mine drainages (AMDs) samples collected from several sulphide mines in Romania, and the bioleaching of electronic scrap was conducted both in shake flask and bioreactor. The results show that in the shake flask, the mixture can tolerate 50 g/L scrap after being acclimated to gradually increased concentrations of scrap. The copper extraction increases obviously in bioleaching of scrap with moderately thermophilic microorganisms supplemented with 0.4 g/L yeast extract at 180 r/min, 74% copper can be extracted in the pulp of 50 g/L scrap after 20 d. Compared with copper extractions of mesophilic culture, unacclimated culture and acclimated culture without addition of yeast extract, that of accliniated culture with addition of yeast extract is increased by 53%, 44% and 16%, respectively. In a completely stirred tank reactor, the mass fraction of copper and total iron extraction reach up to 81% and 56%, respectively. The results also indicate that it is necessary to add a large amount of acid to the pulp to extract copper from electronic scrap effectively.

Solid-Phase Extraction (SPE): Principles and Applications in Food Samples.

PubMed

Ötles, Semih; Kartal, Canan

2016-01-01

Solid-Phase Extraction (SPE) is a sample preparation method that is practised on numerous application fields due to its many advantages compared to other traditional methods. SPE was invented as an alternative to liquid/liquid extraction and eliminated multiple disadvantages, such as usage of large amount of solvent, extended operation time/procedure steps, potential sources of error, and high cost. Moreover, SPE can be plied to the samples combined with other analytical methods and sample preparation techniques optionally. SPE technique is a useful tool for many purposes through its versatility. Isolation, concentration, purification and clean-up are the main approaches in the practices of this method. Food structures represent a complicated matrix and can be formed into different physical stages, such as solid, viscous or liquid. Therefore, sample preparation step particularly has an important role for the determination of specific compounds in foods. SPE offers many opportunities not only for analysis of a large diversity of food samples but also for optimization and advances. This review aims to provide a comprehensive overview on basic principles of SPE and its applications for many analytes in food matrix.

DNA Extraction Protocols for Whole-Genome Sequencing in Marine Organisms.

PubMed

Panova, Marina; Aronsson, Henrik; Cameron, R Andrew; Dahl, Peter; Godhe, Anna; Lind, Ulrika; Ortega-Martinez, Olga; Pereyra, Ricardo; Tesson, Sylvie V M; Wrange, Anna-Lisa; Blomberg, Anders; Johannesson, Kerstin

2016-01-01

The marine environment harbors a large proportion of the total biodiversity on this planet, including the majority of the earths' different phyla and classes. Studying the genomes of marine organisms can bring interesting insights into genome evolution. Today, almost all marine organismal groups are understudied with respect to their genomes. One potential reason is that extraction of high-quality DNA in sufficient amounts is challenging for many marine species. This is due to high polysaccharide content, polyphenols and other secondary metabolites that will inhibit downstream DNA library preparations. Consequently, protocols developed for vertebrates and plants do not always perform well for invertebrates and algae. In addition, many marine species have large population sizes and, as a consequence, highly variable genomes. Thus, to facilitate the sequence read assembly process during genome sequencing, it is desirable to obtain enough DNA from a single individual, which is a challenge in many species of invertebrates and algae. Here, we present DNA extraction protocols for seven marine species (four invertebrates, two algae, and a marine yeast), optimized to provide sufficient DNA quality and yield for de novo genome sequencing projects.

Anti-L. donovani activity in macrophage/amastigote model of palmarumycin CP18 and its large scale production.

PubMed

Ortega, Humberto E; Teixeira, Eliane de Morais; Rabello, Ana; Higginbotham, Sarah; Cubilla-Ríos, Luis

2014-01-01

Palmarumycin CP18, isolated from an extract of the fermentation broth and mycelium of the Panamanian endophytic fungus Edenia sp., was previously reported with strong and specific activity against Leishmania donovani. Here we report that when the same strain was cultured on different solid media--Harrold Agar, Leonian Agar, Potato dextrose Agar (PDA), Corn Meal Agar, Honey Peptone Agar, and eight vegetables (V8) Agar--in order to determine the optimal conditions for isolation of palmarumycin CP18, no signal for this compound was observed in any of the 1H NMR spectra of fractions obtained from these extracts. However, one extract, prepared from the fungal culture in PDA contained significant amounts of CJ-12,372, a possible biosynthetic precursor of palmarumycin CP18. Edenia sp. was cultivated on a large scale on PDA and CJ-12,372 was converted to palmarumycin CP18 by oxidation of its p-hydroquinone moiety with DDQ in dioxane. Palmarumycin CP18 showed anti-leishmanial activity against L. donovani in a macrophage/amastigote model, with IC50 values of 23.5 microM.

A Comparative Analysis of Extract, Transformation and Loading (ETL) Process

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Runtuwene, J. P. A.; Tangkawarow, I. R. H. T.; Manoppo, C. T. M.; Salaki, R. J.

2018-02-01

The current growth of data and information occurs rapidly in varying amount and media. These types of development will eventually produce large number of data better known as the Big Data. Business Intelligence (BI) utilizes large number of data and information for analysis so that one can obtain important information. This type of information can be used to support decision-making process. In practice a process integrating existing data and information into data warehouse is needed. This data integration process is known as Extract, Transformation and Loading (ETL). In practice, many applications have been developed to carry out the ETL process, but selection which applications are more time, cost and power effective and efficient may become a challenge. Therefore, the objective of the study was to provide comparative analysis through comparison between the ETL process using Microsoft SQL Server Integration Service (SSIS) and one using Pentaho Data Integration (PDI).

Logistics and quality control for DNA sampling in large multicenter studies.

PubMed

Nederhand, R J; Droog, S; Kluft, C; Simoons, M L; de Maat, M P M

2003-05-01

To study associations between genetic variation and disease, large bio-banks need to be created in multicenter studies. Therefore, we studied the effects of storage time and temperature on DNA quality and quantity in a simulation experiment with storage up to 28 days frozen, at 4 degrees C and at room temperature. In the simulation experiment, the conditions did not influence the amount or quality of DNA to an unsatisfactory level. However, the amount of extracted DNA was decreased in frozen samples and in samples that were stored for > 7 days at room temperature. In a sample of patients from 24 countries of the EUROPA trial obtained by mail with transport times up to 1 month DNA yield and quality were adequate. From these results we conclude that transport of non-frozen blood by ordinary mail is usable and practical for DNA isolation for polymerase chain reaction in clinical and epidemiological studies.

Fuzzy Document Clustering Approach using WordNet Lexical Categories

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gharib, Tarek F.; Fouad, Mohammed M.; Aref, Mostafa M.

Text mining refers generally to the process of extracting interesting information and knowledge from unstructured text. This area is growing rapidly mainly because of the strong need for analysing the huge and large amount of textual data that reside on internal file systems and the Web. Text document clustering provides an effective navigation mechanism to organize this large amount of data by grouping their documents into a small number of meaningful classes. In this paper we proposed a fuzzy text document clustering approach using WordNet lexical categories and Fuzzy c-Means algorithm. Some experiments are performed to compare efficiency of the proposed approach with the recently reported approaches. Experimental results show that Fuzzy clustering leads to great performance results. Fuzzy c-means algorithm overcomes other classical clustering algorithms like k-means and bisecting k-means in both clustering quality and running time efficiency.

Dancing on coke: smuggling cocaine dispersed in polyvinyl alcohol.

PubMed

van Nuijs, Alexander L N; Maudens, Kristof E; Lambert, Willy E; Van Calenbergh, Serge; Risseeuw, Martijn D P; Van hee, Paul; Covaci, Adrian; Neels, Hugo

2012-01-01

Recent trends suggest that cocaine smugglers have become more and more inventive to avoid seizures of large amounts of cocaine transported between countries. We report a case of a mail parcel containing a dance pad which was seized at the Customs Department of Brussels Airport, Belgium. After investigation, the inside of the dance pad was found to contain a thick polymer, which tested positive for cocaine. Analysis was performed using a routine colorimetric swipe test, gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. The polymer was identified as polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and contained 18% cocaine, corresponding to a street value of € 20,000. Laboratory experiments showed that cocaine could be easily extracted from the PVA matrix. This case report reveals a new smuggling technique for the transportation of large amounts of cocaine from one country to another. © 2011 American Academy of Forensic Sciences.

Microwave-assisted extraction and mild saponification for determination of organochlorine pesticides in oyster samples.

PubMed

Carro, N; García, I; Ignacio, M-C; Llompart, M; Yebra, M-C; Mouteira, A

2002-10-01

A sample-preparation procedure (extraction and saponification) using microwave energy is proposed for determination of organochlorine pesticides in oyster samples. A Plackett-Burman factorial design has been used to optimize the microwave-assisted extraction and mild saponification on a freeze dried sample spiked with a mixture of aldrin, endrin, dieldrin, heptachlor, heptachorepoxide, isodrin, transnonachlor, p, p'-DDE, and p, p'-DDD. Six variables: solvent volume, extraction time, extraction temperature, amount of acetone (%) in the extractant solvent, amount of sample, and volume of NaOH solution were considered in the optimization process. The results show that the amount of sample is statistically significant for dieldrin, aldrin, p, p'-DDE, heptachlor, and transnonachlor and solvent volume for dieldrin, aldrin, and p, p'-DDE. The volume of NaOH solution is statistically significant for aldrin and p, p'-DDE only. Extraction temperature and extraction time seem to be the main factors determining the efficiency of extraction process for isodrin and p, p'-DDE, respectively. The optimized procedure was compared with conventional Soxhlet extraction.

Contact lens deposits, adverse responses, and clinical ocular surface parameters.

PubMed

Zhao, Zhenjun; Naduvilath, Thomas; Flanagan, Judith L; Carnt, Nicole A; Wei, Xiaojia; Diec, Jennie; Evans, Vicki; Willcox, Mark D P

2010-09-01

To correlate clinical responses during contact lens wear with the amount of protein or cholesterol extracted from lenses after wear. Clinical parameters, including adverse response rates and corneal staining, and symptomatology rating during lens wear were collected from a series of clinical tests comprising four different silicone hydrogel lenses with four different multipurpose solutions. To test for correlates, the amount of total protein or cholesterol extracted from lenses after daily wear were compared statistically to clinical parameters. The amount of protein (p = 0.008) or cholesterol (p = 0.01) extracted from lenses was higher for those subjects who showed solution-induced corneal staining. Amount of protein extracted was correlated (p < 0.01) with conjunctival staining (R = -0.23), lens front surface wetting (r = 0.14), and lens fit tightness (R = -0.20). These clinical parameters accounted for 48% of lens protein deposition. The amount of cholesterol extracted from lenses was much more weakly associated with clinical variables. Amount of protein or cholesterol extracted from lenses was not associated with the production of any corneal infiltrative or mechanical adverse event during wear and was only very weakly correlated with insertion comfort of lenses. These results suggest that there may be no physiologically relevant consequence of cholesterol depositing on silicone hydrogel lenses. The amount of protein that deposits onto silicone hydrogel lenses during wear may have more affect on lens performance on-eye. However, the correlations were generally small and may still not indicate any causative relevant physiological response. Further work is required to determine whether there is any direct causative effect to support these correlative findings.

Thermal alteration experiments on organic matter from recent marine sediments in relation to petroleum genesis

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Ishiwatari, R.; Ishiwatari, M.; Rohrback, B. G.; Kaplan, I. R.

1977-01-01

Three fractions of organic matter: lipid (benzene:methanol-extractable), humic acid (alkali-extractable) and kerogen (residue) were extracted from a young marine sediment (Tanner Basin, offshore southern California) and heated for different times (5-116 hr) and temperatures (150-410 C). The volatile (gases) and liquid products, as well as residual material, were then analyzed. On a weight basis, the lipid fraction produced 58% of the total identified n-alkanes, the kerogen fraction 41%, and the humic acid less than 1%. The volatiles produced by heating the lipid and humic acid fractions were largely CO2 and water, whereas those produced from heated kerogen also included methane, hydrogen gas and small amounts of C2-C4 hydrocarbons. A mechanism for hydrocarbon production due to the thermal alteration of organic constituents of marine sediment is discussed.

NMR Confirmation and HPLC Quantification of Javamide-I and Javamide-II in Green Coffee Extract Products Available in the Market.

PubMed

Park, Jae B

2017-01-01

Javamide-I/javamide-II are phenolic amides found in coffee. Recent reports suggested that they may contain several biological activities related to human health. Therefore, there is emergent interest about their quantities in coffee-related products. Green coffee extract is a powder extract made of unroasted green coffee beans, available as a dietary supplement. However, there is little information about the amounts of javamide-I/javamide-II in green coffee extract products in the market. Therefore, in this paper, javamide-I/javamide-II were extracted from green coffee extract products and their identifications were confirmed by NMR. After that, the amounts of javamide-I/javamide-II were individually quantified from seven different green coffee extract samples using the HPLC method coupled to an electrochemical detector. The HPLC method provided accurate and reliable measurement of javamide-I/javamide-II with excellent peak resolution and low detection limit. In all seven green coffee extract samples, javamide-II was found to be between 0.28 and 2.96 mg/g, but javamide-I was detected in only five samples in the concentration levels of 0.15-0.52 mg/g, suggesting that green coffee extract products contain different amounts of javamide-I/javamide-II. In summary, javamide-I/javamide-II can be found in green coffee extract products sold in the market, but their amounts are likely to be comparatively different in between green coffee extract brands.

Subcritical water extraction of amino acids from Mars analog soils.

PubMed

Noell, Aaron C; Fisher, Anita M; Fors-Francis, Kisa; Sherrit, Stewart

2018-01-18

For decades, the Martian regolith has stymied robotic mission efforts to catalog the organic molecules present. Perchlorate salts, found widely throughout Mars, are the main culprit as they breakdown and react with organics liberated from the regolith during pyrolysis, the primary extraction technique attempted to date on Mars. This work further develops subcritical water extraction (SCWE) as a technique for extraction of amino acids on future missions. The effect of SCWE temperature (185, 200, and 215°C) and duration of extraction (10-120 min) on the total amount and distribution of amino acids recovered was explored for three Mars analog soils (JSC Mars-1A simulant, an Atacama desert soil, and an Antarctic Dry Valleys soil) and bovine serum albumin (as a control solution of known amino acid content). Total amounts of amino acids extracted increased with both time and temperature; however, the distribution shifted notably due to the destruction of the amino acids with charged or polar side chains at the higher temperatures. The pure bovine serum albumin solution and JSC Mars 1A also showed lower yields than the Atacama and Antarctic extractions suggesting that SCWE may be less effective at hydrolyzing large or aggregated proteins. Changing solvent from water to a dilute (10 mM) HCl solution allowed total extraction efficiencies comparable to the higher temperature/time combinations while using the lowest temperature/time (185°C/20 min). The dilute HCl extractions also did not lead to the shift in amino acid distribution observed at the higher temperatures. Additionally, adding sodium perchlorate salt to the extraction did not interfere with recoveries. Native magnetite in the JSC Mars-1A may have been responsible for destruction of glycine, as evidenced by its uncharacteristic decrease as the temperature/time of extraction increased. This work shows that SCWE can extract high yields of native amino acids out of Mars analog soils with minimal disruption of the distribution of those amino acids, even in the presence of a perchlorate salt. © 2018 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Methylation of Brazilein on Secang (Caesalpinia sappan Linn) Wood Extract for Maintain Color Stability to the Changes of pH

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ulma, Zeni; Rahayuningsih, Edia; Dwi Wahyuningsih, Tutik

2018-01-01

The stability of natural dyes to the changes of pH is really necessary when the natural dyes are applied either on fabric or food. This research aimed to increase the stability of brazilein, a compound contained within the secang wood extract, to the changes of pH. The methylation process was done by reacting Dimethyl Carbonate (DMC) with the brazilein on the secang wood extract. DMC acts as a substance that substitute hydroxyl group on brazilein. The methylation reaction of brazilein on secang wood extract was operated on a three-necked round-bottomed flask fitted with mercury-sealed stirrer and reflux condenser under 80°C temperature and 250 rpm stirring speed. There were two variables observed in this research; the DMC amount ratio to the amount of secang wood extract and the time of the methylation process. The research showed that at the 1:10 the DMC amount ratio to the amount of wood extract and 8 hours of the methylation process give the better stability of color of the secang wood extract than the variation of the other variables.

RNA Extraction from Animal and Human's Cancerous Tissues: Does Tissue Matter?

PubMed

Samadani, Ali Akbar; Nikbakhsh, Novin; Fattahi, Sadegh; Pourbagher, Roghayeh; Aghajanpour Mir, Seyyed Mohsen; Mousavi Kani, Narges; Abedian, Zeinab; Akhavan-Niaki, Haleh

2015-01-01

The reliability of gene expression profiling, based technologies and methods to find transcriptional differences representative of the original samples is influenced by the quality of the extracted RNA. Hence, RNA extraction is the first step to investigate the gene expression and its function. Consequently, the quality of extracted RNA is really significant. Correspondingly, this research was accomplished to optimize the RNA extraction methods and compare the amounts of tissue or quality of tissue. Relatively, the cancerous tissue of human stomach in fresh and frozen conditions and also the mouse fresh tissue were studied. Some factors like the amount of samples, efficacy differences of diverse extraction buffers (TriPure, Trizol) and also the efficacy of b-mercaptoethanol were compared and investigated. The results indicated that the less amount (1-2 mg) compared to other amounts (2-5 mg, 5-15 mg) yielded the best quality and the RNA bands (5S, 18S, 28S) were observed perfectly. Relatively, comparing and measuring some kinds of buffers (Trizol, TriPure) indicated no difference in RNA extraction quality. The last investigated factor was the effect of b- mercaptoethanol which was used along with TriPure to remove the RNAse. Conclusively, no effective impression was observed.

Thermodynamic power of non-Markovianity

PubMed Central

Bylicka, Bogna; Tukiainen, Mikko; Chruściński, Dariusz; Piilo, Jyrki; Maniscalco, Sabrina

2016-01-01

The natural framework to discuss thermodynamics at the quantum level is the theory of open quantum systems. Memory effects arising from strong system-environment correlations may lead to information back-flow, that is non-Markovian behaviour. The relation between non-Markovianity and quantum thermodynamics has been until now largely unexplored. Here we show by means of Landauer’s principle that memory effects control the amount of work extraction by erasure in presence of realistic environments. PMID:27323947

Multivariate analysis for scanning tunneling spectroscopy data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yamanishi, Junsuke; Iwase, Shigeru; Ishida, Nobuyuki; Fujita, Daisuke

2018-01-01

We applied principal component analysis (PCA) to two-dimensional tunneling spectroscopy (2DTS) data obtained on a Si(111)-(7 × 7) surface to explore the effectiveness of multivariate analysis for interpreting 2DTS data. We demonstrated that several components that originated mainly from specific atoms at the Si(111)-(7 × 7) surface can be extracted by PCA. Furthermore, we showed that hidden components in the tunneling spectra can be decomposed (peak separation), which is difficult to achieve with normal 2DTS analysis without the support of theoretical calculations. Our analysis showed that multivariate analysis can be an additional powerful way to analyze 2DTS data and extract hidden information from a large amount of spectroscopic data.

Interior. Distillation apparatus used for extracting small test amounts of ...

Library of Congress Historic Buildings Survey, Historic Engineering Record, Historic Landscapes Survey

Interior. Distillation apparatus used for extracting small test amounts of latex from plant fiber. - Thomas A. Edison Laboratories, Building No. 2, Main Street & Lakeside Avenue, West Orange, Essex County, NJ

The skin reservoir of sulphur mustard.

PubMed

Hattersley, I J; Jenner, J; Dalton, C; Chilcott, R P; Graham, J S

2008-09-01

Studies of the percutaneous reservoir of sulphur mustard (HD) formed during absorption carried out during WWI and WWII are inconclusive. More recent studies have indicated that a significant amount of unreacted HD remains in human epidermal membranes during percutaneous penetration studies in vitro. The present study investigated the nature and persistence of the HD reservoir formed during in vitro penetration studies using dermatomed slices of human and pig skin (0.5mm thick). Amounts of (14)C-HD that (a) penetrated, (b) remained on the surface, (c) were extractable from and (d) remained in the skin after extraction were estimated by liquid scintillation counting (confirmed using GC-MS analysis). The results demonstrated that there is a reservoir of HD in human and pig skin for up to 24 h after contamination of the skin surface in vitro with liquid agent. At least some of this reservoir could be extracted with acetonitrile, and the amounts of extracted and unextracted HD exceed the amount required to produce injury in vivo by at least 20 fold. The study demonstrated the presence of a reservoir whether the skin was covered (occluded) or left open to the air (unoccluded). The study concluded that the extractable reservoir was significant in terms of the amount of HD required to induce a vesicant response in human skin. The extractable reservoir was at least 20 times the amount required per cm(2) estimated to cause a response in all of the human population, as defined by studies carried out in human volunteers during the 1940s.

Use of an enzyme-assisted method to improve protein extraction from olive leaves.

PubMed

Vergara-Barberán, M; Lerma-García, M J; Herrero-Martínez, J M; Simó-Alfonso, E F

2015-02-15

The improvement of protein extraction from olive leaves using an enzyme-assisted protocol has been investigated. Using a cellulase enzyme (Celluclast® 1.5L), different parameters that affect the extraction process, such as the influence and amount of organic solvent, enzyme amount, pH and extraction temperature and time, were optimised. The influence of these factors was examined using the standard Bradford assay and the extracted proteins were characterised by sodium dodecyl sulphate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE). The optimum extraction parameters were: 30% acetonitrile, 5% (v/v) Celluclast® 1.5L at pH 5.0 and 55°C for 15min. Under these conditions, several protein extracts from olive leaves of different genetic variety (with a total protein amount comprised between 1.87 and 6.64mgg(-1)) were analysed and compared by SDS-PAGE, showing differences in their electrophoretic protein profiles. The developed enzyme-assisted extraction method has shown a faster extraction, higher recovery and reduced solvent usage with respect to the use of the non-enzymatic methods described in literature. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Carboxylic and dicarboxylic acids extracted from crushed magnesium oxide single crystals

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Freund, F.; Gupta, A. D.; Kumar, D.

1999-01-01

Carboxylic and dicarboxylic acids (glycolic, oxalic, malonic and succinic) have been extracted with tetrahydrofuran (THF) and H2O from large synthetic MgO crystals, crushed to a medium fine powder. The extracts were characterized by infrared spectroscopy and 1H-NMR. The THF extracts were derivatized with tert-butyldimethylsilyl (t-BDMS) for GC-MS analysis. A single crystal separated from the extract was used for an x-ray structure analysis, giving the monoclinic unit cell, space group P21/c with ao = 5.543 A, bo = 8.845 A, co = 5.086 A, and beta = 91.9 degrees, consistent with beta-succinic acid, HOOC(CH2)COOH. The amount of extracted acids is estimated to be of the order of 0.1 to 0.5 mg g-1 MgO. The MgO crystals from which these organic acids were extracted grew from the 2860 degrees C hot melt, saturated with CO/CO2 and H2O, thereby incorporating small amounts of the gaseous components to form a solid solution (ss) with MgO. Upon cooling, the ss becomes supersaturated, causing solute carbon and other solute species to segregate not only to the surface but also internally, to dislocations and subgrain boundaries. The organic acids extracted from the MgO crystals after crushing appear to derive from these segregated solutes that formed C-C, C-H and C-O bonds along dislocations and other defects in the MgO structure, leading to entities that can generically be described as (HxCyOz)n-. The processes underlying the formation of these precursors are fundamental in nature and expected to be operational in any minerals, preferentially those with dense structures, that crystallized in H2O-CO2-laden environments. This opens the possibility that common magmatic and metamorphic rocks when weathering at the surface of a tectonically active planet like Earth may be an important source of abiogenically formed complex organic compounds.

Recovery of oil components of okara by ethanol-modified supercritical carbon dioxide extraction.

PubMed

Quitain, Armando T; Oro, Kazuyuki; Katoh, Shunsaku; Moriyoshi, Takashi

2006-09-01

Recovery of the oil components of okara by ethanol-modified supercritical carbon dioxide extraction was investigated at 40-80 degrees C temperature and 12-30 MPa pressure. In a typical run (holding period of 2 h, continuous flow extraction of 5 h), results indicated that the oil component could be best obtained with a recovery of 63.5% at relatively low temperature of 40 degrees C and mild pressure of 20 MPa in the presence of 10 mol% EtOH as entrainer. Based on gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis, the extracts consisted mainly of fatty acids and phytosterols, and traces of decadienal. Folin-Ciocalteau estimates of total phenols showed that addition of EtOH as entrainer increased the yield and the amount of phenolic compounds in the extracts. The amounts of two primary soy isoflavones, genistein and daidzein, in the extracts also increased with increasing amount of EtOH.

[Study on the optimal extraction process of chaihushugan powder].

PubMed

Wang, Chun-yan; Zhang, Wan-ming; Zhang, Dan-shen; An, Fang; Tian, Jia-ming

2009-11-01

To study the optimal extraction process of chaihushugan powder by orthogonal design. RP-HPLC method was developed for the determination of saikosaponin a, ferulic acid, hesperidin and paeoniflorin in chaihushugan powder. The contents of the components and the extraction yield were selected as assessment indices. Four factors were study by L9 (3(4)), including the alcohol concentration, amount of alcohol, duration of extraction and times of extraction. The optimal extracting condition was 80% alcohol consumed as 10 times of crude herb amount, and extracting two times for 90 min each time. This study supplies theoretical base for the development of chaihushugan powder formulation.

Effects of excipients and curing process on the abuse deterrent properties of directly compressed tablets.

PubMed

Rahman, Ziyaur; Zidan, Ahmed S; Korang-Yeboah, Maxwell; Yang, Yang; Siddiqui, Akhtar; Shakleya, Diaa; Khan, Mansoor A; Cruz, Celia; Ashraf, Muhammad

2017-01-30

The objective of the present investigation was to understand the effects of excipients and curing process on the abuse deterrent properties (ADP) of Polyox™ based directly compressible abuse deterrent tablet formulations (ADFs). The excipients investigated were lactose (monohydrate or anhydrous), microcrystalline cellulose and hydroxypropyl methylcellulose. The ADPs studied were tablet crush resistance or hardness, particle size distribution following mechanical manipulation, drug extraction in water and alcohol, syringeability and injectability. Other non-ADPs such as surface morphology and tablet dissolution were also studied. It was found that presence of 50% or more of water soluble or swellable excipient in the ADF tablets significantly affected the tablet hardness, particle size distribution following mechanical manipulation and drug extraction while small amount (5%) of excipients had either minimal or no effect on ADPs of these tablets. Addition of high molecular weight HPMC (K 100M) affected syringeability and injectability of ADF. Curing process was found to affect ADPs (hardness, particle size distribution, drug extraction and syringeability and injectability) when compared with uncured tablet. In conclusion, addition of large amount of excipients, especially water soluble ones in Polyox™ based ADF tablets increase the risk of abuse by various routes of administration. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Composition and molecular weight distribution of carob germ protein fractions.

PubMed

Smith, Brennan M; Bean, Scott R; Schober, Tilman J; Tilley, Michael; Herald, Thomas J; Aramouni, Fadi

2010-07-14

Biochemical properties of carob germ proteins were analyzed using a combination of selective extraction, reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC), size exclusion chromatography (SEC) coupled with multiangle laser light scattering (SEC-MALS), and electrophoretic analysis. Using a modified Osborne extraction procedure, carob germ flour proteins were found to contain approximately 32% albumin and globulin and approximately 68% glutelin with no prolamins detected. The albumin and globulin fraction was found to contain low amounts of disulfide-bonded polymers with relatively low M(w) ranging up to 5 x 10(6) Da. The glutelin fraction, however, was found to contain large amounts of high molecular weight disulfide-bonded polymers with M(w) up to 8 x 10(7) Da. When extracted under nonreducing conditions and divided into soluble and insoluble proteins as typically done for wheat gluten, carob germ proteins were found to be almost entirely ( approximately 95%) in the soluble fraction with only ( approximately 5%) in the insoluble fraction. As in wheat, SEC-MALS analysis showed that the insoluble proteins had a greater M(w) than the soluble proteins and ranged up to 8 x 10(7) Da. The lower M(w) distribution of the polymeric proteins of carob germ flour may account for differences in functionality between wheat and carob germ flour.

Food grade lingonberry extract: polyphenolic composition and in vivo protective effect against oxidative stress.

PubMed

Mane, Carine; Loonis, Michele; Juhel, Christine; Dufour, Claire; Malien-Aubert, Celine

2011-04-13

Fractionation of the polyphenols constituting a food grade lingonberry extract (Vaccinium vitis-idaea) highlighted a composition more complex than described until now in the berry. Procyanidins B1, B2, and A2 were identified by UPLC/ESI-MS(2) along with the presence of other flavanol oligomers. Processing induced the release of large amounts of aglycones for ferulic acid, p-coumaric acid, and quercetin. The described anthocyanic composition of lingonberry was completed with hexoside derivatives of peonidin, petunidin, malvidin, and delphinidin. Besides confirmation of in vitro antioxidant activity, in vivo study was performed on rats fed a diet inducing oxidative stress. Supplementation with lingonberry extract significantly decreased the total oxidant status and favorably affected antioxidant defense enzymes in red blood cells and liver. A drop in the serum reduced glutathione level was also prevented, and uric acid was maintained at low level, confirming the antioxidant activity of the extract (5% proanthocyanidins) from a dosage of 23 mg/kg of body weight.

Development of an SPE/CE method for analyzing HAAs

USGS Publications Warehouse

Zhang, L.; Capel, P.D.; Hozalski, R.M.

2007-01-01

The haloacetic acid (HAA) analysis methods approved by the US Environmental Protection Agency involve extraction and derivatization of HAAs (typically to their methyl ester form) and analysis by gas chromatography (GC) with electron capture detection (ECD). Concerns associated with these methods include the time and effort of the derivatization process, use of potentially hazardous chemicals or conditions during methylation, poor recoveries because of low extraction efficiencies for some HAAs or matrix effects from sulfate, and loss of tribromoacetic acid because of decarboxylation. The HAA analysis method introduced here uses solid-phase extraction (SPE) followed by capillary electrophoresis (CE) analysis. The method is accurate, reproducible, sensitive, relatively safe, and easy to perform, and avoids the use of large amounts of solvent for liquid-liquid extraction and the potential hazards and hassles of derivatization. The cost of analyzing HAAs using this method should be lower than the currently approved methods, and utilities with a GC/ECD can perform the analysis in-house.

Comparison of Two Methods of RNA Extraction from Formalin-Fixed Paraffin-Embedded Tissue Specimens

PubMed Central

Gouveia, Gisele Rodrigues; Ferreira, Suzete Cleusa; Ferreira, Jerenice Esdras; Siqueira, Sheila Aparecida Coelho; Pereira, Juliana

2014-01-01

The present study aimed to compare two different methods of extracting RNA from formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) specimens of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL). We further aimed to identify possible influences of variables—such as tissue size, duration of paraffin block storage, fixative type, primers used for cDNA synthesis, and endogenous genes tested—on the success of amplification from the samples. Both tested protocols used the same commercial kit for RNA extraction (the RecoverAll Total Nucleic Acid Isolation Optimized for FFPE Samples from Ambion). However, the second protocol included an additional step of washing with saline buffer just after sample rehydration. Following each protocol, we compared the RNA amount and purity and the amplification success as evaluated by standard PCR and real-time PCR. The results revealed that the extra washing step added to the RNA extraction process resulted in significantly improved RNA quantity and quality and improved success of amplification from paraffin-embedded specimens. PMID:25105117

Development and validation of a magnetic solid-phase extraction with high-performance liquid chromatography method for the simultaneous determination of amphetamine and methadone in urine.

PubMed

Taghvimi, Arezou; Hamishehkar, Hamed; Ebrahimi, Mahmoud

2016-06-01

The simultaneous determination of amphetamine and methadone was carried out by magnetic graphene oxide nanoparticles, a magnetic solid-phase extraction adsorbent, as a new sample treatment technique. The main factors (the amounts of sample volume, amount of adsorbent, type and amount of extraction organic solvent, time of extraction and desorption, pH, the ionic strength of extraction medium, and agitation rate) influencing the extraction efficiency were investigated and optimized. Under the optimized conditions, good linearity was observed in the range of 100-1500 ng/mL for amphetamine and 100-1000 ng/mL for methadone. The method was evaluated for determination of AM and methadone in positive urine samples, satisfactory results were obtained, therefore magnetic solid-phase extraction can be applied as a novel method for the determination of drugs of abuse in forensic laboratories. © 2016 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Aerosol-Assisted Extraction of Silicon Nanoparticles from Wafer Slicing Waste for Lithium Ion Batteries

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jang, Hee Dong; Kim, Hyekyoung; Chang, Hankwon; Kim, Jiwoong; Roh, Kee Min; Choi, Ji-Hyuk; Cho, Bong-Gyoo; Park, Eunjun; Kim, Hansu; Luo, Jiayan; Huang, Jiaxing

2015-03-01

A large amount of silicon debris particles are generated during the slicing of silicon ingots into thin wafers for the fabrication of integrated-circuit chips and solar cells. This results in a significant loss of valuable materials at about 40% of the mass of ingots. In addition, a hazardous silicon sludge waste is produced containing largely debris of silicon, and silicon carbide, which is a common cutting material on the slicing saw. Efforts in material recovery from the sludge and recycling have been largely directed towards converting silicon or silicon carbide into other chemicals. Here, we report an aerosol-assisted method to extract silicon nanoparticles from such sludge wastes and their use in lithium ion battery applications. Using an ultrasonic spray-drying method, silicon nanoparticles can be directly recovered from the mixture with high efficiency and high purity for making lithium ion battery anode. The work here demonstrated a relatively low cost approach to turn wafer slicing wastes into much higher value-added materials for energy applications, which also helps to increase the sustainability of semiconductor material and device manufacturing.

Aerosol-Assisted Extraction of Silicon Nanoparticles from Wafer Slicing Waste for Lithium Ion Batteries

PubMed Central

Jang, Hee Dong; Kim, Hyekyoung; Chang, Hankwon; Kim, Jiwoong; Roh, Kee Min; Choi, Ji-Hyuk; Cho, Bong-Gyoo; Park, Eunjun; Kim, Hansu; Luo, Jiayan; Huang, Jiaxing

2015-01-01

A large amount of silicon debris particles are generated during the slicing of silicon ingots into thin wafers for the fabrication of integrated-circuit chips and solar cells. This results in a significant loss of valuable materials at about 40% of the mass of ingots. In addition, a hazardous silicon sludge waste is produced containing largely debris of silicon, and silicon carbide, which is a common cutting material on the slicing saw. Efforts in material recovery from the sludge and recycling have been largely directed towards converting silicon or silicon carbide into other chemicals. Here, we report an aerosol-assisted method to extract silicon nanoparticles from such sludge wastes and their use in lithium ion battery applications. Using an ultrasonic spray-drying method, silicon nanoparticles can be directly recovered from the mixture with high efficiency and high purity for making lithium ion battery anode. The work here demonstrated a relatively low cost approach to turn wafer slicing wastes into much higher value-added materials for energy applications, which also helps to increase the sustainability of semiconductor material and device manufacturing. PMID:25819285

Using decision-tree classifier systems to extract knowledge from databases

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

St.clair, D. C.; Sabharwal, C. L.; Hacke, Keith; Bond, W. E.

1990-01-01

One difficulty in applying artificial intelligence techniques to the solution of real world problems is that the development and maintenance of many AI systems, such as those used in diagnostics, require large amounts of human resources. At the same time, databases frequently exist which contain information about the process(es) of interest. Recently, efforts to reduce development and maintenance costs of AI systems have focused on using machine learning techniques to extract knowledge from existing databases. Research is described in the area of knowledge extraction using a class of machine learning techniques called decision-tree classifier systems. Results of this research suggest ways of performing knowledge extraction which may be applied in numerous situations. In addition, a measurement called the concept strength metric (CSM) is described which can be used to determine how well the resulting decision tree can differentiate between the concepts it has learned. The CSM can be used to determine whether or not additional knowledge needs to be extracted from the database. An experiment involving real world data is presented to illustrate the concepts described.

Enhancing biomedical text summarization using semantic relation extraction.

PubMed

Shang, Yue; Li, Yanpeng; Lin, Hongfei; Yang, Zhihao

2011-01-01

Automatic text summarization for a biomedical concept can help researchers to get the key points of a certain topic from large amount of biomedical literature efficiently. In this paper, we present a method for generating text summary for a given biomedical concept, e.g., H1N1 disease, from multiple documents based on semantic relation extraction. Our approach includes three stages: 1) We extract semantic relations in each sentence using the semantic knowledge representation tool SemRep. 2) We develop a relation-level retrieval method to select the relations most relevant to each query concept and visualize them in a graphic representation. 3) For relations in the relevant set, we extract informative sentences that can interpret them from the document collection to generate text summary using an information retrieval based method. Our major focus in this work is to investigate the contribution of semantic relation extraction to the task of biomedical text summarization. The experimental results on summarization for a set of diseases show that the introduction of semantic knowledge improves the performance and our results are better than the MEAD system, a well-known tool for text summarization.

Evaluation of two-dimensional electrophoresis and liquid chromatography – tandem mass spectrometry for tissue-specific protein profiling of laser-microdissected plant samples

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Schad, Martina; Lipton, Mary S.; Giavalisco, Patrick

2005-07-14

Laser microdissection (LM) allows the collection of homogeneous tissue- and cell specific plant samples. The employment of this technique with subsequent protein analysis has thus far not been reported for plant tissues, probably due to the difficulties associated with defining a reasonable cellular morphology and, in parallel, allowing efficient protein extraction from tissue samples. The relatively large sample amount needed for successful proteome analysis is an additional issue that complicates protein profiling on a tissue- or even cell-specific level. In contrast to transcript profiling that can be performed from very small sample amounts due to efficient amplification strategies, there ismore » as yet no amplification procedure for proteins available. In the current study, we compared different tissue preparation techniques prior to LM/laser pressure catapulting (LMPC) with respect to their suitability for protein retrieval. Cryosectioning was identified as the best compromise between tissue morphology and effective protein extraction. After collection of vascular bundles from Arabidopsis thaliana stem tissue by LMPC, proteins were extracted and subjected to protein analysis, either by classical two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2-DE), or by high-efficiency liquid chromatography (LC) in conjunction with tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS). Our results demonstrate that both methods can be used with LMPC collected plant material. But because of the significantly lower sample amount required for LC-MS/MS than for 2-DE, the combination of LMPC and LC-MS/MS has a higher potential to promote comprehensive proteome analysis of specific plant tissues.« less

[Transfer characteristics of cadmium in soil-vegetable-insect food chain].

PubMed

Ding, Ping; Zhuang, Ping; Li, Zhi-An; Xia, Han-Ping; Tai, Yi-Ping; Lu, Huan-Ping

2012-11-01

Taking two kinds of vegetables (Brassica rapa and Amaranthus mangostanus) and one insect species (Prodenia litura) as test materials, a greenhouse pot experiment was conducted to study the transfer characteristics of cadmium (Cd) in soil-vegetable-insect food chain and the distribution patters of different Cd chemical forms in the organs of the two vegetables. With the increasing concentration of applied Cd in soil, the biomass of the two vegetables decreased significantly, while the Cd concentration in the vegetables had a significant increase. The Cd concentration in the vegetable organs decreased in the order of stem > root > leaf for A. mangostanus, and of stem > leaf > root for B. rapa. The Cd concentration in P. litura larvae also increased with the increasing concentration of Cd in soil, and the maximum Cd concentration in the P. litura larvae on B. rapa and A. mangostanus was 36.7 and 46.3 mg x kg(-1), respectively. In the feces of the larvae on B. rapa and A. mangostanus, the Cd concentration was up to 190 and 229.8 mg x kg(-1), respectively, suggesting that the most part of Cd absorbed by P. litura larvae was excreted out of their bodies via feces. In the organs of the two vegetables, NaCl-extractable Cd was the dominant Cd form (> 70%), followed by d-H2O- and ethanol-extractable Cd, while the HAc-extractable Cd (insoluble cadmium phosphate), HCl-extractable Cd (insoluble cadmium oxalate), and residual Cd only had a very low concentration. Such a present pattern of different Cd forms in vegetable organs could be conducive to the Cd transfer in the food chain. P. litura could ease Cd poison by excreting large amount of absorbed Cd via feces, and effectively restrict the transfer of Cd to next trophic level. Since B. rapa and A. mangostanus could accumulate large amount of Cd in their biomass, the two vegetables were suggested not to be planted in highly Cd-contaminated soil.

The effects of logging residue extraction for energy on ecosystem services and biodiversity: A synthesis.

PubMed

Ranius, Thomas; Hämäläinen, Aino; Egnell, Gustaf; Olsson, Bengt; Eklöf, Karin; Stendahl, Johan; Rudolphi, Jörgen; Sténs, Anna; Felton, Adam

2018-03-01

We review the consequences for biodiversity and ecosystem services from the industrial-scale extraction of logging residues (tops, branches and stumps from harvested trees and small-diameter trees from thinnings) in managed forests. Logging residue extraction can replace fossil fuels, and thus contribute to climate change mitigation. The additional biomass and nutrients removed, and soils and other structures disturbed, have several potential environmental impacts. To evaluate potential impacts on ecosystem services and biodiversity we reviewed 279 scientific papers that compared logging residue extraction with non-extraction, the majority of which were conducted in Northern Europe and North America. The weight of available evidence indicates that logging residue extraction can have significant negative effects on biodiversity, especially for species naturally adapted to sun-exposed conditions and the large amounts of dead wood that are created by large-scaled forest disturbances. Slash extraction may also pose risks for future biomass production itself, due to the associated loss of nutrients. For water quality, reindeer herding, mammalian game species, berries, and natural heritage the results were complicated by primarily negative but some positive effects, while for recreation and pest control positive effects were more consistent. Further, there are initial negative effects on carbon storage, but these effects are transient and carbon stocks are mostly restored over decadal time perspectives. We summarize ways of decreasing some of the negative effects of logging residue extraction on specific ecosystem services, by changing the categories of residue extracted, and site or forest type targeted for extraction. However, we found that suggested pathways for minimizing adverse outcomes were often in conflict among the ecosystem services assessed. Compensatory measures for logging residue extraction may also be used (e.g. ash recycling, liming, fertilization), though these may also be associated with adverse environmental impacts. Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

POM Pulses: Characterizing the Physical and Chemical Properties of Particulate Organic Matter (POM) Mobilized by Large Storm Events and its Influence on Receiving Fluvial Systems

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Johnson, E. R.; Rowland, R. D.; Protokowicz, J.; Inamdar, S. P.; Kan, J.; Vargas, R.

2016-12-01

Extreme storm events have tremendous erosive energy which is capable of mobilizing vast amounts of material from watershed sources into fluvial systems. This complex mixture of sediment and particulate organic matter (POM) is a nutrient source, and has the potential to impact downstream water quality. The impact of POM on receiving aquatic systems can vary not only by the total amount exported but also by the various sources involved and the particle sizes of POM. This study examines the composition of POM in potential sources and within-event POM by: (1) determining the amount and quality of dissolved organic matter (DOM) that can be leached from coarse, medium and fine particle classes; (2) assessing the C and N content and isotopic character of within-event POM; and (3) coupling physical and chemical properties to evaluate storm event POM influence on stream water. Storm event POM samples and source sediments were collected from a forested headwater catchment (second order stream) in the Piedmont region of Maryland. Samples were sieved into three particle classes - coarse (2mm-1mm), medium (1mm-250µm) and fine (<250µm). Extractions were performed for three particle class sizes and the resulting fluorescent organic matter was analyzed. Carbon (C) and Nitrogen (N) amount, C:N ratio, and isotopic analysis of 13C and 15N were performed on solid state event and source material. Future work will include examination of microbial communities associated with POM particle size classes. Physical size class separation of within-event POM exhibited differences in C:N ratios, δ15N composition, and extracted DOM lability. Smaller size classes exhibited lower C:N ratios, more enriched δ15N and more recalcitrant properties in leached DOM. Source material had varying C:N ratios and contributions to leached DOM. These results indicate that both source and size class strongly influence the POM contribution to fluvial systems during large storm events.

[3H]Indole-3-acetyl-myo-inositol hydrolysis by extracts of Zea mays L. vegetative tissue

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Hall, P. J.; Bandurski, R. S.

1986-01-01

[3H]Indole-3-acetyl-myo-inositol was hydrolyzed by buffered extracts of acetone powders prepared from 4 day shoots of dark grown Zea mays L. seedlings. The hydrolytic activity was proportional to the amount of extract added and was linear for up to 6 hours at 37 degrees C. Boiled or alcohol denatured extracts were inactive. Analysis of reaction mixtures by high performance liquid chromatography demonstrated that not all isomers of indole-3-acetyl-myo-inositol were hydrolyzed at the same rate. Buffered extracts of acetone powders were prepared from coleoptiles and mesocotyls. The rates of hydrolysis observed with coleoptile extracts were greater than those observed with mesocotyl extracts. Active extracts also catalyzed the hydrolysis of esterase substrates such as alpha-naphthyl acetate and the methyl esters of indoleacetic acid and naphthyleneacetic acid. Attempts to purify the indole-3-acetyl-myo-inositol hydrolyzing activity by chromatographic procedures resulted in only slight purification with large losses of activity. Chromatography over hydroxylapatite allowed separation of two enzymically active fractions, one of which catalyzed the hydrolysis of both indole-3-acetyl-myo-inositol and esterase substrates. With the other enzymic hydrolysis of esterase substrates was readily demonstrated, but no hydrolysis of indole-3-acetyl-myo-inositol was ever detected.

Stabilization of Pb and Cd contaminated soils and soil quality improvements using waste oyster shells.

PubMed

Ok, Yong Sik; Lim, Jung Eun; Moon, Deok Hyun

2011-02-01

Large amounts of oyster shells are produced as a by-product of shellfish farming in coastal regions without beneficial use options. Accordingly, this study was conducted to evaluate the potential for the use of waste oyster shells (WOS) containing a high amount of CaCO₃ to improve soil quality and to stabilize heavy metals in soil. To accomplish this, an incubation experiment was conducted to evaluate the ability of the addition of 1-5 wt% WOS to stabilize the Pb (total 1,246 mg/kg) and Cd (total 17 mg/kg) in a contaminated soil. The effectiveness of the WOS treatments was evaluated using various single extraction techniques. Soil amended with WOS was cured for 30 days complied with the Korean Standard Test method (0.1 M·HCl extraction). The Pb and Cd concentrations were less than the Korean warning and countermeasure standards following treatment with 5 wt% WOS. Moreover, the concentrations of Cd were greatly reduced in response to WOS treatment following extraction using 0.01 M·CaCl₂, which is strongly associated with phytoavailability. Furthermore, the soil pH and exchangeable Ca increased significantly in response to WOS treatment. Taken together, the results of this study indicated that WOS amendments improved soil quality and stabilized Pb and Cd in contaminated soil. However, extraction with 0.43 M·CH₃ COOH revealed that remobilization of heavy metals can occur when the soil reaches an acidic condition.

High metal reactivity and environmental risks at a site contaminated by glass waste.

PubMed

Augustsson, A; Åström, M; Bergbäck, B; Elert, M; Höglund, L O; Kleja, D B

2016-07-01

This study addresses the reactivity and risks of metals (Ba, Cd, Co, Cr, Cu, Ni, Pb, Zn, As and Sb) at a Swedish site with large glass waste deposits. Old glassworks sites typically have high total metal concentrations, but as the metals are mainly bound within the glass waste and considered relatively inert, environmental investigations at these kinds of sites are limited. In this study, soil and landfill samples were subjected to a sequential chemical extraction procedure. Data from batch leaching tests and groundwater upstream and downstream of the waste deposits were also interpreted. The sequential extraction revealed that metals in <2 mm soil/waste samples were largely associated with geochemically active fractions, indicating that metals are released from pristine glass and subsequently largely retained in the surrounding soil and/or on secondary mineral coatings on fine glass particles. From the approximately 12,000 m(3) of coarse glass waste at the site, almost 4000 kg of Pb is estimated to have been lost through corrosion, which, however, corresponds to only a small portion of the total amount of Pb in the waste. Metal sorption within the waste deposits or in underlying soil layers is supported by fairly low metal concentrations in groundwater. However, elevated concentrations in downstream groundwater and in leachates of batch leaching tests were observed for several metals, indicating on-going leaching. Taken together, the high metal concentrations in geochemically active forms and the high amounts of as yet uncorroded metal-rich glass, indicate considerable risks to human health and the environment. Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Automated indexing for making of a newspaper article database

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kamio, Tatsuo

Automated indexing has been widely employed in the process of making newspaper article databases. It is essential to speed up the compiling time of the said databases for the large amount of articles come out daily, and save manpower involved in it, with the aid of computers. However, indexed terms which are extracted by the current automated indexing systems have no links with subject analysis, so that they are not considered to be keywords in a strict sense. Thus, the system of Nihon Keizai Shimbun KK enables to justify keywords to certain extent based on the two clues ; 1) at which location the extracted term occurred, and 2) whether or not subject area of the article corresponds to thesaurus class of the extracted term, by using characteristics peculiar to newspaper articles. Also the experiment of assigning keywords which are not occurred in articles was conducted. The fairly good result was obtained.

Environmental risks associated with unconventional gas extraction: an Australian perspective

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mallants, Dirk; Bekele, Elise; Schmidt, Wolfgang; Miotlinski, Konrad; Gerke Gerke, Kirill

2015-04-01

Coal seam gas is naturally occurring methane gas (CH4) formed by the degradation of organic material in coal seam layers over geological times, typically over several millions of years. Unlike conventional gas resources, which occur as discrete accumulations in traps formed by folds and other structures in sedimentary layers, coal seam gas is generally trapped in low permeable rock by adsorption of the gas molecules within the rock formation and cannot migrate to a trap and form a conventional gas deposit. Extraction of coal seam gas requires producers to de pressurise the coal measures by abstracting large amounts of groundwater through pumping. For coal measures that have too low permeabilities for gas extraction to be economical, mechanical and chemical techniques are required to increase permeability and thus gas yield. One such technique is hydraulic fracturing (HF). Hydraulic fracturing increases the rate and total amount of gas extracted from coal seam gas reservoirs. The process of hydraulic fracturing involves injecting large volumes of hydraulic fracturing fluids under high pressure into the coal seam layers to open up (i.e. fracture) the gas-containing coal layers, thus facilitating extraction of methane gas through pumping. After a hydraulic fracturing operation has been completed in a coal seam gas well, the fracturing fluid pressure is lowered and a significant proportion of the injected fluid returns to the surface as "flowback" water via coal seam gas wells. Flowback water is fluid that returns to the surface after hydraulic fracturing has occurred but before the well is put into production; whereas produced water is fluid from the coal measure that is pumped to the surface after the well is in production. This paper summarises available literature data from Australian coal seam gas practices on i) spills from hydraulic fracturing-related fluids used during coal seam gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing operations, ii) leaks to soil and shallow groundwater of flowback water and produced water from surface impoundments, iii) risks from well integrity failure, and iv) increased gas in water bores.

Cavity ring down spectroscopy for the isotope composition measurement of water from fluid inclusion in stalagmites using heating and crushing techniques

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nakamoto, M.; Uemura, R.; Gibo, M.; Mishima, S.; Asami, R.

2013-12-01

Oxygen isotope record in stalagmites is useful to reconstruct past environmental changes. However, the interpretation of calcite isotope record is not straightforward because it is affected by various factors such as amount of precipitation and temperature. Water isotope composition of fluid inclusions, and oxygen isotope difference between water and host calcite, from stalagmite are potentially important proxies to estimate the paleo-temperature. Recently, infrared spectroscopy (IRIS) has been widely used for stable isotope ratio measurement of water. Unlike traditional isotope mass spectrometer (IRMS), the IRIS does not require pre-treatment processes (e.g., high-temperature furnace or equilibration device). A limitation of IRIS is that commercially available IRIS systems need large sample volume (1 - 2 micro litres) for liquid water measurement. In this study, we first developed a device suitable for measurement of smaller volume of water, and tested two extraction methods (thermal extraction and mechanical crushing). Oxygen and hydrogen isotope ratios of water were measured using cavity ring down spectroscopy (IRIS: WS-CRDS Picarro L2120-i, L2130-i). Stalagmite samples, which appear to be still growing, were collected in several caves in Okinawa, Japan. Reproducibility of a reference water (0.1 micro litres) was within 0.2 permil for δ18O and 1 permil for δD. The results showed that the IRIS is useful for small amount discrete sample. Although the δ18O value of inclusion water generally showed values resembling those of cave dripwaters, the δD value showed large depletion against that of dripwaters. The δD deviation was reduced at lower temperature extraction, suggesting that the erroneous δD values would be caused by spectral interference from organic contaminants produced by thermal decomposition.

Inhibition of nitric oxide production in lipopolysaccharide-activated RAW 264.7 macrophages by Jeju plant extracts

PubMed Central

Yang, Eun-Jin; Yim, Eun-Young; Song, Gwanpil; Kim, Gi-Ok; Hyun, Chang-Gu

2009-01-01

Nitric oxide (NO) produced in large amounts by inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) is known to be responsible for the vasodilation and hypotension observed during septic shock and inflammation. Thus, inhibitors of iNOS may be useful candidates for the treatment of inflammatory diseases accompanied by the overproduction of NO. In this study, we prepared alcoholic extracts of Jeju plants and screened them for their inhibitory activity against NO production in lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-activated macrophages. Among the 260 kinds of plant extract tested, 122 extracts showed potent inhibitory activity towards NO production by more than 25% at a concentration of 100 µg/mL. Plants such as Malus sieboldii, Vaccinium oldhamii, Corylus hallaisanensis, Carpinus laxiflora, Styrax obassia, and Securinega suffruticosa showed the most potent inhibition (above 70%) at a concentration of 100 µg/mL. The cytotoxic effects of the plant extracts were determined by colorimetric MTT assays and most plant extracts exhibited only moderate cytotoxicity at 100 µg/mL. Therefore, these plants should be considered promising candidates for the further purification of bioactive compounds and would be useful for the treatment of inflammatory diseases accompanying overproduction of NO. PMID:21217861

The leaching kinetics of cadmium from hazardous Cu-Cd zinc plant residues.

PubMed

Li, Meng; Zheng, Shili; Liu, Biao; Du, Hao; Dreisinger, David Bruce; Tafaghodi, Leili; Zhang, Yi

2017-07-01

A large amount of Cu-Cd zinc plant residues (CZPR) are produced from the hydrometallurgical zinc plant operations. Since these residues contain substantial amount of heavy metals including Cd, Zn and Cu, therefore, they are considered as hazardous wastes. In order to realize decontamination treatment and efficient extraction of the valuable metals from the CZPR, a comprehensive recovery process using sulfuric acid as the leaching reagent and air as the oxidizing reagent has been proposed. The effect of temperature, sulfuric acid concentration, particle size, solid/liquid ratio and stirring speed on the cadmium extraction efficiency was investigated. The leaching kinetics of cadmium was also studied. It was concluded that the cadmium leaching process was controlled by the solid film diffusion process. Moreover, the order of the reaction rate constant versus H 2 SO 4 concentration, particle size, solid/liquid ratio and stirring speed was calculated. The XRD and SEM-EDS analysis results showed that the main phases of the secondary sulfuric acid leaching residues were lead sulfate and calcium sulfate. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Solvent-Free Microwave-Assisted Extraction of Polyphenols from Olive Tree Leaves: Antioxidant and Antimicrobial Properties.

PubMed

Şahin, Selin; Samli, Ruya; Tan, Ayşe Seher Birteksöz; Barba, Francisco J; Chemat, Farid; Cravotto, Giancarlo; Lorenzo, José M

2017-06-24

Response surface methodology (RSM) and artificial neural networks (ANN) were evaluated and compared in order to decide which method was the most appropriate to predict and optimize total phenolic content (TPC) and oleuropein yields in olive tree leaf ( Olea europaea ) extracts, obtained after solvent-free microwave-assisted extraction (SFMAE). The SFMAE processing conditions were: microwave irradiation power 250-350 W, extraction time 2-3 min, and the amount of sample 5-10 g. Furthermore, the antioxidant and antimicrobial activities of the olive leaf extracts, obtained under optimal extraction conditions, were assessed by several in vitro assays. ANN had better prediction performance for TPC and oleuropein yields compared to RSM. The optimum extraction conditions to recover both TPC and oleuropein were: irradiation power 250 W, extraction time 2 min, and amount of sample 5 g, independent of the method used for prediction. Under these conditions, the maximal yield of oleuropein (0.060 ± 0.012 ppm) was obtained and the amount of TPC was 2.480 ± 0.060 ppm. Moreover, olive leaf extracts obtained under optimum SFMAE conditions showed antibacterial activity against S. aureus and S. epidermidis , with a minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) value of 1.25 mg/mL.

Isosurface Extraction in Time-Varying Fields Using a Temporal Hierarchical Index Tree

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Shen, Han-Wei; Gerald-Yamasaki, Michael (Technical Monitor)

1998-01-01

Many high-performance isosurface extraction algorithms have been proposed in the past several years as a result of intensive research efforts. When applying these algorithms to large-scale time-varying fields, the storage overhead incurred from storing the search index often becomes overwhelming. this paper proposes an algorithm for locating isosurface cells in time-varying fields. We devise a new data structure, called Temporal Hierarchical Index Tree, which utilizes the temporal coherence that exists in a time-varying field and adoptively coalesces the cells' extreme values over time; the resulting extreme values are then used to create the isosurface cell search index. For a typical time-varying scalar data set, not only does this temporal hierarchical index tree require much less storage space, but also the amount of I/O required to access the indices from the disk at different time steps is substantially reduced. We illustrate the utility and speed of our algorithm with data from several large-scale time-varying CID simulations. Our algorithm can achieve more than 80% of disk-space savings when compared with the existing techniques, while the isosurface extraction time is nearly optimal.

Work extraction and thermodynamics for individual quantum systems

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Skrzypczyk, Paul; Short, Anthony J.; Popescu, Sandu

2014-06-01

Thermodynamics is traditionally concerned with systems comprised of a large number of particles. Here we present a framework for extending thermodynamics to individual quantum systems, including explicitly a thermal bath and work-storage device (essentially a ‘weight’ that can be raised or lowered). We prove that the second law of thermodynamics holds in our framework, and gives a simple protocol to extract the optimal amount of work from the system, equal to its change in free energy. Our results apply to any quantum system in an arbitrary initial state, in particular including non-equilibrium situations. The optimal protocol is essentially reversible, similar to classical Carnot cycles, and indeed, we show that it can be used to construct a quantum Carnot engine.

Work extraction and thermodynamics for individual quantum systems.

PubMed

Skrzypczyk, Paul; Short, Anthony J; Popescu, Sandu

2014-06-27

Thermodynamics is traditionally concerned with systems comprised of a large number of particles. Here we present a framework for extending thermodynamics to individual quantum systems, including explicitly a thermal bath and work-storage device (essentially a 'weight' that can be raised or lowered). We prove that the second law of thermodynamics holds in our framework, and gives a simple protocol to extract the optimal amount of work from the system, equal to its change in free energy. Our results apply to any quantum system in an arbitrary initial state, in particular including non-equilibrium situations. The optimal protocol is essentially reversible, similar to classical Carnot cycles, and indeed, we show that it can be used to construct a quantum Carnot engine.

Processing of waste material of radix physochlainae for preparation of fine chemicals after extraction

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

He, A.; Yohannes, A.; Feng, X. T.; Yao, S.

2017-02-01

Waste residues of Chinese traditional medicine radix physochlainae (Huashanshen) contain a large amount of hemicelluloses after extraction. After the removal of the cellulose and lignin, main components of the solution are different degree of hydrolysis products of hemicelluloses. In the degradation process, hemicelluloses firstly become pentose, and then pentose loses 3 molecules of water and turns into furfural. This study explored a series of conditions of the method; finally the yield of furfural can reach 8.5% (calculated with the weight of raw residues) under the condition of pH of 0.2-0.3, temperature of 104-106°C, hydrolysis duration for 10 minutes. Furfural can be further processed to be resin materials.

ECO: A Framework for Entity Co-Occurrence Exploration with Faceted Navigation

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Halliday, K. D.

2010-08-20

Even as highly structured databases and semantic knowledge bases become more prevalent, a substantial amount of human knowledge is reported as written prose. Typical textual reports, such as news articles, contain information about entities (people, organizations, and locations) and their relationships. Automatically extracting such relationships from large text corpora is a key component of corporate and government knowledge bases. The primary goal of the ECO project is to develop a scalable framework for extracting and presenting these relationships for exploration using an easily navigable faceted user interface. ECO uses entity co-occurrence relationships to identify related entities. The system aggregates andmore » indexes information on each entity pair, allowing the user to rapidly discover and mine relational information.« less

Using Microwaves to Heat Lunar Soil

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Ethridge, Edwin C.

2011-01-01

This slide presentation reviews the use of microwaves to heat lunar soil in order to obtain water. There appears to be large amounts of water in the lunar poles, in Martian areas in lower latitudes and some of the Moons of Jupiter. The presence of water in the south lunar polar region was demonstrated by the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission. Microwaves can be used to extract water from lunar soil without excavation. Using microwaves on a lunar soil simulant at least 95% of the water from the regolith permafrost simulant was extracted (2 minutes). The process is modeled using COMSOL Multiphysics Finite Element analysis microwave physics module and demonstrated usingan experiment of an microwave apparatus on a rover.

Semi-Supervised Geographical Feature Detection

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yu, H.; Yu, L.; Kuo, K. S.

2016-12-01

Extraction and tracking geographical features is a fundamental requirement in many geoscience fields. However, this operation has become an increasingly challenging task for domain scientists when tackling a large amount of geoscience data. Although domain scientists may have a relatively clear definition of features, it is difficult to capture the presence of features in an accurate and efficient fashion. We propose a semi-supervised approach to address large geographical feature detection. Our approach has two main components. First, we represent a heterogeneous geoscience data in a unified high-dimensional space, which can facilitate us to evaluate the similarity of data points with respect to geolocation, time, and variable values. We characterize the data from these measures, and use a set of hash functions to parameterize the initial knowledge of the data. Second, for any user query, our approach can automatically extract the initial results based on the hash functions. To improve the accuracy of querying, our approach provides a visualization interface to display the querying results and allow users to interactively explore and refine them. The user feedback will be used to enhance our knowledge base in an iterative manner. In our implementation, we use high-performance computing techniques to accelerate the construction of hash functions. Our design facilitates a parallelization scheme for feature detection and extraction, which is a traditionally challenging problem for large-scale data. We evaluate our approach and demonstrate the effectiveness using both synthetic and real world datasets.

Numerical modeling of cracking pattern's influence on the dynamic response of thickened tailings disposals: a periodic approach

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ferrer, Gabriel; Sáez, Esteban; Ledezma, Christian

2018-01-01

Copper production is an essential component of the Chilean economy. During the extraction process of copper, large quantities of waste materials (tailings) are produced, which are typically stored in large tailing ponds. Thickened Tailings Disposal (TTD) is an alternative to conventional tailings ponds. In TTD, a considerable amount of water is extracted from the tailings before their deposition. Once a thickened tailings layer is deposited, it loses water and it shrinks, forming a relatively regular structure of tailings blocks with vertical cracks in between, which are then filled up with "fresh" tailings once the new upper layer is deposited. The dynamic response of a representative column of this complex structure made out of tailings blocks with softer material in between was analyzed using a periodic half-space finite element model. The tailings' behavior was modeled using an elasto-plastic multi-yielding constitutive model, and Chilean earthquake records were used for the seismic analyses. Special attention was given to the liquefaction potential evaluation of TTD.

Composing Data Parallel Code for a SPARQL Graph Engine

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Castellana, Vito G.; Tumeo, Antonino; Villa, Oreste

Big data analytics process large amount of data to extract knowledge from them. Semantic databases are big data applications that adopt the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to structure metadata through a graph-based representation. The graph based representation provides several benefits, such as the possibility to perform in memory processing with large amounts of parallelism. SPARQL is a language used to perform queries on RDF-structured data through graph matching. In this paper we present a tool that automatically translates SPARQL queries to parallel graph crawling and graph matching operations. The tool also supports complex SPARQL constructs, which requires more than basicmore » graph matching for their implementation. The tool generates parallel code annotated with OpenMP pragmas for x86 Shared-memory Multiprocessors (SMPs). With respect to commercial database systems such as Virtuoso, our approach reduces memory occupation due to join operations and provides higher performance. We show the scaling of the automatically generated graph-matching code on a 48-core SMP.« less

Evaluation of Existing Methods for Human Blood mRNA Isolation and Analysis for Large Studies

PubMed Central

Meyer, Anke; Paroni, Federico; Günther, Kathrin; Dharmadhikari, Gitanjali; Ahrens, Wolfgang; Kelm, Sørge; Maedler, Kathrin

2016-01-01

Aims Prior to implementing gene expression analyses from blood to a larger cohort study, an evaluation to set up a reliable and reproducible method is mandatory but challenging due to the specific characteristics of the samples as well as their collection methods. In this pilot study we optimized a combination of blood sampling and RNA isolation methods and present reproducible gene expression results from human blood samples. Methods The established PAXgeneTM blood collection method (Qiagen) was compared with the more recent TempusTM collection and storing system. RNA from blood samples collected by both systems was extracted on columns with the corresponding Norgen and PAX RNA extraction Kits. RNA quantity and quality was compared photometrically, with Ribogreen and by Real-Time PCR analyses of various reference genes (PPIA, β-ACTIN and TUBULIN) and exemplary of SIGLEC-7. Results Combining different sampling methods and extraction kits caused strong variations in gene expression. The use of PAXgeneTM and TempusTM collection systems resulted in RNA of good quality and quantity for the respective RNA isolation system. No large inter-donor variations could be detected for both systems. However, it was not possible to extract sufficient RNA of good quality with the PAXgeneTM RNA extraction system from samples collected by TempusTM collection tubes. Comparing only the Norgen RNA extraction methods, RNA from blood collected either by the TempusTM or PAXgeneTM collection system delivered sufficient amount and quality of RNA, but the TempusTM collection delivered higher RNA concentration compared to the PAXTM collection system. The established Pre-analytix PAXgeneTM RNA extraction system together with the PAXgeneTM blood collection system showed lowest CT-values, i.e. highest RNA concentration of good quality. Expression levels of all tested genes were stable and reproducible. Conclusions This study confirms that it is not possible to mix or change sampling or extraction strategies during the same study because of large variations of RNA yield and expression levels. PMID:27575051

Removal of Water-Soluble Extractives Improves the Enzymatic Digestibility of Steam-Pretreated Softwood Barks.

PubMed

Frankó, Balázs; Carlqvist, Karin; Galbe, Mats; Lidén, Gunnar; Wallberg, Ola

2018-02-01

Softwood bark contains a large amounts of extractives-i.e., soluble lipophilic (such as resin acids) and hydrophilic components (phenolic compounds, stilbenes). The effects of the partial removal of water-soluble extractives before acid-catalyzed steam pretreatment on enzymatic digestibility were assessed for two softwood barks-Norway spruce and Scots pine. A simple hot water extraction step removed more than half of the water-soluble extractives from the barks, which improved the enzymatic digestibility of both steam-pretreated materials. This effect was more pronounced for the spruce than the pine bark, as evidenced by the 30 and 11% glucose yield improvement, respectively, in the enzymatic digestibility. Furthermore, analysis of the chemical composition showed that the acid-insoluble lignin content of the pretreated materials decreased when water-soluble extractives were removed prior to steam pretreatment. This can be explained by a decreased formation of water-insoluble "pseudo-lignin" from water-soluble bark phenolics during the acid-catalyzed pretreatment, which otherwise results in distorted lignin analysis and may also contribute to the impaired enzymatic digestibility of the barks. Thus, this study advocates the removal of extractives as the first step in the processing of bark or bark-rich materials in a sugar platform biorefinery.

Plasma extraction rate enhancement scheme for a real-time and continuous blood plasma separation device using a sheathless cell concentrator

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kang, Dong-Hyun; Kim, Kyongtae; Kim, Yong-Jun

2018-02-01

Microfluidic devices for plasma extraction are popular because they offer the advantage of smaller reagent consumption compared to conventional centrifugations. The plasma yield (volume percentage of plasma that can be extracted) is an important factor for diagnoses in microdevices with small reagent consumptions. However, recently designed microfluidic devices tend to have a low plasma yield because they have been optimized to improve the purity of extracted plasma. Thus, these devices require large amounts of reagents, and this complexity has eliminated the advantage of microfluidic devices that can operate with only small amounts of reagents. We therefore propose a continuous, real-time, blood plasma separation device, for plasma extraction rate enhancements. Moreover, a blood plasma separation device was designed to achieve improved plasma yields with high-purity efficiency. To obtain a high plasma yield, microstructures were placed on the bottom side of the channel to increase the concentration of blood cells. Plasma separation was then accomplished via microfluidic networks based on the Zweifach-Fung effect. The proposed device was fabricated based on the polydimethylsiloxane molding process using the SU-8 microfluidic channel for the fabrication of the mold and bottom structures. Human blood diluted in a phosphate buffered saline solution (25% hematocrit) was injected into the inlet of the device. The purity efficiencies were approximately equal to 96% with a maximum of 96.75% at a flow rate of 2 µl min-1, while the plasma yield was approximately 59% with a maximum of 59.92% at a flow rate of 4 µl min-1. Compared to results obtained using other devices, our proposed device could obtain comparable or higher plasma purity and a high plasma yield.

Identification of nonvolatile coal derived products via chromatography coupled with on-line FTIR detection. Quarterly progress report, March 1-May 31, 1985. [C/sub 2/H/sub 2/ extracts of ground coal, coffee and paprika

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Taylor, L.T.

Because it has been our goal to interface the supercritical fluid chromatograph with a Fourier transform infrared spectrometer we have initially chosen packed columns due to their increased sample capacities, and supercritical CO/sub 2/ because of its infrared transparency. This paper compares two sampling techniques that can be utilized in packed column supercritical fluid Chromatography (SFC). Traditional sample introduction is accomplished using an injector with a sample loop. The loop is filled with the appropriate amount of material, and subsequently inserted into the mobile phase path. In most cases the sample must be either dissolved or extracted into an appropriatemore » solvent for such sample introduction. Note that unlike HPLC, where the solvent can be the same as the mobile phase, traditional sampling with SFC must use a solvent that is very different from the mobile phase. As a result, solvent peaks are almost always present, especially with universal detectors like FTIR. An alternative method is described here whereby both extraction of the sample and introduction of the extract onto the column is accomplished on-line using only the supercritical fluid mobile phase. This sampling technique is made possible by a simple valving scheme which ties directly the extraction vessel, the injector, the packed column and the detector. This technique has several advantages over the traditional methods, not the least of which is the absence of a large amount of foreign solvent introduced on the column. 11 refs., 7 figs.« less

Sequential estimation and satellite data assimilation in meteorology and oceanography

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Ghil, M.

1986-01-01

The role of dynamics in estimating the state of the atmosphere and ocean from incomplete and noisy data is discussed and the classical applications of four-dimensional data assimilation to large-scale atmospheric dynamics are presented. It is concluded that sequential updating of a forecast model with continuously incoming conventional and remote-sensing data is the most natural way of extracting the maximum amount of information from the imperfectly known dynamics, on the one hand, and the inaccurate and incomplete observations, on the other.

Big Data Analytics for a Smart Green Infrastructure Strategy

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Barrile, Vincenzo; Bonfa, Stefano; Bilotta, Giuliana

2017-08-01

As well known, Big Data is a term for data sets so large or complex that traditional data processing applications aren’t sufficient to process them. The term “Big Data” is referred to using predictive analytics. It is often related to user behavior analytics, or other advanced data analytics methods which from data extract value, and rarely to a particular size of data set. This is especially true for the huge amount of Earth Observation data that satellites constantly orbiting the earth daily transmit.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Vorobev, A.M.; Kuzmina, V.P.

A method is described for determining Pu in the presence of large quantities of U. Pu is extracted using thenoyltrifluoroacetone (TTA) and precipitated using bismuth phosphate. In contrast to U (VI), plutonium (IV) is easily separated by TTA from 1M nitric acid and lends itself to quantitative precipitation. The yield of Pu amounted to 90%. The presence of U/sup 235/ in quantities exceeding 200-fold the Pu content did not influence the determination in 10-mg specimens. The order of error was plus or minus 20%. (R.V.J.)

Phenylpropanoid profiling reveals a class of hydroxycinnamoyl glucaric acid conjugates in Isatis tinctoria leaves.

PubMed

Nguyen, Thi-Kieu-Oanh; Jamali, Arash; Grand, Eric; Morreel, Kris; Marcelo, Paulo; Gontier, Eric; Dauwe, Rebecca

2017-12-01

The brassicaceous herb, Isatis tinctoria, is an ancient medicinal plant whose rosette leaf extracts have anti-inflammatory and anti-allergic activity. Brassicaceae are known to accumulate a variety of phenylpropanoids in their rosette leaves acting as antioxidants and a UV-B shield, and these compounds often have pharmacological potential. Nevertheless, knowledge about the phenylpropanoid content of I. tinctoria leaves remains limited to the characterization of a number of flavonoids. In this research, we profiled the methanol extracts of I. tinctoria fresh leaf extracts by liquid chromatography - mass spectrometry (LC-MS) and focused on the phenylpropanoid derivatives. We report the structural characterization of 99 compounds including 18 flavonoids, 21 mono- or oligolignols, 2 benzenoids, and a wide spectrum of 58 hydroxycinnamic acid esters. Besides the sinapate esters of malate, glucose and gentiobiose, which are typical of brassicaceous plants, these conjugates comprised a large variety of glucaric acid esters that have not previously been reported in plants. Feeding with 13 C 6 -glucaric acid showed that glucaric acid is an acyl acceptor of an as yet unknown acyltransferase activity in I. tinctoria rosette leaves. The large amount of hydroxycinnamic acid derivatives changes radically our view of the woad metabolite profile and potentially contributes to the pharmacological activity of I. tinctoria leaf extracts. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

On Feature Extraction from Large Scale Linear LiDAR Data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Acharjee, Partha Pratim

Airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) can generate co-registered elevation and intensity map over large terrain. The co-registered 3D map and intensity information can be used efficiently for different feature extraction application. In this dissertation, we developed two algorithms for feature extraction, and usages of features for practical applications. One of the developed algorithms can map still and flowing waterbody features, and another one can extract building feature and estimate solar potential on rooftops and facades. Remote sensing capabilities, distinguishing characteristics of laser returns from water surface and specific data collection procedures provide LiDAR data an edge in this application domain. Furthermore, water surface mapping solutions must work on extremely large datasets, from a thousand square miles, to hundreds of thousands of square miles. National and state-wide map generation/upgradation and hydro-flattening of LiDAR data for many other applications are two leading needs of water surface mapping. These call for as much automation as possible. Researchers have developed many semi-automated algorithms using multiple semi-automated tools and human interventions. This reported work describes a consolidated algorithm and toolbox developed for large scale, automated water surface mapping. Geometric features such as flatness of water surface, higher elevation change in water-land interface and, optical properties such as dropouts caused by specular reflection, bimodal intensity distributions were some of the linear LiDAR features exploited for water surface mapping. Large-scale data handling capabilities are incorporated by automated and intelligent windowing, by resolving boundary issues and integrating all results to a single output. This whole algorithm is developed as an ArcGIS toolbox using Python libraries. Testing and validation are performed on a large datasets to determine the effectiveness of the toolbox and results are presented. Significant power demand is located in urban areas, where, theoretically, a large amount of building surface area is also available for solar panel installation. Therefore, property owners and power generation companies can benefit from a citywide solar potential map, which can provide available estimated annual solar energy at a given location. An efficient solar potential measurement is a prerequisite for an effective solar energy system in an urban area. In addition, the solar potential calculation from rooftops and building facades could open up a wide variety of options for solar panel installations. However, complex urban scenes make it hard to estimate the solar potential, partly because of shadows cast by the buildings. LiDAR-based 3D city models could possibly be the right technology for solar potential mapping. Although, most of the current LiDAR-based local solar potential assessment algorithms mainly address rooftop potential calculation, whereas building facades can contribute a significant amount of viable surface area for solar panel installation. In this paper, we introduce a new algorithm to calculate solar potential of both rooftop and building facades. Solar potential received by the rooftops and facades over the year are also investigated in the test area.

The nutritive value of cassava starch extraction residue for growing ducks.

PubMed

Abouelezz, Khaled; Yuan, Jianfeng; Wang, Guiping; Bian, Guozhi

2018-02-26

The cassava root meal (CRM) has been utilized as a cheap energy alternative to replace maize in poultry diets. Recently, the CRM in turn has an increasing demand for starch extraction industry, which renders large amounts of residues. This study evaluated the nutrient composition, amino acid profile, and feeding value of cassava starch extraction residue meal (CReM) for growing ducks. A total of 960, 11-day-old, ducklings were housed in 24 floor pens and allocated randomly into four dietary treatments: (i) 0CReM (control), (ii) 50 g CReM/kg, (iii) 100 g CReM/kg, and (iv) 150 g CReM/kg. The analyses (/kg) of CReM showed high gross energy (3306.88 kcal), ME (2109.54 kcal), and starch (514.0 g), with poor crude protein (20.9 g) and moderate crude fiber (140.0 g) and ash (60.0 g) contents. The total amino acid (AA) content amounted to 19.9 g/kg of CReM DM, in which the methionine, lysine, cystine, and isoleucine were present in low levels. The dietary inclusion of CReM up to 150 g/kg, between 11 and 42 days of age, had no significant effects (P > 0.05) on duck growth parameters, mortality, dressed weight, internal organs, or abdominal fat. Besides, the tested CReM levels did not show any significant effect on the blood proteins or liver enzymes. The results, therefore, revealed that the CReM contains a considerable amount of energy and could be incorporated successfully up to 150 g/kg in the diets of growing ducks.

Dissipation of bentazone, pyrimethanil and boscalid in biochar and digestate based soil mixtures for biopurification systems.

PubMed

Mukherjee, Santanu; Tappe, Wolfgang; Weihermueller, Lutz; Hofmann, Diana; Köppchen, Stephan; Laabs, Volker; Schroeder, Tom; Vereecken, Harry; Burauel, Peter

2016-02-15

Biopurification systems, such as biofilters, are biotechnological tools to prevent point sources of pesticide pollution stemming from on-farm operations. For the purification processes pesticide sorption and mineralization and/or dissipation are essential and both largely depend on the type of filling materials and the pesticide in use. In this paper the mineralization and dissipation of three contrasting (14)C-labeled pesticides (bentazone, boscalid, and pyrimethanil) were investigated in laboratory incubation experiments using sandy soil, biochar produced from Pine woodchips, and/or digestate obtained from anaerobic digestion process using maize silage, chicken manure, beef and pig urine as feedstock. The results indicate that the addition of digestate increased pesticide mineralization, whereby the mineralization was not proportional to the digestate loads in the mixture, indicating a saturation effect in the turnover rate of pesticides. This effect was in correlation with the amount of water extractable DOC, obtained from the digestate based mixtures. Mixing biochar into the soil generally reduced total mineralization and led to larger sorption/sequestration of the pesticides, resulting in faster decrease of the extractable fraction. Also the addition of biochar to the soil/digestate mixtures reduced mineralization compared to the digestate alone mixture but mineralization rates were still higher as for the biochar/soil alone. In consequence, the addition of biochar to the soil generally decreased pesticide dissipation times and larger amounts of biochar led to high amounts of non-extractable residues of pesticide in the substrates. Among the mixtures tested, a mixture of digestate (5%) and biochar (5%) gave optimal results with respect to mineralization and simultaneous sorption for all three pesticides. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Treatment and resource recovery from inorganic fluoride-containing waste produced by the pesticide industry.

PubMed

Li, Yang; Zhang, Hua; Zhang, Zhiqi; Shao, Liming; He, Pinjing

2015-05-01

The rapid development of the fluorinated pesticide industry has produced a large amount of fluorine-containing hazardous waste, especially inorganic fluoride-containing waste (IFCW). A two-step process, including extraction and recovery, was developed to recover fluorine as synthetic cryolite from IFCW produced by the pesticide industry. The optimum conditions for extraction were found to be a temperature of 75°C, an initial pH (pHi) of 12, a 4-hr incubation time and a liquid-to-solid ratio of 40mL/g; these conditions resulted in a fluorine extraction ratio of 99.0%. The effects of pH and the F/Al molar ratio on fluorine recovery and the compositional, mineralogical and morphological characteristics of the cryolite products were investigated. Field-emission scanning electron microscopy of recovered precipitates showed changes in morphology with the F/Al molar ratio. Coupling Fourier transform and infrared spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction indicated that the formation of AlF6(3-) was restricted as increasing pH. Both the amount of fluorine recovered and the quality of the cryolite were optimized at initial pH=3 and a F/Al molar ratio 5.75. This study proposed a reliable and environmentally friendly method for the treatment of fluoride-containing wastes, which could be suitable for industrial applications. Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier B.V.

A novel benzimidazole-functionalized 2-D COF material: synthesis and application as a selective solid-phase extractant for separation of uranium.

PubMed

Li, Juan; Yang, Xiaodan; Bai, Chiyao; Tian, Yin; Li, Bo; Zhang, Shuang; Yang, Xiaoyu; Ding, Songdong; Xia, Chuanqin; Tan, Xinyu; Ma, Lijian; Li, Shoujian

2015-01-01

A novel COF-based material (COF-COOH) containing large amounts of carboxylic groups was prepared for the first time by using a simple and effective one-step synthetic method, in which the cheap and commercially available raw materials, trimesoyl chloride and p-phenylenediamine, were used. The as-synthesized COF-COOH was modified with previously synthesized 2-(2,4-dihydroxyphenyl)-benzimidazole (HBI) by "grafting to" method, and a new solid-phase extractant (COF-HBI) with highly efficient sorption performance for uranium(VI) was consequently obtained. A series of characterizations demonstrated that COF-COOH and COF-HBI exhibited great thermostabilities and irradiation stabilities. Sorption behavior of the COF-based materials toward U(VI) was compared in simulated nuclear industrial effluent containing UO2(2+) and 11 undesired ions, and the UO2(2+) sorption amount of COF-HBI was 81 mg g(-1), accounting for approximately 58% of the total sorption amount, which was much higher than the sorption selectivity of COF-COOH to UO2(2+) (39%). Batch sorption experiment results indicated that the uranium(VI) sorption on COF-HBI was a pH dependent, rapid (sorption equilibrium was reached in 30 min), endothermic and spontaneous process. In the most favorable conditions, the equilibrium sorption capacity of the adsorbent for uranium could reach 211 mg g(-1). Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Ultrasonication followed by single-drop microextraction combined with GC/MS for rapid determination of organochlorine pesticides from fish.

PubMed

Shrivas, Kamlesh; Wu, Hui-Fen

2008-02-01

A novel, rapid and simple sample pretreatment technique termed ultrasonication followed by single-drop micro-extraction (U-SDME) has been developed and combined with GC/MS for the determination of organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) in fish. In the present work, the lengthy procedures generally used in the conventional methods like, Soxhlet extraction, supercritical fluid extraction, pressurized liquid extraction and microwave assisted solvent extraction for extraction of OCPs from fish tissues are minimized by the use of two simple extraction procedures. Firstly, OCPs from fish were extracted in organic solvent with ultrasonication and then subsequently preconcentrated by single-drop micro-extraction (SDME). Extraction parameters of ultrasonication and SDME were optimized in spiked sample solution in order to obtain efficient extraction of OCPs from fish tissues. The calibration curves for OCPs were found to be linear between 10-1000 ng/g with correlation of estimations in the range 0.990-0.994. The recoveries obtained in blank fish tissues were ranged from 82.1 to 95.3%. The LOD and RSD for determination of OCPs in fish were 0.5 ng/g and 9.4-10.0%, respectively. The proposed method was applied for the determination of bioconcentration factor in fish after exposure to different concentrations of OCPs in cultured water. The present method avoids the co-extraction of lipids, long extraction steps (>12 h) and large amount of organic solvent for the separation of OCPs. The main advantages of the present method are rapid, selective, sensitive and low cost for the determination of OCPs in fish.

Fully integrated physically-based numerical modelling of impacts of groundwater extraction on surface and irrigation-induced groundwater interactions: case study Lower River Murray, Australia

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Alaghmand, S.; Beecham, S.; Hassanli, A.

2013-07-01

Combination of reduction in the frequency, duration and magnitude of natural floods, rising saline water-table in floodplains and excessive evapotranspiration have led to an irrigation-induced groundwater mound forced the naturally saline groundwater onto the floodplain in the Lower River Murray. It is during the attenuation phase of floods that these large salt accumulations are likely to be mobilised and will discharge into the river. The Independent Audit Group for Salinity highlighted this as the most significant risk in the Murray-Darling Basin. South Australian government and catchment management authorities have developed salt interception schemes (SIS). This is to pump the highly saline groundwater from the floodplain aquifer to evaporation basins in order to reduce the hydraulic gradient that drives the regional saline groundwater towards the River Murray. This paper investigates the interactions between a river (River Murray in South Australia) and a saline semi-arid floodplain (Clarks Floodplain) significantly influenced by groundwater lowering (Bookpurnong SIS). Results confirm that groundwater extraction maintain a lower water-table and more fresh river water flux to the saline floodplain aquifer. In term of salinity, this may lead to less amount of solute stored in the floodplain aquifer. This occurs through two mechanisms; extracting some of the solute mass from the system and changing the floodplain groundwater regime from a losing to gaining one. Finally, it is shown that groundwater extraction is able to remove some amount of solute stored in the unsaturated zone and mitigate the floodplain salinity risk.

A Rapid and Accurate Extraction Procedure for Analysing Free Amino Acids in Meat Samples by GC-MS

PubMed Central

Barroso, Miguel A.; Ruiz, Jorge; Antequera, Teresa

2015-01-01

This study evaluated the use of a mixer mill as the homogenization tool for the extraction of free amino acids in meat samples, with the main goal of analyzing a large number of samples in the shortest time and minimizing sample amount and solvent volume. Ground samples (0.2 g) were mixed with 1.5 mL HCl 0.1 M and homogenized in the mixer mill. The final biphasic system was separated by centrifugation. The supernatant was deproteinized, derivatized and analyzed by gas chromatography. This procedure showed a high extracting ability, especially in samples with high free amino acid content (recovery = 88.73–104.94%). It also showed a low limit of detection and quantification (3.8 · 10−4–6.6 · 10−4  μg μL−1 and 1.3 · 10−3–2.2 · 10−2  μg μL−1, resp.) for most amino acids, an adequate precision (2.15–20.15% for run-to-run), and a linear response for all amino acids (R 2 = 0.741–0.998) in the range of 1–100 µg mL−1. Moreover, it takes less time and requires lower amount of sample and solvent than conventional techniques. Thus, this is a cost and time efficient tool for homogenizing in the extraction procedure of free amino acids from meat samples, being an adequate option for routine analysis. PMID:25873963

An atomic-absorption method for the determination of gold in large samples of geologic materials

USGS Publications Warehouse

VanSickle, Gordon H.; Lakin, Hubert William

1968-01-01

A laboratory method for the determination of gold in large (100-gram) samples has been developed for use in the study of the gold content of placer deposits and of trace amounts of gold in other geologic materials. In this method the sample is digested with bromine and ethyl ether, the gold is extracted into methyl isobutyl ketone, and the determination is made by atomicabsorption spectrophotometry. The lower limit of detection is 0.005 part per million in the sample. The few data obtained so far by this method agree favorably with those obtained by assay and by other atomic-absorption methods. About 25 determinations can be made per man-day.

Cortisol level and hemodynamic changes during tooth extraction at hypertensive and normotensive patients.

PubMed

Agani, Zana Bajrami; Benedetti, Alberto; Krasniqi, Vjosa Hamiti; Ahmedi, Jehona; Sejfija, Zana; Loxha, Mergime Prekazi; Murtezani, Arben; Rexhepi, Aida Namani; Ibraimi, Zana

2015-04-01

The patients that are subjects to oral-surgical interventions produce large amounts of steroids in comparison with healthy patients which are not a subject to any dental intervention. The aim of research was to determine the level of stress hormone cortisol in serum, arterial blood pressure and arterial pulse, and to compare the effectiveness of the usage of lidocaine with adrenalin in comparison with lidocaine without adrenalin during the tooth extraction. This clinical research includes patients with indication of tooth extraction divided in hypertensive and normotensive patients. There is no important statistical distinction between groups, for the cortisol levels before, during and after tooth extraction regardless of the type of anesthetic used, while we registered higher values of systolic and diastolic values at hypertensive patients, regardless of the type of anesthetic. There is significant systolic and diastolic blood pressure rise in both groups of patients hypertensive and normotensive patients, (regardless of anesthetic used with or without vasoconstrictor), who underwent tooth extraction. The special emphasize is attributed to hypertensive patients where these changes are more significant. As per cortisol level and pulse rate, our results indicate no significant statistical difference in between groups.

Benzyl and Methyl Fatty Hydroxamic Acids Based on Palm Kernel Oil as Chelating Agent for Liquid-Liquid Iron(III) Extraction

PubMed Central

Haron, Md Jelas; Jahangirian, Hossein; Silong, Sidik; Yusof, Nor Azah; Kassim, Anuar; Rafiee-Moghaddam, Roshanak; Mahdavi, Behnam; Peyda, Mazyar; Abdollahi, Yadollah; Amin, Jamileh

2012-01-01

Liquid-liquid iron(III) extraction was investigated using benzyl fatty hydroxamic acids (BFHAs) and methyl fatty hydroxamic acids (MFHAs) as chelating agents through the formation of iron(III) methyl fatty hydroxamate (Fe-MFHs) or iron(III) benzyl fatty hydroxamate (Fe-BFHs) in the organic phase. The results obtained under optimized conditions, showed that the chelating agents in hexane extract iron(III) at pH 1.9 were realized effectively with a high percentage of extraction (97.2% and 98.1% for MFHAs and BFHAs, respectively). The presence of a large amount of Mg(II), Ni(II), Al(III), Mn(II) and Co(II) ions did affect the iron(III) extraction. Finally stripping studies for recovering iron(III) from organic phase (Fe-MFHs or Fe-BFHs dissolved in hexane) were carried out at various concentrations of HCl, HNO3 and H2SO4. The results showed that the desired acid for recovery of iron(III) was 5 M HCl and quantitative recovery of iron(III) was achieved from Fe(III)-MFHs and Fe(III)-BFHs solutions in hexane containing 5 mg/L of Fe(III). PMID:22408444

Cortisol Level and Hemodynamic Changes During Tooth Extraction at Hypertensive and Normotensive Patients

PubMed Central

Agani, Zana Bajrami; Benedetti, Alberto; Krasniqi, Vjosa Hamiti; Ahmedi, Jehona; Sejfija, Zana; Loxha, Mergime Prekazi; Murtezani, Arben; Rexhepi, Aida Namani; Ibraimi, Zana

2015-01-01

Background: The patients that are subjects to oral-surgical interventions produce large amounts of steroids in comparison with healthy patients which are not a subject to any dental intervention. The aim of research was to determine the level of stress hormone cortisol in serum, arterial blood pressure and arterial pulse, and to compare the effectiveness of the usage of lidocaine with adrenalin in comparison with lidocaine without adrenalin during the tooth extraction. Patients and methods: This clinical research includes patients with indication of tooth extraction divided in hypertensive and normotensive patients. Results: There is no important statistical distinction between groups, for the cortisol levels before, during and after tooth extraction regardless of the type of anesthetic used, while we registered higher values of systolic and diastolic values at hypertensive patients, regardless of the type of anesthetic Conclusion: There is significant systolic and diastolic blood pressure rise in both groups of patients hypertensive and normotensive patients, (regardless of anesthetic used with or without vasoconstrictor), who underwent tooth extraction. The special emphasize is attributed to hypertensive patients where these changes are more significant. As per cortisol level and pulse rate, our results indicate no significant statistical difference in between groups. PMID:26005263

Enhancing Biomedical Text Summarization Using Semantic Relation Extraction

PubMed Central

Shang, Yue; Li, Yanpeng; Lin, Hongfei; Yang, Zhihao

2011-01-01

Automatic text summarization for a biomedical concept can help researchers to get the key points of a certain topic from large amount of biomedical literature efficiently. In this paper, we present a method for generating text summary for a given biomedical concept, e.g., H1N1 disease, from multiple documents based on semantic relation extraction. Our approach includes three stages: 1) We extract semantic relations in each sentence using the semantic knowledge representation tool SemRep. 2) We develop a relation-level retrieval method to select the relations most relevant to each query concept and visualize them in a graphic representation. 3) For relations in the relevant set, we extract informative sentences that can interpret them from the document collection to generate text summary using an information retrieval based method. Our major focus in this work is to investigate the contribution of semantic relation extraction to the task of biomedical text summarization. The experimental results on summarization for a set of diseases show that the introduction of semantic knowledge improves the performance and our results are better than the MEAD system, a well-known tool for text summarization. PMID:21887336

[Simultaneous determination of the migrations of bisphenol A and phenol in polycarbonate bottles based on subcritical water extraction and high performance liquid chromatography].

PubMed

Bai, Weiwei; Liu, Shuhui; Cao, Jiangping; Fan, Yingying; Xie, Qilong

2013-03-01

A new method was established for the simultaneous determination of the migration amounts of bisphenol A (BPA) and phenol from polycarbonate (PC) bottles based on subcritical water extraction (SWE) and high performance liquid chromatography. The optimum extraction conditions included an extraction temperature of 120 degree C, a pressure of 6.89 MPa (1000 psi), a static extraction time of 1 h and one cycle. Under the conditions, the migration amounts of the BPA ranged from 6.81 to 1116 micro g/g in 11 samples. Phenol was not detectable in 5 samples, and in other ones the migration amounts of phenol varied in the range of 3.25 -6. 08 micro g/g. The traditional soaking extraction experiments showed that PC was subjected to weak hydrolysis after long-time leaching. The BPA and phenol were separated in 8 min. Good linearities were obtained in the range of 0. 05 - 20 mg/L for BPA and 0.02 - 20 mg/L for phenol ( r > 0.999 7). The limits of detection were 7.6 micro g/L for BPA and 2.0 micro g/L for phenol. Intra-day and inter-day repeatabilities (expressed as RSD) were less than 5.21% and 11.63%, respectively. Compared with traditional water soaking extraction, the extraction efficiencies increased 49 - 106 times using this developed SWE method. The procedure is simple, rapid and environment friendly, and can be utilized to determine the migration amounts of BPA and phenol in PC bottles.

Extraction and HPLC analysis of phenolic compounds in leaves, stalks, and textile fibers of Urtica dioica L.

PubMed

Pinelli, Patrizia; Ieri, Francesca; Vignolini, Pamela; Bacci, Laura; Baronti, Silvia; Romani, Annalisa

2008-10-08

In the present study the phenolic composition of leaves, stalks, and textile fiber extracts from Urtica dioica L. is described. Taking into account the increasing demand for textile products made from natural fibers and the necessity to create sustainable "local" processing chains, an Italian project was funded to evaluate the cultivation of nettle fibers in the region of Tuscany. The leaves of two nettle samples, cultivated and wild (C and W), contain large amounts of chlorogenic and 2- O-caffeoylmalic acid, which represent 71.5 and 76.5% of total phenolics, respectively. Flavonoids are the main class in the stalks: 54.4% of total phenolics in C and 31.2% in W samples. Anthocyanins are second in quantitative importance and are present only in nettle stalks: 28.6% of total phenolics in C and 24.4% in W extracts. Characterization of phenolic compounds in nettle extracts is an important result with regard to the biological properties (antioxidant and antiradical) of these metabolites for their possible applications in various industrial activities, such as food/feed, cosmetics, phytomedicine, and textiles.

Towards an intelligent framework for multimodal affective data analysis.

PubMed

Poria, Soujanya; Cambria, Erik; Hussain, Amir; Huang, Guang-Bin

2015-03-01

An increasingly large amount of multimodal content is posted on social media websites such as YouTube and Facebook everyday. In order to cope with the growth of such so much multimodal data, there is an urgent need to develop an intelligent multi-modal analysis framework that can effectively extract information from multiple modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal information extraction agent, which infers and aggregates the semantic and affective information associated with user-generated multimodal data in contexts such as e-learning, e-health, automatic video content tagging and human-computer interaction. In particular, the developed intelligent agent adopts an ensemble feature extraction approach by exploiting the joint use of tri-modal (text, audio and video) features to enhance the multimodal information extraction process. In preliminary experiments using the eNTERFACE dataset, our proposed multi-modal system is shown to achieve an accuracy of 87.95%, outperforming the best state-of-the-art system by more than 10%, or in relative terms, a 56% reduction in error rate. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A modified protocol for RNA extraction from different peach tissues suitable for gene isolation and real-time PCR analysis.

PubMed

Tong, Zhaoguo; Qu, Shenchun; Zhang, Jiyu; Wang, Fei; Tao, Jianmin; Gao, Zhihong; Zhang, Zhen

2012-03-01

RNA extraction is the first step in the study of gene isolation and expression. However, it is difficult to extract high quantity and quality RNA from tissues containing large quantities of polysaccharides and polyphenols. Peach (Prunus persica), in addition to containing high levels of polysaccharides and polyphenols, is a challenging starting material for RNA isolation using a single method because of different amounts of those substances in diverse tissues. Based on three reported methods, we developed a modified RNA isolation protocol to solve this problem, leading to high quality and quantity of total RNA from peach mesocarp tissues of fruits which were sampled from all developmental stages and different storage periods, as well as from other tissues including flowers, leaves, stems, and roots. With our modified method, 28-650 μg of total RNA was routinely obtained from per gram of fresh material, gave at least a 1.16-fold improvement by compared with those isolated by other seven methods. The RNA extracts were successfully used in downstream applications such as RT-PCR, RACE, and real-time PCR.

An effective protein extraction method for two-dimensional electrophoresis in the anticancer herb Andrographis paniculata Nees.

PubMed

Talei, Daryush; Valdiani, Alireza; Puad, Mohd Abdullah

2013-01-01

Proteomic analysis of plants relies on high yields of pure protein. In plants, protein extraction and purification present a great challenge due to accumulation of a large amount of interfering substances, including polysaccharides, polyphenols, and secondary metabolites. Therefore, it is necessary to modify the extraction protocols. A study was conducted to compare four protein extraction and precipitation methods for proteomic analysis. The results showed significant differences in protein content among the four methods. The chloroform-trichloroacetic acid-acetone method using 4-(2-hydroxyethyl)-1-piperazineethanesulfonic acid (HEPES) buffer provided the best results in terms of protein content, pellets, spot resolution, and intensity of unique spots detected. An overall of 83 qualitative or quantitative significant differential spots were found among the four methods. Based on the 2-DE gel map, the method is expected to benefit the development of high-level proteomic and biochemical studies of Andrographis paniculata, which may also be applied to other recalcitrant medicinal plant tissues. © 2013 International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc.

Rat immunoreactive cholecystokinin (CCK): characterization using two chromatographic techniques.

PubMed

Bacarese-Hamilton, A J; Adrian, T E; Chohan, P; Bloom, S R

1985-06-01

Acid and neutral extracts of rat cerebral cortex and upper small intestine were prepared and the endogenous concentrations of cholecystokinin-like immunoreactivity (CCK-LI) measured by three new CCK-specific radioimmunoassays. The characterization of the immunoreactive CCK molecular forms was undertaken using gel permeation chromatography in the presence of 6 M urea to minimise problems relating to peptide adsorption or aggregation. Reverse-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was also performed on the rat tissue extracts. Rat cortex contained 268 +/- 12 pmol/g CCK-LI, and over 90% resembled the sulphated CCK-8, which was preferentially extracted at neutral pH. In contrast, the rat upper small intestine (97 +/- 8 pmol/g of CCK-LI) contained less than 20% CCK-8, the majority of immunoreactive CCK being of larger molecular size and being preferentially extracted at acid pH. In the small intestine the predominant molecular form(s) was intermediate in size between CCK-33 and CCK-8. Large amounts of CCK-33 and of a molecular form larger than CCK-33 were also detected. It is concluded that post-translational cleavage of CCK differs in rat brain and gut.

Extraction of intracellular protein from Chlorella pyrenoidosa using a combination of ethanol soaking, enzyme digest, ultrasonication and homogenization techniques.

PubMed

Zhang, Ruilin; Chen, Jian; Zhang, Xuewu

2018-01-01

Due to the rigid cell wall of Chlorella species, it is still challenging to effectively extract significant amounts of protein. Mass methods were used for the extraction of intracellular protein from microalgae with biological, mechanical and chemical approaches. In this study, based on comparison of different extraction methods, a new protocol was established to maximize extract amounts of protein, which was involved in ethanol soaking, enzyme digest, ultrasonication and homogenization techniques. Under the optimized conditions, 72.4% of protein was extracted from the microalgae Chlorella pyrenoidosa, which should contribute to the research and development of Chlorella protein in functional food and medicine. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Robust watermarking scheme for binary images using a slice-based large-cluster algorithm with a Hamming Code

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chen, Wen-Yuan; Liu, Chen-Chung

2006-01-01

The problems with binary watermarking schemes are that they have only a small amount of embeddable space and are not robust enough. We develop a slice-based large-cluster algorithm (SBLCA) to construct a robust watermarking scheme for binary images. In SBLCA, a small-amount cluster selection (SACS) strategy is used to search for a feasible slice in a large-cluster flappable-pixel decision (LCFPD) method, which is used to search for the best location for concealing a secret bit from a selected slice. This method has four major advantages over the others: (a) SBLCA has a simple and effective decision function to select appropriate concealment locations, (b) SBLCA utilizes a blind watermarking scheme without the original image in the watermark extracting process, (c) SBLCA uses slice-based shuffling capability to transfer the regular image into a hash state without remembering the state before shuffling, and finally, (d) SBLCA has enough embeddable space that every 64 pixels could accommodate a secret bit of the binary image. Furthermore, empirical results on test images reveal that our approach is a robust watermarking scheme for binary images.

Carboxylic and Dicarboxylic Acids Extracted from Crushed Magnesium Oxide Single Crystals

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Freund, Friedemann; Gupta, Alka D.; Kumar, Devendra; DeVincenzi, Donald (Technical Monitor)

1998-01-01

Carboxylic and dicarboxylic acids (glycolic, oxalic, malonic and succinic) have been extracted with tetrahydrofuran (THE) and H2O from large synthetic MgO crystals, crushed to a medium fine powder. The extracts were characterized by infrared spectroscopy and (sup 1)H-NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance). The THF extracts were derivatized with tert-butyldimethylsilyl (t-BDMS) for GC-MS (Gas Chromatography - Mass Spectroscopy) analysis. A single crystal separated from the extract was used for an x-ray structure analysis, giving the monoclinic unit cell, space group P2(sub 1)/c with a(sub o) = 5.543 A, b(sub o) = 8.845 A, c(sub o) = 5.086 A, and beta = 91.9 degrees, consistent with beta-succinic acid, HOOC(CH2)COOH. The amount of extracted acids is estimated to be of the order of 0.1 to 0.5 mg/g MgO. The MgO crystals from which these organic acids were extracted grew from the 2360 C hot melt, saturated with CO/CO2 and H2O, thereby incorporating small amounts of the gaseous components to form a solid solution (ss) with MgO. Upon cooling, the ss becomes supersaturated, causing solute carbon and other solute species to segregate not only to the surface but also internally, to dislocations and subgrain boundaries. The organic acids extracted from the MgO crystals after crushing appear to derive from these segregated solutes that formed C-C, C-H, and C-O bonds along dislocations and other defects in the MgO structure, leading to entities that can generically be described as (HxCyOz)(sup n-). The processes underlying the formation of these precursors are fundamental in nature and expected to be operational in any minerals, preferentially those with dense structures, that crystallized in H2O-CO2-laden environments. This opens the possibility that common magmatic and metamorphic rocks when weathering at the surface of a tectonically active planet like Earth may be an important source of abiogenically formed complex organic compounds.

Management of ingested foreign bodies in childhood: our experience and review of the literature.

PubMed

Hachimi-Idrissi, S; Corne, L; Vandenplas, Y

1998-09-01

The management of foreign bodies in the gastrointestinal tract is not standardized. Retrospectively, we analysed the management of 174 cases of accidental ingestion of foreign bodies in children. No child had ingested more than one foreign object. The ingested foreign bodies were: coins, toy parts, jewels, batteries, 'sharp' materials such as needles and pins, fish and chicken bone, and 'large' amounts of food. Of the patients 51% had transient symptoms at the moment of ingestion, such as retrosternal pain, cyanosis and dysphasia. Attempts to extract the foreign body either by a magnet tube, endoscopy or McGill forceps was performed in 83 patients. The majority of the extracted foreign bodies were batteries and sharp materials. The outcome of all the patients was excellent. No complications were observed.

Antioxidants from the bark of Burkea africana, an African medicinal plant.

PubMed

Mathisen, Elin; Diallo, Drissa; Andersen, Øyvind M; Malterud, Karl Egil

2002-03-01

The bark of the tree Burkea africana is used medicinally in large areas of sub-Saharan Africa. The constituents responsible for its putative activity are not well known. We have investigated the bark of B. africana for antioxidant and radical scavenging activity. A hydroethanol bark extract showed high activity, and most of this activity was located in semipolar fractions of the extract. From chromatographic purification and spectroscopical structure studies, we conclude that the active constituents are proanthocyanidins. Two major components appear to be fisetinidol-(4alpha- --> 8)-catechin 3-gallate and bis-fisetinidol-(4alpha- --> 6, 4alpha- --> 8)-catechin 3-gallate. The latter compound is a new natural product. Smaller amounts of monomeric flavan-3-ols (catechin, epicatechin and fisetinidol) were also found. Copyright 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Profiling Lung Cancer Patients Using Electronic Health Records.

PubMed

Menasalvas Ruiz, Ernestina; Tuñas, Juan Manuel; Bermejo, Guzmán; Gonzalo Martín, Consuelo; Rodríguez-González, Alejandro; Zanin, Massimiliano; González de Pedro, Cristina; Méndez, Marta; Zaretskaia, Olga; Rey, Jesús; Parejo, Consuelo; Cruz Bermudez, Juan Luis; Provencio, Mariano

2018-05-31

If Electronic Health Records contain a large amount of information about the patient's condition and response to treatment, which can potentially revolutionize the clinical practice, such information is seldom considered due to the complexity of its extraction and analysis. We here report on a first integration of an NLP framework for the analysis of clinical records of lung cancer patients making use of a telephone assistance service of a major Spanish hospital. We specifically show how some relevant data, about patient demographics and health condition, can be extracted; and how some relevant analyses can be performed, aimed at improving the usefulness of the service. We thus demonstrate that the use of EHR texts, and their integration inside a data analysis framework, is technically feasible and worth of further study.

Lyophilization decreases the formation of dialyzable iron by extraction and digestion of chicken breast muscle.

PubMed

Karava, Nilesh B; Mahoney, Raymond R

2011-06-01

We studied the effect of lyophilization of chicken breast muscle on the formation of dialyzable iron from ferric iron. Chicken breast muscle was used chilled, frozen or lyophilized and was analyzed for sulfhydryl and histidine content. It was then homogenized and mixed with ferric iron. The mixture was extracted with acid or digested with pepsin and pancreatin. The extracts and digests were analyzed for dialyzable ferrous and dialyzable total iron and also for protein. In the chilled muscle, similar amounts of dialyzable iron were formed after acid extraction and after proteolytic digestion; however, digestion led to more dialyzable ferrous iron. Freezing had no effect but lyophilization of the homogenized muscle caused large decreases in dialyzable iron and dialyzable ferrous iron for both extraction and digestion processes. Lyophilization also resulted in decreased extraction of peptides, decreased digestion of muscle proteins and reduced levels of sulfhydryl and histidine residues. Our results demonstrate that dialyzable iron is produced both by acid-soluble low molecular weight muscle component(s) and also by peptides resulting from digestion of muscle proteins: both of which reduce and chelate iron. Reduced formation of dialyzable iron by both mechanisms following lyophilization could be explained by sulfhydryl oxidation and impaired digestion due to protein crosslinking.

Sensitive determination of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in water samples by HPLC coupled with SPE based on graphene functionalized with triethoxysilane.

PubMed

Huang, Ke-Jing; Li, Jing; Liu, Yan-Ming; Wang, Lan

2013-02-01

The graphene functionalized with (3-aminopropyl) triethoxysilane was synthesized by a simple hydrothermal reaction and applied as SPE sorbents to extract trace polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from environmental water samples. These sorbents possess high adsorption capacity and extraction efficiency due to strong adsorption ability of carbon materials and large specific surface area of nanoparticles, and only 10 mg of sorbents are required to extract PAHs from 100 mL water samples. Several condition parameters, such as eluent and its volume, adsorbent amount, sample volume, sample pH, and sample flow rate, were optimized to achieve good sensitivity and precision. Under the optimized extraction conditions, the method showed good linearity in the range of 1-100 μg/L, repeatability of the extraction (the RSDs were between 1.8 and 2.9%, n = 6), and satisfactory detection limits of 0.029-0.1 μg/L. The recoveries of PAHs spiked in environmental water samples ranged from 84.6 to 109.5%. All these results demonstrated that this new SPE technique was a viable alternative to conventional enrichment techniques for the extraction and analysis of PAHs in complex samples. © 2013 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Carbon coated magnetic nanoparticles as a novel magnetic solid phase extraction adsorbent for simultaneous extraction of methamphetamine and ephedrine from urine samples.

PubMed

Taghvimi, Arezou; Hamishehkar, Hamed

2017-01-15

This paper develops a highly selective, specific and efficient method for simultaneous determination of ephedrine and methamphetamine by a new carbon coated magnetic nanoparticles (C/MNPs) as a magnetic solid phase extraction (MSPE) adsorbent in biological urine medium. The characterization of synthesized magnetic nano adsorbent was completely carried out by various characterization techniques like Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy, powder x-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM). Nine important parameters influencing extraction efficiency including amount of adsorbent, amounts of sample volume, pH, type and amount of extraction organic solvent, time of extraction and desorption, agitation rate and ionic strength of extraction medium, were studied and optimized. Under optimized extraction conditions, a good linearity was observed in the concentration range of 100-2000ng/mL for ephedrine and 100-2500ng/mL for methamphetamine. Analysis of positive urine samples was carried out by proposed method with the recovery of 98.71 and 97.87% for ephedrine and methamphetamine, respectively. The results indicated that carbon coated magnetic nanoparticles could be applied in clinical and forensic laboratories for simultaneous determination of abused drugs in urine media. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Agricultural land contamination by heavy metals around the former mining site of Bechateur (northern Tunisia)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Daldoul, G.; Soussi, R.; Soussi, F.; Boularbah, A.

2012-04-01

The activity of the former Pb-Zn mine of Jebel Ghozlen (Béchateur. extreme northern Tunisia) generated during the last century large quantities of tailings (extraction, flotation, gravimetry) deposited as three heap between the mine site and the shoreline located 700 m away. Areas surrounding the mine site are agricultural and are crossed by two rivers, one of which crosses the main heap. The minerals that make up these wastes are calcite, dolomite, quartz, gypsum, pyrite, barite, smithsonite, cerussite and galena. The amounts of Zn, Cd and Pb in the wastes vary between 1.3 and 9.3%, 1.1% and 5.7 and 185 and 410 mg kg-1, respectively. Soils in the study area are carbonated and are characterized by a silt-sand texture. The clay fraction is dominated by kaolinite. The chemical analysis of thirty samples collected over an area of 3 km2 shows that the amounts of total organic carbon (TOC) and total sulfur vary from 0.7 % to 2.5 % and 0.08 % to 0.96 %, respectively, while those of Zn, Pb and Cd range from 300 to 22 000 mg kg-1, 85 to 3000 mg kg-1 and 2 to 47 mg kg-1, respectively. The highest concentrations of metals were found in flood plains at 500 m downstream of the mine site. Extraction tests using deionized water and a 0.1 M CaCl2 solution were performed to assess the mobility of Zn, Pb and Cd in contaminated and reference soil samples collected within the study area. The results of extraction with deionized water showed that the leached amounts of Zn and Cd range between 0.2 and 4 mg kg-1 and 0.02 and 0.2 mg kg-1, respectively; while that of Pb is quite near the detection limit. During the extraction with CaCl2 the leached amounts of Zn, Pb and Cd range from 0.3 to 86 mg kg-1, 2 to 6 mg kg-1 and 0.05 to 0.9 mg kg-1, respectively. Thus, the mobility of Cd, Zn and Pb in CaCl2 solution (0.8 %, 0.4 % and 0.3 %, respectively) is higher compared with the extraction with deionized water (0.2%, 0.1% and 0.02 %, respectively). Toxicity tests were conducted on these soils using the MetPlate method. The results show a low bioavailability of contaminants.

Comparison of extraction techniques and modeling of accelerated solvent extraction for the authentication of natural vanilla flavors.

PubMed

Cicchetti, Esmeralda; Chaintreau, Alain

2009-06-01

Accelerated solvent extraction (ASE) of vanilla beans has been optimized using ethanol as a solvent. A theoretical model is proposed to account for this multistep extraction. This allows the determination, for the first time, of the total amount of analytes initially present in the beans and thus the calculation of recoveries using ASE or any other extraction technique. As a result, ASE and Soxhlet extractions have been determined to be efficient methods, whereas recoveries are modest for maceration techniques and depend on the solvent used. Because industrial extracts are obtained by many different procedures, including maceration in various solvents, authenticating vanilla extracts using quantitative ratios between the amounts of vanilla flavor constituents appears to be unreliable. When authentication techniques based on isotopic ratios are used, ASE is a valid sample preparation technique because it does not induce isotopic fractionation.

SLIDE - a web-based tool for interactive visualization of large-scale -omics data.

PubMed

Ghosh, Soumita; Datta, Abhik; Tan, Kaisen; Choi, Hyungwon

2018-06-28

Data visualization is often regarded as a post hoc step for verifying statistically significant results in the analysis of high-throughput data sets. This common practice leaves a large amount of raw data behind, from which more information can be extracted. However, existing solutions do not provide capabilities to explore large-scale raw datasets using biologically sensible queries, nor do they allow user interaction based real-time customization of graphics. To address these drawbacks, we have designed an open-source, web-based tool called Systems-Level Interactive Data Exploration, or SLIDE to visualize large-scale -omics data interactively. SLIDE's interface makes it easier for scientists to explore quantitative expression data in multiple resolutions in a single screen. SLIDE is publicly available under BSD license both as an online version as well as a stand-alone version at https://github.com/soumitag/SLIDE. Supplementary Information are available at Bioinformatics online.

The influence of large-scale wind power on global climate.

PubMed

Keith, David W; Decarolis, Joseph F; Denkenberger, David C; Lenschow, Donald H; Malyshev, Sergey L; Pacala, Stephen; Rasch, Philip J

2004-11-16

Large-scale use of wind power can alter local and global climate by extracting kinetic energy and altering turbulent transport in the atmospheric boundary layer. We report climate-model simulations that address the possible climatic impacts of wind power at regional to global scales by using two general circulation models and several parameterizations of the interaction of wind turbines with the boundary layer. We find that very large amounts of wind power can produce nonnegligible climatic change at continental scales. Although large-scale effects are observed, wind power has a negligible effect on global-mean surface temperature, and it would deliver enormous global benefits by reducing emissions of CO(2) and air pollutants. Our results may enable a comparison between the climate impacts due to wind power and the reduction in climatic impacts achieved by the substitution of wind for fossil fuels.

Allelopathic Effects, Physiological Responses and Phenolic Compounds in Litter Extracts of Juniperus rigidaSieb. et Zucc.

PubMed

Liu, Jing; Li, Dengwu; Wang, Dongmei; Liu, Yu; Song, Huiying

2017-08-01

The allelopathic effects of Juniperus rigida litter aqueous extract (LE) on wheat and Pinus tabuliformis were studied, as well as the physiological responses to the extract. High concentration LE (0.10 g Dw/ml) significantly inhibited the seed germination and seedling growth in receptor plants. The chlorophyll content and root activity in the wheat seedlings were reduced significantly across all treatments; however, those were more prominently reduced at high concentration (0.10 g Dw/ml) but received little stimulation at low concentration (0.025 g Dw/ml) in P. tabuliformis. The content of malonaldehyde (MDA) increased with increasing concentrations of LE, except at 0.025 g Dw/ml. Activities of antioxidant enzymes (POD, CAT and SOD) in receptor plants were all significantly inhibited at high concentrations but stimulated at low concentrations. These results demonstrate that the aqueous extract from J. rigida litter has allelopathic potential. Various phenolic compounds were identified in litter aqueous extract and litter ethanol extract by HPLC. The phenolic compound content in the aqueous extract was significantly lower than that in the ethanol extract. Chlorogenic acid and podophyllotoxin were the predominant phenolic compounds in both types of litter extracts. These findings suggest that the seed germination and seedling growth of P. tabuliformis and wheat would be inhibited when planted near large amounts J. rigida litter. © 2017 Wiley-VHCA AG, Zurich, Switzerland.

The extraction of essential oil from patchouli leaves (Pogostemon cablin Benth) using microwave hydrodistillation and solvent-free microwave extraction methods

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Putri, D. K. Y.; Kusuma, H. S.; Syahputra, M. E.; Parasandi, D.; Mahfud, M.

2017-12-01

Patchouli plant (Pogostemon cablin Benth) is one of the important essential oil-producing plant, contributes more than 50% of total exports of Indonesia’s essential oil. However, the extraction of patchouli oil that has been done in Indonesia is generally still used conventional methods that require enormous amount of energy, high solvent usage, and long time of extraction. Therefore, in this study, patchouli oil extraction was carried out by using microwave hydrodistillation and solvent-free microwave extraction methods. Based on this research, it is known that the extraction of patchouli oil using microwave hydrodistillation method with longer extraction time (240 min) only produced patchouli oil’s yield 1.2 times greater than solvent-free microwave extraction method which require faster extraction time (120 min). Otherwise the analysis of electric consumption and the environmental impact, the solvent-free microwave extraction method showed a smaller amount when compared with microwave hydrodistillation method. It is conclude that the use of solvent-free microwave extraction method for patchouli oil extraction is suitably method as a new green technique.

Production of unusual dispiro metabolites in Pestalotiopsis virgatula endophyte cultures: HPLC-SPE-NMR, electronic circular dichroism, and time-dependent density-functional computation study.

PubMed

Kesting, Julie R; Olsen, Lars; Staerk, Dan; Tejesvi, Mysore V; Kini, Kukkundoor R; Prakash, Harishchandra S; Jaroszewski, Jerzy W

2011-10-28

The endophytic fungus Pestalotiopsis virgatula, derived from the plant Terminalia chebula and previously found to produce a large excess of a single metabolite when grown in the minimal M1D medium, was induced to produce a variety of unusual metabolites by growing in potato dextrose broth medium. Analysis of the fermentation medium extract was performed using an HPLC-PDA-MS-SPE-NMR hyphenated system, which led to the identification of a total of eight metabolites (1-8), six of which are new. Most of the metabolites are structurally related and are derivatives of benzo[c]oxepin, rare among natural products. This includes dispiro derivatives 7 and 8 (pestalospiranes A and B), having a novel 1,9,11,18-tetraoxadispiro[6.2.6.2]octadecane skeleton. Relative and absolute configurations of the latter were determined by a combination of NOESY spectroscopy and electronic circular dichroism spectroscopy supported by time-dependent density-functional theory calculations (B3LYP/TZVP level). This work demonstrates that a largely complete structure elucidation of numerous metabolites present in a raw fermentation medium extract can be performed by the HPLC-SPE-NMR technique using only a small amount of the extract, even with unstable metabolites that are difficult to isolate by traditional methods.

Optimization of protein electroextraction from microalgae by a flow process.

PubMed

Coustets, Mathilde; Joubert-Durigneux, Vanessa; Hérault, Josiane; Schoefs, Benoît; Blanckaert, Vincent; Garnier, Jean-Pierre; Teissié, Justin

2015-06-01

Classical methods, used for large scale treatments such as mechanical or chemical extractions, affect the integrity of extracted cytosolic protein by releasing proteases contained in vacuoles. Our previous experiments on flow processes electroextraction on yeasts proved that pulsed electric field technology allows preserving the integrity of released cytosolic proteins, by not affecting vacuole membranes. Furthermore, large cell culture volumes are easily treated by the flow technology. Based on this previous knowledge, we developed a new protocol in order to electro-extract total cytoplasmic proteins from microalgae (Nannochloropsis salina, Chlorella vulgaris and Haematococcus pluvialis). Given that induction of electropermeabilization is under the control of target cell size, as the mean diameter for N. salina is only 2.5 μm, we used repetitive 2 ms long pulses of alternating polarities with stronger field strengths than previously described for yeasts. The electric treatment was followed by a 24h incubation period in a salty buffer. The amount of total protein release was observed by a classical Bradford assay. A more accurate evaluation of protein release was obtained by SDS-PAGE. Similar results were obtained with C. vulgaris and H. pluvialis under milder electrical conditions as expected from their larger size. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Andrographis paniculata extracts and major constituent diterpenoids inhibit growth of intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma cells by inducing cell cycle arrest and apoptosis.

PubMed

Suriyo, Tawit; Pholphana, Nanthanit; Rangkadilok, Nuchanart; Thiantanawat, Apinya; Watcharasit, Piyajit; Satayavivad, Jutamaad

2014-05-01

Andrographis paniculata is an important herbal medicine widely used in several Asian countries for the treatment of various diseases due to its broad range of pharmacological activities. The present study reports that A. paniculata extracts potently inhibit the growth of liver (HepG2 and SK-Hep1) and bile duct (HuCCA-1 and RMCCA-1) cancer cells. A. paniculata extracts with different contents of major diterpenoids, including andrographolide, 14-deoxy-11,12-didehydroandrographolide, neoandrographolide, and 14-deoxyandrographolide, exhibited a different potency of growth inhibition. The ethanolic extract of A. paniculata at the first true leaf stage, which contained a high amount of 14-deoxyandrographolide but a low amount of andrographolide, showed a cytotoxic effect to cancer cells about 4 times higher than the water extract of A. paniculata at the mature leaf stage, which contained a high amount of andrographolide but a low amount of 14-deoxyandrographolide. Andrographolide, not 14-deoxy-11,12-didehydroandrographolide, neoandrographolide, or 14-deoxyandrographolide, possessed potent cytotoxic activity against the growth of liver and bile duct cancer cells. The cytotoxic effect of the water extract of A. paniculata at the mature leaf stage could be explained by the present amount of andrographolide, while the cytotoxic effect of the ethanolic extract of A. paniculata at the first true leaf stage could not. HuCCA-1 cells showed more sensitivity to A. paniculata extracts and andrographolide than RMCCA-1 cells. Furthermore, the ethanolic extract of A. paniculata at the first true leaf stage increased cell cycle arrest at the G0/G1 and G2/M phases, and induced apoptosis in both HuCCA-1 and RMCCA-1 cells. The expressions of cyclin-D1, Bcl-2, and the inactive proenzyme form of caspase-3 were reduced by the ethanolic extract of A. paniculata in the first true leaf stage treatment, while a proapoptotic protein Bax was increased. The cleavage of poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase was also found in the ethanolic extract of A. paniculata in the first true leaf stage treatment. This study suggests that A. paniculata could be a promising herbal plant for the alternative treatment of intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma. Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart · New York.

Automated Fault Interpretation and Extraction using Improved Supplementary Seismic Datasets

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bollmann, T. A.; Shank, R.

2017-12-01

During the interpretation of seismic volumes, it is necessary to interpret faults along with horizons of interest. With the improvement of technology, the interpretation of faults can be expedited with the aid of different algorithms that create supplementary seismic attributes, such as semblance and coherency. These products highlight discontinuities, but still need a large amount of human interaction to interpret faults and are plagued by noise and stratigraphic discontinuities. Hale (2013) presents a method to improve on these datasets by creating what is referred to as a Fault Likelihood volume. In general, these volumes contain less noise and do not emphasize stratigraphic features. Instead, planar features within a specified strike and dip range are highlighted. Once a satisfactory Fault Likelihood Volume is created, extraction of fault surfaces is much easier. The extracted fault surfaces are then exported to interpretation software for QC. Numerous software packages have implemented this methodology with varying results. After investigating these platforms, we developed a preferred Automated Fault Interpretation workflow.

Optimization and Validation of Thermal Desorption Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry for the Determination of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Ambient Air

PubMed Central

Durana, Nieves; García, José Antonio; Gómez, María Carmen; Alonso, Lucio

2018-01-01

Thermal desorption (TD) coupled with gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (TD-GC/MS) is a simple alternative that overcomes the main drawbacks of the solvent extraction-based method: long extraction times, high sample manipulation, and large amounts of solvent waste. This work describes the optimization of TD-GC/MS for the measurement of airborne polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in particulate phase. The performance of the method was tested by Standard Reference Material (SRM) 1649b urban dust and compared with the conventional method (Soxhlet extraction-GC/MS), showing a better recovery (mean of 97%), precision (mean of 12%), and accuracy (±25%) for the determination of 14 EPA PAHs. Furthermore, other 15 nonpriority PAHs were identified and quantified using their relative response factors (RRFs). Finally, the proposed method was successfully applied for the quantification of PAHs in real 8 h-samples (PM10), demonstrating its capability for determination of these compounds in short-term monitoring. PMID:29854561

Multi-Target State Extraction for the SMC-PHD Filter

PubMed Central

Si, Weijian; Wang, Liwei; Qu, Zhiyu

2016-01-01

The sequential Monte Carlo probability hypothesis density (SMC-PHD) filter has been demonstrated to be a favorable method for multi-target tracking. However, the time-varying target states need to be extracted from the particle approximation of the posterior PHD, which is difficult to implement due to the unknown relations between the large amount of particles and the PHD peaks representing potential target locations. To address this problem, a novel multi-target state extraction algorithm is proposed in this paper. By exploiting the information of measurements and particle likelihoods in the filtering stage, we propose a validation mechanism which aims at selecting effective measurements and particles corresponding to detected targets. Subsequently, the state estimates of the detected and undetected targets are performed separately: the former are obtained from the particle clusters directed by effective measurements, while the latter are obtained from the particles corresponding to undetected targets via clustering method. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method yields better estimation accuracy and reliability compared to existing methods. PMID:27322274

Lipidomic profiling of dried seahorses by hydrophilic interaction chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry.

PubMed

Shen, Qing; Dai, Zhiyuan; Huang, Yao-Wen; Cheung, Hon-Yeung

2016-08-15

Dried seahorse is a precious raw food material for cooking soups. In this study, a lipidomics strategy using the techniques of solid-phase extraction (SPE) and hydrophilic interaction chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (HILIC-QTOF/MS) was developed for extraction, visualization, and quantification of phospholipids in dried seahorses. The parameters of SPE were optimized, and 1 mL of sample and chloroform/methanol (1:2, v/v) were found to be the best loading volume and eluting solvent, respectively. Afterwards, each phospholipid class was successfully separated on a HILIC column and analyzed by mass spectrometry. A total of 50 phospholipid molecular species were identified and determined, including 15 phosphatidylcholines (PCs), 14 phosphatidylethanolamines (PEs), 12 phosphatidylinositols (PIs) and 9 phosphatidylserines (PSs). In comparison to previously methods, this strategy was robust and efficient in extraction, characterization, and determination of phospholipids. The dried seahorse was found to contain large amounts of polyunsaturated fatty acyl phospholipids which are beneficial to human health. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Information Extraction in Tomb Pit Using Hyperspectral Data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yang, X.; Hou, M.; Lyu, S.; Ma, S.; Gao, Z.; Bai, S.; Gu, M.; Liu, Y.

2018-04-01

Hyperspectral data has characteristics of multiple bands and continuous, large amount of data, redundancy, and non-destructive. These characteristics make it possible to use hyperspectral data to study cultural relics. In this paper, the hyperspectral imaging technology is adopted to recognize the bottom images of an ancient tomb located in Shanxi province. There are many black remains on the bottom surface of the tomb, which are suspected to be some meaningful texts or paintings. Firstly, the hyperspectral data is preprocessing to get the reflectance of the region of interesting. For the convenient of compute and storage, the original reflectance value is multiplied by 10000. Secondly, this article uses three methods to extract the symbols at the bottom of the ancient tomb. Finally we tried to use morphology to connect the symbols and gave fifteen reference images. The results show that the extraction of information based on hyperspectral data can obtain a better visual experience, which is beneficial to the study of ancient tombs by researchers, and provides some references for archaeological research findings.

TextHunter – A User Friendly Tool for Extracting Generic Concepts from Free Text in Clinical Research

PubMed Central

Jackson MSc, Richard G.; Ball, Michael; Patel, Rashmi; Hayes, Richard D.; Dobson, Richard J.B.; Stewart, Robert

2014-01-01

Observational research using data from electronic health records (EHR) is a rapidly growing area, which promises both increased sample size and data richness - therefore unprecedented study power. However, in many medical domains, large amounts of potentially valuable data are contained within the free text clinical narrative. Manually reviewing free text to obtain desired information is an inefficient use of researcher time and skill. Previous work has demonstrated the feasibility of applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) to extract information. However, in real world research environments, the demand for NLP skills outweighs supply, creating a bottleneck in the secondary exploitation of the EHR. To address this, we present TextHunter, a tool for the creation of training data, construction of concept extraction machine learning models and their application to documents. Using confidence thresholds to ensure high precision (>90%), we achieved recall measurements as high as 99% in real world use cases. PMID:25954379

Review of the harvesting and extraction program within the National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts

DOE PAGES

Marrone, Babetta L.; Lacey, Ronald E.; Anderson, Daniel B.; ...

2017-08-07

Energy-efficient and scalable harvesting and lipid extraction processes must be developed in order for the algal biofuels and bioproducts industry to thrive. The major challenge for harvesting is the handling of large volumes of cultivation water to concentrate low amounts of biomass. For lipid extraction, the major energy and cost drivers are associated with disrupting the algae cell wall and drying the biomass before solvent extraction of the lipids. Here we review the research and development conducted by the Harvesting and Extraction Team during the 3-year National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts (NAABB) algal consortium project. The harvesting andmore » extraction team investigated five harvesting and three wet extraction technologies at lab bench scale for effectiveness, and conducted a techoeconomic study to evaluate their costs and energy efficiency compared to available baseline technologies. Based on this study, three harvesting technologies were selected for further study at larger scale. We evaluated the selected harvesting technologies: electrocoagulation, membrane filtration, and ultrasonic harvesting, in a field study at minimum scale of 100 L/h. None of the extraction technologies were determined to be ready for scale-up; therefore, an emerging extraction technology (wet solvent extraction) was selected from industry to provide scale-up data and capabilities to produce lipid and lipid-extracted materials for the NAABB program. One specialized extraction/adsorption technology was developed that showed promise for recovering high value co-products from lipid extracts. Overall, the NAABB Harvesting and Extraction Team improved the readiness level of several innovative, energy efficient technologies to integrate with algae production processes and captured valuable lessons learned about scale-up challenges.« less

Review of the harvesting and extraction program within the National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Marrone, Babetta L.; Lacey, Ronald E.; Anderson, Daniel B.

Energy-efficient and scalable harvesting and lipid extraction processes must be developed in order for the algal biofuels and bioproducts industry to thrive. The major challenge for harvesting is the handling of large volumes of cultivation water to concentrate low amounts of biomass. For lipid extraction, the major energy and cost drivers are associated with disrupting the algae cell wall and drying the biomass before solvent extraction of the lipids. Here we review the research and development conducted by the Harvesting and Extraction Team during the 3-year National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts (NAABB) algal consortium project. The harvesting andmore » extraction team investigated five harvesting and three wet extraction technologies at lab bench scale for effectiveness, and conducted a techoeconomic study to evaluate their costs and energy efficiency compared to available baseline technologies. Based on this study, three harvesting technologies were selected for further study at larger scale. We evaluated the selected harvesting technologies: electrocoagulation, membrane filtration, and ultrasonic harvesting, in a field study at minimum scale of 100 L/h. None of the extraction technologies were determined to be ready for scale-up; therefore, an emerging extraction technology (wet solvent extraction) was selected from industry to provide scale-up data and capabilities to produce lipid and lipid-extracted materials for the NAABB program. One specialized extraction/adsorption technology was developed that showed promise for recovering high value co-products from lipid extracts. Overall, the NAABB Harvesting and Extraction Team improved the readiness level of several innovative, energy efficient technologies to integrate with algae production processes and captured valuable lessons learned about scale-up challenges.« less

Extraction process of palm kernel cake as a source of mannan for feed additive on poultry diet

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tafsin, M.; Hanafi, N. D.; Yusraini, E.

2017-05-01

Palm Kernel Cake (PKC) is a by-product of palm kernel oil extraction and found in large quantity in Indonesia. The inclusion of PKC on poultry diet are limited due to some nutritional problems such as anti-nutritional properties (mannan). On the other hand, mannan containing polysaccharides play in various biological functions particularly in enhancing the immune response and to control pathogen in poultry. The research objective to find out the extraction process of PKC and conducted at animal nutrition and Feed Science Laboratory, Agricultural Faculty, University of Sumatera Utara. Various extraction methode were used in this experiment, including fraction analysis used 7 number sieves, and followed by water and acetic acid extraction. The result indicated that PKC had different particle size according to sieve size and dominated by particle size 850 um. The analysis of sugar content indicated that each particle size had different characteristic on treatment by hot water extraction. The particle size 180—850 um had higher sugar content than coarse PKC (2000—3000 um). The total sugar content were recovered vary between 0.9—3,2% from PKC were extracted. Treatment grinding method followed by hot water extraction (100—120 °C, 1 h) increased total sugar content than previous treatments and reach 8% from PKC were extracted. Utilisation acetic acid decreased the total amount of total sugar from PKC were extracted. It is concluded that treatment by hot temperature (110—120 °C) for 1 h show highest yield to extract sugar from PKC.

Unsupervised Extraction of Diagnosis Codes from EMRs Using Knowledge-Based and Extractive Text Summarization Techniques

PubMed Central

Kavuluru, Ramakanth; Han, Sifei; Harris, Daniel

2017-01-01

Diagnosis codes are extracted from medical records for billing and reimbursement and for secondary uses such as quality control and cohort identification. In the US, these codes come from the standard terminology ICD-9-CM derived from the international classification of diseases (ICD). ICD-9 codes are generally extracted by trained human coders by reading all artifacts available in a patient’s medical record following specific coding guidelines. To assist coders in this manual process, this paper proposes an unsupervised ensemble approach to automatically extract ICD-9 diagnosis codes from textual narratives included in electronic medical records (EMRs). Earlier attempts on automatic extraction focused on individual documents such as radiology reports and discharge summaries. Here we use a more realistic dataset and extract ICD-9 codes from EMRs of 1000 inpatient visits at the University of Kentucky Medical Center. Using named entity recognition (NER), graph-based concept-mapping of medical concepts, and extractive text summarization techniques, we achieve an example based average recall of 0.42 with average precision 0.47; compared with a baseline of using only NER, we notice a 12% improvement in recall with the graph-based approach and a 7% improvement in precision using the extractive text summarization approach. Although diagnosis codes are complex concepts often expressed in text with significant long range non-local dependencies, our present work shows the potential of unsupervised methods in extracting a portion of codes. As such, our findings are especially relevant for code extraction tasks where obtaining large amounts of training data is difficult. PMID:28748227

The photosynthetic cytochrome c 550 from the diatom Phaeodactylum tricornutum.

PubMed

Bernal-Bayard, Pilar; Puerto-Galán, Leonor; Yruela, Inmaculada; García-Rubio, Inés; Castell, Carmen; Ortega, José M; Alonso, Pablo J; Roncel, Mercedes; Martínez, Jesús I; Hervás, Manuel; Navarro, José A

2017-09-01

The photosynthetic cytochrome c 550 from the marine diatom Phaeodactylum tricornutum has been purified and characterized. Cytochrome c 550 is mostly obtained from the soluble cell extract in relatively large amounts. In addition, the protein appeared to be truncated in the last hydrophobic residues of the C-terminus, both in the soluble cytochrome c 550 and in the protein extracted from the membrane fraction, as deduced by mass spectrometry analysis and the comparison with the gene sequence. Interestingly, it has been described that the C-terminus of cytochrome c 550 forms a hydrophobic finger involved in the interaction with photosystem II in cyanobacteria. Cytochrome c 550 was almost absent in solubilized photosystem II complex samples, in contrast with the PsbO and Psb31 extrinsic subunits, thus suggesting a lower affinity of cytochrome c 550 for the photosystem II complex. Under iron-limiting conditions the amount of cytochrome c 550 decreases up to about 45% as compared to iron-replete cells, pointing to an iron-regulated synthesis. Oxidized cytochrome c 550 has been characterized using continuous wave EPR and pulse techniques, including HYSCORE, and the obtained results have been interpreted in terms of the electrostatic charge distribution in the surroundings of the heme centre.

Molecular species composition of plant cardiolipin determined by liquid chromatography mass spectrometry

PubMed Central

Zhou, Yonghong; Peisker, Helga

2016-01-01

Cardiolipin (CL), an anionic phospholipid of the inner mitochondrial membrane, provides essential functions for stabilizing respiratory complexes and is involved in mitochondrial morphogenesis and programmed cell death in animals. The role of CL and its metabolism in plants are less well understood. The measurement of CL in plants, including its molecular species composition, is hampered by the fact that CL is of extremely low abundance, and that plants contain large amounts of interfering compounds including galactolipids, neutral lipids, and pigments. We used solid phase extraction by anion exchange chromatography to purify CL from crude plant lipid extracts. LC/MS was used to determine the content and molecular species composition of CL. Thus, up to 23 different molecular species of CL were detected in different plant species, including Arabidopsis, mung bean, spinach, barley, and tobacco. Similar to animals, plant CL is dominated by highly unsaturated species, mostly containing linoleic and linolenic acid. During phosphate deprivation or exposure to an extended dark period, the amount of CL decreased in Arabidopsis, accompanied with an increased degree in unsaturation. The mechanism of CL remodeling during stress, and the function of highly unsaturated CL molecular species, remains to be defined. PMID:27179363

Carbon sequestration in a surface flow constructed wetland after 12 years of swine wastewater treatment.

PubMed

Reddy, Gudigopuram B; Raczkowski, Charles W; Cyrus, Johnsely S; Szogi, Ariel

2016-01-01

Constructed wetlands used for the treatment of swine wastewater may potentially sequester significant amounts of carbon. In past studies, we evaluated the treatment efficiency of wastewater in a marsh-pond-marsh design wetland system. The functionality of this system was highly dependent on soil carbon content and organic matter turnover rate. To better understand system performance and carbon dynamics, we measured plant dry matter, decomposition rates and soil carbon fractions. Plant litter decomposition rate was 0.0052 g day(-1) (±0.00119 g day(-1)) with an estimated half-life of 133 days. The detritus layer accumulated over the soil surface had much more humin than other C fractions. In marsh areas, soil C extracted with NaOH had four to six times higher amounts of humic acid, fulvic acid and humin than soil C extracted by cold and hot water, HCl/HF, and Na pyruvate. In the pond area, humic acid, fulvic acid and humin content were two to four times lower than in the marsh area. More soil C and N was found in the marsh area than in the pond area. These wetlands proved to be large sinks for stable C forms.

Determination of selected neurotoxic insecticides in small amounts of animal tissue utilizing a newly constructed mini-extractor.

PubMed

Seifertová, Marta; Čechová, Eliška; Llansola, Marta; Felipo, Vicente; Vykoukalová, Martina; Kočan, Anton

2017-10-01

We developed a simple analytical method for the simultaneous determination of representatives of various groups of neurotoxic insecticides (carbaryl, chlorpyrifos, cypermethrin, and α-endosulfan and β-endosulfan and their metabolite endosulfan sulfate) in limited amounts of animal tissues containing different amounts of lipids. Selected tissues (rodent fat, liver, and brain) were extracted in a special in-house-designed mini-extractor constructed on the basis of the Soxhlet and Twisselmann extractors. A dried tissue sample placed in a small cartridge was extracted, while the nascent extract was simultaneously filtered through a layer of sodium sulfate. The extraction was followed by combined clean-up, including gel permeation chromatography (in case of high lipid content), ultrasonication, and solid-phase extraction chromatography using C 18 on silica and aluminum oxide. Gas chromatography coupled with high-resolution mass spectrometry was used for analyte separation, detection, and quantification. Average recoveries for individual insecticides ranged from 82 to 111%. Expanded measurement uncertainties were generally lower than 35%. The developed method was successfully applied to rat tissue samples obtained from an animal model dealing with insecticide exposure during brain development. This method may also be applied to the analytical treatment of small amounts of various types of animal and human tissue samples. A significant advantage achieved using this method is high sample throughput due to the simultaneous treatment of many samples. Graphical abstract Optimized workflow for the determination of selected insecticides in small amounts of animal tissue including newly developed mini-extractor.

Performance of multi-aperture grid extraction systems for an ITER-relevant RF-driven negative hydrogen ion source

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Franzen, P.; Gutser, R.; Fantz, U.; Kraus, W.; Falter, H.; Fröschle, M.; Heinemann, B.; McNeely, P.; Nocentini, R.; Riedl, R.; Stäbler, A.; Wünderlich, D.

2011-07-01

The ITER neutral beam system requires a negative hydrogen ion beam of 48 A with an energy of 0.87 MeV, and a negative deuterium beam of 40 A with an energy of 1 MeV. The beam is extracted from a large ion source of dimension 1.9 × 0.9 m2 by an acceleration system consisting of seven grids with 1280 apertures each. Currently, apertures with a diameter of 14 mm in the first grid are foreseen. In 2007, the IPP RF source was chosen as the ITER reference source due to its reduced maintenance compared with arc-driven sources and the successful development at the BATMAN test facility of being equipped with the small IPP prototype RF source ( {\\sim}\\frac{1}{8} of the area of the ITER NBI source). These results, however, were obtained with an extraction system with 8 mm diameter apertures. This paper reports on the comparison of the source performance at BATMAN of an ITER-relevant extraction system equipped with chamfered apertures with a 14 mm diameter and 8 mm diameter aperture extraction system. The most important result is that there is almost no difference in the achieved current density—being consistent with ion trajectory calculations—and the amount of co-extracted electrons. Furthermore, some aspects of the beam optics of both extraction systems are discussed.

Extraction and physicochemical characterization of chitin and chitosan from Zophobas morio larvae in varying sodium hydroxide concentration.

PubMed

Soon, Chu Yong; Tee, Yee Bond; Tan, Choon Hui; Rosnita, Abdul Talib; Khalina, Abdan

2018-03-01

Large amount of sodium hydroxide (NaOH) is consumed to remove the protein content in chitin biomass during deproteinization. However, excessive NaOH concentration used might lead to the reduction of cost effectiveness during chitin extraction. Hence, the present study aimed to extract and evaluate the physicochemical properties of chitin and chitosan isolated from superworm (Zophobas morio) larvae using 0.5M-2.0M of NaOH. The extracted chitin and chitosan were subjected to Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FT-IR), elemental analysis, Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), Thermogravimetric Analysis (TGA), Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) and X-ray Diffraction (XRD). The 0.5M NaOH treatment resulted in the highest yield of chitin (5.43%), but produced the lowest yield (65.84%) of chitosan. The extracted chitin samples had relatively high degree of acetylation (DA) (82.39%-101.39%). Both chitin and chitosan showed smooth surface with tiny pores. The extracted chitin samples were confirmed as α-chitin based on the FT-IR and TGA. The chitin samples were amorphous with low degree of crystallinity. From TGA, the Chitosan 3 extracted was partially deacetylated. Both DPPH radical scavenging and ferric-chelating assay showed positive correlation with DD of chitosan isolates. However, the chitosan isolates were not fully dissolved, resulting in lower radical scavenging and ferric-chelating ability compared to commercial chitosan. Copyright © 2017. Published by Elsevier B.V.

The presence of ergothioneine in the central nervous system and its probable identity with the cerebellar factor

PubMed Central

Crossland, J.; Mitchell, J. F.; Woodruff, G. N.

1966-01-01

1. Ergothioneine has been detected and quantitatively estimated in the brains of mice, rats, guinea-pigs, rabbits, cats and sheep. It is present in the cerebellum in amounts ranging from about 3·0 μg/g in the cat to 10 μg/g in the guinea-pig. Amounts in the cerebral hemispheres are much smaller, ranging from < 0·1 μg/g in the cat to 1·6 μg/g in the guinea-pig. 2. Large amounts of ergothioneine (about 30 μg/g) were found in the optic nerves of the rabbit. None was detected in the dorsal columns of the spinal cord of the same species. 3. Ergothioneine has an excitatory action on the electrical activity of the cerebellum of the decerebrate rabbit and the excitatory actions of cerebellar extracts on this preparation are completely accounted for by their contained ergothioneine. 4. It is concluded that the cerebellar factor of Crossland & Mitchell (1956) is identical with ergothioneine. PMID:5942036

Place in Perspective: Extracting Online Information about Points of Interest

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Alves, Ana O.; Pereira, Francisco C.; Rodrigues, Filipe; Oliveirinha, João

During the last few years, the amount of online descriptive information about places has reached reasonable dimensions for many cities in the world. Being such information mostly in Natural Language text, Information Extraction techniques are needed for obtaining the meaning of places that underlies these massive amounts of commonsense and user made sources. In this article, we show how we automatically label places using Information Extraction techniques applied to online resources such as Wikipedia, Yellow Pages and Yahoo!.

Quantification of individual proteins in silicone hydrogel contact lens deposits

PubMed Central

Zhao, Zhenjun; Zhu, Hua; Tilia, Daniel; Willcox, Mark D.P.

2013-01-01

Purpose The aim of this study was to quantify specific proteins deposited on daily wear silicone hydrogel lenses used in combination with multipurpose disinfecting solutions (MPDSs) by applying multiple-reaction-monitoring mass spectrometry (MRM-MS). Methods Balafilcon A or senofilcon A contact lenses used with different MPDSs on a daily wear schedule were collected. Each worn lens was extracted and then digested with trypsin. MRM-MS was applied to quantify the amounts of lysozyme, lactoferrin, lipocalin-1, proline-rich protein-4, and keratin-1 in the extracts. Results The amount of protein extracted from the contact lenses was affected by the individual wearers, lens material, and type of care system used. Higher amounts of proteins were extracted from lenses after wear when they were used with an MPDS containing polyhexamethylene biguanide (PHMB) and poloxamer 407 compared with MPDSs containing polyquaternium-1 (PQ-1)/alexidine dihydrochloride with Tetronic 904 or PQ-1/ PHMB with poloxamine and sulfobetaine (p<0.05). There was a correlation between the amount of lipocalin-1 or keratin-1 extracted from lenses and symptoms of ocular dryness. Conclusions The MRM-MS technique is a promising approach that could be used to reveal associations of individual proteins deposited on lenses with performance of contact lenses during wear. PMID:23441110

Nitrate capture and slow release in biochar amended compost and soil.

PubMed

Hagemann, Nikolas; Kammann, Claudia I; Schmidt, Hans-Peter; Kappler, Andreas; Behrens, Sebastian

2017-01-01

Slow release of nitrate by charred organic matter used as a soil amendment (i.e. biochar) was recently suggested as potential mechanism of nutrient delivery to plants which may explain some agronomic benefits of biochar. So far, isolated soil-aged and composted biochar particles were shown to release considerable amounts of nitrate only in extended (>1 h) extractions ("slow release"). In this study, we quantified nitrate and ammonium release by biochar-amended soil and compost during up to 167 h of repeated extractions in up to six consecutive steps to determine the effect of biochar on the overall mineral nitrogen retention. We used composts produced from mixed manures amended with three contrasting biochars prior to aerobic composting and a loamy soil that was amended with biochar three years prior to analysis and compared both to non-biochar amended controls. Composts were extracted with 2 M KCl at 22°C and 65°C, after sterilization, after treatment with H2O2, after removing biochar particles or without any modification. Soils were extracted with 2 M KCl at 22°C. Ammonium was continuously released during the extractions, independent of biochar amendment and is probably the result of abiotic ammonification. For the pure compost, nitrate extraction was complete after 1 h, while from biochar-amended composts, up to 30% of total nitrate extracted was only released during subsequent extraction steps. The loamy soil released 70% of its total nitrate amount in subsequent extractions, the biochar-amended soil 58%. However, biochar amendment doubled the amount of total extractable nitrate. Thus, biochar nitrate capture can be a relevant contribution to the overall nitrate retention in agroecosystems. Our results also indicate that the total nitrate amount in biochar amended soils and composts may frequently be underestimated. Furthermore, biochars could prevent nitrate loss from agroecosystems and may be developed into slow-release fertilizers to reduce global N fertilizer demands.

Nitrate capture and slow release in biochar amended compost and soil

PubMed Central

Kammann, Claudia I.; Schmidt, Hans-Peter; Kappler, Andreas; Behrens, Sebastian

2017-01-01

Slow release of nitrate by charred organic matter used as a soil amendment (i.e. biochar) was recently suggested as potential mechanism of nutrient delivery to plants which may explain some agronomic benefits of biochar. So far, isolated soil-aged and composted biochar particles were shown to release considerable amounts of nitrate only in extended (>1 h) extractions (“slow release”). In this study, we quantified nitrate and ammonium release by biochar-amended soil and compost during up to 167 h of repeated extractions in up to six consecutive steps to determine the effect of biochar on the overall mineral nitrogen retention. We used composts produced from mixed manures amended with three contrasting biochars prior to aerobic composting and a loamy soil that was amended with biochar three years prior to analysis and compared both to non-biochar amended controls. Composts were extracted with 2 M KCl at 22°C and 65°C, after sterilization, after treatment with H2O2, after removing biochar particles or without any modification. Soils were extracted with 2 M KCl at 22°C. Ammonium was continuously released during the extractions, independent of biochar amendment and is probably the result of abiotic ammonification. For the pure compost, nitrate extraction was complete after 1 h, while from biochar-amended composts, up to 30% of total nitrate extracted was only released during subsequent extraction steps. The loamy soil released 70% of its total nitrate amount in subsequent extractions, the biochar-amended soil 58%. However, biochar amendment doubled the amount of total extractable nitrate. Thus, biochar nitrate capture can be a relevant contribution to the overall nitrate retention in agroecosystems. Our results also indicate that the total nitrate amount in biochar amended soils and composts may frequently be underestimated. Furthermore, biochars could prevent nitrate loss from agroecosystems and may be developed into slow-release fertilizers to reduce global N fertilizer demands. PMID:28199354

Determination of trace metals in drinking water using solid-phase extraction disks and X-ray fluorescence spectrometry.

PubMed

Hou, Xiandeng; Peters, Heather L; Yang, Zheng; Wagner, Karl A; Batchelor, James D; Daniel, Meredith M; Jones, Bradley T

2003-03-01

A convenient method is described for monitoring Cd, Ni, Cu, and Pb at trace levels in drinking water samples. These metals are preconcentrated on a chelating solid-phase extraction disk and then determined by X-ray fluorescence spectrometry. The method tolerates a wide pH range (pH 6-14) and a large amount of alkaline and alkaline earth elements. The preconcentration factor is well over 1600, assuming a 1 L water sample volume. The limits of detection for Cd, Ni, Cu, and Pb are 3.8, 0.6, 0.4, and 0.3 ng/mL, respectively. These are well below the federal maximum contaminant level values, which are 5, 100, 1300, and 15 ng/mL, respectively. The proposed method has many advantages including ease of operation, multielement capability, nondestructiveness, high sensitivity, and relative cost efficiency. The solid-phase extraction step can be conducted in the field and then the disks can be mailed to a laboratory for the analysis, eliminating the cost of transporting large volumes of water samples. Furthermore, the color of the used extraction disk provides an initial estimate of the degree of contamination for some transition metals (for example, Ni and Cu). Thus, the overall cost for analysis of metals in drinking water can be minimized by implementing the method, and small water supply companies with limited budgets will be better able to comply with the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Research on Optimization of GLCM Parameter in Cell Classification

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhang, Xi-Kun; Hou, Jie; Hu, Xin-Hua

2016-05-01

Real-time classification of biological cells according to their 3D morphology is highly desired in a flow cytometer setting. Gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) algorithm has been developed to extract feature parameters from measured diffraction images ,which are too complicated to coordinate with the real-time system for a large amount of calculation. An optimization of GLCM algorithm is provided based on correlation analysis of GLCM parameters. The results of GLCM analysis and subsequent classification demonstrate optimized method can lower the time complexity significantly without loss of classification accuracy.

Amino acids of Diclidophora merlangi (Monogenea).

PubMed

Arme, C; Whyte, A

1975-02-01

The level of free amino acids in Diclidophora merlangi is high, comprising over 500 mu moles/g ethanol extracted dry weight. A single amino acid, proline, constitutes some 70% of the total pool. Analysis of parasite protein and host blood and mucus revealed low proline levels, suggesting that the high free pool content was not related to a requirement for protein systhesis or to its abundance in the diet of the worm. Experiments revealed that proline was not involved specifically in osmoregulation, and the reasons for the large amounts present in Diclidophora remain unknown.

SCP -- A Simple CCD Processing Package

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lewis, J. R.

This note describes a small set of programs, written at RGO, which deal with basic CCD frame processing (e.g. bias subtraction, flat fielding, trimming etc.). The need to process large numbers of CCD frames from devices such as FOS or ISIS in order to extract spectra has prompted the writing of routines which will do the basic hack-work with a minimal amount of interaction from the user. Although they were written with spectral data in mind, there are no ``spectrum-specific'' features in the software which means they can be applied to any CCD data.

Analysis of the Growth Process of Neural Cells in Culture Environment Using Image Processing Techniques

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mirsafianf, Atefeh S.; Isfahani, Shirin N.; Kasaei, Shohreh; Mobasheri, Hamid

Here we present an approach for processing neural cells images to analyze their growth process in culture environment. We have applied several image processing techniques for: 1- Environmental noise reduction, 2- Neural cells segmentation, 3- Neural cells classification based on their dendrites' growth conditions, and 4- neurons' features Extraction and measurement (e.g., like cell body area, number of dendrites, axon's length, and so on). Due to the large amount of noise in the images, we have used feed forward artificial neural networks to detect edges more precisely.

CFD Analysis of Flexible Thermal Protection System Shear Configuration Testing in the LCAT Facility

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Ferlemann, Paul G.

2014-01-01

This paper documents results of computational analysis performed after flexible thermal protection system shear configuration testing in the LCAT facility. The primary objectives were to predict the shear force on the sample and the sensitivity of all surface properties to the shape of the sample. Bumps of 0.05, 0.10,and 0.15 inches were created to approximate the shape of some fabric samples during testing. A large amount of information was extracted from the CFD solutions for comparison between runs and also current or future flight simulations.

Accelerated solvent extraction combined with solid phase extraction for the determination of organophosphate esters from sewage sludge compost by UHPLC-MS/MS.

PubMed

Pang, Long; Yang, Peijie; Ge, Liming; Du, Jingjing; Zhang, Hongzhong

2017-02-01

Organophosphate esters (OPEs), widely used as flame retardants and plasticizers, are regarded as emerging pollutants. OPEs are prone to concentrate into residual activated sludge, which might cause secondary pollution if not suitably treated. Composting is an economical and effective approach to make sewage sludge stable and harmless. Therefore, it is essential to develop a novel method for analyzing OPEs in sewage sludge compost samples. However, in the composting process, large amounts of amendments are doped into the sludge to adjust the carbon-nitrogen ratio. Amendment has a strong capacity for adsorption and thus induces a decrease of extraction efficiency. This study developed a novel procedure for determining OPEs in compost samples. Accelerated solvent extraction (ASE) and solid phase extraction (SPE) were used for extracting and concentrating the OPEs from sewage sludge compost samples, and then analyzed by UHPLC-MS/MS. Some parameters were optimized in this study, mainly including the extraction solvent type, extraction temperature, static extraction time, extraction cycles, and flush volume. Under the optimal conditions, the proposed method showed good linearity between 0.50 and 100 μg kg -1 with regression coefficients in the range of 0.9984-0.9998. Detection limits were in the range of 0.02-3 μg kg -1 with standard deviations ranging from 2 to 6%. Acceptable recoveries between 56 and 119% for samples spiked at different concentration levels were achieved. In contrast, the recoveries merely ranged from 24 to 58% by using ultrasonic-assisted extraction. Graphical abstract A comparison of recoveries between ultrasonic-assisted extraction (UAS) and accelerated solvent extraction (ASE) for organophosphate esters from sewage sludge compost samples.

Chelating resin immobilizing carboxymethylated polyethyleneimine for selective solid-phase extraction of trace elements: Effect of the molecular weight of polyethyleneimine and its carboxymethylation rate.

PubMed

Kagaya, Shigehiro; Kajiwara, Takehiro; Gemmei-Ide, Makoto; Kamichatani, Waka; Inoue, Yoshinori

2016-01-15

The effect of the molecular weight of polyethyleneimine (PEI), defined as a compound having two or more ethyleneamine units, and of its carboxymethylation rate (CM/N), represented by the ratio of ion-exchange capacity to the amount of N on the resin, on the selective solid-phase extraction ability of the chelating resin immobilizing carboxymethylated (CM) PEI was investigated. The chelating resins (24 types) were prepared by immobilization of diethylenetriamine, triethylenetetramine, tetraethylenepentamine, pentaethylenehexamine, PEI300 (MW=ca. 300), and PEI600 (MW=ca. 600) on methacrylate resins, followed by carboxymethylation with various amounts of sodium monochloroacetate. When resins with approximately the same CM/N ratio (0.242-0.271) were used, the recovery of Cd, Co, Cu, Fe, Ni, Pb, Ti, Zn, and alkaline earth elements increased with increasing the molecular weight of PEIs under acidic and weakly acidic conditions; however, the extraction behavior of Mo and V was only slightly affected. This was probably due to the increase in N content of the resin, resulting in an increase in carboxylic acid groups; the difference in the molecular weight of PEIs immobilized on the resin exerts an insignificant influence on the selective extraction ability. The CM/N ratio considerably affected the extraction behavior for various elements. Under acidic and neutral conditions, the recovery of Cd, Co, Cu, Fe, Ni, Pb, Ti, and Zn increased with increasing CM/N values. However, under these conditions, the recovery of alkaline earth elements was considerably low when a resin with low CM/N ratio was used. This is presumably attributed to the different stability constants of the complexes of these elements with aminocarboxylic acids and amines, and to the electrostatic repulsion between the elements and the protonated amino groups in the CM-PEI. The recovery of Mo and V decreased or varied with increasing CM/N values, suggesting that the extraction of these elements occurred mainly by the anion-exchange reaction. For the separation and preconcentration of trace elements in samples containing large amounts of alkali and alkaline earth elements, the CM-PEI600 resin with CM/N=0.131 (Cu(II) extraction capacity, 0.37mmol g(-)(1)) was found to be the most suitable because it scarcely extracts alkali and alkaline earth elements under acidic and neutral conditions. This resin proved to be convenient for separating and preconcentrating Cd, Co, Cu, Fe, Mn, Mo, Ni, Pb, V, and Zn in the certified reference materials (EnviroMAT EU-L-1 wastewater and ES-L-1 ground water) and commercially available table salt. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Identification and quantification and antioxidant activity of flavonoids in different strains of silk cocoon, Bombyx mori.

PubMed

Napavichayanun, Supamas; Lutz, Oliver; Fischnaller, Martin; Jakschitz, Thomas; Bonn, Günther; Aramwit, Pornanong

2017-10-01

Silk cocoon is produced from silkworm (Bombyx mori) to protect itself from outer environment. Various strains of cocoon contain different forms and amounts of flavonoids, which may affect on their antioxidant activity. Moreover, the extraction method would influence the amount of flavonoids extracted. Therefore, the objectives of this study were to identify and quantify the flavonoids in 3 strains of bivoltine Bombyx mori silk cocoon (Chul 1/1; white cocoon, Chul 3/2; greenish cocoon, and Chul 4/2; yellow cocoon) extracted by 6 different solvents including acetone, ethyl acetate, dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), ethanol, methanol, and purified water. The flavonoids extracted were identified and quantified by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS). The antioxidant activity of flavonoids extracted was also investigated by visible spectroscopy at 517 nm. The results showed that Chul 3/2 silk cocoon contained the highest amount of flavonoids. Purified water seemed to be the best solvent that preserved most antioxidant activity of the flavonoids extracted. Flavonoids in Chul 1/1 and Chul 4/2 silk cocoon were rarely found, however they contained some antioxidant activities. The data from this study can provide basic information for flavonoid extraction from silk cocoon which can also apply for other flavonoid-containing natural biomaterials. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Photoprotective substance occurs primarily in outer layers of fish skin

USGS Publications Warehouse

Fabacher, D.L.; Little, E.E.

1998-01-01

Methanol extracts of dorsal skin layers, eyes, gills, and livers from ultraviolet-B (UVB) radiation-sensitive and UVB-tolerant species of freshwater fish were examined for a substance that appears to be photoprotective. Significantly larger amounts of this substance were found in extracts of outer dorsal skin layers from both UVB-sensitive and UVB-tolerant fish when compared with extracts of inner dorsal skin layers. This substance occurred in minor amounts or was not detected in eye, gill, and liver extracts. The apparent primary function of this substance in fish is to protect the cells in outer dorsal skin layers from harmful levels of UVB radiation.

Photoprotective substance occurs primarily in outer layers of fish skin.

PubMed

Fabacher, D L; Little, E E

1998-01-01

Methanol extracts of dorsal skin layers, eyes, gills, and livers from ultraviolet-B (UVB) radiation-sensitive and UVB-tolerant species of freshwater fish were examined for a substance that appears to be photoprotective. Significantly larger amounts of this substance were found in extracts of outer dorsal skin layers from both UVB-sensitive and UVB-tolerant fish when compared with extracts of inner dorsal skin layers. This substance occurred in minor amounts or was not detected in eye, gill, and liver extracts. The apparent primary function of this substance in fish is to protect the cells in outer dorsal skin layers from harmful levels of UVB radiation.

Microwave superheated water extraction of polysaccharides from spent coffee grounds.

PubMed

Passos, Cláudia P; Coimbra, Manuel A

2013-04-15

The spent coffee grounds (SCG) are a food industry by-product that can be used as a rich source of polysaccharides. In the present work, the feasibility of microwave superheated water extraction of polysaccharides from SCG was studied. Different ratios of mass of SCG to water, from 1:30 to 1:5 (g:mL) were used for a total volume of 80 mL. Although the amount of material extracted/batch (MAE1) increased with the increase of the concentration of the sample, the amount of polysaccharides achieved a maximum of 0.57 g/batch for 1:10. Glycosidic-linkage composition showed that all extraction conditions allowed to obtain mainly arabinogalactans. When the unextracted insoluble material was re-extracted under the same conditions (MAE2), a further extraction of polysaccharides was observed (0.34 g/batch for 1:10), mainly galactomannans. Also, a high amount of oligosaccharides, mainly derived from galactomannans, can be obtained in MAE2 (0.96 g/batch for 1:10). This technology allows to obtain galactomannans and arabinogalactans in proportions that are dependent on the operating conditions. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Macro and micro plastics sorb and desorb metals and act as a point source of trace metals to coastal ecosystems

PubMed Central

2018-01-01

Nine urban intertidal regions in Burrard Inlet, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, were sampled for plastic debris. Debris included macro and micro plastics and originated from a wide diversity of uses ranging from personal hygiene to solar cells. Debris was characterized for its polymer through standard physiochemical characteristics, then subject to a weak acid extraction to remove the metals, zinc, copper, cadmium and lead from the polymer. Recently manufactured low density polyethylene (LDPE), nylon, polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polypropylene (PP), polystyrene (PS) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) were subject to the same extraction. Data was statistically analyzed by appropriate parametric and non-parametric tests when needed with significance set at P < 0.05. Polymers identified in field samples in order of abundance were; PVC (39), LDPE (28), PS (18), polyethylene (PE, 9), PP (8), nylon (8), high density polyethylene (HDPE, 7), polycarbonate (PC, 6), PET (6), polyurethane (PUR, 3) and polyoxymethylene (POM, 2). PVC and LDPE accounted for 46% of all samples. Field samples of PVC, HDPE and LDPE had significantly greater amounts of acid extracted copper and HDPE, LDPE and PUR significantly greater amounts of acid extracted zinc. PVC and LDPE had significantly greater amounts of acid extracted cadmium and PVC tended to have greater levels of acid extracted lead, significantly so for HDPE. Five of the collected items demonstrated extreme levels of acid extracted metal; greatest concentrations were 188, 6667, 698,000 and 930 μgg-1 of copper, zinc, lead and cadmium respectively recovered from an unidentified object comprised of PVC. Comparison of recently manufactured versus field samples indicated that recently manufactured samples had significantly greater amounts of acid extracted cadmium and zinc and field samples significantly greater amounts of acid extracted copper and lead which was primarily attributed to metal extracted from field samples of PVC. Plastic debris will affect metals within coastal ecosystems by; 1) providing a sorption site (copper and lead), notably for PVC 2) desorption from the plastic i.e., the “inherent” load (cadmium and zinc) and 3) serving as a point source of acute trace metal exposure to coastal ecosystems. All three mechanisms will put coastal ecosystems at risk to the toxic effects of these metals. PMID:29444103

Macro and micro plastics sorb and desorb metals and act as a point source of trace metals to coastal ecosystems.

PubMed

Munier, B; Bendell, L I

2018-01-01

Nine urban intertidal regions in Burrard Inlet, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, were sampled for plastic debris. Debris included macro and micro plastics and originated from a wide diversity of uses ranging from personal hygiene to solar cells. Debris was characterized for its polymer through standard physiochemical characteristics, then subject to a weak acid extraction to remove the metals, zinc, copper, cadmium and lead from the polymer. Recently manufactured low density polyethylene (LDPE), nylon, polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polypropylene (PP), polystyrene (PS) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) were subject to the same extraction. Data was statistically analyzed by appropriate parametric and non-parametric tests when needed with significance set at P < 0.05. Polymers identified in field samples in order of abundance were; PVC (39), LDPE (28), PS (18), polyethylene (PE, 9), PP (8), nylon (8), high density polyethylene (HDPE, 7), polycarbonate (PC, 6), PET (6), polyurethane (PUR, 3) and polyoxymethylene (POM, 2). PVC and LDPE accounted for 46% of all samples. Field samples of PVC, HDPE and LDPE had significantly greater amounts of acid extracted copper and HDPE, LDPE and PUR significantly greater amounts of acid extracted zinc. PVC and LDPE had significantly greater amounts of acid extracted cadmium and PVC tended to have greater levels of acid extracted lead, significantly so for HDPE. Five of the collected items demonstrated extreme levels of acid extracted metal; greatest concentrations were 188, 6667, 698,000 and 930 μgg-1 of copper, zinc, lead and cadmium respectively recovered from an unidentified object comprised of PVC. Comparison of recently manufactured versus field samples indicated that recently manufactured samples had significantly greater amounts of acid extracted cadmium and zinc and field samples significantly greater amounts of acid extracted copper and lead which was primarily attributed to metal extracted from field samples of PVC. Plastic debris will affect metals within coastal ecosystems by; 1) providing a sorption site (copper and lead), notably for PVC 2) desorption from the plastic i.e., the "inherent" load (cadmium and zinc) and 3) serving as a point source of acute trace metal exposure to coastal ecosystems. All three mechanisms will put coastal ecosystems at risk to the toxic effects of these metals.

Landscape consequences of natural gas extraction in Bedford, Blair, Cambria, Centre, Clearfield, Clinton, Columbia, Huntingdon, and Luzerne counties, Pennsylvania, 2004-2010

USGS Publications Warehouse

Slonecker, E.T.; Milheim, L.E.; Roig-Silva, C.M.; Winters, S.G.

2014-01-01

Increased demands for cleaner burning energy, coupled with the relatively recent technological advances in accessing unconventional hydrocarbon-rich geologic formations, have led to an intense effort to find and extract natural gas from various underground sources around the country. One of these sources, the Marcellus Shale, located in the Allegheny Plateau, is currently undergoing extensive drilling and production. The technology used to extract gas in the Marcellus Shale is known as hydraulic fracturing and has garnered much attention because of its use of large amounts of fresh water, its use of proprietary fluids for the hydraulic-fracturing process, its potential to release contaminants into the environment, and its potential effect on water resources. Nonetheless, development of natural gas extraction wells in the Marcellus Shale is only part of the overall natural gas story in this area of Pennsylvania. Conventional natural gas wells, which sometimes use the same technique, are commonly located in the same general area as the Marcellus Shale and are frequently developed in clusters across the landscape. The combined effects of these two natural gas extraction methods create potentially serious patterns of disturbance on the landscape. This document quantifies the landscape changes and consequences of natural gas extraction for Bedford, Blair, Cambria, Centre, Clearfield, Clinton, Columbia, Huntingdon, and Luzerne Counties in Pennsylvania between 2004 and 2010. Patterns of landscape disturbance related to natural gas extraction activities were collected and digitized using National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) imagery for 2004, 2005/2006, 2008, and 2010. The disturbance patterns were then used to measure changes in land cover and land use using the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) of 2001. A series of landscape metrics is also used to quantify these changes and is included in this publication. In this region, natural gas development disturbed approximately 943 hectares of land in which forest sustained three times the amount of disturbance as agricultural land. One-quarter of that total disturbance was from Marcellus natural gas development.

Ternary liquid-liquid equilibria for the phenolic compounds extraction from artificial textile industrial waste

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fardhyanti, Dewi Selvia; Prasetiawan, Haniif; Hermawan, Sari, Lelita Sakina

2017-03-01

Liquid waste in textile industry contains large amounts of dyes and chemicals which are capable of harming the environment and human health. It is due to liquid waste characteristics which have high BOD, COD, temperature, dissolved and suspended solid. One of chemical compound which might be harmful for environment when disposed in high concentration is phenol. Currently, Phenol compound in textile industrial waste has reached 10 ppm meanwhile maximum allowable phenol concentration is not more than 0.2 ppm. Otherwise, Phenol also has economic value as feedstock of plastic, pharmaceutical and cosmetic industry. Furthermore, suitable method to separate phenol from waste water is needed. In this research, liquid - liquid extraction method was used with extraction time for 70 minutes. Waste water sample was then separated into two layers which are extract and raffinate. Thereafter, extract and raffinate were then tested by using UV-Vis Spectrophotometer to obtained liquid - liquid equilibrium data. Aim of this research is to study the effect of temperature, stirring speed and type of solvent to obtain distribution coefficient (Kd), phenol yield and correlation of Three-Suffix Margules model for the liquid - liquid extraction data equilibrium. The highest extraction yield at 80.43 % was found by using 70% methanol as solvent at extraction temperature 50 °C with stirring speed 300 rpm, coefficient distribution was found 216.334. From this research it can be concluded that Three-Suffix Margules Model is suitable to predict liquid - liquid equilibrium data for phenol system.

Stevia rebaudiana Bert. leaf extracts as a multifunctional source of natural antioxidants.

PubMed

Gaweł-Bęben, Katarzyna; Bujak, Tomasz; Nizioł-Łukaszewska, Zofia; Antosiewicz, Beata; Jakubczyk, Anna; Karaś, Monika; Rybczyńska, Kamila

2015-03-27

The aim of the presented study was to characterize the content and biological activity of extracts prepared from dried Stevia rebaudiana leaves with potential application in the food or cosmetic industry. Aqueous (A), ethanolic (E) and glycol-aqueous (GA) extracts were analyzed for the content of polyphenols and proteins, showing that the highest amount of phenols (15.50 mg/g) and flavonoids (3.85 mg/g) contained GA. All extracts contained significant amount of protein (69.40-374.67 mg/g). Between analyzed stevia extracts (HPLC) GA contained the highest amount of polyphenols, especially ferulic (5.50 mg/g) and rozmaric (4.95 mg/g) acids derivates. The highest antiradical activity against DPPH• and ABTS•+ was noted for GA and E (IC50 = 0.38 and 0.71 µg flavonoids/mL). The highest ability to chelate Fe2+ was observed for E (IC50 = 2.08 µg flavonoids/mL). Stevia extracts were also analyzed for their cytotoxicity and fibroblast irritation potential in vitro. E and GA were the most cytotoxic and irritating, probably due to the high content of biologically active phytochemicals. On the other hand, a extract was the most tolerable by the cells. To summarize, the presented study evaluated the potential application of A, E and GA stevia extracts as natural source of antioxidants in the food and cosmetic industry.

Magnetic nano graphene oxide as solid phase extraction adsorbent coupled with liquid chromatography to determine pseudoephedrine in urine samples.

PubMed

Taghvimi, Arezou; Hamishehkar, Hamed; Ebrahimi, Mahmoud

2016-01-15

This paper reports on a method based on magnetic solid phase extraction (MSPE) for the determination of pseudoephedrine. Magnetic nanographene oxide (MNGO) was applied as a new adsorbent for the extraction of pseudoephedrine from urine samples. Synthesis of MNGO was characterized by Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), powder X-ray diffraction (XRD), and vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM). The main factors influencing extraction efficiency, including the amounts of sample volume, amount of adsorbent, type and amount of extraction organic solvent, time of extraction and desorption, pH, ionic strength of extraction medium, and agitation rate, were investigated and optimized. Under optimized extraction conditions, a good linearity was observed in the range of 100-2000ng/mL with a correlation coefficient of 0.9908 (r(2)). Limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantification (LOQ) were 25 and 82.7ng/mL, respectively. Inter-day and intra-day precision and accuracy were 6.01 and 0.34 (%), and 8.70 and 0.29 (%), respectively. The method was applied for the determination of pseudoephedrine in urine samples of volunteers receiving pseudoephedrine with the recovery of 96.42. It was concluded that the proposed method can be applied in diagnostic clinics. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Preparation of a novel hyperbranched carbosilane-silica hybrid coating for trace amount detection by solid phase microextraction/gas chromatography.

PubMed

Chen, Guowen; Li, Wenjie; Zhang, Chen; Zhou, Chuanjian; Feng, Shengyu

2012-09-21

Phenyl-ended hyperbranched carbosilane (HBC) is synthesized and immobilized onto the inner wall of a fused silica capillary column using a sol-gel process. The hybrid coating layer formed is used as a stationary phase for gas chromatography (GC) and as an adsorption medium for solid phase microextraction (SPME). Trifluoroacetic acid, as a catalyst in this process, helps produce a homogeneous hybrid coating layer. This result is beneficial for better column chromatographic performances, such as high efficiency and high resolution. Extraction tests using the novel hybrid layer show an extraordinarily large adsorption capacity and specific adsorption behavior for aromatic compounds. A 1 ppm trace level detectability is obtained with the SPME/GC work model when both of the stationary phase and adsorption layer bear a hyperbranched structure. A large amount of phenyl groups and a low viscosity of hyperbranched polymers contribute to these valuable properties, which are important to environment and safety control, wherein detection sensitivity and special adsorption behavior are usually required. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Review of particle-in-cell modeling for the extraction region of large negative hydrogen ion sources for fusion

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wünderlich, D.; Mochalskyy, S.; Montellano, I. M.; Revel, A.

2018-05-01

Particle-in-cell (PIC) codes are used since the early 1960s for calculating self-consistently the motion of charged particles in plasmas, taking into account external electric and magnetic fields as well as the fields created by the particles itself. Due to the used very small time steps (in the order of the inverse plasma frequency) and mesh size, the computational requirements can be very high and they drastically increase with increasing plasma density and size of the calculation domain. Thus, usually small computational domains and/or reduced dimensionality are used. In the last years, the available central processing unit (CPU) power strongly increased. Together with a massive parallelization of the codes, it is now possible to describe in 3D the extraction of charged particles from a plasma, using calculation domains with an edge length of several centimeters, consisting of one extraction aperture, the plasma in direct vicinity of the aperture, and a part of the extraction system. Large negative hydrogen or deuterium ion sources are essential parts of the neutral beam injection (NBI) system in future fusion devices like the international fusion experiment ITER and the demonstration reactor (DEMO). For ITER NBI RF driven sources with a source area of 0.9 × 1.9 m2 and 1280 extraction apertures will be used. The extraction of negative ions is accompanied by the co-extraction of electrons which are deflected onto an electron dump. Typically, the maximum negative extracted ion current is limited by the amount and the temporal instability of the co-extracted electrons, especially for operation in deuterium. Different PIC codes are available for the extraction region of large driven negative ion sources for fusion. Additionally, some effort is ongoing in developing codes that describe in a simplified manner (coarser mesh or reduced dimensionality) the plasma of the whole ion source. The presentation first gives a brief overview of the current status of the ion source development for ITER NBI and of the PIC method. Different PIC codes for the extraction region are introduced as well as the coupling to codes describing the whole source (PIC codes or fluid codes). Presented and discussed are different physical and numerical aspects of applying PIC codes to negative hydrogen ion sources for fusion as well as selected code results. The main focus of future calculations will be the meniscus formation and identifying measures for reducing the co-extracted electrons, in particular for deuterium operation. The recent results of the 3D PIC code ONIX (calculation domain: one extraction aperture and its vicinity) for the ITER prototype source (1/8 size of the ITER NBI source) are presented.

OpenElectrophy: An Electrophysiological Data- and Analysis-Sharing Framework

PubMed Central

Garcia, Samuel; Fourcaud-Trocmé, Nicolas

2008-01-01

Progress in experimental tools and design is allowing the acquisition of increasingly large datasets. Storage, manipulation and efficient analyses of such large amounts of data is now a primary issue. We present OpenElectrophy, an electrophysiological data- and analysis-sharing framework developed to fill this niche. It stores all experiment data and meta-data in a single central MySQL database, and provides a graphic user interface to visualize and explore the data, and a library of functions for user analysis scripting in Python. It implements multiple spike-sorting methods, and oscillation detection based on the ridge extraction methods due to Roux et al. (2007). OpenElectrophy is open source and is freely available for download at http://neuralensemble.org/trac/OpenElectrophy. PMID:19521545

Autoshaped head poking in the mouse: a quantitative analysis of the learning curve.

PubMed

Papachristos, Efstathios B; Gallistel, C R

2006-05-01

In autoshaping experiments, we quantified the acquisition of anticipatory head poking in individual mice, using an algorithm that finds changes in the slope of a cumulative record. In most mice, upward changes in the amount of anticipatory poking per trial were abrupt, and tended to occur at session boundaries, suggesting that the session is as significant a unit of experience as the trial. There were large individual differences in the latency to the onset of vigorous responding. "Asymptotic" performance was unstable; large, bidirectional, and relatively enduring changes were common. Given the characteristics of the individual learning curves, it is unlikely that physiologically meaningful estimates of rate of learning can be extracted from group-average learning curves.

Autoshaped Head Poking in the Mouse: A Quantitative Analysis of the Learning Curve

PubMed Central

Papachristos, Efstathios B; Gallistel, C.R

2006-01-01

In autoshaping experiments, we quantified the acquisition of anticipatory head poking in individual mice, using an algorithm that finds changes in the slope of a cumulative record. In most mice, upward changes in the amount of anticipatory poking per trial were abrupt, and tended to occur at session boundaries, suggesting that the session is as significant a unit of experience as the trial. There were large individual differences in the latency to the onset of vigorous responding. “Asymptotic” performance was unstable; large, bidirectional, and relatively enduring changes were common. Given the characteristics of the individual learning curves, it is unlikely that physiologically meaningful estimates of rate of learning can be extracted from group-average learning curves. PMID:16776053

Machine learning for Big Data analytics in plants.

PubMed

Ma, Chuang; Zhang, Hao Helen; Wang, Xiangfeng

2014-12-01

Rapid advances in high-throughput genomic technology have enabled biology to enter the era of 'Big Data' (large datasets). The plant science community not only needs to build its own Big-Data-compatible parallel computing and data management infrastructures, but also to seek novel analytical paradigms to extract information from the overwhelming amounts of data. Machine learning offers promising computational and analytical solutions for the integrative analysis of large, heterogeneous and unstructured datasets on the Big-Data scale, and is gradually gaining popularity in biology. This review introduces the basic concepts and procedures of machine-learning applications and envisages how machine learning could interface with Big Data technology to facilitate basic research and biotechnology in the plant sciences. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

In vitro digestion with bile acids enhances the bioaccessibility of kale polyphenols.

PubMed

Yang, Isabelle; Jayaprakasha, Guddarangavvanahally K; Patil, Bhimanagouda

2018-02-21

Kale (Brassica oleracea) is a leafy green vegetable belonging to the Brassicaceae family, and kale leaves have large amounts of dietary fiber and polyphenolics. Dietary fiber can bind bile acids, thus potentially decreasing cholesterol levels; however, whether the polyphenols from kale contribute to in vitro bile acid binding capacity remains unclear. In the present study, kale was extracted with hexane, acetone, and MeOH : water and the dried extracts, as well as the fiber-rich residue, were tested for their bile acid binding capacity. The fiber-rich residue bound total bile acids in amounts equivalent to that bound by raw kale. The lyophilized acetone extract bound significantly more glycochenodeoxycholate and glycodeoxycholate and less of other bile acids. To test whether bile acid binding enhanced the bioaccessibility of polyphenolic compounds from kale, we used ultra-performance liquid chromatography coupled with electrospray ionization/quadrupole-time-of-flight mass spectrometry to identify chemical constituents and measure their bioaccessibility in an in vitro digestion reaction. This identified 36 phenolic compounds in kale, including 18 kaempferol derivatives, 13 quercetin derivatives, 4 sinapoyl derivatives, and one caffeoylquinic acid. The bioaccessibility of these phenolics was significantly higher (69.4%) in digestions with bile acids. Moreover, bile acids enhanced the bioaccessibility of quercetin by 25 times: only 2.7% of quercetin derivatives were bioaccessible in the digestion without bile acids, but with bile acids, their accessibility increased to 69.5%. Bile acids increased the bioaccessibility of kaempferol from 37.7% to 69.2%. The extractability and biostability of total phenolics in the digested residue increased 1.8 fold in the digestions with bile acids. These results demonstrated the potential use of kale to improve human health.

Kaempferia parviflora, a plant used in traditional medicine to enhance sexual performance contains large amounts of low affinity PDE5 inhibitors

PubMed Central

Temkitthawon, Prapapan; Hinds, Thomas R.; Beavo, Joseph A.; Viyoch, Jarupa; Suwanborirux, Khanit; Pongamornkul, Wittaya; Sawasdee, Pattara; Ingkaninan, Kornkanok

2014-01-01

Aim of the study A number of medicinal plants are used in traditional medicine to treat erectile dysfunction. Since cyclic nucleotide PDEs inhibitors underlie several current treatments for this condition, we sought to show whether these plants might contain substantial amounts of PDE5 inhibitors. Materials and methods Forty one plant extracts and eight 7-methoxyflavones from Kaempferia parviflora Wall. ex Baker were screened for PDE5 and PDE6 inhibitory activities using the two-step radioactive assay. The PDE5 and PDE6 were prepared from mice lung and chicken retinas, respectively. All plant extracts were tested at 50 μg/ml whereas the pure compounds were tested at 10 μM. Results From forty one plant extracts tested, four showed the PDE5 inhibitory effect. The chemical constituents isolated from rhizomes of Kaempferia parviflora were further investigated on inhibitory activity against PDE5 and PDE6. The results showed that 7-methoxyflavones from this plant showed inhibition toward both enzymes. The most potent PDE5 inhibitor was 5,7-dimethoxyflavone (IC50 = 10.64 ± 2.09 μM, selectivity on PDE5 over PDE6 = 3.71). Structure activity relationship showed that the methoxyl group at C-5 position of 7-methoxyflavones was necessary for PDE5 inhibition. Conclusions Kaempferia parviflora rhizome extract and its 7-methoxyflavone constituents had moderate inhibitory activity against PDE5. This finding provides an explanation for enhancing sexual performance in the traditional use of Kaempferia parviflora. Moreover, 5,7-dimethoxyflavones should make a useful lead compound to further develop clinically efficacious PDE5 inhibitors. PMID:21884777

Adsorption and desorption of ammonium by maple wood biochar as a function of oxidation and pH.

PubMed

Wang, Bing; Lehmann, Johannes; Hanley, Kelly; Hestrin, Rachel; Enders, Akio

2015-11-01

The objective of this work was to investigate the retention mechanisms of ammonium in aqueous solution by using progressively oxidized maple wood biochar at different pH values. Hydrogen peroxide was used to oxidize the biochar to pH values ranging from 8.1 to 3.7, with one set being adjusted to a pH of 7 afterwards. Oxidizing the biochars at their lowered pH did not increase their ability to adsorb ammonium. However, neutralizing the oxygen-containing surface functional groups on oxidized biochar to pH 7 increased ammonia adsorption two to three-fold for biochars originally at pH 3.7-6, but did not change adsorption of biochars oxidized to pH 7 and above. The adsorption characteristics of ammonium are well described by the Freundlich equation. Adsorption was not fully reversible in water, and less than 27% ammonium was desorbed in water in two consecutive steps than previously adsorbed, for biochars with a pH below 7, irrespective of oxidation. Recovery using an extraction with 2M KCl increased from 34% to 99% of ammonium undesorbed by both preceding water extractions with increasing oxidation, largely irrespective of pH adjustment. Unrecovered ammonium in all extractions and residual biochar was negligible at high oxidation, but increased to 39% of initially adsorbed amounts at high pH, likely due to low amounts adsorbed and possible ammonia volatilization losses. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Local-search based prediction of medical image registration error

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Saygili, Görkem

2018-03-01

Medical image registration is a crucial task in many different medical imaging applications. Hence, considerable amount of work has been published recently that aim to predict the error in a registration without any human effort. If provided, these error predictions can be used as a feedback to the registration algorithm to further improve its performance. Recent methods generally start with extracting image-based and deformation-based features, then apply feature pooling and finally train a Random Forest (RF) regressor to predict the real registration error. Image-based features can be calculated after applying a single registration but provide limited accuracy whereas deformation-based features such as variation of deformation vector field may require up to 20 registrations which is a considerably high time-consuming task. This paper proposes to use extracted features from a local search algorithm as image-based features to estimate the error of a registration. The proposed method comprises a local search algorithm to find corresponding voxels between registered image pairs and based on the amount of shifts and stereo confidence measures, it predicts the amount of registration error in millimetres densely using a RF regressor. Compared to other algorithms in the literature, the proposed algorithm does not require multiple registrations, can be efficiently implemented on a Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) and can still provide highly accurate error predictions in existence of large registration error. Experimental results with real registrations on a public dataset indicate a substantially high accuracy achieved by using features from the local search algorithm.

Comparison and optimization of detection methods for noroviruses in frozen strawberries containing different amounts of RT-PCR inhibitors.

PubMed

Bartsch, Christina; Szabo, Kathrin; Dinh-Thanh, Mai; Schrader, Christina; Trojnar, Eva; Johne, Reimar

2016-12-01

Frozen berries have been repeatedly identified as vehicles for norovirus (NoV) transmission causing large gastroenteritis outbreaks. However, virus detection in berries is often hampered by the presence of RT-PCR-inhibiting substances. Here, several virus extraction methods for subsequent real-time RT-PCR-based NoV-RNA detection in strawberries were compared and optimized. NoV recovery rates (RRs) between 0.21 ± 0.13% and 10.29 ± 6.03% were found when five different artificially contaminated strawberry batches were analyzed by the ISO/TS15216-2 method indicating the presence of different amounts of RT-PCR inhibitors. A comparison of five different virus extraction methods using artificially contaminated strawberries containing high amounts of RT-PCR inhibitors revealed the best NoV RRs for the ISO/TS15216 method. Further improvement of NoV RRs from 2.83 ± 2.92% to 15.28 ± 9.73% was achieved by the additional use of Sephacryl(®)-based columns for RNA purification. Testing of 22 frozen strawberry samples from a batch involved in a gastroenteritis outbreak resulted in 5 vs. 13 NoV GI-positive and in 9 vs. 20 NoV GII-positive samples using the original ISO/TS15216 method vs. the extended protocol, respectively. It can be concluded that the inclusion of an additional RNA purification step can increase NoV detection by the ISO/TS15216-2 method in frozen berries containing high amounts of RT-PCR inhibitors. Copyright © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Ultrasound-assisted extraction of bioactive compounds from lemon balm and peppermint leaves

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Šic Žlabur, Jana; Voća, Sandra; Dobričević, Nadica; Pliestić, Stjepan; Galić, Ante; Boričević, Ana; Borić, Nataša

2016-01-01

The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of conventional and ultrasound-assisted extraction (frequency, time, temperature) on the content of bioactive compounds as well as on the antioxidant activity of aqueous extracts from fresh lemon balm and peppermint leaves. Total phenols, flavonoids, non-flavonoids, total chlorophylls, total carotenoids, and radical scavenging capacity were determined. Moreover, the relationship between bioactive compounds and antioxidant capacity was studied by linear regression. A significant increase in all studied bioactive compounds during ultrasonic extraction for 5 to 20 min was found. With the classical extraction method, the highest amounts of total phenols, flavonoids, and antioxidant activity were determined, and the maximum amounts of total chlorophylls and carotenoids were determined during 20 min ultrasonic extraction. The correlation analysis revealed a strong, positive relationship between antioxidant activity and total phenolic compounds.

Query-oriented evidence extraction to support evidence-based medicine practice.

PubMed

Sarker, Abeed; Mollá, Diego; Paris, Cecile

2016-02-01

Evidence-based medicine practice requires medical practitioners to rely on the best available evidence, in addition to their expertise, when making clinical decisions. The medical domain boasts a large amount of published medical research data, indexed in various medical databases such as MEDLINE. As the size of this data grows, practitioners increasingly face the problem of information overload, and past research has established the time-associated obstacles faced by evidence-based medicine practitioners. In this paper, we focus on the problem of automatic text summarisation to help practitioners quickly find query-focused information from relevant documents. We utilise an annotated corpus that is specialised for the task of evidence-based summarisation of text. In contrast to past summarisation approaches, which mostly rely on surface level features to identify salient pieces of texts that form the summaries, our approach focuses on the use of corpus-based statistics, and domain-specific lexical knowledge for the identification of summary contents. We also apply a target-sentence-specific summarisation technique that reduces the problem of underfitting that persists in generic summarisation models. In automatic evaluations run over a large number of annotated summaries, our extractive summarisation technique statistically outperforms various baseline and benchmark summarisation models with a percentile rank of 96.8%. A manual evaluation shows that our extractive summarisation approach is capable of selecting content with high recall and precision, and may thus be used to generate bottom-line answers to practitioners' queries. Our research shows that the incorporation of specialised data and domain-specific knowledge can significantly improve text summarisation performance in the medical domain. Due to the vast amounts of medical text available, and the high growth of this form of data, we suspect that such summarisation techniques will address the time-related obstacles associated with evidence-based medicine. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Analysis of inorganic and organic constituents of myrrh resin by GC-MS and ICP-MS: An emphasis on medicinal assets.

PubMed

Ahamad, Syed Rizwan; Al-Ghadeer, Abdul Rahman; Ali, Raisuddin; Qamar, Wajhul; Aljarboa, Suliman

2017-07-01

The aim of the present investigation was to explore the constituents of the Arabian myrrh resin obtained from Commiphora myrrha. The organic and inorganic composition of the myrrh gum resin has been investigated using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). Analysis executed by ICP-MS reveals the presence of various inorganic elements in significant amount in the myrrh resin. The elements that were found to be present in large amounts include calcium, magnesium, aluminum, phosphorus, chlorine, chromium, bromine and scandium. The important organic constituents identified in the myrrh ethanolic extract include limonene, curzerene, germacrene B, isocericenine, myrcenol, beta selinene, and spathulenol,. The present work complements other myrrh associated investigations done in the past and provides additional data for the future researches.

[Study on extraction process of zhanjin ruji].

PubMed

Du, Zhi-qian; Du, Tian-xin; Wang, Zhong-dong; Li, Gen-lin

2003-01-01

To select the optimum extraction process of Zhanjin Ruji. To observe influence of extraction time upon the extraction rate of volatile oil, the orthogonal test was adopted to observe the extraction process by alcohol from the extraction rate and content of the total saponins in Radix Notoginseng. The three kinds of herbs including Radix Angelicae Sinensis, Resina Olibani and Myrrha were extracted with water for 3 hours, 95% of volatile oil can be distilled. The three kinds of herbs including Radix Notoginseng, Herba Lycopodii and Radix Gentianae Macrophyllac were extracted by alcohol. Four factors such as alcohol concentration(A), extraction times(B), extraction time(C), and solvent amount(D), had not significant effect on the content of total saponins in Radix Notoginseng in herbal extraction, but factor A and B had significant effect on the extraction rate. The optimum extraction process was as follows extracted with 5 times the amount of the solvent volum 60% alcohol for 3 times and with each time for 1 hour. Three times experiments showed that the extraction rate was 26.5% and the content of the total saponins in Radix Notoginseng was 17.28% mg.g-1. The above experimental results can provide experimental basis for deciding the extraction process of Zhanjin Ruji.

High-performance computing in image registration

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zanin, Michele; Remondino, Fabio; Dalla Mura, Mauro

2012-10-01

Thanks to the recent technological advances, a large variety of image data is at our disposal with variable geometric, radiometric and temporal resolution. In many applications the processing of such images needs high performance computing techniques in order to deliver timely responses e.g. for rapid decisions or real-time actions. Thus, parallel or distributed computing methods, Digital Signal Processor (DSP) architectures, Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) programming and Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices have become essential tools for the challenging issue of processing large amount of geo-data. The article focuses on the processing and registration of large datasets of terrestrial and aerial images for 3D reconstruction, diagnostic purposes and monitoring of the environment. For the image alignment procedure, sets of corresponding feature points need to be automatically extracted in order to successively compute the geometric transformation that aligns the data. The feature extraction and matching are ones of the most computationally demanding operations in the processing chain thus, a great degree of automation and speed is mandatory. The details of the implemented operations (named LARES) exploiting parallel architectures and GPU are thus presented. The innovative aspects of the implementation are (i) the effectiveness on a large variety of unorganized and complex datasets, (ii) capability to work with high-resolution images and (iii) the speed of the computations. Examples and comparisons with standard CPU processing are also reported and commented.

Diabetic retinopathy grading by digital curvelet transform.

PubMed

Hajeb Mohammad Alipour, Shirin; Rabbani, Hossein; Akhlaghi, Mohammad Reza

2012-01-01

One of the major complications of diabetes is diabetic retinopathy. As manual analysis and diagnosis of large amount of images are time consuming, automatic detection and grading of diabetic retinopathy are desired. In this paper, we use fundus fluorescein angiography and color fundus images simultaneously, extract 6 features employing curvelet transform, and feed them to support vector machine in order to determine diabetic retinopathy severity stages. These features are area of blood vessels, area, regularity of foveal avascular zone, and the number of micro-aneurisms therein, total number of micro-aneurisms, and area of exudates. In order to extract exudates and vessels, we respectively modify curvelet coefficients of color fundus images and angiograms. The end points of extracted vessels in predefined region of interest based on optic disk are connected together to segment foveal avascular zone region. To extract micro-aneurisms from angiogram, first extracted vessels are subtracted from original image, and after removing detected background by morphological operators and enhancing bright small pixels, micro-aneurisms are detected. 70 patients were involved in this study to classify diabetic retinopathy into 3 groups, that is, (1) no diabetic retinopathy, (2) mild/moderate nonproliferative diabetic retinopathy, (3) severe nonproliferative/proliferative diabetic retinopathy, and our simulations show that the proposed system has sensitivity and specificity of 100% for grading.

[Analysis of methylmercury in biological guano by the optimized atomic fluorescence spectrometry coupled with microwave assisted extraction].

PubMed

Chen, Qian-Qian; Liu, Xiao-Dong; Sun, Li-Guang; Jiang, Shan; Yan, Hong; Liu, Yi; Luo, Yu-Han; Huang, Jing

2011-01-01

The analytical method for the determination of methylmercury in seabird excrements was established using atomic fluorescence spectrometry coupled with microwave-assisted extraction In general, temperature and hydrochloric amount are the most important influencing factors on the extraction of MeHg in the samples, and the present paper optimized these two parameters. The result showed that 120 degrees C and 200 microL 6 mol x L(-1) hydrochloric acid are the best extraction conditions. Under these experimental conditions, the relative standard deviation (RSD) values of reduplicative analyses on standard reference material (human hair powder) and the same seabird excrement sample were 0.74% and 6.61% respectively, and their percent recoveries were over 90%. The combination of microwave-assisted extraction and atomic fluorescence spectrometry has many advantages such as simple operation, high sensitivity, low detection limit and low cost, therefore, it is suitable for rapid separation and analysis of trace methylmercury composition in the biological guanos. Using this method, we analyzed the methylmercury contents in the ancient and fresh seabird droppings taken from Xisha Islands of South China Sea, and the result showed that the Xisha guanos were rich in methylmercury and the large input of seabird guanos will cause serious environmental contamination in the remote island ecosystem of Xisha Islands.

Bioavailable Citrus sinensis Extract: Polyphenolic Composition and Biological Activity.

PubMed

Pepe, Giacomo; Pagano, Francesco; Adesso, Simona; Sommella, Eduardo; Ostacolo, Carmine; Manfra, Michele; Chieppa, Marcello; Sala, Marina; Russo, Mariateresa; Marzocco, Stefania; Campiglia, Pietro

2017-04-15

Citrus plants contain large amounts of flavonoids with beneficial effects on human health. In the present study, the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory potential of bioavailable polyphenols from Citrus sinensis was evaluated in vitro and ex vivo, using the murine macrophages cell line J774A.1 and primary peritoneal macrophages. Following simulated gastro-intestinal digestion, the in vitro bioavailability of Citrus sinensis polyphenolic extract was assessed using the human cell line Caco-2 grown as monolayers on a transwell membrane. Data demonstrated a relative permeation of its compounds (8.3%). Thus, the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effect of polyphenolic Citrus sinensis fraction (Cs) was compared to the bioavailable one (CsB). Results revealed that Citrus extract were able to reduce macrophages pro-inflammatory mediators, including nitric oxide, iNOS, COX-2 and different cytokines. Moreover, the effect of Citrus sinensis polyphenols was associated with antioxidant effects, such as a reduction of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and heme-oxygenase-1 (HO-1) increased expression. Our results provide evidence that the bioavailable polyphenolic constituents of the Citrus sinensis extract accumulate prevalently at intestinal level and could reach systemic circulation exerting their effect. The bioavailable fraction showed a higher anti-inflammatory and antioxidant potential compared to the initial extract, thus highlighting its potential nutraceutical value.

Comparison of Psilocybe cubensis spore and mycelium allergens.

PubMed

Helbling, A; Horner, W E; Lehrer, S B

1993-05-01

Basidiospores are an important cause of respiratory allergy in mold-sensitive atopic subjects. Collection of the large amounts of spores required for extract preparation is tedious and difficult. A desirable alternative could be mycelium grown in vitro if it is allergenically similar to spores. Therefore this study compared the allergen contents of Psilocybe cubensis spore and mycelium extracts by different techniques with the use of pooled sera from subjects who had skin test and RAST results that were positive to P. cubensis spores. Isoelectric focusing immunoprints revealed six common IgE-binding bands at isoelectric points 4.7, 5.0, 5.5, 5.6, 8.7, and 9.3. Two additional bands at isoelectric points 3.9 and 5.7 were detected only in the spore extract. Sodium dodecylsulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis immunoblots exhibited six common IgE-binding bands at 16, 35, 487, 52, 62, and 76 kd; 20 and 40 kd bands were present only in the spore extract. Although RAST and isoelectric focusing inhibition demonstrated that P. cubensis spore and mycelium extracts share many allergens, spores were allergenically more potent than mycelium. The results indicate that mycelium is a useful source of P. cubensis allergen, even though several spore allergens were not detected in mycelium.

Polyphenol-Retaining Decaffeinated Cocoa Powder Obtained by Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Extraction and Its Antioxidant Activity

PubMed Central

Kobori, Kinji; Maruta, Yuto; Mineo, Shigeru; Shigematsu, Toru; Hirayama, Masao

2013-01-01

Cocoa beans contain many functional ingredients such as theobromine and polyphenols, but also contain a relatively high amount of caffeine, which can negatively impact human health. It is therefore desirable to reduce caffeine levels in cocoa powder used to make chocolate or cocoa beverages while retaining functional ingredients. We have established conditions for supercritical carbon dioxide (SCCO2) extraction that remove 80.1% of the caffeine from cocoa powder while retaining theobromine (94.1%) and polyphenols (84.7%). The antioxidant activity of the decaffeinated cocoa powder (DCP) made with this optimized SCCO2 extraction method was 85.3% that of non-processed cocoa powder. The total procyanidin and total polyphenol concentrations of the DCPs resulting from various SCCO2 extractions showed a significant positive correlation with oxygen radical absorbance capacity (ORAC). The correlation coefficient between total polyphenols and ORAC was higher than that between total procyanidins and ORAC; thus, the concentration of total polyphenols might be a greater factor in the antioxidant activity of DCP. These results indicate that we could remove large quantities of caffeine from conventional high-cocoa products while retaining the functional benefits of high polyphenol content. This SCCO2 extraction method is expected to be applicable high-cocoa products, such as dark chocolate. PMID:28239130

Sequential protein extraction as an efficient method for improved proteome coverage in larvae of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar).

PubMed

Nuez-Ortín, Waldo G; Carter, Chris G; Nichols, Peter D; Wilson, Richard

2016-07-01

Understanding diet- and environmentally induced physiological changes in fish larvae is a major goal for the aquaculture industry. Proteomic analysis of whole fish larvae comprising multiple tissues offers considerable potential but is challenging due to the very large dynamic range of protein abundance. To extend the coverage of the larval phase of the Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) proteome, we applied a two-step sequential extraction (SE) method, based on differential protein solubility, using a nondenaturing buffer containing 150 mM NaCl followed by a denaturing buffer containing 7 M urea and 2 M thiourea. Extracts prepared using SE and one-step direct extraction were characterized via label-free shotgun proteomics using nanoLC-MS/MS (LTQ-Orbitrap). SE partitioned the proteins into two fractions of approximately equal amounts, but with very distinct protein composition, leading to identification of ∼40% more proteins than direct extraction. This fractionation strategy enabled the most detailed characterization of the salmon larval proteome to date and provides a platform for greater understanding of physiological changes in whole fish larvae. The MS data are available via the ProteomeXchange Consortium PRIDE partner repository, dataset PXD003366. © 2016 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Polyphenol-Retaining Decaffeinated Cocoa Powder Obtained by Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Extraction and Its Antioxidant Activity.

PubMed

Kobori, Kinji; Maruta, Yuto; Mineo, Shigeru; Shigematsu, Toru; Hirayama, Masao

2013-10-14

Cocoa beans contain many functional ingredients such as theobromine and polyphenols, but also contain a relatively high amount of caffeine, which can negatively impact human health. It is therefore desirable to reduce caffeine levels in cocoa powder used to make chocolate or cocoa beverages while retaining functional ingredients. We have established conditions for supercritical carbon dioxide (SCCO₂) extraction that remove 80.1% of the caffeine from cocoa powder while retaining theobromine (94.1%) and polyphenols (84.7%). The antioxidant activity of the decaffeinated cocoa powder (DCP) made with this optimized SCCO₂ extraction method was 85.3% that of non-processed cocoa powder. The total procyanidin and total polyphenol concentrations of the DCPs resulting from various SCCO₂ extractions showed a significant positive correlation with oxygen radical absorbance capacity (ORAC). The correlation coefficient between total polyphenols and ORAC was higher than that between total procyanidins and ORAC; thus, the concentration of total polyphenols might be a greater factor in the antioxidant activity of DCP. These results indicate that we could remove large quantities of caffeine from conventional high-cocoa products while retaining the functional benefits of high polyphenol content. This SCCO₂ extraction method is expected to be applicable high-cocoa products, such as dark chocolate.

Selenium speciation and extractability in Dutch agricultural soils.

PubMed

Supriatin, Supriatin; Weng, Liping; Comans, Rob N J

2015-11-01

The study aimed to understand selenium (Se) speciation and extractability in Dutch agricultural soils. Top soil samples were taken from 42 grassland fields and 41 arable land fields in the Netherlands. Total Se contents measured in aqua regia were between 0.12 and 1.97 mg kg(-1) (on average 0.58 mg kg(-1)). Organic Se after NaOCl oxidation-extraction accounted for on average 82% of total Se, whereas inorganic selenite (selenate was not measurable) measured in ammonium oxalate extraction using HPLC-ICP-MS accounted for on average 5% of total Se. The predominance of organic Se in the soils is supported by the positive correlations between total Se (aqua regia) and total soil organic matter content, and Se and organic C content in all the other extractions performed in this study. The amount of Se extracted followed the order of aqua regia > 1 M NaOCl (pH8) > 0.1 M NaOH>ammonium oxalate (pH3) > hot water>0.43 M HNO3 > 0.01 M CaCl2. None of these extractions selectively extracts only inorganic Se, and relative to other extractions 0.43 M HNO3 extraction contains the lowest fraction of organic Se, followed by ammonium oxalate extraction. In the 0.1M NaOH extraction, the hydrophobic neutral (HON) fraction of soil organic matter is richer in Se than in the hydrophilic (Hy) and humic acid (HA) fractions. The organic matter extracted in 0.01 M CaCl2 and hot water is in general richer in Se compared to the organic matter extracted in 0.1M NaOH, and other extractions (HNO3, ammonium oxalate, NaOCl, and aqua regia). Although the extractability of Se follows to a large extent the extractability of soil organic carbon, there is several time variations in the Se to organic C ratios, reflecting the changes in composition of organic matter extracted. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Towards building a disease-phenotype knowledge base: extracting disease-manifestation relationship from literature

PubMed Central

Xu, Rong; Li, Li; Wang, QuanQiu

2013-01-01

Motivation: Systems approaches to studying phenotypic relationships among diseases are emerging as an active area of research for both novel disease gene discovery and drug repurposing. Currently, systematic study of disease phenotypic relationships on a phenome-wide scale is limited because large-scale machine-understandable disease–phenotype relationship knowledge bases are often unavailable. Here, we present an automatic approach to extract disease–manifestation (D-M) pairs (one specific type of disease–phenotype relationship) from the wide body of published biomedical literature. Data and Methods: Our method leverages external knowledge and limits the amount of human effort required. For the text corpus, we used 119 085 682 MEDLINE sentences (21 354 075 citations). First, we used D-M pairs from existing biomedical ontologies as prior knowledge to automatically discover D-M–specific syntactic patterns. We then extracted additional pairs from MEDLINE using the learned patterns. Finally, we analysed correlations between disease manifestations and disease-associated genes and drugs to demonstrate the potential of this newly created knowledge base in disease gene discovery and drug repurposing. Results: In total, we extracted 121 359 unique D-M pairs with a high precision of 0.924. Among the extracted pairs, 120 419 (99.2%) have not been captured in existing structured knowledge sources. We have shown that disease manifestations correlate positively with both disease-associated genes and drug treatments. Conclusions: The main contribution of our study is the creation of a large-scale and accurate D-M phenotype relationship knowledge base. This unique knowledge base, when combined with existing phenotypic, genetic and proteomic datasets, can have profound implications in our deeper understanding of disease etiology and in rapid drug repurposing. Availability: http://nlp.case.edu/public/data/DMPatternUMLS/ Contact: rxx@case.edu PMID:23828786

A hierarchical pyramid method for managing large-scale high-resolution drainage networks extracted from DEM

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bai, Rui; Tiejian, Li; Huang, Yuefei; Jiaye, Li; Wang, Guangqian; Yin, Dongqin

2015-12-01

The increasing resolution of Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) and the development of drainage network extraction algorithms make it possible to develop high-resolution drainage networks for large river basins. These vector networks contain massive numbers of river reaches with associated geographical features, including topological connections and topographical parameters. These features create challenges for efficient map display and data management. Of particular interest are the requirements of data management for multi-scale hydrological simulations using multi-resolution river networks. In this paper, a hierarchical pyramid method is proposed, which generates coarsened vector drainage networks from the originals iteratively. The method is based on the Horton-Strahler's (H-S) order schema. At each coarsening step, the river reaches with the lowest H-S order are pruned, and their related sub-basins are merged. At the same time, the topological connections and topographical parameters of each coarsened drainage network are inherited from the former level using formulas that are presented in this study. The method was applied to the original drainage networks of a watershed in the Huangfuchuan River basin extracted from a 1-m-resolution airborne LiDAR DEM and applied to the full Yangtze River basin in China, which was extracted from a 30-m-resolution ASTER GDEM. In addition, a map-display and parameter-query web service was published for the Mississippi River basin, and its data were extracted from the 30-m-resolution ASTER GDEM. The results presented in this study indicate that the developed method can effectively manage and display massive amounts of drainage network data and can facilitate multi-scale hydrological simulations.

Evaluation of petroleum heterogeneities in the Eldfish Chalk reservoir using thermal extraction and pyrolysis GC and thermal extraction GC-MS

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Hall, P.B.; Bjory, M.; Stoddart, D.

1993-09-01

Petroleum geochemical research is being applied more and more to production-oriented problems such as improving recovery of oil from existing fields and identifying satellite fields. Recent studies by ourselves and others have suggested that compositional heterogeneities within the petroleum column of reservoirs can provide information relevant to these objectives. Some of the best data for distinguishing petroleum [open quotes]populations[close quotes] in reservoirs comes from conventional geochemical techniques, some of which are very time consuming (e.g., solvent extraction, EOM fractionation, and GC and GC-MS of saturated and aromatic hydrocarbon fractions). Furthermore, a large number of samples need to be analyzed onmore » order to detect the often slight heterogeneities present in a reservoir. The techniques employed in this study (particularly thermal extraction and pyrolysis GC and thermal extraction GC-MS) can be used to generate large amounts of relevant data quickly. In this study, data were acquired on core samples ([approximately]750) from the Paleocene/Cretaceous Eldfish Chalk reservoir (2/7 block Norwegian North Sea). The acquired data reveal distinct maturity gradients and also small, but still significant, variations in source of the oil within the different Eldfisk oil pools (Alpha, Bravo, and East). This indicates incomplete mixing of the hydrocarbons. These variations have been used to delineate lateral and vertical barriers to petroleum mixing. These observations, when integrated with geological data, can lead to an improved understanding of the possible field filling directions and the intrareservoir compartmentalization. The conclusions from this may also aid in exploration for satellite fields as well as influencing the production plan for the Eldfisk field.« less

Comparison of leaching characteristics of heavy metals in APC residue from an MSW incinerator using various extraction methods.

PubMed

Chiang, Kung-Yuh; Tsai, Chen-Chiu; Wang, Kuen-Sheng

2009-01-01

This study investigates four extraction methods (water extraction, toxicity characteristics leaching procedure (TCLP), modified TCLP with pH control, and sequential chemical extraction (SCE)), each representing different liquid-to-solid (L/S) ratios, pH controls, and types of leachant, and their effects on the leaching concentration of heavy metals in municipal solid waste (MSW) incinerator air pollution control (APC) residue. The results indicated that for extraction with distilled water, the heavy metal leaching concentration (mg/l) decreased with L/S ratio, but the amount of heavy metal released (AHMR), defined as the leached amount of heavy metals to the weight of the tested sample (mg/kg), increased with an increase in L/S ratio, in the range of 2-100. The results also showed that both the leaching concentration and the amount of released metals were strongly pH-dependent in the TCLP and modified TCLP tests. In the case of pHs lower than 6.5, the leaching concentrations of Cd, Pb, Cu, Zn, and Cr decreased with an increase in pH. As pH increased higher than 6.5, Cr and Zn were almost insoluble. Meanwhile, Cd and Cu also showed a similar trend but at pHs of 8.5 and 7.5, respectively. Due to the nature of amphoteric elements, in the case of pHs higher than 7, the Pb leaching concentration increased with increasing pH. In modified TCLP tests with the pH value controlled at the same level as in the SCE test, the heavy metal speciation approached the extractable carbonate bound fraction by the SCE. Both amounts of targeted metals leached from the SCE and modified TCLP tests were much higher than those for the regular TCLP and water extraction tests.

[Supercritical CO2 extraction and component analysis of Aesculus wilsonii seed oil].

PubMed

Chen, Guang-Yu; Shi, Zhao-Hua; Li, Hai-Chi; Ge, Fa-Huan; Zhan, Hua-Shu

2013-03-01

To research the optimal extraction process of supercritical CO2 extraction and analyze the component of the oil extracted from Aesculus wilsonii seed. Using the yield of Aesculus wilsonii seed oil as the index, optimized supercritical CO2 extraction parameter by orthogonal experiment methodology and analysed the compounds of Aesculus wilsonii seed oil by GC-MS. The optimal parameters of the supercritical CO2 extraction of the oil extracted from Aesculus wilsoniit seed were determined: the extraction pressure was 28 MPa and the temperature was 38 degrees C, the separation I pressure was 12 MPa and the temperature was 40 degrees C, the separation II pressure was 5 MPa and the temperature was 40 degrees C, the extraction time was 110 min. The average extraction rate of Aesculus wilsonii seed oil was 1.264%. 26 kinds of compounds were identified by GC-MS in Aesculus wilsonii seed oil extracted by supercritical CO2. The main components were fatty acids. Comparing with the petroleum ether extraction, the supercritical CO2 extraction has higher extraction rate, shorter extraction time, more clarity oil. The kinds of fatty acids with high amounts in Aesculus wilsonii seed oil is identical in general, the kinds of fatty acids with low amounts in Aesculus wilsonii seed oil have differences.

An optimised protocol for isolation of RNA from small sections of laser-capture microdissected FFPE tissue amenable for next-generation sequencing.

PubMed

Amini, Parisa; Ettlin, Julia; Opitz, Lennart; Clementi, Elena; Malbon, Alexandra; Markkanen, Enni

2017-08-23

Formalin-fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) tissue constitutes a vast treasury of samples for biomedical research. Thus far however, extraction of RNA from FFPE tissue has proved challenging due to chemical RNA-protein crosslinking and RNA fragmentation, both of which heavily impact on RNA quantity and quality for downstream analysis. With very small sample sizes, e.g. when performing Laser-capture microdissection (LCM) to isolate specific subpopulations of cells, recovery of sufficient RNA for analysis with reverse-transcription quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) or next-generation sequencing (NGS) becomes very cumbersome and difficult. We excised matched cancer-associated stroma (CAS) and normal stroma from clinical specimen of FFPE canine mammary tumours using LCM, and compared the commonly used protease-based RNA isolation procedure with an adapted novel technique that additionally incorporates a focused ultrasonication step. We successfully adapted a protocol that uses focused ultrasonication to isolate RNA from small amounts of deparaffinised, stained, clinical LCM samples. Using this approach, we found that total RNA yields could be increased by 8- to 12-fold compared to a commonly used protease-based extraction technique. Surprisingly, RNA extracted using this new approach was qualitatively at least equal if not superior compared to the old approach, as Cq values in RT-qPCR were on average 2.3-fold lower using the new method. Finally, we demonstrate that RNA extracted using the new method performs comparably in NGS as well. We present a successful isolation protocol for extraction of RNA from difficult and limiting FFPE tissue samples that enables successful analysis of small sections of clinically relevant specimen. The possibility to study gene expression signatures in specific small sections of archival FFPE tissue, which often entail large amounts of highly relevant clinical follow-up data, unlocks a new dimension of hitherto difficult-to-analyse samples which now become amenable for investigation.

Collection and processing of whole blood for transformation of peripheral blood mononuclear cells and extraction of DNA: the Type 1 Diabetes Genetics Consortium

PubMed Central

Rosinger, Silke; Nutland, Sarah; Mickelson, Eric; Varney, Michael D; Boehm, Bernard O; Olsem, Gary J; Hansen, John A; Nicholson, Ian; Hilner, Joan E; Perdue, Letitia H; Pierce, June J; Akolkar, Beena; Nierras, Concepcion; Steffes, Michael W

2010-01-01

Background and Purpose To yield large amounts of DNA for many genotype analyses and to provide a renewable source of DNA, the Type 1 Diabetes Genetics Consortium (T1DGC) harvested DNA and peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from individuals with type 1 diabetes and their family members in several regions of the world. Methods DNA repositories were established in Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America, and the United Kingdom. To address region-specific needs, different methods and sample processing techniques were used among the laboratories to extract and to quantify DNA and to establish Epstein-Barr virus transformed cell lines. Results More than 98% of the samples of PBMCs were successfully transformed. Approximately 20–25 µg of DNA were extracted per mL of whole blood. Extraction of DNA from the cell pack ranged from 92 to 165 µg per cell pack. In addition, the extracted DNA from whole blood or transformed cells was successfully utilized in each regional human leukocyte antigen genotyping laboratory and by several additional laboratories performing consortium-wide genotyping projects. Limitations Although the isolation of PBMCs was consistent among sites, the measurement of DNA was difficult to harmonize. Conclusions DNA repositories can be established in different regions of the world and produce similar amounts of high-quality DNA for a variety of high-throughput genotyping techniques. Furthermore, even with the distances and time necessary for transportation, highly efficient transformation of PBMCs is possible. For future studies/trials involving several laboratories in different locations, the T1DGC experience includes examples of protocols that may be applicable. In summary, T1DGC has developed protocols that would be of interest to any scientific organization attempting to overcome the logistical problems associated with studies/trials spanning multiple research facilities, located in different regions of the world. PMID:20595244

Comparative study on the physicochemical and functional properties of the mucilage in the carpel of Nymphaea odorata using ultrasonic and classical heating extractions.

PubMed

Wu, WeiZhi; Tu, ChinWei; Yang, WenJen; Wang, HengLong; Chang, ChaoLin; Chung, JengDer; Lu, MeiKuang; Liao, WeiTung

2018-02-21

The cooked carpel of Nymphaea odorata has a large amount of transparent mucilage; however, the basic characteristics of this mucilage have not yet been reported. This study compared the physicochemical and functional properties of this mucilage obtained using conventional hot water extraction (HWM) and ultrasonic-assisted extraction (UAM). Neither HWM nor UAM affected the viability of mouse skin fibroblasts (NIH/3T3) below 100 μg/mL. UAM had a higher yield production, phenol concentration, and in vitro antioxidant activity, but lower viscosity and water-holding capacity than for HWM. The Fourier transform infrared spectra revealed that the dialyzed HWM and UAM, named HWMD and UAMD, respectively, appeared major spectral differences at 1730 cm -1 and 1605 cm -1 , implying that the degree of methylation was different between HWMD and UAMD. Compared to HWMD, UAMD in low-molecular weight polysaccharides increased. Evidently, the basic characteristics of native mucilage in the carpel of N. odorata were greatly changed by various extractions. Nevertheless, sugar analysis indicated that glucuronic acid was the mainly composition of HWMD and UAMD. Copyright © 2017. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Consequences of bioenergy wood extraction for landscape-level availability of habitat for dead wood-dependent organisms.

PubMed

Hiron, Matthew; Jonsell, Mats; Kubart, Ariana; Thor, Göran; Schroeder, Martin; Dahlberg, Anders; Johansson, Victor; Ranius, Thomas

2017-08-01

Stumps and slash resulting from forest clearcutting is used as a source of low-net-carbon energy, but there are concerns about the consequences of biofuel extraction on biodiversity. Logging residues constitute potentially important habitats, since a large part of forest biodiversity is dependent on dead wood. Here we used snapshot field data from a managed forest landscape (25 000 ha) to predict landscape scale population changes of dead wood dependent organisms after extraction of stumps and slash after clearcutting. We did this by estimating habitat availability for all observed dead wood-dependent beetles, macrofungi, and lichens (380 species) in the whole landscape. We found that 53% of species occurred in slash or stumps. For most species, population declines after moderate extraction (≤30%) were small (<10% decline) because they mainly occur on other dead wood types. However, some species were only recorded in slash and stumps. Red listed species were affected by slash and stump extraction (12 species), but less often than other species. Beetles and fungi were more affected by stump extraction, while lichens were more affected by slash extraction. For beetles and lichens, extraction of a combination of spruce, pine and birch resulted in larger negative effects than if only extracting spruce, while for fungi tree species had little effect. We conclude that extensive extraction decreases the amount of habitat to such extent that it may have negative consequences on species persistence at the landscape level. The negative consequences can be limited by extracting only slash, or only logging residues from spruce stands. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Evaluation of the volatile profile of Tuber liyuanum by HS-SPME with GC-MS.

PubMed

Liu, Changjiao; Li, Yu

2017-04-01

The volatile components of Tuber liyuanum were determined by HS-SPME with GC-MS for the first time. The effects of different fibre coating, extraction time, extraction temperature and sample amount were studied to get optimal extraction conditions. The optimal conditions were SPME fibre of Carboxen/PDMS, extraction time of 40 min, extraction temperature of 80 °C, sample amount of 2 g. Under these conditions 57 compounds in volatile of T. liyuanum were detected with a resemblance percentage above 80%. Aldehydes and aromatics were the main chemical families identified. The contribution of 3-Octanone(11.67%), phenylethyl alcohol (10.60%), isopentana (9.29%) and methylbutana (8.06%) for the total volatile profile were more significant in T. liyuanum than other compounds.

Modified procedure to determine acid-insoluble lignin in wood and pulp

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Effland, M.J.

1977-10-01

If wood is treated with strong acid, carbohydrates are hydrolyzed and solubilized. The insoluble residue is by definition lignin and can be measured gravimetrically. The standard method of analysis requires samples of 1 or 2 g of wood or pulp. In research at this laboratory these amounts of sample are often not available for analytical determinations. Thus we developed a modification of the standard procedure suitable for much smaller sample amounts. The modification is based on the procedure of Saeman. Wood samples require extraction prior to lignin analysis to remove acid-insoluble extractives that will be measured as lignin. Usually thismore » involves only a standard extraction with ethanol--benzene. However, woods high in tannin must also be subjected to extraction with alcohol. Pulps seldom require extraction.« less

Interaction and the structures of coal

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Opaprakasit, Pakorn

The origin of a decrease in the amount of soluble material from coal upon a reflux treatment has been investigated in an attempt to obtain insight into the nature of the interaction in the macromolecular network structure of coal. This decrease in the extractable material is a result of an increase in the amount of physical cross-links associated with secondary interactions. The alternate possibility of covalent cross-link formation by ether linkage was found to be unlikely because the coal hydroxyl content remains unchanged upon heat treatment. The functional groups responsible for forming these physical cross-links and their contents vary from coal to coal with coal rank. Carboxylate/cation complexes, similar to those found in ionomers, dominate in low rank coal. In high rank coal, the clusters involving pi-cation interactions were observed. Both mechanisms seem to play a role in mid rank coals. These physical cross-links are responsible for a lowering of the extraction yield of coal, but are disrupted by a treatment with acid solution, resulting in an increase in the extraction yield. As a consequence, the cross-links in coal structure should be classified into two types; a "permanent" covalent cross-link, which break under extreme conditions such as chemical reaction and pyrolysis, and "reversible" cross-links, largely associated with ionomer-like structure and pi-cation interactions. The interaction between a "magic" solvent of N-methylpyrollidone and carbon disulfide (NMP/CS2) and its role in the unusual extractability enhancement of Upper Freeport coal has also been investigated. The results strongly suggest that NMP/CS2 mixed solvents form complexes with cations. These mixed solvents are capable of forming a solid complex with cations from NaOH and some simple salts, such as NaCl and LiCl. Given that Upper Freeport coal contains a large amount of mineral matter, it is not surprising that these types of complexes could be formed in the present of the mixed solvents, which in turn enhances the coal extraction yield. Finally, the evidence for the presence of a glass transition temperature in coal was examined. The results from Differential Scanning Calorimetry showed that no transition similar to the Tg can be observed in bulk coal or its low-molecular weight fraction, pyridine soluble extracted material, at a temperature near 110°C. In contrast, an irreversible transition that is due to water evaporation has been found. Thermomechanical measurements, which are very sensitive to the presence of a Tg in synthetic polymers, also provided no evidence for a Tg below temperatures where chemical reactions occur. Additionally, the results from Thermomechanical Analysis showed an expansion in size when the coal was heated to 300°C, which is associated with a "caking" process. The degree of expansion during this "caking" process is about five times greater in the direction perpendicular to the bedding plane than the parallel, indicating an accommodation of anisotropic strain relaxation, which was generated in the direction perpendicular to the bedding plane during the coalification process.

Application of solid/liquid extraction for the gravimetric determination of lipids in royal jelly.

PubMed

Antinelli, Jean-François; Davico, Renée; Rognone, Catherine; Faucon, Jean-Paul; Lizzani-Cuvelier, Louisette

2002-04-10

Gravimetric lipid determination is a major parameter for the characterization and the authentication of royal jelly quality. A solid/liquid extraction was compared to the reference method, which is based on liquid/liquid extraction. The amount of royal jelly and the time of the extraction were optimized in comparison to the reference method. Boiling/rinsing ratio and spread of royal jelly onto the extraction thimble were identified as critical parameters, resulting in good accuracy and precision for the alternative method. Comparison of reproducibility and repeatability of both methods associated with gas chromatographic analysis of the composition of the extracted lipids showed no differences between the two methods. As the intra-laboratory validation tests were comparable to the reference method, while offering rapidity and a decrease in amount of solvent used, it was concluded that the proposed method should be used with no modification of quality criteria and norms established for royal jelly characterization.

Isolation of levoglucosan from pyrolysis oil derived from cellulose

DOEpatents

Moens, Luc

1994-01-01

High purity levoglucosan is obtained from pyrolysis oil derived from cellulose by: mixing pyrolysis oil with water and a basic metal hydroxide, oxide, or salt in amount sufficient to elevate pH values to a range of from about 12 to about 12.5, and adding an amount of the hydroxide, oxide, or salt in excess of the amount needed to obtain the pH range until colored materials of impurities from the oil are removed and a slurry is formed; drying the slurry azeotropically with methyl isobutyl ketone solvent to form a residue, and further drying the residue by evaporation; reducing the residue into a powder; continuously extracting the powder residue with ethyl acetate to provide a levoglucosan-rich extract; and concentrating the extract by removing ethyl acetate to provide crystalline levoglucosan. Preferably, Ca(OH).sub.2 is added to adjust the pH to the elevated values, and then Ca(OH).sub.2 is added in an excess amount needed.

Isolation of levoglucosan from pyrolysis oil derived from cellulose

DOEpatents

Moens, L.

1994-12-06

High purity levoglucosan is obtained from pyrolysis oil derived from cellulose by: mixing pyrolysis oil with water and a basic metal hydroxide, oxide, or salt in amount sufficient to elevate pH values to a range of from about 12 to about 12.5, and adding an amount of the hydroxide, oxide, or salt in excess of the amount needed to obtain the pH range until colored materials of impurities from the oil are removed and a slurry is formed; drying the slurry azeotropically with methyl isobutyl ketone solvent to form a residue, and further drying the residue by evaporation; reducing the residue into a powder; continuously extracting the powder residue with ethyl acetate to provide a levoglucosan-rich extract; and concentrating the extract by removing ethyl acetate to provide crystalline levoglucosan. Preferably, Ca(OH)[sub 2] is added to adjust the pH to the elevated values, and then Ca(OH)[sub 2] is added in an excess amount needed. 3 figures.

Antibacterial properties of Chinese herbal medicines against nosocomial antibiotic resistant strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa in Taiwan.

PubMed

Liu, Ching-Shen; Cham, Thau-Ming; Yang, Cheng-Hong; Chang, Hsueh-Wei; Chen, Chia-Hong; Chuang, Li-Yeh

2007-01-01

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is well-recognized as a nosocomial pathogen, which exhibits inherent drug resistance. In this study, the antibacterial activity of ethanol extracts of 58 Chinese herbal medicines used in Taiwan were tested against 89 nosocomial antibiotic resistant strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The results gathered by the disc diffusion method showed that 26 out of the 58 herbal extracts exhibited antibacterial activity. Among the 26 herbal extracts, 10 extracts showed broad-spectrum antibacterial activities and were selected for further antibacterial property assay. The minimum inhibitory concentrations (MIC) of the active partition fractions ranged from 0.25 to 11.0 mg/L. The presence of flavonoid compounds in the active fractions of test herbal extracts was observed by the TLC-bioautography. The results from the time-kill assay revealed that most of the herbal extracts completely killed the test organisms within 4 hours. Exposure of the test strains to a sub-MIC level of the herbal extracts for 10 consecutive subcultures did not induce resistance to the active components. A combination of the active herbal fractions with antibiotics showed that one of the herbal medicines, the hexane fraction of Ramulus Cinnamomi, possessed a synergistic effect with tetracycline, gentamycin, and streptomycin. In conclusion, the tested Chinese medical herbs have the potential to be developed into natural antibiotics. This is the first evaluation for screening large amounts of medical plants against nosocomial antibiotic resistant bacteria in Taiwan.

Evaluation of Phytoavailability of Heavy Metals to Chinese Cabbage (Brassica chinensis L.) in Rural Soils

PubMed Central

Hseu, Zeng-Yei; Zehetner, Franz

2014-01-01

This study compared the extractability of Cd, Cu, Ni, Pb, and Zn by 8 extraction protocols for 22 representative rural soils in Taiwan and correlated the extractable amounts of the metals with their uptake by Chinese cabbage for developing an empirical model to predict metal phytoavailability based on soil properties. Chemical agents in these protocols included dilute acids, neutral salts, and chelating agents, in addition to water and the Rhizon soil solution sampler. The highest concentrations of extractable metals were observed in the HCl extraction and the lowest in the Rhizon sampling method. The linear correlation coefficients between extractable metals in soil pools and metals in shoots were higher than those in roots. Correlations between extractable metal concentrations and soil properties were variable; soil pH, clay content, total metal content, and extractable metal concentration were considered together to simulate their combined effects on crop uptake by an empirical model. This combination improved the correlations to different extents for different extraction methods, particularly for Pb, for which the extractable amounts with any extraction protocol did not correlate with crop uptake by simple correlation analysis. PMID:25295297

Extracting PICO Sentences from Clinical Trial Reports using Supervised Distant Supervision

PubMed Central

Wallace, Byron C.; Kuiper, Joël; Sharma, Aakash; Zhu, Mingxi (Brian); Marshall, Iain J.

2016-01-01

Systematic reviews underpin Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) by addressing precise clinical questions via comprehensive synthesis of all relevant published evidence. Authors of systematic reviews typically define a Population/Problem, Intervention, Comparator, and Outcome (a PICO criteria) of interest, and then retrieve, appraise and synthesize results from all reports of clinical trials that meet these criteria. Identifying PICO elements in the full-texts of trial reports is thus a critical yet time-consuming step in the systematic review process. We seek to expedite evidence synthesis by developing machine learning models to automatically extract sentences from articles relevant to PICO elements. Collecting a large corpus of training data for this task would be prohibitively expensive. Therefore, we derive distant supervision (DS) with which to train models using previously conducted reviews. DS entails heuristically deriving ‘soft’ labels from an available structured resource. However, we have access only to unstructured, free-text summaries of PICO elements for corresponding articles; we must derive from these the desired sentence-level annotations. To this end, we propose a novel method – supervised distant supervision (SDS) – that uses a small amount of direct supervision to better exploit a large corpus of distantly labeled instances by learning to pseudo-annotate articles using the available DS. We show that this approach tends to outperform existing methods with respect to automated PICO extraction. PMID:27746703

Dry Socket: Frequency, Clinical Picture, and Risk Factors in a Palestinian Dental Teaching Center

PubMed Central

Abu Younis, Mohammed H; Abu Hantash, Ra'ed O

2011-01-01

Aims: The objectives of this study were to find out the frequency, clinical picture, and risk factors of dry socket at the Dental Teaching Center of Al-Quds University in Palestine. Methods and Materials: Two previously used questionnaires were accomplished in this study over a one year period. The first questionnaire was completed for every patient who had one or more permanent teeth extracted in the Dental Surgery Clinic. The other one was completed for every patient suffered a postoperative pain and was diagnosed with dry socket. Results: There were 1305 dental extractions performed in 805 patients. The overall frequency of dry socket was 3.2%. The incidence of dry socket following non-surgical extractions was 1.7% while it was 15% following surgical extractions (P< 0.005). The incidence of dry socket was significantly higher in smokers (12%) than in non-smokers (4%) (P < 0.005), however, there is a strong association between the amount of smoking and the incidence of dry socket (P < 0.002). The incidence of dry socket was significantly higher in the single extraction cases (13%) than in the multiple extraction cases (5%) (P = 0.005). Age, sex, medical history, extraction site, amount of local anesthesia and experience of operator play no role in the occurrence of dry socket. Conclusion: Smoking, surgical trauma and single extractions are considered predisposing factors in the occurrence of dry socket. On the other hand, factors like: age, sex, medical history, extraction site, amount of anesthesia, and operator experience have no effect on the observation of dry socket. PMID:21559187

Chemical and biological evaluation of Ranunculus muricatus.

PubMed

Khan, Farhat Ali; Zahoor, Muhammad; Khan, Ezzat

2016-03-01

Ranunculus muricatus is commonly known as spiny fruit buttercup and is used in the treatment of intermittent fevers, gout and asthma. Qualitative analysis of phytochemicals of Ranunculus muricatus indicated the presence of saponins, tannins, phenols, flavonoids and alkaloids. Saponins were present in high amount as compared with other chemicals. Inorganic and heavy metals constituents were determined. Heavy metals estimation in the sample showed that iron was present in high amount followed by zinc even then the concentration of these metals is below acceptable limit. The physical parameters, antioxidant and antimicrobial activities of the extracts were determined. Acetone extract fraction showed optimal antioxidant activity as compared to ethanol and chloroform fractions of the candidate plant. The antimicrobial and antifungal activities of the crude extract and extract fractions were determined by well agar diffusion method. Highest zone of inhibitions were observed for crude extract followed by acetone extract fraction against Micrococcus luteus. Antifungal activities were high for crude extracts against Candida Albican. Findings of this study show that Ranunculus muricatus has a good medicinal impact.

High performance curcumin subcritical water extraction from turmeric (Curcuma longa L.).

PubMed

Valizadeh Kiamahalleh, Mohammad; Najafpour-Darzi, Ghasem; Rahimnejad, Mostafa; Moghadamnia, Ali Akbar; Valizadeh Kiamahalleh, Meisam

2016-06-01

Curcumin is a hydrophobic polyphenolic compound derived from turmeric rhizome, which consists about 2-5% of the total rhizome content and is a more valuable component of turmeric. For reducing the drawbacks of conventional extraction (using organic solvents) of curcumin, the water as a clean solvent was used for extracting curcumin. Subcritical water extraction (SWE) experimental setup was fabricated in a laboratory scale and the influences of some parameters (e.g. extraction temperature, particle size, retention time and pressure) on the yield of extraction were investigated. Optimum extraction conditions such as SWE pressure of 10bar, extractive temperature of 140°C, particle size of 0.71mm and retention time of 14min were defined. The maximum amount of curcumin extracted at the optimum condition was 3.8wt%. The yield of curcumin extraction was more than 76wt% with regards to the maximum possible curcumin content of turmeric, as known to be 5%. The scanning electron microscope (SEM) images from the outer surface of turmeric, before and after extraction, clearly demonstrated the effect of each parameter; changes in porosity and hardness of turmeric that is directly related to the amount of extracted curcumin in process optimization of the extraction parameters. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Fabric phase sorptive extraction: Two practical sample pretreatment techniques for brominated flame retardants in water.

PubMed

Huang, Guiqi; Dong, Sheying; Zhang, Mengfei; Zhang, Haihan; Huang, Tinglin

2016-09-15

Sample pretreatment is the critical section for residue monitoring of hazardous pollutants. In this paper, using the cellulose fabric as host matrix, three extraction sorbents such as poly (tetrahydrofuran) (PTHF), poly (ethylene glycol) (PEG) and poly (dimethyldiphenylsiloxane) (PDMDPS), were prepared on the surface of the cellulose fabric. Two practical extraction techniques including stir bar fabric phase sorptive extraction (stir bar-FPSE) and magnetic stir fabric phase sorptive extraction (magnetic stir-FPSE) have been designed, which allow stirring of fabric phase sorbent during the whole extraction process. In the meantime, three brominated flame retardants (BFRs) [tetrabromobisphenol A (TBBPA), tetrabromobisphenol A bisallylether (TBBPA-BAE), tetrabromobisphenol A bis(2,3-dibromopropyl)ether (TBBPA-BDBPE)] in the water sample were selected as model analytes for the practical evaluation of the proposed two techniques using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Moreover, various experimental conditions affecting extraction process such as the type of fabric phase, extraction time, the amount of salt and elution conditions were also investigated. Due to the large sorbent loading capacity and unique stirring performance, both techniques possessed high extraction capability and fast extraction equilibrium. Under the optimized conditions, high recoveries (90-99%) and low limits of detection (LODs) (0.01-0.05 μg L(-1)) were achieved. In addition, the reproducibility was obtained by evaluating the intraday and interday precisions with relative standard deviations (RSDs) less than 5.1% and 6.8%, respectively. The results indicated that two pretreatment techniques were promising and practical for monitoring of hazardous pollutants in the water sample. Due to low solvent consumption and high repeated use performance, proposed techniques also could meet green analytical criteria. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Phytochemical screening and free radical scavenging activity of Citrullus colocynthis seeds extracts

PubMed Central

Benariba, Nabila; Djaziri, Rabeh; Bellakhdar, Wafaa; Belkacem, Nacera; Kadiata, Marcel; Malaisse, Willy J.; Sener, Abdullah

2013-01-01

Objective To study the phytochemical screening of different extracts from Citrullus colocynthis (C. colocynthis ) seeds extracts and to assess their antioxidant activity on the DPPH free radical scavenging. Methods Phytochemical screening, total content of polyphenols and flavonoids of C. colocynthis seeds extracts, including a crude aqueous extract (E1), a defatted aqueous extract (E2), a hydromethanolic extract (HM), an ethyl acetate extract (EA) and a n-butanol extract (n-B) was carried out according to the standard methods and to assess their corresponding effect on the antioxidant activity of this plant. Results None of these extracts contained detectable amount of alkaloid, quinone, antraquinone, or reducing sugar. Catechic tannins and flavonoids were abundant in E1, HM and EA, whilst terpenoids were abundantly present in E1 and n-B but only weekly in HM. Coumarins were found in E2, EA and n-B. Polyphenols, expressed as gallic acid equivalent, amounted, per 100 g plant matter, to 329, 1002 and 150 mg in EA, HM an E1 respectively. Flavonoids, expressed as catechin equivalent, amounted, per 100 g plant matter to 620, 241 and 94 mg in EA, HM and E1 respectively. Comparable values were found in n-B and E1, with lower values in E2. Quercetin, myricetin and gallic acid were found in the EA and HM extracts by thin layer chromatography, The antioxidative effect of these extracts yielded, when tested at a concentration of 2 000 µg/mL in a 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl assay, a reducing percentage of 88.8% with EA, 74.5% with HM and 66.2% with E1, and corresponding IC50 of 350, 580 and 500 µg/mL as compared to 1.1 µg/mL for ascorbic acid. Conclusions These qualitative and quantitative analytical data document the presence in C. colocynthis extracts of such chemical compounds as flavonoids responsible for the antioxidant activity, as well as other biological activities of this plant. PMID:23570014

The utility of an automated electronic system to monitor and audit transfusion practice.

PubMed

Grey, D E; Smith, V; Villanueva, G; Richards, B; Augustson, B; Erber, W N

2006-05-01

Transfusion laboratories with transfusion committees have a responsibility to monitor transfusion practice and generate improvements in clinical decision-making and red cell usage. However, this can be problematic and expensive because data cannot be readily extracted from most laboratory information systems. To overcome this problem, we developed and introduced a system to electronically extract and collate extensive amounts of data from two laboratory information systems and to link it with ICD10 clinical codes in a new database using standard information technology. Three data files were generated from two laboratory information systems, ULTRA (version 3.2) and TM, using standard information technology scripts. These were patient pre- and post-transfusion haemoglobin, blood group and antibody screen, and cross match and transfusion data. These data together with ICD10 codes for surgical cases were imported into an MS ACCESS database and linked by means of a unique laboratory number. Queries were then run to extract the relevant information and processed in Microsoft Excel for graphical presentation. We assessed the utility of this data extraction system to audit transfusion practice in a 600-bed adult tertiary hospital over an 18-month period. A total of 52 MB of data were extracted from the two laboratory information systems for the 18-month period and together with 2.0 MB theatre ICD10 data enabled case-specific transfusion information to be generated. The audit evaluated 15,992 blood group and antibody screens, 25,344 cross-matched red cell units and 15,455 transfused red cell units. Data evaluated included cross-matched to transfusion ratios and pre- and post-transfusion haemoglobin levels for a range of clinical diagnoses. Data showed significant differences between clinical units and by ICD10 code. This method to electronically extract large amounts of data and linkage with clinical databases has provided a powerful and sustainable tool for monitoring transfusion practice. It has been successfully used to identify areas requiring education, training and clinical guidance and allows for comparison with national haemoglobin-based transfusion guidelines.

Classification Influence of Features on Given Emotions and Its Application in Feature Selection

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Xing, Yin; Chen, Chuang; Liu, Li-Long

2018-04-01

In order to solve the problem that there is a large amount of redundant data in high-dimensional speech emotion features, we analyze deeply the extracted speech emotion features and select better features. Firstly, a given emotion is classified by each feature. Secondly, the recognition rate is ranked in descending order. Then, the optimal threshold of features is determined by rate criterion. Finally, the better features are obtained. When applied in Berlin and Chinese emotional data set, the experimental results show that the feature selection method outperforms the other traditional methods.

Graphene oxide: an adsorbent for the extraction and quantification of aflatoxins in peanuts by high-performance liquid chromatography.

PubMed

Yu, Li; Li, Peiwu; Zhang, Qi; Zhang, Wen; Ding, Xiaoxia; Wang, Xiupin

2013-11-29

In this paper, graphene oxide (GO) was synthesized and specifically selected by centrifugation to extract four aflatoxins (B1, B2, G1, and G2) as an effective adsorbent. Then, the amount of aflatoxins was quantitatively measured by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The GO was characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), atomic force microscopy (AFM), and ultraviolet (UV) spectrophotometer. Several parameters that could affect the extraction efficiency, including the GO amount, methanol concentration in the extraction solvent, spiked amount, extraction time, and elution cycle, were also investigated and optimized in this work. Under optimal conditions, good linear relationships were achieved with the correlation coefficient (r) ranging from 0.99217 to 0.99995. The detection limit of this method for the four aflatoxins ranged from 0.08 to 0.65ng/g. Finally, the proposed method has been successfully applied to determine aflatoxins in peanut samples. The results show that the recoveries of the four aflatoxins range from 85.1% to 100.8% with the relative standard deviations between 2.1% and 7.9%. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Construction of uniformly sized pseudo template imprinted polymers coupled with HPLC-UV for the selective extraction and determination of trace estrogens in chicken tissue samples.

PubMed

Wang, Shu; Li, Yun; Wu, Xiaoli; Ding, Meijuan; Yuan, Lihua; Wang, Ruoyu; Wen, Tingting; Zhang, Jun; Chen, Lina; Zhou, Xuemin; Li, Fei

2011-02-28

To assess the potential risks associated with the environmental exposure of steroid estrogens, a novel highly efficient and selective estrogen enrichment procedure based on the use of molecularly imprinted polymer has been developed and evaluated. Herein, analogue of estrogens, namely 17-ethyl estradiol (EE(2)) was used as the pseudo template, to avoid the leakage of a trace amount of the target analytes. The resulting pseudo molecularly imprinted polymers (PMIPs) showed large sorption capacity, high recognition ability and fast binding kinetics for estrogens. Moreover, using these imprinted particles as dispersive solid-phase extraction (DSPE) materials, the amounts of three estrogens (E(1), E(2) and E(3)) which were detected by HPLC-UV from the chicken tissue samples were 0.28, 0.31 and 0.17 μg g(-1), and the recoveries were 72.5-78.7%, 90.3-95.2% and 80.5-83.6% in spiked chicken tissue samples with RSD <7%, respectively. All these results reveal that EE(2)-PMIPs as DSPE materials coupled with HPLC-UV could be applied to the highly selective separation and sensitive determination of trace estrogens in chicken tissue samples. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

New by-products rich in bioactive substances from the olive oil mill processing.

PubMed

Romero, Concepción; Medina, Eduardo; Mateo, Maria Antonia; Brenes, Manuel

2018-01-01

Olive oil extraction generates a large amount of residue consisting mainly of the pomace and leaves when using a two-phase centrifugation system. The aim of this study was to assess the content of phenolic and triterpene compounds in the by-products produced in Spanish olive oil mills. Olive pomace had concentrations of phenolic and triterpene substances lower than 2 and 3 g kg -1 , respectively. The leaves contained a high concentration of these substances, although those collected from ground-picked olives had lost most of their phenolic compounds. Moreover, the sediment from the bottom of the olive oil storage tanks did not have a significant amount of these substances. By contrast, a new by-product called olive pomace skin has been revealed as a very rich source of triterpenic acids, the content of which can reach up to 120 g kg -1 in this waste product, maslinic acid comprising around 70% of total triterpenics. Among the by-products generated during extraction of olive oil, olive pomace skin has been discovered to be a very rich source of triterpenic acids, which can reach up to 120 g kg -1 of the waste. These results will contribute to the valorization of olive oil by-products. © 2017 Society of Chemical Industry. © 2017 Society of Chemical Industry.

Unsupervised Detection of Planetary Craters by a Marked Point Process

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Troglio, G.; Benediktsson, J. A.; Le Moigne, J.; Moser, G.; Serpico, S. B.

2011-01-01

With the launch of several planetary missions in the last decade, a large amount of planetary images is being acquired. Preferably, automatic and robust processing techniques need to be used for data analysis because of the huge amount of the acquired data. Here, the aim is to achieve a robust and general methodology for crater detection. A novel technique based on a marked point process is proposed. First, the contours in the image are extracted. The object boundaries are modeled as a configuration of an unknown number of random ellipses, i.e., the contour image is considered as a realization of a marked point process. Then, an energy function is defined, containing both an a priori energy and a likelihood term. The global minimum of this function is estimated by using reversible jump Monte-Carlo Markov chain dynamics and a simulated annealing scheme. The main idea behind marked point processes is to model objects within a stochastic framework: Marked point processes represent a very promising current approach in the stochastic image modeling and provide a powerful and methodologically rigorous framework to efficiently map and detect objects and structures in an image with an excellent robustness to noise. The proposed method for crater detection has several feasible applications. One such application area is image registration by matching the extracted features.

Observations of the release of non-methane hydrocarbons from fractured shale.

PubMed

Sommariva, Roberto; Blake, Robert S; Cuss, Robert J; Cordell, Rebecca L; Harrington, Jon F; White, Iain R; Monks, Paul S

2014-01-01

The organic content of shale has become of commercial interest as a source of hydrocarbons, owing to the development of hydraulic fracturing ("fracking"). While the main focus is on the extraction of methane, shale also contains significant amounts of non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHCs). We describe the first real-time observations of the release of NMHCs from a fractured shale. Samples from the Bowland-Hodder formation (England) were analyzed under different conditions using mass spectrometry, with the objective of understanding the dynamic process of gas release upon fracturing of the shale. A wide range of NMHCs (alkanes, cycloalkanes, aromatics, and bicyclic hydrocarbons) are released at parts per million or parts per billion level with temperature- and humidity-dependent release rates, which can be rationalized in terms of the physicochemical characteristics of different hydrocarbon classes. Our results indicate that higher energy inputs (i.e., temperatures) significantly increase the amount of NMHCs released from shale, while humidity tends to suppress it; additionally, a large fraction of the gas is released within the first hour after the shale has been fractured. These findings suggest that other hydrocarbons of commercial interest may be extracted from shale and open the possibility to optimize the "fracking" process, improving gas yields and reducing environmental impacts.

Brood pheromone effects on colony protein supplement consumption and growth in the honey bee (Hymenoptera: Apidae) in a subtropical winter climate.

PubMed

Pankiw, Tanya; Sagili, Ramesh R; Metz, Bradley N

2008-12-01

Fatty acid esters extractable from the surface of honey bee, Apis mellifera L. (Hymenoptera: Apidae), larvae, called brood pheromone, significantly increase rate of colony growth in the spring and summer when flowering plant pollen is available in the foraging environment. Increased colony growth rate occurs as a consequence of increased pollen intake through mechanisms such as increasing number of pollen foragers and pollen load weights returned. Here, we tested the hypothesis that addition of brood pheromone during the winter pollen dearth period of a humid subtropical climate increases rate of colony growth in colonies provisioned with a protein supplement. Experiments were conducted in late winter (9 February-9 March 2004) and mid-winter (19 January-8 February 2005). In both years, increased brood area, number of bees, and amount of protein supplement consumption were significantly greater in colonies receiving daily treatments of brood pheromone versus control colonies. Amount of extractable protein from hypopharyngeal glands measured in 2005 was significantly greater in bees from pheromone-treated colonies. These results suggest that brood pheromone may be used as a tool to stimulate colony growth in the southern subtropical areas of the United States where the package bee industry is centered and a large proportion of migratory colonies are overwintered.

Optimization of clean extraction methods to isolate carotenoids from the microalga Neochloris oleoabundans and subsequent chemical characterization using liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry.

PubMed

Castro-Puyana, María; Herrero, Miguel; Urreta, Iratxe; Mendiola, Jose A; Cifuentes, Alejandro; Ibáñez, Elena; Suárez-Alvarez, Sonia

2013-05-01

A novel experimental design was used to optimize the extraction of carotenoids from Neochloris oleoabundans using pressurized liquid extraction with food-grade solvents such as ethanol and limonene. Experimental factors, including the extraction temperature and the solvent composition, were optimized using a three-level factorial design. The response variables extraction yield and total amount of carotenoids were assessed. The statistical analysis of the results provided mathematical models to predict the behavior of the responses as a function of the factors involved in the process. The optimum conditions predicted by the model developed in this study were 112 °C as the extraction temperature and 100% ethanol as the extraction solvent. Chemical characterization of the extracts obtained was performed by means of high-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. The results obtained demonstrated that, under certain growth conditions (photoautotrophically cultured in a medium supplemented with 0.3 g L(-1) KNO3), N. oleoabundans accumulated significant total amounts of the carotenoids (from 57.4 to 120.2 mg carotenoids per gram of extract depending on the extraction conditions), mainly lutein, cantaxanthin, zeaxanthin, and astaxanthin monoesters and diesters.

Analysis of DNA methylation in FFPE tissues using the MethyLight technology.

PubMed

Dallol, Ashraf; Al-Ali, Waleed; Al-Shaibani, Amina; Al-Mulla, Fahd

2011-01-01

Novel biomarkers are sought after by mining DNA extracted from formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues. Such tissues offer the great advantage of often having complete clinical data (including survival), as well as the tissues are amenable for laser microdissection targeting specific tissue areas. Downstream analysis of such DNA includes mutational screens and methylation profiling. Screening for mutations by sequencing requires a significant amount of DNA for PCR and cycle sequencing. This is self-inhibitory if the gene screened has a large number of exons. Profiling DNA methylation using the MethyLight technology circumvents this problem and allows for the mining of several biomarkers from DNA extracted from a single microscope slide of the tissue of interest. We describe in this chapter a detailed protocol for MethyLight and its use in the determination of CpG Island Methylator Phenotype status in FFPE colorectal cancer samples.

Use of LEU in the aqueous homogeneous medical isotope production reactor

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Ball, R.M.

1997-08-01

The Medical Isotope Production Reactor (MIPR) is an aqueous solution of uranyl nitrate in water, contained in an aluminum cylinder immersed in a large pool of water which can provide both shielding and a medium for heat exchange. The control rods are inserted at the top through re-entrant thimbles. Provision is made to remove radiolytic gases and recombine emitted hydrogen and oxygen. Small quantities of the solution can be continuously extracted and replaced after passing through selective ion exchange columns, which are used to extract the desired products (fission products), e.g. molybdenum-99. This reactor type is known for its largemore » negative temperature coefficient, the small amount of fuel required for criticality, and the ease of control. Calculation using TWODANT show that a 20% U-235 enriched system, water reflected can be critical with 73 liters of solution.« less

Text mining for adverse drug events: the promise, challenges, and state of the art.

PubMed

Harpaz, Rave; Callahan, Alison; Tamang, Suzanne; Low, Yen; Odgers, David; Finlayson, Sam; Jung, Kenneth; LePendu, Paea; Shah, Nigam H

2014-10-01

Text mining is the computational process of extracting meaningful information from large amounts of unstructured text. It is emerging as a tool to leverage underutilized data sources that can improve pharmacovigilance, including the objective of adverse drug event (ADE) detection and assessment. This article provides an overview of recent advances in pharmacovigilance driven by the application of text mining, and discusses several data sources-such as biomedical literature, clinical narratives, product labeling, social media, and Web search logs-that are amenable to text mining for pharmacovigilance. Given the state of the art, it appears text mining can be applied to extract useful ADE-related information from multiple textual sources. Nonetheless, further research is required to address remaining technical challenges associated with the text mining methodologies, and to conclusively determine the relative contribution of each textual source to improving pharmacovigilance.

Study regarding the spline interpolation accuracy of the experimentally acquired data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Oanta, Emil M.; Danisor, Alin; Tamas, Razvan

2016-12-01

Experimental data processing is an issue that must be solved in almost all the domains of science. In engineering we usually have a large amount of data and we try to extract the useful signal which is relevant for the phenomenon under investigation. The criteria used to consider some points more relevant then some others may take into consideration various conditions which may be either phenomenon dependent, or general. The paper presents some of the ideas and tests regarding the identification of the best set of criteria used to filter the initial set of points in order to extract a subset which best fits the approximated function. If the function has regions where it is either constant, or it has a slow variation, fewer discretization points may be used. This means to create a simpler solution to process the experimental data, keeping the accuracy in some fair good limits.

THE EFFECT OF DINITROPHENOL AND THYROXIN ON THE SUSCEPTIBILITY OF MICE TO STAPHYLOCOCCAL INFECTIONS

PubMed Central

Smiths, J. Maclean; Dubos, René J.

1956-01-01

Mice were given daily per os amounts of dinitrophenol or of thyroid extract sufficient to prevent or retard the normal weight gain of uninfected animals, but not large enough to cause their death. When mice maintained on these regimens for 1 or 2 weeks were infected with staphylococci, most of them died within 12 days—much more rapidly than did mice fed a normal diet. Deaths occurred even when the organism injected was a non-virulent staphylococcus, unable to cause fatal disease in mice fed a normal diet. There was some suggestion that thyroid treatment interfered with the bactericidal mechanism in the liver, spleen, and kidneys of mice during the initial phase of infection. In contrast there was no clear evidence at any time thereafter that either thyroid extract or dinitrophenol caused the staphylococci to multiply more rapidly in the various organs. PMID:13278459

Exploring patterns of epigenetic information with data mining techniques.

PubMed

Aguiar-Pulido, Vanessa; Seoane, José A; Gestal, Marcos; Dorado, Julián

2013-01-01

Data mining, a part of the Knowledge Discovery in Databases process (KDD), is the process of extracting patterns from large data sets by combining methods from statistics and artificial intelligence with database management. Analyses of epigenetic data have evolved towards genome-wide and high-throughput approaches, thus generating great amounts of data for which data mining is essential. Part of these data may contain patterns of epigenetic information which are mitotically and/or meiotically heritable determining gene expression and cellular differentiation, as well as cellular fate. Epigenetic lesions and genetic mutations are acquired by individuals during their life and accumulate with ageing. Both defects, either together or individually, can result in losing control over cell growth and, thus, causing cancer development. Data mining techniques could be then used to extract the previous patterns. This work reviews some of the most important applications of data mining to epigenetics.

Seawater-cultured Botryococcus braunii for efficient hydrocarbon extraction.

PubMed

Furuhashi, Kenichi; Saga, Kiyotaka; Okada, Shigeru; Imou, Kenji

2013-01-01

As a potential source of biofuel, the green colonial microalga Botryococcus braunii produces large amounts of hydrocarbons that are accumulated in the extracellular matrix. Generally, pretreatment such as drying or heating of wet algae is needed for sufficient recoveries of hydrocarbons from B. braunii using organic solvents. In this study, the Showa strain of B. braunii was cultured in media derived from the modified Chu13 medium by supplying artificial seawater, natural seawater, or NaCl. After a certain period of culture in the media with an osmotic pressure corresponding to 1/4-seawater, hydrocarbon recovery rates exceeding 90% were obtained by simply mixing intact wet algae with n-hexane without any pretreatments and the results using the present culture conditions indicate the potential for hydrocarbon milking. Seawater was used for efficient hydrocarbon extraction from Botryococcus braunii. The alga was cultured in media prepared with seawater or NaCl. Hydrocarbon recovery rate exceeding 90% was obtained without any pretreatment.

Text Mining for Adverse Drug Events: the Promise, Challenges, and State of the Art

PubMed Central

Harpaz, Rave; Callahan, Alison; Tamang, Suzanne; Low, Yen; Odgers, David; Finlayson, Sam; Jung, Kenneth; LePendu, Paea; Shah, Nigam H.

2014-01-01

Text mining is the computational process of extracting meaningful information from large amounts of unstructured text. Text mining is emerging as a tool to leverage underutilized data sources that can improve pharmacovigilance, including the objective of adverse drug event detection and assessment. This article provides an overview of recent advances in pharmacovigilance driven by the application of text mining, and discusses several data sources—such as biomedical literature, clinical narratives, product labeling, social media, and Web search logs—that are amenable to text-mining for pharmacovigilance. Given the state of the art, it appears text mining can be applied to extract useful ADE-related information from multiple textual sources. Nonetheless, further research is required to address remaining technical challenges associated with the text mining methodologies, and to conclusively determine the relative contribution of each textual source to improving pharmacovigilance. PMID:25151493

Intelligent Detection of Structure from Remote Sensing Images Based on Deep Learning Method

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Xin, L.

2018-04-01

Utilizing high-resolution remote sensing images for earth observation has become the common method of land use monitoring. It requires great human participation when dealing with traditional image interpretation, which is inefficient and difficult to guarantee the accuracy. At present, the artificial intelligent method such as deep learning has a large number of advantages in the aspect of image recognition. By means of a large amount of remote sensing image samples and deep neural network models, we can rapidly decipher the objects of interest such as buildings, etc. Whether in terms of efficiency or accuracy, deep learning method is more preponderant. This paper explains the research of deep learning method by a great mount of remote sensing image samples and verifies the feasibility of building extraction via experiments.

In vitro studies on the stability in the proximal gastrointestinal tract and bioaccessibility in Caco-2 cells of chlorogenic acids from spent coffee grounds.

PubMed

Monente, Carmen; Ludwig, Iziar A; Stalmach, Angelique; de Peña, Maria Paz; Cid, Concepción; Crozier, Alan

2015-01-01

Spent coffee grounds are a potential commercial source of substantial amounts of chlorogenic acids (CGAs). The aim of this study was to evaluate the stability of spent coffee CGAs using in vitro simulated gastroduodenal digestion and to investigate their potential absorption using an in vitro Caco-2 model of human small intestinal epithelium. During in vitro digestion, lactones were partially degraded while caffeoylquinic and feruloylquinic acids were much more stable. Transport and metabolism studies showed that 1% of the total CGAs were absorbed and transported from the apical to the basolateral side of a Caco-2 cell monolayer after 1 h. Lactones and coumaroylquinic acids showed the rate of highest absorption. Caco-2 cells possessed low metabolic activity. In conclusion, spent coffee extracts contain large amounts of CGAs, which remained bioaccessible across the intestinal barrier, albeit to a relatively low degree.

High-speed cell recognition algorithm for ultrafast flow cytometer imaging system.

PubMed

Zhao, Wanyue; Wang, Chao; Chen, Hongwei; Chen, Minghua; Yang, Sigang

2018-04-01

An optical time-stretch flow imaging system enables high-throughput examination of cells/particles with unprecedented high speed and resolution. A significant amount of raw image data is produced. A high-speed cell recognition algorithm is, therefore, highly demanded to analyze large amounts of data efficiently. A high-speed cell recognition algorithm consisting of two-stage cascaded detection and Gaussian mixture model (GMM) classification is proposed. The first stage of detection extracts cell regions. The second stage integrates distance transform and the watershed algorithm to separate clustered cells. Finally, the cells detected are classified by GMM. We compared the performance of our algorithm with support vector machine. Results show that our algorithm increases the running speed by over 150% without sacrificing the recognition accuracy. This algorithm provides a promising solution for high-throughput and automated cell imaging and classification in the ultrafast flow cytometer imaging platform. (2018) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).

High-speed cell recognition algorithm for ultrafast flow cytometer imaging system

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhao, Wanyue; Wang, Chao; Chen, Hongwei; Chen, Minghua; Yang, Sigang

2018-04-01

An optical time-stretch flow imaging system enables high-throughput examination of cells/particles with unprecedented high speed and resolution. A significant amount of raw image data is produced. A high-speed cell recognition algorithm is, therefore, highly demanded to analyze large amounts of data efficiently. A high-speed cell recognition algorithm consisting of two-stage cascaded detection and Gaussian mixture model (GMM) classification is proposed. The first stage of detection extracts cell regions. The second stage integrates distance transform and the watershed algorithm to separate clustered cells. Finally, the cells detected are classified by GMM. We compared the performance of our algorithm with support vector machine. Results show that our algorithm increases the running speed by over 150% without sacrificing the recognition accuracy. This algorithm provides a promising solution for high-throughput and automated cell imaging and classification in the ultrafast flow cytometer imaging platform.

Visualizing Internet routing changes.

PubMed

Lad, Mohit; Massey, Dan; Zhang, Lixia

2006-01-01

Today's Internet provides a global data delivery service to millions of end users and routing protocols play a critical role in this service. It is important to be able to identify and diagnose any problems occurring in Internet routing. However, the Internet's sheer size makes this task difficult. One cannot easily extract out the most important or relevant routing information from the large amounts of data collected from multiple routers. To tackle this problem, we have developed Link-Rank, a tool to visualize Internet routing changes at the global scale. Link-Rank weighs links in a topological graph by the number of routes carried over each link and visually captures changes in link weights in the form of a topological graph with adjustable size. Using Link-Rank, network operators can easily observe important routing changes from massive amounts of routing data, discover otherwise unnoticed routing problems, understand the impact of topological events, and infer root causes of observed routing changes.

The protective ability of Camellia meal extract on the silk protein

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Weng, JZ; Cai, C.; Zhang, DY; Dai, BK

2018-02-01

With the enhancement of living standards, people pay more and more attention to the health. The edible oil become more and more popular, but also produced a large amount of Camellia meal which can not fully put into utilization. In this study, the extracting liquid of Camellia meal was used on the process of silk degumming. Firstly, tussah silk was treated by degumming in the Na2CO3 solution, and the preliminary condition of tussah silk degumming was obtained by orthogonal experiment: the concentration Na2CO3 was 0.1%, the degumming time was 1 hour, and the ratio of silk/water was 40:1. Then the extract of Camellia meal (GCJSY) was added before the bleaching process of tussah silk to investigate the protective ability of GCJSY on the silk protein basry on the residual ratio of the silk. While the concentration of GYJSY was 0.08%, the residual ratio of silk after degumming in the Na2CO3 solution and bleaching in the 2% H2O2 solution was 87.2%.

Purification and partial characterization of low molecular weight vicilin-like glycoprotein from the seeds of Citrullus lanatus.

PubMed

Yadav, Sushila; Tomar, Anil Kumar; Jithesh, O; Khan, Meraj Alam; Yadav, R N; Srinivasan, A; Singh, Tej P; Yadav, Savita

2011-12-01

The watermelon (Citrullus lanatus) seeds are highly nutritive and contain large amount of proteins and many beneficial minerals such as magnesium, calcium, potassium, iron, phosphorous, zinc etc. In various parts of the world, C. lanatus seed extracts are used to cure cancer, cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, and blood pressure. C. lanatus seed extracts are also used as home remedy for edema and urinary tract problems. In this study, we isolated protein fraction of C. lanatus seeds using various protein separation methods. We successfully purified a low molecular weight vicilin-like glycoprotein using chromatographic methods followed by SDS-PAGE and MALDI-TOF/MS identification. This is the first report of purification of a vicilin like polypeptide from C. lanatus seeds. In next step, we extracted mRNA from immature seeds and reverse transcribed it using suitable forward and reverse primers for purified glycoprotein. The PCR product was analysed on 1% agarose gel and was subsequently sequenced by Dideoxy DNA sequencing method. An amino acid translation of the gene is in agreement with amino acid sequences of the identified peptides.

A Survey on the Feasibility of Sound Classification on Wireless Sensor Nodes

PubMed Central

Salomons, Etto L.; Havinga, Paul J. M.

2015-01-01

Wireless sensor networks are suitable to gain context awareness for indoor environments. As sound waves form a rich source of context information, equipping the nodes with microphones can be of great benefit. The algorithms to extract features from sound waves are often highly computationally intensive. This can be problematic as wireless nodes are usually restricted in resources. In order to be able to make a proper decision about which features to use, we survey how sound is used in the literature for global sound classification, age and gender classification, emotion recognition, person verification and identification and indoor and outdoor environmental sound classification. The results of the surveyed algorithms are compared with respect to accuracy and computational load. The accuracies are taken from the surveyed papers; the computational loads are determined by benchmarking the algorithms on an actual sensor node. We conclude that for indoor context awareness, the low-cost algorithms for feature extraction perform equally well as the more computationally-intensive variants. As the feature extraction still requires a large amount of processing time, we present four possible strategies to deal with this problem. PMID:25822142

Solid phase extraction of trace amounts of cadmium(II) ions in water and food samples using iron magnetite nanoparticles modified by sodium dodecyl sulfate and 2-mercaptobenzothiazole.

PubMed

Abbasi, Shahriar; ShanbehDehbalai, Mehdi; Khani, Hossein

2017-03-01

A new, simple and rapid method for solid phase extraction and preconcentration of trace amounts of cadmium ions using 2-mercaptobenzothiazole/sodium dodecyl sulfate immobilized on magnetite nanoparticles (MBT-SDS-MNPs) was proposed. The method is based on the extraction of cadmium ions via complexation with MBT immobilized on SDS-coated MNPs and their determination by flame atomic absorption spectrometry. The effects of different parameters - pH; eluent type, concentration and volume; amounts of salt and adsorbent; contact time and interfering ions - on the adsorption of cadmium ions were studied. Under optimized conditions, the calibration curve was linear in the range of 10-5,000 μg L -1 . Detection limit and relative standard deviation of the proposed method were 0.009 μg L -1 and 2.2%, respectively. The adsorption data were analyzed by Langmuir and Freundlich isotherm models and a maximum adsorption amount of 24.80 mg g -1 , a Langmuir adsorption equilibrium constant (b) of 4.62 and Freundlich constants K f and n of 6.075 mg 1-1/n L 1/n g -1 and 2.391, respectively, were obtained. Finally, this adsorbent was successfully used for extraction of cadmium from water and food samples.

Use Cases for Combining Web Services with ArcPython Tools for Enabling Quality Control of Land Remote Sensing Data Products.

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Krehbiel, C.; Maiersperger, T.; Friesz, A.; Harriman, L.; Quenzer, R.; Impecoven, K.

2016-12-01

Three major obstacles facing big Earth data users include data storage, management, and analysis. As the amount of satellite remote sensing data increases, so does the need for better data storage and management strategies to exploit the plethora of data now available. Standard GIS tools can help big Earth data users whom interact with and analyze increasingly large and diverse datasets. In this presentation we highlight how NASA's Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC) is tackling these big Earth data challenges. We provide a real life use case example to describe three tools and services provided by the LP DAAC to more efficiently exploit big Earth data in a GIS environment. First, we describe the Open-source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol (OPeNDAP), which calls to specific data, minimizing the amount of data that a user downloads and improves the efficiency of data downloading and processing. Next, we cover the LP DAAC's Application for Extracting and Exploring Analysis Ready Samples (AppEEARS), a web application interface for extracting and analyzing land remote sensing data. From there, we review an ArcPython toolbox that was developed to provide quality control services to land remote sensing data products. Locating and extracting specific subsets of larger big Earth datasets improves data storage and management efficiency for the end user, and quality control services provides a straightforward interpretation of big Earth data. These tools and services are beneficial to the GIS user community in terms of standardizing workflows and improving data storage, management, and analysis tactics.

Chromatin immunoprecipitation with fixed animal tissues and preparation for high-throughput sequencing.

PubMed

Cotney, Justin L; Noonan, James P

2015-02-02

Chromatin immunoprecipitation coupled with high-throughput sequencing (ChIP-Seq) is a powerful method used to identify genome-wide binding patterns of transcription factors and distribution of various histone modifications associated with different chromatin states. In most published studies, ChIP-Seq has been performed on cultured cells grown under controlled conditions, allowing generation of large amounts of material in a homogeneous biological state. Although such studies have provided great insight into the dynamic landscapes of animal genomes, they do not allow the examination of transcription factor binding and chromatin states in adult tissues, developing embryonic structures, or tumors. Such knowledge is critical to understanding the information required to create and maintain a complex biological tissue and to identify noncoding regions of the genome directly involved in tissues affected by complex diseases such as autism. Studying these tissue types with ChIP-Seq can be challenging due to the limited availability of tissues and the lack of complex biological states able to be achieved in culture. These inherent differences require alterations of standard cross-linking and chromatin extraction typically used in cell culture. Here we describe a general approach for using small amounts of animal tissue to perform ChIP-Seq directed at histone modifications and transcription factors. Tissue is homogenized before treatment with formaldehyde to ensure proper cross-linking, and a two-step nuclear isolation is performed to increase extraction of soluble chromatin. Small amounts of soluble chromatin are then used for immunoprecipitation (IP) and prepared for multiplexed high-throughput sequencing. © 2015 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.

Antioxidant activity of Sicilian pistachio (Pistacia vera L. var. Bronte) nut extract and its bioactive components.

PubMed

Gentile, Carla; Tesoriere, Luisa; Butera, Daniela; Fazzari, Marco; Monastero, Massimo; Allegra, Mario; Livrea, Maria A

2007-02-07

Pistacia vera L. is the only species of Pistacia genus producing edible nuts. This paper investigates the antioxidant potential of a Sicilian variety of pistachio nut by chemical as well as biological assays and measured antioxidant vitamins and a number of antioxidant polyphenols in either the hydrophilic and/or the lipophilic nut extract. In accordance with the majority of foods, the total antioxidant activity, measured as a TAA test, was much higher (50-fold) in the hydrophilic than in the lipophilic extract. Substantial amounts of total phenols were measured. The hydrophilic extract inhibited dose-dependently both the metal-dependent and -independent lipid oxidation of bovine liver microsomes, and the Cu+2-induced oxidation of human low-density lipoprotein (LDL). Peroxyl radical-scavenging as well as chelating activity of nut components may be suggested to explain the observed inhibition patterns. Among tocopherols, gamma-tocopherol was the only vitamin E isomer found in the lipophilic extract that did not contain any carotenoid. Vitamin C was found only in a modest amount. The hydrophilic extract was a source of polyphenol compounds among which trans-resveratrol, proanthocyanidins, and a remarkable amount of the isoflavones daidzein and genistein, 3.68 and 3.40 mg per 100 g of edible nut, respectively, were evaluated. With the exception of isoflavones that appeared unmodified, the amounts of other bioactive molecules were remarkably reduced in the pistachio nut after roasting, and the total antioxidant activity decreased by about 60%. Collectively, our findings provide evidence that the Sicilian pistachio nut may be considered for its bioactive components and can effectively contribute to a healthy status.

Application of enzymes, sodium tripolyphosphate and cation exchange resin for the release of extracellular polymeric substances from sewage sludge. Characterization of the extracted polysaccharides/glycoconjugates by a panel of lectins.

PubMed

Wawrzynczyk, J; Szewczyk, E; Norrlöw, O; Dey, E Szwajcer

2007-06-30

The study describes extraction of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) from sewage sludge by applying enzymes and enzymes combined with sodium tripolyphosphate (STPP). Additionally, a systematic study of two non-enzymatic extraction agents is described. The assessment of the released products is made by colorimetrical methods and polysaccharides/glycoconjugates identification by the interaction with four immobilized lectins. Bio-sludge from Helsingborg (Sweden) and Damhusåen (Denmark) were used as two case studies for testing enzymatic extractability and thereby to make useful prediction of sludge bio-digestibility. From Helsingborg sludge the enzymes extracted about 40% more of EPS than from Damhusåen. The polysaccharides/glycoconjugates in both sludges maintained the same level, and showed substantial different interaction motifs with lectins panel. Damhusåen enzymatic extracted EPS had an enhanced amount of suspended material that was post-hydrolysed by the use of polygalacturonase and lysozyme resulting in pectin like polymers and petiptidoglycans. Petiptidoglycan is a marker from bacterial cell debris. STPP and cation exchange resin (CER) released different quantities of EPS. The CER released polysaccharides/glycoconjugates had higher molecular weight and stronger affinity towards Concanavalin A than the one released by the action of STPP. Independent of the extraction conditions, STPP released elevated amounts of polyvalent cations and humic substances in contrast to the very low amounts of released by CER.

Corn silk extract improves cholesterol metabolism in C57BL/6J mouse fed high-fat diets.

PubMed

Cha, Jae Hoon; Kim, Sun Rim; Kang, Hyun Joong; Kim, Myung Hwan; Ha, Ae Wha; Kim, Woo Kyoung

2016-10-01

Corn silk (CS) extract contains large amounts of maysin, which is a major flavonoid in CS. However, studies regarding the effect of CS extract on cholesterol metabolism is limited. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine the effect of CS extract on cholesterol metabolism in C57BL/6J mouse fed high-fat diets. Normal-fat group fed 7% fat diet, high-fat (HF) group fed 25% fat diet, and high-fat with corn silk (HFCS) group were orally administered CS extract (100 mg/kg body weight) daily. Serum and hepatic levels of total lipids, triglycerides, and total cholesterol as well as serum free fatty acid, glucose, and insulin levels were determined. The mRNA expression levels of acyl-CoA: cholesterol acyltransferase (ACAT), cholesterol 7-alpha hydroxylase (CYP7A1), farnesoid X receptor (FXR), lecithin cholesterol acyltransferase (LCAT), low-density lipoprotein receptor, 3-hyroxy-3-methylglutaryl-coenzyme A reductase (HMG-CoA reductase), adiponectin, leptin, and tumor necrosis factor α were determined. Oral administration of CS extract with HF improved serum glucose and insulin levels as well as attenuated HF-induced fatty liver. CS extracts significantly elevated mRNA expression levels of adipocytokines and reduced mRNA expression levels of HMG-CoA reductase, ACAT, and FXR. The mRNA expression levels of CYP7A1 and LCAT between the HF group and HFCS group were not statistically different. CS extract supplementation with a high-fat diet improves levels of adipocytokine secretion and glucose homeostasis. CS extract is also effective in decreasing the regulatory pool of hepatic cholesterol, in line with decreased blood and hepatic levels of cholesterol though modulation of mRNA expression levels of HMG-CoA reductase, ACAT, and FXR.

Occurrence of pesticide non extractable residues in physical and chemical fractions from two natural soils.

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Andreou, K.; Jones, K.; Semple, K.

2009-04-01

Distribution of pesticide non extractable residues resulted from the incubation of two natural soils with each of the isoproturon, diazinon and cypermethrin pesticide was assessed in this study. Pesticide non extractable residues distribution in soil physical and chemical fractions is known to ultimately affect their fate. This study aimed to address the fate and behaviour of the non extractable residues in the context of their association with soil physical and chemical fractions with varying properties and characteristics. Non extractable residues were formed from incubation of each pesticide in the two natural soils over a period of 24 months. Soils containing the non extractable residues were fractionated into three solid phase fractions using a physical fractionation procedure as follows: Sediment (SED, >20 μm), (II) Microaggregate (MA, 20-2 μm) and (III) Colloid phase (COL, 2-0.05 μm). Each soil fraction was then fractionated into organic carbon chemical fractionations as follows: Fulvic acid (FA), Humic acid (HA) and Humin (HM). Significant amount of the pesticides was lost during the incubation period. Enrichment factors for the organic carbon and the 14C-pesticide residues were higher in the MA and COL fraction rather than the SED fraction. Greater association and enrichment of the fulvic acid fraction of the organic carbon in the soil was observed. Non extractable residues at the FA fraction showed to diminish while in the HA fraction were increased with decreasing the fraction size. An appreciable amount of non extractable residues were located in the HM fraction but this was less than the amount recovered in the humic substances. Long term fate of pesticide non extractable residues in the soil structural components is important in order to assess any risk associated with them.

Extraction of valuable compounds from mangosteen pericarps by hydrothermal assisted sonication

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Machmudah, Siti; Lestari, Sarah Duta; Shiddiqi, Qifni Yasa'Ash; Widiyastuti, Winardi, Sugeng; Wahyudiono, Kanda, Hideki; Goto, Motonobu

2015-12-01

Valuable compounds, such as xanthone and phenolic compounds, from mangosteen pericarps was extracted by hydrothermal treatment at temperatures of 120-160 °C and pressures of 5 MPa using batch and semi-batch extractor. This method is a simple and environmentally friendly extraction method requiring no chemicals other than water. Under these conditions, there is possibility for the formation of phenolic compounds from mangosteen pericarps from decomposition of bounds between lignin, cellulose, and hemicellulose via autohydrolysis. In order to increase the amount of extracted valuable compounds, sonication pre-treament was performed prior to the hydrothermal extraction process. 30 min of sonication pre-treatment could increase significantly the amount of xanthone and phenolic compounds mangosteen pericarps extraction. In batch-system, the xanthone recovery approach to 100 % at 160 °C with 30 min sonication pre-treatment for 150 min extraction time. Under semi-batch process, the total phenolic compounds in the extract was 217 mg/g sample at 160 °C with 30 min sonication pre-treatment for 150 min total extraction time. The results revealed that hydrothermal extraction assisted sonication pre-treatment is applicable method for the isolation of polyphenolic compounds from other types of biomass and may lead to an advanced plant biomass components extraction technology.

Automated identification and geometrical features extraction of individual trees from Mobile Laser Scanning data in Budapest

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Koma, Zsófia; Székely, Balázs; Folly-Ritvay, Zoltán; Skobrák, Ferenc; Koenig, Kristina; Höfle, Bernhard

2016-04-01

Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) is an evolving operational measurement technique for urban environment providing large amounts of high resolution information about trees, street features, pole-like objects on the street sides or near to motorways. In this study we investigate a robust segmentation method to extract the individual trees automatically in order to build an object-based tree database system. We focused on the large urban parks in Budapest (Margitsziget and Városliget; KARESZ project) which contained large diversity of different kind of tree species. The MLS data contained high density point cloud data with 1-8 cm mean absolute accuracy 80-100 meter distance from streets. The robust segmentation method contained following steps: The ground points are determined first. As a second step cylinders are fitted in vertical slice 1-1.5 meter relative height above ground, which is used to determine the potential location of each single trees trunk and cylinder-like object. Finally, residual values are calculated as deviation of each point from a vertically expanded fitted cylinder; these residual values are used to separate cylinder-like object from individual trees. After successful parameterization, the model parameters and the corresponding residual values of the fitted object are extracted and imported into the tree database. Additionally, geometric features are calculated for each segmented individual tree like crown base, crown width, crown length, diameter of trunk, volume of the individual trees. In case of incompletely scanned trees, the extraction of geometric features is based on fitted circles. The result of the study is a tree database containing detailed information about urban trees, which can be a valuable dataset for ecologist, city planners, planting and mapping purposes. Furthermore, the established database will be the initial point for classification trees into single species. MLS data used in this project had been measured in the framework of KARESZ project for whole Budapest. BSz contributed as an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow.

PANTHER. Pattern ANalytics To support High-performance Exploitation and Reasoning.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Czuchlewski, Kristina Rodriguez; Hart, William E.

Sandia has approached the analysis of big datasets with an integrated methodology that uses computer science, image processing, and human factors to exploit critical patterns and relationships in large datasets despite the variety and rapidity of information. The work is part of a three-year LDRD Grand Challenge called PANTHER (Pattern ANalytics To support High-performance Exploitation and Reasoning). To maximize data analysis capability, Sandia pursued scientific advances across three key technical domains: (1) geospatial-temporal feature extraction via image segmentation and classification; (2) geospatial-temporal analysis capabilities tailored to identify and process new signatures more efficiently; and (3) domain- relevant models of humanmore » perception and cognition informing the design of analytic systems. Our integrated results include advances in geographical information systems (GIS) in which we discover activity patterns in noisy, spatial-temporal datasets using geospatial-temporal semantic graphs. We employed computational geometry and machine learning to allow us to extract and predict spatial-temporal patterns and outliers from large aircraft and maritime trajectory datasets. We automatically extracted static and ephemeral features from real, noisy synthetic aperture radar imagery for ingestion into a geospatial-temporal semantic graph. We worked with analysts and investigated analytic workflows to (1) determine how experiential knowledge evolves and is deployed in high-demand, high-throughput visual search workflows, and (2) better understand visual search performance and attention. Through PANTHER, Sandia's fundamental rethinking of key aspects of geospatial data analysis permits the extraction of much richer information from large amounts of data. The project results enable analysts to examine mountains of historical and current data that would otherwise go untouched, while also gaining meaningful, measurable, and defensible insights into overlooked relationships and patterns. The capability is directly relevant to the nation's nonproliferation remote-sensing activities and has broad national security applications for military and intelligence- gathering organizations.« less

[Study on extraction process of Radix Bupleuri].

PubMed

Zhao, Lei; Liu, Benliang; Wu, Fuxiang; Tao, Lanping; Liu, Jian

2004-10-01

The orthogonal design was used to optimize extraction process of Radix Bupleuri with content of total saponin and yield of the extract as markers. Factors that have been chosen were ethanol concentration, ethanol consumption, extraction times and extraction time. Each factor had three levels. The result showed that the optimum extraction condition was 80% ethanol, 4 times the amount of material, refluxing for 4 times, 60 minutes each time. The optimized process was stable and workable.

Negative ion production in large volume source with small deposition of cesium

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Jacquot, C.; Pamela, J.; Riz, D.

1996-03-01

Experimental data on the enhancement of D{sup {minus}} (H{sup {minus}}) negative ion production due to cesium injection into a large volume multiampere negative ion source (MANTIS) are described. The directed deposition of small cesium amounts (5{endash}100 mg) from a compact, movable oven, placed into the central part of a MANTIS gas-discharge box was used. A calorimetrically measured D{sup {minus}} beam with an intensity up to 1.6 A and an extracted current density up to 4.2 mA/cm{sup 2} (beam energy 25 kV) was obtained. Exactly 30 mg of cesium provides at least one month of source operation (1000 pulses with amore » discharge pulse duration of 4 s). The effect of cesium on NI enhancement was immediately displayed after the distributed Cs deposition, but it needed some {open_quote}{open_quote}conditioning{close_quote}{close_quote} of cesium by tens of discharge pulses (or by several hours {open_quote}{open_quote}pause{close_quote}{close_quote}) in the case of a localized Cs deposition. No degradation of extraction-acceleration voltage holding on within the tested range of cesium injection was observed. {copyright} {ital 1996 American Institute of Physics.}« less

Characteristics of purple nonsulfur bacteria grown under Stevia residue extractions.

PubMed

Xu, J; Feng, Y; Wang, Y; Lin, X

2013-11-01

As a consequence of the large-scale cultivation of Stevia plants, releases of plant residues, the byproduct after sweetener extraction, to the environment are inevitable. Stevia residue and its effluent after batching up contain large amounts of organic matters with small molecular weight, which therefore are a potential pollution source. Meanwhile, they are favourite substrates for micro-organism growths. This investigation was aimed to utilize the simulated effluent of Stevia residue to enrich the representative purple nonsulfur bacterium (PNSB), Rhodopseudomonas palustris (Rps. palustris), which has important economic values. The growth profile and quality of Rps. palustris were characterized by spectrophotometry, compared to those grown in common PNSB mineral synthetic medium. Our results revealed that the simulated effluent of Stevia residue not only stimulated Rps. palustris growth to a greater extent, but also increased its physiologically active cytochrome concentrations and excreted indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) content. This variation in phenotype of Rps. palustris could result from the shift in its genotype, further revealed by the repetitive sequence-based PCR (rep-PCR) fingerprinting analysis. Our results showed that the effluent of Stevia residue was a promising substrate for microbial growth. © 2013 The Society for Applied Microbiology.

Patterns and comparisons of human-induced changes in river flood impacts in cities

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Clark, Stephanie; Sharma, Ashish; Sisson, Scott A.

2018-03-01

In this study, information extracted from the first global urban fluvial flood risk data set (Aqueduct) is investigated and visualized to explore current and projected city-level flood impacts driven by urbanization and climate change. We use a novel adaption of the self-organizing map (SOM) method, an artificial neural network proficient at clustering, pattern extraction, and visualization of large, multi-dimensional data sets. Prevalent patterns of current relationships and anticipated changes over time in the nonlinearly-related environmental and social variables are presented, relating urban river flood impacts to socioeconomic development and changing hydrologic conditions. Comparisons are provided between 98 individual cities. Output visualizations compare baseline and changing trends of city-specific exposures of population and property to river flooding, revealing relationships between the cities based on their relative map placements. Cities experiencing high (or low) baseline flood impacts on population and/or property that are expected to improve (or worsen), as a result of anticipated climate change and development, are identified and compared. This paper condenses and conveys large amounts of information through visual communication to accelerate the understanding of relationships between local urban conditions and global processes.

Fuzzy Linguistic Knowledge Based Behavior Extraction for Building Energy Management Systems

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Dumidu Wijayasekara; Milos Manic

2013-08-01

Significant portion of world energy production is consumed by building Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) units. Thus along with occupant comfort, energy efficiency is also an important factor in HVAC control. Modern buildings use advanced Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) control schemes to realize these goals. However, since the performance of HVAC units is dependent on many criteria including uncertainties in weather, number of occupants, and thermal state, the performance of current state of the art systems are sub-optimal. Furthermore, because of the large number of sensors in buildings, and the high frequency of data collection, large amount ofmore » information is available. Therefore, important behavior of buildings that compromise energy efficiency or occupant comfort is difficult to identify. This paper presents an easy to use and understandable framework for identifying such behavior. The presented framework uses human understandable knowledge-base to extract important behavior of buildings and present it to users via a graphical user interface. The presented framework was tested on a building in the Pacific Northwest and was shown to be able to identify important behavior that relates to energy efficiency and occupant comfort.« less

Application of a fast skyline computation algorithm for serendipitous searching problems

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Koizumi, Kenichi; Hiraki, Kei; Inaba, Mary

2018-02-01

Skyline computation is a method of extracting interesting entries from a large population with multiple attributes. These entries, called skyline or Pareto optimal entries, are known to have extreme characteristics that cannot be found by outlier detection methods. Skyline computation is an important task for characterizing large amounts of data and selecting interesting entries with extreme features. When the population changes dynamically, the task of calculating a sequence of skyline sets is called continuous skyline computation. This task is known to be difficult to perform for the following reasons: (1) information of non-skyline entries must be stored since they may join the skyline in the future; (2) the appearance or disappearance of even a single entry can change the skyline drastically; (3) it is difficult to adopt a geometric acceleration algorithm for skyline computation tasks with high-dimensional datasets. Our new algorithm called jointed rooted-tree (JR-tree) manages entries using a rooted tree structure. JR-tree delays extend the tree to deep levels to accelerate tree construction and traversal. In this study, we presented the difficulties in extracting entries tagged with a rare label in high-dimensional space and the potential of fast skyline computation in low-latency cell identification technology.

Production and disposal of waste materials from gas and oil extraction from the Marcellus Shale Play in Pennsylvania

USGS Publications Warehouse

Maloney, Kelly O.; Yoxtheimer, David A.

2012-01-01

The increasing world demand for energy has led to an increase in the exploration and extraction of natural gas, condensate, and oil from unconventional organic-rich shale plays. However, little is known about the quantity, transport, and disposal method of wastes produced during the extraction process. We examined the quantity of waste produced by gas extraction activities from the Marcellus Shale play in Pennsylvania for 2011. The main types of wastes included drilling cuttings and fluids from vertical and horizontal drilling and fluids generated from hydraulic fracturing [i.e., flowback and brine (formation) water]. Most reported drill cuttings (98.4%) were disposed of in landfills, and there was a high amount of interstate (49.2%) and interbasin (36.7%) transport. Drilling fluids were largely reused (70.7%), with little interstate (8.5%) and interbasin (5.8%) transport. Reported flowback water was mostly reused (89.8%) or disposed of in brine or industrial waste treatment plants (8.0%) and largely remained within Pennsylvania (interstate transport was 3.1%) with little interbasin transport (2.9%). Brine water was most often reused (55.7%), followed by disposal in injection wells (26.6%), and then disposed of in brine or industrial waste treatment plants (13.8%). Of the major types of fluid waste, brine water was most often transported to other states (28.2%) and to other basins (9.8%). In 2011, 71.5% of the reported brine water, drilling fluids, and flowback was recycled: 73.1% in the first half and 69.7% in the second half of 2011. Disposal of waste to municipal sewage treatment plants decreased nearly 100% from the first half to second half of 2011. When standardized against the total amount of gas produced, all reported wastes, except flowback sands, were less in the second half than the first half of 2011. Disposal of wastes into injection disposal wells increased 129.2% from the first half to the second half of 2011; other disposal methods decreased. Some issues with data were uncovered during the analytical process (e.g., correct geospatial location of disposal sites and the proper reporting of end use of waste) that obfuscated the analyses; correcting these issues will help future analyses.

Preferential induction of Th17 cells in vitro and in vivo by Fucogalactan from Ganoderma lucidum (Reishi).

PubMed

Yoshida, Hideyuki; Suzuki, Mayu; Sakaguchi, Ryota; Tani, Ito; Kotani, Hitoshi; Shudo, Norimasa; Yoshimura, Akihiko

2012-05-25

The mushroom known as Reishi (Ganoderma lucidum) has been used as an herbal medicine for tumor treatment and immune system activation. Because its effects on the differentiation of effector T helper cells have not yet been fully understood, we investigated the effects of Reishi and those of its principal ingredient, β-glucan, on the activation of dendritic cells and the differentiation of Th17 cells. Reishi extracts as well as purified β-glucan (Curdran) activated DCs and caused them to produce large amounts of IL-23. β-glucan also enhanced and sustained the transcription of IL-23p19. The MEK-ERK signaling pathway positively regulates IL-23p19 transcription in β-glucan-stimulated DCs. In a mixed leukocyte reaction, Reishi-stimulated DCs preferentially induced Th17 cells. Furthermore, orally-administrated Reishi increased the percentages of Th17 cells and the transcription levels of antimicrobial peptides. Our results show that Reishi and β-glucan activate DCs to produce large amounts of IL-23, which induces Th17 differentiation both in vitro and in vivo. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Evaluation of specimen preservatives for DNA analyses of bees

USGS Publications Warehouse

Frampton, M.; Droege, S.; Conrad, T.; Prager, S.; Richards, M.H.

2008-01-01

Large-scale insect collecting efforts that are facilitated by the use of pan traps result in large numbers of specimens being collected. Storage of these specimens can be problematic if space and equipment are limited. In this study, we investigated the effects of various preservatives (alcohol solutions and DMSO) on the amount and quality of DNA extracted from bees (specifically Halictidae, Apidae, and Andrenidae). In addition, we examined the amount and quality of DNA obtained from bee specimens killed and stored at -80 degrees C and from specimens stored for up to 24 years in ethanol. DNA quality was measured in terms of how well it could be PCR-amplified using a set of mitochondrial primers that are commonly used in insect molecular systematics. Overall the best methods of preservation were ultra-cold freezing and dimethyl sulfoxide, but these are both expensive and in the case of ultra-cold freezing, somewhat impractical for field entomologists. Additionally, dimethyl sulfoxide was shown to have adverse effects on morphological characters that are typically used for identification to the level of species. We therefore recommend that the best alternative is 95% ethanol, as it preserves bee specimens well for both morphological and molecular studies.

Multimodal Word Meaning Induction From Minimal Exposure to Natural Text.

PubMed

Lazaridou, Angeliki; Marelli, Marco; Baroni, Marco

2017-04-01

By the time they reach early adulthood, English speakers are familiar with the meaning of thousands of words. In the last decades, computational simulations known as distributional semantic models (DSMs) have demonstrated that it is possible to induce word meaning representations solely from word co-occurrence statistics extracted from a large amount of text. However, while these models learn in batch mode from large corpora, human word learning proceeds incrementally after minimal exposure to new words. In this study, we run a set of experiments investigating whether minimal distributional evidence from very short passages suffices to trigger successful word learning in subjects, testing their linguistic and visual intuitions about the concepts associated with new words. After confirming that subjects are indeed very efficient distributional learners even from small amounts of evidence, we test a DSM on the same multimodal task, finding that it behaves in a remarkable human-like way. We conclude that DSMs provide a convincing computational account of word learning even at the early stages in which a word is first encountered, and the way they build meaning representations can offer new insights into human language acquisition. Copyright © 2017 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

The transforming growth factor-ss superfamily cytokine macrophage inhibitory cytokine-1 is present in high concentrations in the serum of pregnant women.

PubMed

Moore, A G; Brown, D A; Fairlie, W D; Bauskin, A R; Brown, P K; Munier, M L; Russell, P K; Salamonsen, L A; Wallace, E M; Breit, S N

2000-12-01

Macrophage inhibitory cytokine-1 (MIC-1) is a recently described divergent member of the transforming growth factor-ss superfamily. MIC-1 transcription up-regulation is associated with macrophage activation, and this observation led to its cloning. Northern blots indicate that MIC-1 is also present in human placenta. A sensitive sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay for the quantification of MIC-1 was developed and used to examine the role of this cytokine in pregnancy. High levels of MIC-1 are present in the sera of pregnant women. The level rises substantially with progress of gestation. MIC-1 can also be detected, in large amounts, in amniotic fluid and placental extracts. In addition, the BeWo placental trophoblastic cell line was found to constitutively express the MIC-1 transcript and secrete large amounts of MIC-1. These findings suggest that the placental trophoblast is a major source of the MIC-1 present in maternal serum and amniotic fluid. We suggest that MIC-1 may promote fetal survival by suppressing the production of maternally derived proinflammatory cytokines within the uterus.

Combined alkaline hydrolysis and ultrasound-assisted extraction for the release of nonextractable phenolics from cauliflower (Brassica oleracea var. botrytis) waste.

PubMed

Gonzales, Gerard Bryan; Smagghe, Guy; Raes, Katleen; Van Camp, John

2014-04-16

Cauliflower waste contains high amounts phenolic compounds, but conventional solvent extraction misses high amounts of nonextractable phenolics (NEP), which may contribute more to the valorization of these waste streams. In this study, the NEP content and composition of cauliflower waste were investigated. The ability of alkaline hydrolysis, sonication, and their combination to release NEP was assessed. Alkaline hydrolysis with sonication was found to extract the highest NEP content (7.3 ± 0.17 mg gallic acid equivalents (GAE)/g dry waste), which was higher than the extractable fraction. The highest yield was obtained after treatment of 2 M NaOH at 60 °C for 30 min of sonication. Quantification and identification were done using U(H)PLC-DAD and U(H)PLC-ESI-MS(E). Kaempferol and quercetin glucosides along with several phenolic acids were found. The results of the study show that there are higher amounts of valuable health-promoting compounds from cauliflower waste than what is currently described in the literature.

The cyst wall of Colpoda steinii. A substance rich in glutamic acid residues

PubMed Central

Tibbs, J.

1966-01-01

1. The cyst wall of Colpoda steinii has been isolated and its chemical nature examined. It had a nitrogen content 13·9±0·2% (s.d.) and an ash 8·6±1·6% (s.d.). After lipid and hot-acid extraction there was a variable residual phosphorus of 0·19–0·64%. The protein nature, indicated by infrared and ultraviolet absorption, was confirmed when 100μg. of hydrolysed wall gave a ninhydrin colour equivalent to that given by 0·88–1·01μmoles of glycine. Hexosamine, hexose, pentose, lipid and dipicolinic acid were absent. 2. Paper chromatography of hydrolysates, besides showing the presence of the usual protein amino acids and three unidentified ninhydrin-reacting spots, indicated the presence of large amounts of glutamic acid. Estimated by chromatography, the amount present was 52·9±0·6 (s.d.) g./100g. of ash-free wall; manometric estimation of l-glutamic acid with l-glutamate 1-carboxy-lyase gave 46·5±0·9 (s.d.) g./100g. 3. Free carboxyl groups were estimated by titration as 0·159±0·011 (s.d.) mole/100g. and those present as amide as 0·154±0·004 (s.d.) mole/100g., and the total was compared with the dicarboxylic acid content 0·360±0·010 (s.d.) mole/100g. 4. After treatment with 98% formic acid 25–30% of the wall material could be extracted by 0·05m-sodium carbonate solution (extract 1); after treatment of the residue with performic acid a further 62–63% based on the original weight could be extracted by 0·05m-sodium carbonate (extract 2). 5. The average values found for the glutamic acid contents were 21·7g./100g. for extract 1 and 58·0g./100g. for extract 2. The cysteic acid content of whole oxidized wall was about 5·8g./100g. and of extract 2 also about 5·8g./100g. The glutamic acid and cysteic acid contents of the final residue were also investigated. 6. The significance of these extraction experiments in relation to the wall structure is discussed. ImagesPlate 1. PMID:4957913

Phenolic Compounds and Antioxidant Activity of Phalaenopsis Orchid Hybrids

PubMed Central

Minh, Truong Ngoc; Khang, Do Tan; Tuyen, Phung Thi; Minh, Luong The; Anh, La Hoang; Quan, Nguyen Van; Ha, Pham Thi Thu; Quan, Nguyen Thanh; Toan, Nguyen Phu; Elzaawely, Abdelnaser Abdelghany; Xuan, Tran Dang

2016-01-01

Phalaenopsis spp. is the most commercially and economically important orchid, but their plant parts are often left unused, which has caused environmental problems. To date, reports on phytochemical analyses were most available on endangered and medicinal orchids. The present study was conducted to determine the total phenolics, total flavonoids, and antioxidant activity of ethanol extracts prepared from leaves and roots of six commercial hybrid Phalaenopsis spp. Leaf extracts of “Chian Xen Queen” contained the highest total phenolics with a value of 11.52 ± 0.43 mg gallic acid equivalent per g dry weight and the highest total flavonoids (4.98 ± 0.27 mg rutin equivalent per g dry weight). The antioxidant activity of root extracts evaluated by DPPH (2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl) free radical scavenging assay and β-carotene bleaching method was higher than those of the leaf extracts. Eleven phenolic compounds were identified, namely, protocatechuic acid, p-hydroxybenzoic acid, vanillic acid, caffeic acid, syringic acid, vanillin, ferulic acid, sinapic acid, p-coumaric acid, benzoic acid, and ellagic acid. Ferulic, p-coumaric and sinapic acids were concentrated largely in the roots. The results suggested that the root extracts from hybrid Phalaenopsis spp. could be a potential source of natural antioxidants. This study also helps to reduce the amount of this orchid waste in industrial production, as its roots can be exploited for pharmaceutical purposes. PMID:27649250

A method for extracting high-quality total RNA from plant rich in polysaccharides and polyphenols using Dendrobium huoshanense

PubMed Central

Yu, Nianjun; Zhang, Wei; Xing, Lihua; Xie, Dongmei; Peng, Daiyin

2018-01-01

Acquiring high quality RNA is the basis of plant molecular biology research, plant genetics and other physiological investigations. At present, a large number of nucleotide isolation methods have been exploited or modified, such as commercial kits, CTAB, SDS methods and so on. Due to the nature of different plants, extraction methods vary. Moreover, efficiency of certain approach cannot be guaranteed due to composition of different plants and extracting high quality RNA from plants rich in polysaccharides and polyphenols are often difficult. The physical and chemical properties of polysaccharides which are similar to nucleic acids and other secondary metabolites will be coprecipitated with RNA irreversibly. Therefore, how to remove polysaccharides and other secondary metabolites during RNA extraction is the primary challenge. Dendrobium huoshanense is an Orchidaceae perennial herb that is rich in polysaccharides and other secondary metabolites. By using D. huoshanense as the subject, we improved the method originated from CHAN and made it suitable for plants containing high amount of polysaccharides and polyphenols. The extracted total RNA was clear and non-dispersive, with good integrity and no obvious contamination with DNA and other impurities. And it was also evaluated by gel electrophoresis, nucleic acid quantitative detector and PCR assessment. Thus, as a simple approach, it is suitable and efficient in RNA isolation for plants rich in polysaccharides and polyphenols. PMID:29715304

SUPERCRITICAL FLUID EXTRACTION OF POLYCYCLIC AROMATIC HYDROCARBON MIXTURES FROM CONTAMINATED SOILS

EPA Science Inventory

Highly contaminated (with PAHs) topsoils were extracted with supercritical CO₂ to determine the feasibility and mechanism of supercritical fluid extraction (SFE). Effect of SCF density, temperature, cosolvent type and amount, and of slurrying the soil with water were ...

Ultrasonic-Assisted Extraction of Raspberry Seed Oil and Evaluation of Its Physicochemical Properties, Fatty Acid Compositions and Antioxidant Activities

PubMed Central

Huang, Qun; Wang, Jinli; Lin, Qiyang; Liu, Mingxin; Lee, Won Young; Song, Hongbo

2016-01-01

Ultrasonic-assisted extraction was employed for highly efficient separation of aroma oil from raspberry seeds. A central composite design with two variables and five levels was employed and effects of process variables of sonication time and extraction temperature on oil recovery and quality were investigated. Optimal conditions predicted by response surface methodology were sonication time of 37 min and extraction temperature of 54°C. Specifically, ultrasonic-assisted extraction (UAE) was able to provide a higher content of beneficial unsaturated fatty acids, whereas conventional Soxhlet extraction (SE) resulted in a higher amount of saturated fatty acids. Moreover, raspberry seed oil contained abundant amounts of edible linoleic acid and linolenic acid, which suggest raspberry seeds could be valuable edible sources of natural γ-linolenic acid products. In comparison with SE, UAE exerted higher free radical scavenging capacities. In addition, UAE significantly blocked H2O2-induced intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation. PMID:27120053

Studies on the extraction of nitrogenous and phosphorus-containing materials from the seeds of kidney beans (Phaseolus vulgaris)

PubMed Central

Pusztai, A.

1965-01-01

1. The conditions of extracting nitrogenous, phosphorus-containing and glucosamine-containing components of the seeds of kidney bean have been studied. 2. The dispersing of proteins was incomplete below pH 7, and the exact amount of protein extracted depended on the pH and the ionic strength of the solvent. 3. The extraction of proteins was practically complete in the range pH 7–9, but the relative amounts of the individual proteins obtained still depended on the pH of the extracting media, indicating a pH-dependent association–dissociation reaction between the protein molecules present. 4. The extraction of phosphorus-containing material showed an optimum at pH 6–7, and only a part of this was removed on dialysis. The precipitates obtained with trichloroacetic acid, on the other hand, retained very little phosphorus-containing material. 5. The significance of these findings is discussed. PMID:14340051

Contribution of calcium oxalate to soil-exchangeable calcium

USGS Publications Warehouse

Dauer, Jenny M.; Perakis, Steven S.

2013-01-01

Acid deposition and repeated biomass harvest have decreased soil calcium (Ca) availability in many temperate forests worldwide, yet existing methods for assessing available soil Ca do not fully characterize soil Ca forms. To account for discrepancies in ecosystem Ca budgets, it has been hypothesized that the highly insoluble biomineral Ca oxalate might represent an additional soil Ca pool that is not detected in standard measures of soil-exchangeable Ca. We asked whether several standard method extractants for soil-exchangeable Ca could also access Ca held in Ca oxalate crystals using spike recovery tests in both pure solutions and soil extractions. In solutions of the extractants ammonium chloride, ammonium acetate, and barium chloride, we observed 2% to 104% dissolution of Ca oxalate crystals, with dissolution increasing with both solution molarity and ionic potential of cation extractant. In spike recovery tests using a low-Ca soil, we estimate that 1 M ammonium acetate extraction dissolved sufficient Ca oxalate to contribute an additional 52% to standard measurements of soil-exchangeable Ca. However, in a high-Ca soil, the amount of Ca oxalate spike that would dissolve in 1 M ammonium acetate extraction was difficult to detect against the large pool of exchangeable Ca. We conclude that Ca oxalate can contribute substantially to standard estimates of soil-exchangeable Ca in acid forest soils with low soil-exchangeable Ca. Consequently, measures of exchangeable Ca are unlikely to fully resolve discrepancies in ecosystem Ca mass balance unless the contribution of Ca oxalate to exchangeable Ca is also assessed.

Total Phenolic and Flavonoid Contents of Aqueous Extract of Stinging Nettle and In Vitro Antiproliferative Effect on Hela and BT-474 Cell Lines.

PubMed

Fattahi, Sadegh; Zabihi, Ebrahim; Abedian, Zeinab; Pourbagher, Roghayeh; Motevalizadeh Ardekani, Ali; Mostafazadeh, Amrollah; Akhavan-Niaki, Haleh

2014-01-01

Phenolic compounds including flavonoids and phenolic acids are plants secondary metabolites. Due to their ability to act as antioxidant agents, there is a growing interest to use those components in traditional medicine for cancer prevention or treatment. The aim of this study was to measure the amounts of total phenolics and flavonoids as well as anti-proliferative effect of aqueous extract of Stinging nettle on BT-474 and Hela cell lines. The amounts of phenolics content and total flavonoids were determined by folin ciocalteu and aluminium chloride methods, respectively. The free radical scavenging activity was measured by using diphenyl - picrylhydrazyl (DPPH). The reducing power of the extract was measured in the presence of potassium hexacyanoferrate and its antiproliferative activity was assessed on BT-474 and Hela cell lines using MTT assay. Total phenolic content was 322.941± 11.811 mg gallic acid/g extract. Total flavonoid content was 133.916±12.006 mg Catechin/g. The IC50 of DPPH radical was 1.2 mg/ ml and the reducing power was 218.9± 15.582 μg ascorbic acid/ g. Cell viability of BT-474 cells decreased to less than half of the control (no added extract) at the presence of 3 mg/ ml extract while no significant changes were detected for Hela cells at similar conditions. There was no significant difference in the percentage of surviving cells between consecutive days (day 1, 2 and 3) for both BT-474 and Hela cells (P>0.05). Although the relatively high amount of phenolic and flavonoid contents of the aqueous extract make this plant a promising candidate for diseases treatment; however, there is not a direct relationship between the amounts of these antioxidant components and the efficiency in in vitro cancer treatment.

Total Phenolic and Flavonoid Contents of Aqueous Extract of Stinging Nettle and In Vitro Antiproliferative Effect on Hela and BT-474 Cell Lines

PubMed Central

Fattahi, Sadegh; Zabihi, Ebrahim; Abedian, Zeinab; Pourbagher, Roghayeh; Motevalizadeh Ardekani, Ali; Mostafazadeh, Amrollah; Akhavan-Niaki, Haleh

2014-01-01

Phenolic compounds including flavonoids and phenolic acids are plants secondary metabolites. Due to their ability to act as antioxidant agents, there is a growing interest to use those components in traditional medicine for cancer prevention or treatment. The aim of this study was to measure the amounts of total phenolics and flavonoids as well as anti-proliferative effect of aqueous extract of Stinging nettle on BT-474 and Hela cell lines. The amounts of phenolics content and total flavonoids were determined by folin ciocalteu and aluminium chloride methods, respectively. The free radical scavenging activity was measured by using diphenyl - picrylhydrazyl (DPPH). The reducing power of the extract was measured in the presence of potassium hexacyanoferrate and its antiproliferative activity was assessed on BT-474 and Hela cell lines using MTT assay. Total phenolic content was 322.941± 11.811 mg gallic acid/g extract. Total flavonoid content was 133.916±12.006 mg Catechin/g. The IC50 of DPPH radical was 1.2 mg/ ml and the reducing power was 218.9± 15.582 μg ascorbic acid/ g. Cell viability of BT-474 cells decreased to less than half of the control (no added extract) at the presence of 3 mg/ ml extract while no significant changes were detected for Hela cells at similar conditions. There was no significant difference in the percentage of surviving cells between consecutive days (day 1, 2 and 3) for both BT-474 and Hela cells (P>0.05). Although the relatively high amount of phenolic and flavonoid contents of the aqueous extract make this plant a promising candidate for diseases treatment; however, there is not a direct relationship between the amounts of these antioxidant components and the efficiency in in vitro cancer treatment. PMID:25035860

[Effect of enzymolysis after acid and alkali pretreatment on extraction of tanshinones from Salviae Miltiorrhizae Radix et Rhizoma residues].

PubMed

Dai, Xin-Xin; Shen, Fei; Su, Shu-Lan; Zhang, Sen; Guo, Sheng; Jiang, Shu; Qian, Da-Wei; Duan, Jin-Ao

2016-09-01

Salviae Miltiorrhizae Radix et Rhizoma residues were pre-treated with acid and alkali, degraded by using cellulose, and the effects of different processing methods on the extraction rate of tanshinones were compared to provide scientific basis for development and utilization of tanshinones from Salviae Miltiorrhizae Radix et Rhizoma residues. The results showed that in the Salviae Miltiorrhizae Radix et Rhizoma residues without pre-treatment, enzymatic hydrolysis time of 4.5 d could make most of the cellulose degraded when the concentration of substrate enzyme concentration was 6 U•mL-1, and the highest glucose concentration was 59.74 mg•g⁻¹. It was found that the best effect was achieved after alkali pre-treatment-cellulose C degradation among the different pre-treatment methods, and the glucose content reached 119.50 mg•g⁻¹, followed by the same concentration of acid pre-treatment-cellulose C degradation. The extraction amount of tanshinone ⅡA was increased by 82.54% after enzyme degradation, with a mass fraction of 2.451 mg•g⁻¹; extraction amount of tanshinone I was increased by 81.82% after enzyme degradation, with a mass fraction of 2.373 mg•g⁻¹; extraction amount of cryptotanshinone was increased by 64.4% after enzyme degradation, with a mass fraction of 1.080 mg•g⁻¹; extraction amount of dihydrotanshinone I was increased by 61.3% after enzyme degradation, with a mass fraction of 0.601 2 mg•g⁻¹. Acid and alkali pre-treatment combined with cellulose degradation could effectively improve the extraction rate of tanshinones from Salviae Miltiorrhizae Radix et Rhizoma residues. This method is operable and practical, and it is beneficial for improving the utilization efficiency of tanshinones (resource based chemicals) from Salviae Miltiorrhizae Radix et Rhizoma residues. Copyright© by the Chinese Pharmaceutical Association.

Germinated and Ungerminated Seeds Extract from Two Lupinus Species: Biological Compounds Characterization and In Vitro and In Vivo Evaluations

PubMed Central

Andor, Bogdan; Alexa, Ersilia; Hogea, Elena; Coricovac, Dorina; Pătrașcu, Jenel Marian; Mioc, Marius; Cristina, Romeo Teodor; Soica, Codruta; Dehelean, Cristina

2016-01-01

In recent years, nutraceuticals attracted a great amount of attention in the biomedical research due to their significant contribution as natural agents for prevention of various health issues. Ethanolic extracts from the ungerminated and germinated seeds of Lupinus albus L. and Lupinus angustifolius L. were analyzed for the content in isoflavones (genistein) and cinnamic acid derivatives. Additionally, the extracts were evaluated for antimicrobial, antiproliferative, and anti-inflammatory properties, using in vitro and in vivo tests. Germination proved to be a method of choice in increasing the amount of genistein and cinnamic acid derivatives in both Lupinus albus L. and Lupinus angustifolius L. seeds. Biological evaluation of all vegetal extracts revealed a weak therapeutic potential for both ungerminated and germinated seeds. PMID:28090213

Comparison of the Composition and Antioxidant Activities of Phenolics from the Fruiting Bodies of Cultivated Asian Culinary-Medicinal Mushrooms.

PubMed

Lin, Shaoling; Ching, Lai Tsz; Ke, Xinxin; Cheung, Peter Chi Keung

2016-01-01

The composition profile and the antioxidant properties of phenolics in water extracts obtained from the fresh fruiting bodies of 4 common cultivated Asian edible mushrooms-Agrocybe aegerita, Pleurotus ostreatus, P. eryngii, and Pholiota nameko were compared. The water extract from A. aegerita (AaE) had the highest total phenolic content (TPC) at 54.18 ± 0.27 gallic acid equivalents (μmol/L)/mg extract (P < 0.05), as measured by the Folin-Ciocalteu method, and consisted of the largest number (including gallic acid, protocatechuic acid, chlorogenic acid, ferulic acid, and sinapic acid) and total amounts of phenolic acids identified by Fourier transform-ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry. The water extract of Ph. nameko was found to have the second-highest TPC (43.55 ± 0.10 gallic acid equivalents [μmol/L]/mg extract), followed by the water extract of P. eryngii and the water extract of P. ostreatus (39.55 ± 0.25 and 39.02 ± 0.30 gallic acid equivalents/mg extract, respectively). The scavenging activities of the water extracts from these mushrooms were evaluated against 2,2-diphenyl-l-(2,4,6-trinitrophenyl) hydrazyl diphenylpicrylhydrazyl (DPPH), superoxide anion radicals, hydroxyl radicals, and hydrogen peroxide. Based on halfmaximal effective concentrations, AaE was more effective in scavenging hydrogen peroxide (<0.05), followed by DPPH (0.51 mg/mL), superoxide anion radicals (0.85 mg/mL) and hydroxyl radicals (5.94 mg/mL), then the other mushroom water extracts. The differences in the half-maximal effective concentrations of individual mushroom water extracts were probably the result of the different numbers and amounts of individual phenolic acids in the extracts. The antioxidant activities of the mushroom water extracts were correlated with their TPC. The strongest antioxidant properties of AaE were consistent with its highest TPC and with the largest number and amount of phenolics identified in the extract. These results indicated that cultivated edible mushrooms could be a potential source of natural antioxidants with free radical scavenging properties for application as a functional food ingredient.

Avocado by-products as inhibitors of color deterioration and lipid and protein oxidation in raw porcine patties subjected to chilled storage.

PubMed

Rodríguez-Carpena, J G; Morcuende, D; Estévez, M

2011-10-01

Processing of avocados generates an important amount of by-products such as peels and seeds that are rich in bioactive substances with proven radical suppressing activities. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of peel and seed extracts from two avocado varieties-'Hass' and 'Fuerte'-as inhibitors of lipid and protein oxidation and color deterioration of raw porcine patties during chilled storage (4 °C/15 days). Avocado extracts significantly (p<0.05) reduced the loss of redness and the increase of lightness during storage of porcine patties. 'Fuerte' extracts were more efficient at inhibiting discoloration of chilled patties than 'Hass' extracts. Patties treated with avocado extracts had significantly lower amounts of TBA-RS than control ones throughout the storage. 'Hass' avocado extracts significantly inhibited the formation of protein carbonyls in chilled patties at day 15. The present results highlight the potential usage of extracts from avocado by-products as ingredients for the production of muscle foods with enhanced quality traits. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Techno-economical evaluation of protein extraction for microalgae biorefinery

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sari, Y. W.; Sanders, J. P. M.; Bruins, M. E.

2016-01-01

Due to scarcity of fossil feedstocks, there is an increasing demand for biobased fuels. Microalgae are considered as promising biobased feedstocks. However, microalgae based fuels are not yet produced at large scale at present. Applying biorefinery, not only for oil, but also for other components, such as carbohydrates and protein, may lead to the sustainable and economical microalgae-based fuels. This paper discusses two relatively mild conditions for microalgal protein extraction, based on alkali and enzymes. Green microalgae (Chlorella fusca) with and without prior lipid removal were used as feedstocks. Under mild conditions, more protein could be extracted using proteases, with the highest yields for microalgae meal (without lipids). The data on protein extraction yields were used to calculate the costs for producing 1 ton of microalgal protein. The processing cost for the alkaline method was € 2448 /ton protein. Enzymatic method performed better from an economic point of view with € 1367 /ton protein on processing costs. However, this is still far from industrially feasible. For both extraction methods, biomass cost per ton of produced product were high. A higher protein extraction yield can partially solve this problem, lowering processing cost to €620 and 1180 /ton protein product, using alkali and enzyme, respectively. Although alkaline method has lower processing cost, optimization appears to be better achievable using enzymes. If the enzymatic method can be optimized by lowering the amount of alkali added, leading to processing cost of € 633/ton protein product. Higher revenue can be generated when the residue after protein extraction can be sold as fuel, or better as a highly digestible feed for cattle.

A comparison between high hydrostatic pressure extraction and heat extraction of ginsenosides from ginseng (Panax ginseng CA Meyer).

PubMed

Lee, Hyun-Sun; Lee, Hyun Jung; Yu, Hyung Jo; Ju, Do Weon; Kim, Yoonsook; Kim, Chong-Tai; Kim, Chul-Jin; Cho, Yong-Jin; Kim, Namsoo; Choi, Sin-Yang; Suh, Hyung Joo

2011-06-01

To determine biomaterial components, the components must first be transferred into solution; thus extraction is the first step in biomaterial analysis. High hydrostatic pressure technology was used for ginsenoside extraction from ginseng roots. In the extraction of fresh and red ginseng, high hydrostatic pressure extraction (HHPE) was found to be more effective than heat extraction (HE). In fresh ginseng extraction under HHPE, total ginsenosides (1602.2 µg mL⁻¹) and ginsenoside metabolite (132.6 µg mL⁻¹) levels were slightly higher than those under HE (1259.0 and 78.7 µg mL⁻¹), respectively. In red ginseng, similar results indicated total ginsenoside and ginsenoside metabolite amounts according to the extraction methods. Most volatile compounds by HHPE were higher than by HE treatment. HHPE of red ginseng was conducted under four pressures: 0.1 MPa (1 atm), 30, 50, and 80 MPa. Total sugar, uronic acid, and polyphenol amounts increased until 30 MPa of pressure and then showed decreasing tendencies. Total ginsenoside and ginsenoside metabolite contents linearly increased with increasing pressure, and a maximum was reached at 80 MPa for the metabolites. HHPE used for red ginseng processing contributes to enhanced extraction efficiencies of functional materials such as ginsenosides through cell structure modification. Copyright © 2011 Society of Chemical Industry.

Analysis of Polyphenolic Compounds in Extracts from Leaves of Some Malus domestica Cultivars: Antiradical and Antimicrobial Analysis of These Extracts

PubMed Central

Sowa, Alina; Zgórka, Grażyna; Szykuła, Aleksandra; Franiczek, Roman; Żbikowska, Beata; Gamian, Andrzej

2016-01-01

In this study, methanol, ethyl acetate, water extracts, and precipitate were obtained from leaves of Malus domestica cultivars: Golden delicious, Jonagold, Elstar, Ligol, and Mutsu. Antiradical activity of these extracts was measured using the ABTS+∙ radical, and antimicrobial activity was measured with the disk-diffusion method. Phenolic compounds were measured with the colorimetric method and identified with high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The highest antiradical activity was observed for the Jonagold variety, and in particular strong activity was noted for ethyl acetate extracts. Antimicrobial activity was observed against strains of Staphylococcus aureus, Enterococcus faecalis, and the fungus Candida glabrata. Particularly susceptible to the extracts activity appeared to be Staphylococcus aureus, but the growth of Candida glabrata was inhibited in the presence of ethyl acetate extracts. With the HPLC method we identified a high amount of phloridzin (above 500 mg per g of ethyl acetate extracts), lower amounts of hyperoside, isoquercitrin, and quercitrin, and traces of p-hydroxybenzoic and chlorogenic acids. The contribution of phloridzin to antiradical activity of methanol and ethyl acetate extracts was very high (above 90%). In water extract the contribution of phloridzin was between 38.9 and 55.2%, chlorogenic acid 22.7 and 36.1%, and hyperoside 12.2 and 13.3%. PMID:28097143

Analysis of Polyphenolic Compounds in Extracts from Leaves of Some Malus domestica Cultivars: Antiradical and Antimicrobial Analysis of These Extracts.

PubMed

Sowa, Alina; Zgórka, Grażyna; Szykuła, Aleksandra; Franiczek, Roman; Żbikowska, Beata; Gamian, Andrzej; Sroka, Zbigniew

2016-01-01

In this study, methanol, ethyl acetate, water extracts, and precipitate were obtained from leaves of Malus domestica cultivars: Golden delicious, Jonagold, Elstar, Ligol, and Mutsu. Antiradical activity of these extracts was measured using the ABTS +∙ radical, and antimicrobial activity was measured with the disk-diffusion method. Phenolic compounds were measured with the colorimetric method and identified with high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The highest antiradical activity was observed for the Jonagold variety, and in particular strong activity was noted for ethyl acetate extracts. Antimicrobial activity was observed against strains of Staphylococcus aureus , Enterococcus faecalis , and the fungus Candida glabrata . Particularly susceptible to the extracts activity appeared to be Staphylococcus aureus , but the growth of Candida glabrata was inhibited in the presence of ethyl acetate extracts. With the HPLC method we identified a high amount of phloridzin (above 500 mg per g of ethyl acetate extracts), lower amounts of hyperoside, isoquercitrin, and quercitrin, and traces of p -hydroxybenzoic and chlorogenic acids. The contribution of phloridzin to antiradical activity of methanol and ethyl acetate extracts was very high (above 90%). In water extract the contribution of phloridzin was between 38.9 and 55.2%, chlorogenic acid 22.7 and 36.1%, and hyperoside 12.2 and 13.3%.

Reliability of vascular geometry factors derived from clinical MRA

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bijari, Payam B.; Antiga, Luca; Steinman, David A.

2009-02-01

Recent work from our group has demonstrated that the amount of disturbed flow at the carotid bifurcation, believed to be a local risk factor for carotid atherosclerosis, can be predicted from luminal geometric factors. The next step along the way to a large-scale retrospective or prospective imaging study of such local risk factors for atherosclerosis is to investigate whether these geometric features are reproducible and accurate from routine 3D contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance angiography (CEMRA) using a fast and practical method of extraction. Motivated by this fact, we examined the reproducibility of multiple geometric features that are believed important in atherosclerosis risk assessment. We reconstructed three-dimensional carotid bifurcations from 15 clinical study participants who had previously undergone baseline and repeat CEMRA acquisitions. Certain geometric factors were extracted and compared between the baseline and the repeat scan. As the spatial resolution of the CEMRA data was noticeably coarse and anisotropic, we also investigated whether this might affect the measurement of the same geometric risk factors by simulating the CEMRA acquisition for 15 normal carotid bifurcations previously acquired at high resolution. Our results show that the extracted geometric factors are reproducible and faithful, with intra-subject uncertainties well below inter-subject variabilities. More importantly, these geometric risk factors can be extracted consistently and quickly for potential use as disturbed flow predictors.

Lipophilic extracts from banana fruit residues: a source of valuable phytosterols.

PubMed

Oliveira, Lúcia; Freire, Carmen S R; Silvestre, Armando J D; Cordeiro, Nereida

2008-10-22

The chemical composition of the lipophilic extracts of unripe pulp and peel of banana fruit 'Dwarf Cavendish' was studied by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. Fatty acids, sterols, and steryl esters are the major families of lipophilic components present in banana tissues, followed by diacylglycerols, steryl glucosides, long chain fatty alcohols, and aromatic compounds. Fatty acids are more abundant in the banana pulp (29-90% of the total amount of lipophilic extract), with linoleic, linolenic, and oleic acids as the major compounds of this family. In banana peel, sterols represent about 49-71% of the lipophilic extract with two triterpenic ketones (31-norcyclolaudenone and cycloeucalenone) as the major components. The detection of high amounts of steryl esters (469-24405 mg/kg) and diacylglycerols (119-878 mg/kg), mainly present in the banana peel extract, explains the increase in the abundance of fatty acids and sterols after alkaline hydrolysis. Several steryl glucosides were also found in significative amounts (273-888 mg/kg), particularly in banana pulp (888 mg/kg). The high content of sterols (and their derivatives) in the 'Dwarf Cavendish' fruit can open new strategies for the valorization of the banana residues as a potential source of high-value phytochemicals with nutraceutical and functional food additive applications.

[Studies on extraction process of Radix Platycodi].

PubMed

Wu, Biyuan; Sun, Jun; Jiang, Hongfang

2002-06-01

The orthogonal design was used to optimize the extraction process of Radix Platycodi with content of total saponin and yield of the extract as markers. Factors that have been chosen were alcohol concentration, alcohol consumption, extraction times and extraction time. Each factor has three levels. The result showed that the optimum extraction condition obtained was 70% alcohol, 3 times the amount of material, refluxing for 5 times, 60 minutes each time, the optimized process was stable and workable.

Extraction of steroidal glucosiduronic acids from aqueous solutions by anionic liquid ion-exchangers

PubMed Central

Mattox, Vernon R.; Litwiller, Robert D.; Goodrich, June E.

1972-01-01

A pilot study on the extraction of three steroidal glucosiduronic acids from water into organic solutions of liquid ion-exchangers is reported. A single extraction of a 0.5mm aqueous solution of either 11-deoxycorticosterone 21-glucosiduronic acid or cortisone 21-glucosiduronic acid with 0.1m-tetraheptylammonium chloride in chloroform took more than 99% of the conjugate into the organic phase; under the same conditions, the very polar conjugate, β-cortol 3-glucosiduronic acid, was extracted to the extent of 43%. The presence of a small amount of chloride, acetate, or sulphate ion in the aqueous phase inhibited extraction, but making the aqueous phase 4.0m with ammonium sulphate promoted extraction strongly. An increase in the concentration of ion-exchanger in the organic phase also promoted extraction. The amount of cortisone 21-glucosiduronic acid extracted by tetraheptylammonium chloride over the pH range of 3.9 to 10.7 was essentially constant. Chloroform solutions of a tertiary, a secondary, or a primary amine hydrochloride also will extract cortisone 21-glucosiduronic acid from water. The various liquid ion exchangers will extract steroidal glucosiduronic acid methyl esters from water into chloroform, although less completely than the corresponding free acids. The extraction of the glucosiduronic acids from water by tetraheptylammonium chloride occurs by an ion-exchange process; extraction of the esters does not involve ion exchange. PMID:5075264

Searching social networks for subgraph patterns

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ogaard, Kirk; Kase, Sue; Roy, Heather; Nagi, Rakesh; Sambhoos, Kedar; Sudit, Moises

2013-06-01

Software tools for Social Network Analysis (SNA) are being developed which support various types of analysis of social networks extracted from social media websites (e.g., Twitter). Once extracted and stored in a database such social networks are amenable to analysis by SNA software. This data analysis often involves searching for occurrences of various subgraph patterns (i.e., graphical representations of entities and relationships). The authors have developed the Graph Matching Toolkit (GMT) which provides an intuitive Graphical User Interface (GUI) for a heuristic graph matching algorithm called the Truncated Search Tree (TruST) algorithm. GMT is a visual interface for graph matching algorithms processing large social networks. GMT enables an analyst to draw a subgraph pattern by using a mouse to select categories and labels for nodes and links from drop-down menus. GMT then executes the TruST algorithm to find the top five occurrences of the subgraph pattern within the social network stored in the database. GMT was tested using a simulated counter-insurgency dataset consisting of cellular phone communications within a populated area of operations in Iraq. The results indicated GMT (when executing the TruST graph matching algorithm) is a time-efficient approach to searching large social networks. GMT's visual interface to a graph matching algorithm enables intelligence analysts to quickly analyze and summarize the large amounts of data necessary to produce actionable intelligence.

Pyrochars and hydrochars differently alter the sorption of the herbicide isoproturon in an agricultural soil.

PubMed

Eibisch, Nina; Schroll, Reiner; Fuß, Roland; Mikutta, Robert; Helfrich, Mirjam; Flessa, Heinz

2015-01-01

Carbonaceous material from pyrolysis (pyrochars) and hydrothermal carbonization (hydrochars) are applied to soil to improve soil fertility and carbon sequestration. As a positive side effect, the mobility of pesticides and the risk of groundwater contamination can be minimized. However, the impact of various raw materials on the sorption capacity of different pyrochars and hydrochars is poorly understood. Thus, sorption experiments were performed with (14)C-labeled isoproturon (IPU, 0.75 kg ha(-1)) in a loamy sand soil amended with either pyrochar or hydrochar (0.5% and 5% dry weight, respectively). Carbonaceous materials were produced from three different raw materials: corn digestate, miscanthus, woodchips of willow and poplar. After 72 h of incubation, a sequential extraction procedure was conducted to quantify in situ IPU bioavailability, total amount of extractable IPU, and non-extractable pesticide residues (NER). Added char amount, carbonization type, and raw materials had statistically significant effects on the sorption of IPU. The amount of in situ available IPU was reduced by a factor of 10-2283 in treatments with pyrochar and by a factor of 3-13 in hydrochar treatments. The surface area of the charred material was the most predictive variable of IPU sorption to char amended soil. Some physical and chemical char properties tend to correlate with pore water-, methanol- or non-extractable IPU amounts. Due to a low micro-porosity and ash content, high water extractable carbon contents and O-functional groups of hydrochars, the proportion of NER in hydrochar amended soils was considerably lower than in soil amended with pyrochars. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Computationally efficient simulation of unsteady aerodynamics using POD on the fly

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Moreno-Ramos, Ruben; Vega, José M.; Varas, Fernando

2016-12-01

Modern industrial aircraft design requires a large amount of sufficiently accurate aerodynamic and aeroelastic simulations. Current computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solvers with aeroelastic capabilities, such as the NASA URANS unstructured solver FUN3D, require very large computational resources. Since a very large amount of simulation is necessary, the CFD cost is just unaffordable in an industrial production environment and must be significantly reduced. Thus, a more inexpensive, yet sufficiently precise solver is strongly needed. An opportunity to approach this goal could follow some recent results (Terragni and Vega 2014 SIAM J. Appl. Dyn. Syst. 13 330-65 Rapun et al 2015 Int. J. Numer. Meth. Eng. 104 844-68) on an adaptive reduced order model that combines ‘on the fly’ a standard numerical solver (to compute some representative snapshots), proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) (to extract modes from the snapshots), Galerkin projection (onto the set of POD modes), and several additional ingredients such as projecting the equations using a limited amount of points and fairly generic mode libraries. When applied to the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation, the method produces acceleration factors (comparing with standard numerical solvers) of the order of 20 and 300 in one and two space dimensions, respectively. Unfortunately, the extension of the method to unsteady, compressible flows around deformable geometries requires new approaches to deal with deformable meshes, high-Reynolds numbers, and compressibility. A first step in this direction is presented considering the unsteady compressible, two-dimensional flow around an oscillating airfoil using a CFD solver in a rigidly moving mesh. POD on the Fly gives results whose accuracy is comparable to that of the CFD solver used to compute the snapshots.

Saving Salmon Through Advances in Fluvial Remote Sensing: Applying the Optimal Band Ratio Analysis (OBRA) for Bathymetric Mapping of Over 250 km of River Channel and Habitat Classification

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Richardson, R.; Legleiter, C. J.; Harrison, L.

2015-12-01

Salmonids are threatened with extinction across the world from the fragmentation of riverine ecosystems from dams and diversions. In California, efforts to expand the range of spawnable habitat for native salmon by transporting fish around reservoirs is a potentially species saving idea. But, strong scientific evidence of the amount of high quality habitat is required to make these difficult management decisions. Remote sensing has long been used in fluvial settings to identify physical parameters that drive the quality of aquatic habitat; however, the true strength of remote sensing to cover large spatial extents has not been applied with the resolution that is relevant to salmonids. This project utilizes hyperspectral data of over 250 km of the Tuolumne and Merced Rivers to extract depth and bed slope from the wetted channel and NIR LiDAR for the surrounding topography. The Optimal Band Ratio Analysis (OBRA) has proven as an effective tool to create bathymetric maps of river channels in ideal settings with clear water, high amounts of bottom reflectance, and less than 3 meters deep over short distances. Results from this study show that OBRA can be applied over larger riverscapes at high resolutions (0.5 m). The depth and bed slope estimations are used to classify habitat units that are crucial to quantifying the quality and amount of habitat in these river that once produced large populations of native salmonids. As more managers look to expand habitat for these threatened species the tools developed here will be cost effective over the large extents that salmon migrate to spawn.

The Potential of Graphene as an Adsorbent for Five Pesticides from Different Classes in Rape Oil Samples Using Dispersive Solid-Phase Extraction.

PubMed

Madej, Katarzyna; Janiga, Katarzyna; Piekoszewski, Wojciech

2018-01-01

Isolation conditions for five pesticides (metazachlor, tebuconazole, λ -cyhalothrin, chlorpyrifos, and deltamethrin) from rape oil samples were examined using the dispersive solid-phase graphene extraction technique. To determine the optimal extraction conditions, a number of experimental factors (amount of graphene, amount of salt, type and volume of the desorbing solvent, desorption time with and without sonication energy, and temperature during desorption) were studied. The compounds of interest were separated and detected by an HPLC-UV employing a Kinetex XB-C18 column and a mobile phase consisting of acetonitrile and water flowing in a gradient mode. The optimized extraction conditions were: the amount of graphene 15 mg, desorbing solvent (acetonitrile) 5 mL, time desorption 10 min at 40°C, and amount of NaCl 1 g. The detection limit for metazachlor, tebuconazole, λ -cyhalothrin, and chlorpyrifos was 62.5 ng·g -1 , and for deltamethrin, it was 500 ng·g -1 . The obtained results lead to the conclusion that graphene may be successfully used for the isolation of the five pesticides from rape oil. However, their determination at low concentration levels, as they occur in real oil samples, requires the employment of appropriately highly sensitive analytical methods, as well as a more suitable graphene form (e.g., magnetically modified graphene).

Earth Science Data Analytics: Preparing for Extracting Knowledge from Information

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Kempler, Steven; Barbieri, Lindsay

2016-01-01

Data analytics is the process of examining large amounts of data of a variety of types to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations and other useful information. Data analytics is a broad term that includes data analysis, as well as an understanding of the cognitive processes an analyst uses to understand problems and explore data in meaningful ways. Analytics also include data extraction, transformation, and reduction, utilizing specific tools, techniques, and methods. Turning to data science, definitions of data science sound very similar to those of data analytics (which leads to a lot of the confusion between the two). But the skills needed for both, co-analyzing large amounts of heterogeneous data, understanding and utilizing relevant tools and techniques, and subject matter expertise, although similar, serve different purposes. Data Analytics takes on a practitioners approach to applying expertise and skills to solve issues and gain subject knowledge. Data Science, is more theoretical (research in itself) in nature, providing strategic actionable insights and new innovative methodologies. Earth Science Data Analytics (ESDA) is the process of examining, preparing, reducing, and analyzing large amounts of spatial (multi-dimensional), temporal, or spectral data using a variety of data types to uncover patterns, correlations and other information, to better understand our Earth. The large variety of datasets (temporal spatial differences, data types, formats, etc.) invite the need for data analytics skills that understand the science domain, and data preparation, reduction, and analysis techniques, from a practitioners point of view. The application of these skills to ESDA is the focus of this presentation. The Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Federation Earth Science Data Analytics (ESDA) Cluster was created in recognition of the practical need to facilitate the co-analysis of large amounts of data and information for Earth science. Thus, from a to advance science point of view: On the continuum of ever evolving data management systems, we need to understand and develop ways that allow for the variety of data relationships to be examined, and information to be manipulated, such that knowledge can be enhanced, to facilitate science. Recognizing the importance and potential impacts of the unlimited ways to co-analyze heterogeneous datasets, now and especially in the future, one of the objectives of the ESDA cluster is to facilitate the preparation of individuals to understand and apply needed skills to Earth science data analytics. Pinpointing and communicating the needed skills and expertise is new, and not easy. Information technology is just beginning to provide the tools for advancing the analysis of heterogeneous datasets in a big way, thus, providing opportunity to discover unobvious scientific relationships, previously invisible to the science eye. And it is not easy It takes individuals, or teams of individuals, with just the right combination of skills to understand the data and develop the methods to glean knowledge out of data and information. In addition, whereas definitions of data science and big data are (more or less) available (summarized in Reference 5), Earth science data analytics is virtually ignored in the literature, (barring a few excellent sources).

Heat exposure of Cannabis sativa extracts affects the pharmacokinetic and metabolic profile in healthy male subjects.

PubMed

Eichler, Martin; Spinedi, Luca; Unfer-Grauwiler, Sandra; Bodmer, Michael; Surber, Christian; Luedi, Markus; Drewe, Juergen

2012-05-01

The most important psychoactive constituent of CANNABIS SATIVA L. is Δ (9)-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Cannabidiol (CBD), another important constituent, is able to modulate the distinct unwanted psychotropic effect of THC. In natural plant extracts of C. SATIVA, large amounts of THC and CBD appear in the form of THCA-A (THC-acid-A) and CBDA (cannabidiolic acid), which can be transformed to THC and CBD by heating. Previous reports of medicinal use of cannabis or cannabis preparations with higher CBD/THC ratios and use in its natural, unheated form have demonstrated that pharmacological effects were often accompanied with a lower rate of adverse effects. Therefore, in the present study, the pharmacokinetics and metabolic profiles of two different C. SATIVA extracts (heated and unheated) with a CBD/THC ratio > 1 were compared to synthetic THC (dronabinol) in a double-blind, randomized, single center, three-period cross-over study involving 9 healthy male volunteers. The pharmacokinetics of the cannabinoids was highly variable. The metabolic pattern was significantly different after administration of the different forms: the heated extract showed a lower median THC plasma AUC (24 h) than the unheated extract of 2.84 vs. 6.59 pmol h/mL, respectively. The later was slightly higher than that of dronabinol (4.58 pmol h/mL). On the other hand, the median sum of the metabolites (THC, 11-OH-THC, THC-COOH, CBN) plasma AUC (24 h) was higher for the heated than for the unheated extract. The median CBD plasma AUC (24 h) was almost 2-fold higher for the unheated than for the heated extract. These results indicate that use of unheated extracts may lead to a beneficial change in metabolic pattern and possibly better tolerability. © Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart · New York.

Landscape consequences of natural gas extraction in Greene and Tioga Counties, Pennsylvania, 2004-2010

USGS Publications Warehouse

Slonecker, E.T.; Milheim, L.E.; Roig-Silva, C.M.; Fisher, G.B.

2012-01-01

Increased demands for cleaner burning energy, coupled with the relatively recent technological advances in accessing unconventional hydrocarbon-rich geologic formations, have led to an intense effort to find and extract natural gas from various underground sources around the country. One of these sources, the Marcellus Shale, located in the Allegheny Plateau, is currently undergoing extensive drilling and production. The technology used to extract gas in the Marcellus shale is known as hydraulic fracturing and has garnered much attention because of its use of large amounts of fresh water, its use of proprietary fluids for the hydraulic-fracturing process, its potential to release contaminants into the environment, and its potential effect on water resources. Nonetheless, development of natural gas extraction wells in the Marcellus Shale is only part of the overall natural gas story in the area of Pennsylvania. Coalbed methane, which is sometimes extracted using the same technique, is commonly located in the same general area as the Marcellus Shale and is frequently developed in clusters across the landscape. The combined effects of these two natural gas extraction methods create potentially serious patterns of disturbance on the landscape. This document quantifies the landscape changes and consequences of natural gas extraction for Greene County and Tioga County in Pennsylvania between 2004 and 2010. Patterns of landscape disturbance related to natural gas extraction activities were collected and digitized using National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) imagery for 2004, 2005/2006, 2008, and 2010. The disturbance patterns were then used to measure changes in land cover and land use using the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) of 2001. A series of landscape metrics are also used to quantify these changes and are included in this publication.

Landscape consequences of natural gas extraction in Bradford and Washington Counties, Pennsylvania, 2004-2010

USGS Publications Warehouse

Slonecker, E.T.; Milheim, L.E.; Roig-Silva, C.M.; Malizia, A.R.; Marr, D.A.; Fisher, G.B.

2012-01-01

Increased demands for cleaner burning energy, coupled with the relatively recent technological advances in accessing unconventional hydrocarbon-rich geologic formations, led to an intense effort to find and extract natural gas from various underground sources around the country. One of these sources, the Marcellus Shale, located in the Allegheny Plateau, is undergoing extensive drilling and production. The technology used to extract gas in the Marcellus Shale is known as hydraulic fracturing and has garnered much attention because of its use of large amounts of fresh water, its use of proprietary fluids for the hydraulic-fracturing process, its potential to release contaminants into the environment, and its potential effect on water resources. Nonetheless, development of natural gas extraction wells in the Marcellus Shale is only part of the overall natural gas story in the area of Pennsylvania. Coalbed methane, which is sometimes extracted using the same technique, is often located in the same general area as the Marcellus Shale and is frequently developed in clusters across the landscape. The combined effects of these two natural gas extraction methods create potentially serious patterns of disturbance on the landscape. This document quantifies the landscape changes and consequences of natural gas extraction for Bradford County and Washington County, Pennsylvania, between 2004 and 2010. Patterns of landscape disturbance related to natural gas extraction activities were collected and digitized using National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) imagery for 2004, 2005/2006, 2008, and 2010. The disturbance patterns were then used to measure changes in land cover and land use using the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) of 2001. A series of landscape metrics is used to quantify these changes and are included in this publication.

Landscape consequences of natural gas extraction in Allegheny and Susquehanna Counties, Pennsylvania, 2004--2010

USGS Publications Warehouse

Slonecker, E.T.; Milheim, L.E.; Roig-Silva, C.M.; Malizia, A.R.

2013-01-01

Increased demands for cleaner burning energy, coupled with the relatively recent technological advances in accessing unconventional hydrocarbon-rich geologic formations, have led to an intense effort to find and extract natural gas from various underground sources around the country. One of these sources, the Marcellus Shale, located in the Allegheny Plateau, is currently undergoing extensive drilling and production. The technology used to extract gas in the Marcellus Shale is known as hydraulic fracturing and has garnered much attention because of its use of large amounts of fresh water, its use of proprietary fluids for the hydraulic-fracturing process, its potential to release contaminants into the environment, and its potential effect on water resources. Nonetheless, development of natural gas extraction wells in the Marcellus Shale is only part of the overall natural gas story in this area of Pennsylvania. Coalbed methane, which is sometimes extracted using the same technique, is commonly located in the same general area as the Marcellus Shale and is frequently developed in clusters of wells across the landscape. The combined effects of these two natural gas extraction methods create potentially serious patterns of disturbance on the landscape. This document quantifies the landscape changes and consequences of natural gas extraction for Allegheny County and Susquehanna County in Pennsylvania between 2004 and 2010. Patterns of landscape disturbance related to natural gas extraction activities were collected and digitized using National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) imagery for 2004, 2005/2006, 2008, and 2010. The disturbance patterns were then used to measure changes in land cover and land use using the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) of 2001. A series of landscape metrics is also used to quantify these changes and is included in this publication.

A rapid analytical method to quantify complex organohalogen contaminant mixtures in large samples of high lipid mammalian tissues.

PubMed

Desforges, Jean-Pierre; Eulaers, Igor; Periard, Luke; Sonne, Christian; Dietz, Rune; Letcher, Robert J

2017-06-01

In vitro investigations of the health impact of individual chemical compounds have traditionally been used in risk assessments. However, humans and wildlife are exposed to a plethora of potentially harmful chemicals, including organohalogen contaminants (OHCs). An alternative exposure approach to individual or simple mixtures of synthetic OHCs is to isolate the complex mixture present in free-ranging wildlife, often non-destructively sampled from lipid rich adipose. High concentration stock volumes required for in vitro investigations do, however, pose a great analytical challenge to extract sufficient amounts of complex OHC cocktails. Here we describe a novel method to easily, rapidly and efficiently extract an environmentally accumulated and therefore relevant contaminant cocktail from large (10-50 g) marine mammal blubber samples. We demonstrate that lipid freeze-filtration with acetonitrile removes up to 97% of blubber lipids, with minimal effect on the efficiency of OHC recovery. Sample extracts after freeze-filtration were further processed to remove residual trace lipids via high-pressure gel permeation chromatography and solid phase extraction. Average recoveries of OHCs from triplicate analysis of killer whale (Orcinus orca), polar bear (Ursus maritimus) and pilot whale (Globicephala spp.) blubber standard reference material (NIST SRM-1945) ranged from 68 to 80%, 54-92% and 58-145%, respectively, for 13 C-enriched internal standards of six polychlorinated biphenyl congeners, 16 organochlorine pesticides and four brominated flame retardants. This approach to rapidly generate OHC mixtures shows great potential for experimental exposures using complex contaminant mixtures, research or monitoring driven contaminant quantification in biological samples, as well as the untargeted identification of emerging contaminants. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Antihepatotoxic Effect and Metabolite Profiling of Panicum turgidum Extract via UPLC-qTOF-MS.

PubMed

Farag, Mohamed A; El Fishawy, Ahlam M; El-Toumy, Sayed A; Amer, Khadiga F; Mansour, Ahmed M; Taha, Hala E

2016-07-01

Panicum turgidum , desert grass, has not reported any detailed phytochemical or biological study as yet. To establish P. turgidum secondary metabolite profile and to assess its antihepatotoxic effect. Ultra-performance liquid chromatography (UPLC) coupled to quadrupole high-resolution time of flight mass spectrometry (qTOF-MS) was used for large-scale secondary metabolites profiling in P. turgidum extract, alongside assessing median lethal dose (LD 50 ) and hepatoprotective effect against carbon tetrachloride (CCl 4 ) intoxication. A total of 39 metabolites were identified with flavonoids as the major class present as O/C -glycosides of luteolin, apigenin, isorhamnetin and naringenin, most of which are first time to be reported in Panicum sp. Antihepatotoxic effect of P. turgidum crude extract was revealed via improving several biochemical marker levels and mitigation against oxidative stress in the serum and liver tissues, compared with CCl4 intoxicated group and further confirmed by histopathological examination. This study reveals that P. turgidum , enriched in C -flavonoids, presents a novel source of safe antihepatotoxic agents and further demonstrates the efficacy of UPLC-MS metabolomics in the field of natural products drug discovery. UPLC coupled to qTOF-MS was used for large scale secondary metabolites profiling in P. turgidum .A total of 39 metabolites were identified with flavonoids amounting as the major metabolite class.Anti-hepatotoxic effect of P. turgidum extract was revealed via several biochemical markers and histopathological examination.This study reveals that P. turgidum , enriched in C -flavonoids, present a novel source of antihepatotoxic agents. Abbreviations used: UPLC: Ultra-performance liquid chromatography (UPLC), LD50: median lethal dose, MDA: malondialdehyde, GSH: glutathione reductase, CAT: catalase, SOD: superoxide dismutase, ALT: alanine aminotransferase, AST: aspartate aminotransferase, ALP: alkaline phosphatase, TG: triglycerides.

Antihepatotoxic Effect and Metabolite Profiling of Panicum turgidum Extract via UPLC-qTOF-MS

PubMed Central

Farag, Mohamed A.; El Fishawy, Ahlam M.; El-Toumy, Sayed A.; Amer, Khadiga F.; Mansour, Ahmed M.; Taha, Hala E.

2016-01-01

Background: Panicum turgidum, desert grass, has not reported any detailed phytochemical or biological study as yet Objective: To establish P. turgidum secondary metabolite profile and to assess its antihepatotoxic effect Materials and Methods: Ultra-performance liquid chromatography (UPLC) coupled to quadrupole high-resolution time of flight mass spectrometry (qTOF-MS) was used for large-scale secondary metabolites profiling in P. turgidum extract, alongside assessing median lethal dose (LD50) and hepatoprotective effect against carbon tetrachloride (CCl4) intoxication Results: A total of 39 metabolites were identified with flavonoids as the major class present as O/C-glycosides of luteolin, apigenin, isorhamnetin and naringenin, most of which are first time to be reported in Panicum sp. Antihepatotoxic effect of P. turgidum crude extract was revealed via improving several biochemical marker levels and mitigation against oxidative stress in the serum and liver tissues, compared with CCl4 intoxicated group and further confirmed by histopathological examination. Conclusion: This study reveals that P. turgidum, enriched in C-flavonoids, presents a novel source of safe antihepatotoxic agents and further demonstrates the efficacy of UPLC-MS metabolomics in the field of natural products drug discovery. SUMMARY UPLC coupled to qTOF-MS was used for large scale secondary metabolites profiling in P. turgidum.A total of 39 metabolites were identified with flavonoids amounting as the major metabolite class.Anti-hepatotoxic effect of P. turgidum extract was revealed via several biochemical markers and histopathological examination.This study reveals that P. turgidum, enriched in C-flavonoids, present a novel source of antihepatotoxic agents. Abbreviations used: UPLC: Ultra-performance liquid chromatography (UPLC), LD50: median lethal dose, MDA: malondialdehyde, GSH: glutathione reductase, CAT: catalase, SOD: superoxide dismutase, ALT: alanine aminotransferase, AST: aspartate aminotransferase, ALP: alkaline phosphatase, TG: triglycerides. PMID:27761073

Root cultures of Hypericum perforatum subsp. angustifolium elicited with chitosan and production of xanthone-rich extracts with antifungal activity.

PubMed

Tocci, Noemi; Simonetti, Giovanna; D'Auria, Felicia Diodata; Panella, Simona; Palamara, Anna Teresa; Valletta, Alessio; Pasqua, Gabriella

2011-08-01

Hypericum perforatum is a well-known medicinal plant which contains a wide variety of metabolites, including xanthones, which have a wide range of biological properties, including antifungal activity. In the present study, we evaluated the capability of roots regenerated from calli of H. perforatum subsp. angustifolium to produce xanthones. Root biomass was positively correlated with the indole-3-butyric acid concentration, whereas a concentration of 1 mg l(-1) was the most suitable for the development of roots. High auxin concentrations also inhibited xanthone accumulation. Xanthones were produced in large amounts, with a very stable trend throughout the culture period. When the roots were treated with chitosan, the xanthone content dramatically increased, peaking after 7 days. Chitosan also induced a release of these metabolites into the culture. The maximum accumulation (14.26 ± 0.62 mg g(-1) dry weight [DW]) and release (2.64 ± 0.13 mg g(-1) DW) of xanthones were recorded 7 days after treatment. The most represented xanthones were isolated, purified, and spectroscopically characterized. Antifungal activity of the total root extracts was tested against a broad panel of human fungal pathogen strains (30 Candida species, 12 Cryptococcus neoformans, and 16 dermatophytes); this activity significantly increased when using chitosan. Extracts obtained after 7 days of chitosan treatment showed high antifungal activity (mean minimum inhibitory concentration of 83.4, 39.1, and 114 μg ml(-1) against Candida spp., C. neoformans, and dermatophytes, respectively). Our results suggest that root cultures can be considered as a potential tool for large-scale production of extracts with stable quantities of xanthones.

Preserved pharmacological activity of hepatocytes-treated extracts of valerian and St. John's wort.

PubMed

Simmen, Urs; Saladin, Caroline; Kaufmann, Priska; Poddar, Manisha; Wallimann, Christine; Schaffner, Willi

2005-07-01

The two herbal extracts valerian (Valeriana officinalis L.) and St. John's wort (Hypericum perforatum L.) were studied for their metabolic changes upon incubation with freshly prepared rat hepatocytes and subsequently analysed phytochemically as well as pharmacologically in vitro. Quantitative HPLC analysis of valerian extracts revealed considerable metabolic activities with regard to sesquiterpenes and iridoids. The amount of acetoxyvalerenic acid decreased 9-fold, while that of hydroxyvalerenic acid correspondingly increased 9-fold due to O-deacetylation. The valepotriates didrovaltrate, isovaltrate and valtrate decreased 2-, 18- and 16-fold, respectively. However, the binding affinities of the incubated extracts to the benzodiazepine and picrotoxin binding site of the GABA (A) receptor were quite similar to those of the non-incubated extracts. Neither valerenic acids nor valepotriates exhibited any significant effect on the two binding sites when tested as single compounds. Therefore, either other constituents represent the active ones or multiple compounds are necessary for the observed inhibitory and allosteric effects at the GABA (A) receptor. Extracts of St. John's wort were less potently metabolised than valerian. The amount of pseudohypericin and the main flavonoids (hyperoside, rutin, isoquercitrin, quercitrin, quercetin and I3,II8-biapigenin) slightly decreased during the 4-h incubation period. Both the antagonist effect at the corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) type 1 receptor and the binding inhibition at the 5-HT transporter were attenuated during the metabolic treatment. The reduced antagonist effect correlates with the decreasing amount of pseudohypericin known to be a CRF (1) receptor antagonist. In conclusion, the incubation of plant extracts with freshly prepared rat hepatocytes represents a useful approach to study the pharmacological action of metabolised plant extracts. The consistent pharmacological activity of both valerian and St. John's wort is concordant with the known clinical efficacy of pharmacological activities.

21 CFR 73.170 - Grape skin extract (enocianina).

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-04-01

... LISTING OF COLOR ADDITIVES EXEMPT FROM CERTIFICATION Foods § 73.170 Grape skin extract (enocianina). (a... removed. A small amount of sulphur dioxide may be present. (2) Color additive mixtures for food use made... suitable in color additive mixtures for coloring foods. (b) Specifications. Grape skin extract (enocianina...

21 CFR 73.170 - Grape skin extract (enocianina).

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-04-01

... LISTING OF COLOR ADDITIVES EXEMPT FROM CERTIFICATION Foods § 73.170 Grape skin extract (enocianina). (a... removed. A small amount of sulphur dioxide may be present. (2) Color additive mixtures for food use made... suitable in color additive mixtures for coloring foods. (b) Specifications. Grape skin extract (enocianina...

21 CFR 73.170 - Grape skin extract (enocianina).

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-04-01

... LISTING OF COLOR ADDITIVES EXEMPT FROM CERTIFICATION Foods § 73.170 Grape skin extract (enocianina). (a... removed. A small amount of sulphur dioxide may be present. (2) Color additive mixtures for food use made... suitable in color additive mixtures for coloring foods. (b) Specifications. Grape skin extract (enocianina...

21 CFR 73.170 - Grape skin extract (enocianina).

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-04-01

... LISTING OF COLOR ADDITIVES EXEMPT FROM CERTIFICATION Foods § 73.170 Grape skin extract (enocianina). (a... removed. A small amount of sulphur dioxide may be present. (2) Color additive mixtures for food use made... suitable in color additive mixtures for coloring foods. (b) Specifications. Grape skin extract (enocianina...

21 CFR 73.170 - Grape skin extract (enocianina).

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-04-01

... LISTING OF COLOR ADDITIVES EXEMPT FROM CERTIFICATION Foods § 73.170 Grape skin extract (enocianina). (a... removed. A small amount of sulphur dioxide may be present. (2) Color additive mixtures for food use made... suitable in color additive mixtures for coloring foods. (b) Specifications. Grape skin extract (enocianina...

Pretreatment method for immunoassay of polychlorinated biphenyls in transformer oil using multilayer capillary column and microfluidic liquid-liquid partitioning.

PubMed

Aota, Arata; Date, Yasumoto; Terakado, Shingo; Ohmura, Naoya

2013-01-01

Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are persistent organic pollutants that are present in the insulating oil inside a large number of transformers. To aid in eliminating PCB-contaminated transformers, PCBs in oil need to be measured using a rapid and cost-effective analytical method. We previously reported a pretreatment method for the immunoassay of PCBs in oil using a large-scale multilayer column and a microchip with multiple microrecesses, which permitted concentrated solvent extraction. In this paper, we report on a more rapid and facile pretreatment method, without an evaporation process, by improving the column and the microchip. In a miniaturized column, the decomposition and separation of oil were completed in 2 min. PCBs can be eluted from the capillary column at concentrations seven-times higher than those from the previous column. The total volume of the microrecesses was increased by improving the microrecess structure, the enabling extraction of four-times the amount of PCBs achieved with the previous system. By interfacing the capillary column with the improved microchip, PCBs in the eluate from the column were extracted into dimethyl sulfoxide in microrecesses with high enrichment and without the need for evaporation. Pretreatment was completed within 20 min. The pretreated oil was analyzed using a flow-based kinetic exclusion immunoassay. The limit of detection of PCBs in oil was 0.15 mg kg(-1), which satisfies the criterion set in Japan of 0.5 mg kg(-1).

Nonlinear evolution and final fate of (charged) superradiant instability

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Green, Stephen; Bosch, Pablo; Lehner, Luis

2016-03-01

We describe the full nonlinear development of the superradiant instability for a charged massless scalar field, coupled to general relativity and electromagnetism, in the vicinity of a Reissner-Nordstrom-AdS black hole. The presence of the negative cosmological constant provides a natural context for considering perfectly reflecting boundary conditions and studying the dynamics as the scalar field interacts repeateadly with the black hole. At early times, small superradiant perturbations grow as expected from linearized studies. Backreaction then causes the black hole to lose charge and mass until the perturbation becomes nonsuperradiant, with the final state described by a stable hairy black hole. For large gauge coupling, the instability extracts a large amount of charge per unit mass, resulting in greater entropy increase. We discuss the implications of the observed behavior for the general problem of superradiance in black hole spacetimes.

Research highlights: microfluidics meets big data.

PubMed

Tseng, Peter; Weaver, Westbrook M; Masaeli, Mahdokht; Owsley, Keegan; Di Carlo, Dino

2014-03-07

In this issue we highlight a collection of recent work in which microfluidic parallelization and automation have been employed to address the increasing need for large amounts of quantitative data concerning cellular function--from correlating microRNA levels to protein expression, increasing the throughput and reducing the noise when studying protein dynamics in single-cells, and understanding how signal dynamics encodes information. The painstaking dissection of cellular pathways one protein at a time appears to be coming to an end, leading to more rapid discoveries which will inevitably translate to better cellular control--in producing useful gene products and treating disease at the individual cell level. From these studies it is also clear that development of large scale mutant or fusion libraries, automation of microscopy, image analysis, and data extraction will be key components as microfluidics contributes its strengths to aid systems biology moving forward.

Effect of Allium flavum L. and Allium melanantherum Panč. Extracts on Oxidative DNA Damage and Antioxidative Enzymes Superoxide Dismutase and Catalase.

PubMed

Mitić-Ćulafić, Dragana; Nikolić, Biljana; Simin, Nataša; Jasnić, Nebojša; Četojević-Simin, Dragana; Krstić, Maja; Knežević-Vukčević, Jelena

2016-03-01

Allium flavum L. and Allium melanantherum Panč. are wild growing plants used in traditional diet in Balkan region. While chemical composition and some biological activities of A. flavum have been reported, A. melanantherum, as an endemic in the Balkan Peninsula, has never been comprehensively examined. After chemical characterization of A. melanantherum, we examined the protective effect of methanol extracts of both species against t-butyl hydro-peroxide (t-BOOH)-induced DNA damage and mutagenesis. The bacterial reverse mutation assay was performed on Escherichia coli WP2 oxyR strain. DNA damage was monitored in human fetal lung fibroblasts (MRC-5) with alkaline comet assay. Obtained results indicated that extracts reduced t-BOOH-induced DNA damage up to 70 and 72% for A. flavum and A. melanantherum extract, respectively, and showed no effect on t-BOOH-induced mutagenesis. Since the results indicated modulatory effect on cell-mediated antioxidative defense, the effect of extracts on total protein content, and superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase (CAT) amounts and activities were monitored. Both extracts increased total protein content, while the increase of enzyme amount and activity was obtained only with A. melanantherum extract and restricted to CAT. The activity of CuZnSOD family was not affected, while SOD1 and SOD2 amounts were significantly decreased, indicating potential involvement of extracellular CuZnSOD. Obtained results strongly support the traditional use of A. flavum and A. melanantherum in nutrition and recommend them for further study.

Effects on H(-) production in a multicusp ion source by mixture of H2 with H2O, NH3, CH4, N2H4, and SF6

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Orient, O. J.; Chutjian, A.; Leung, K. N.

1987-01-01

Effects of H(-) production in a multicusp ion source are measured by separately mixing with hydrogen small amounts (0.33-10 percent) of water, ammonia, methane, and hydrazine these are molecules which produce large amounts of H(-) via dissociative attachment (DA) resonances at higher electron energies. The mixing was done in a separate reservoir, with careful measurement of individual pressures. Experimental enhancements of 1.4 and less were observed, whereas calculated enhancements, using accurate DA cross sections for ground-state H2, should have produced factors of 1.5, 3.0, 1.3, and 2.4 enhancements for water, ammonia methane, and hydrazine, respectively, at a mean electron energy of 1.0 eV in the extraction region. The difference is accounted for by including, in the enhancement calculation, vibrationally and rotationally excited H2 molecules, with v-double prime = 5-11, and J-double prime = 0-5, and the large DA cross sections for the excited H2 (v-double prime, J-double prime). The relative populations of H2 (v-double prime, J-double prime) thus obtained are found to be substantially smaller than those predicted by theoretical calculations. The effect on H(-) current was also studied by mixing small amounts of SF6 with H2. A 1.5 percent mixture was found to reduce the H(-) output by one half.

Optimization of β-cyclodextrin-based flavonol extraction from apple pomace using response surface methodology.

PubMed

Parmar, Indu; Sharma, Sowmya; Rupasinghe, H P Vasantha

2015-04-01

The present study investigated five cyclodextrins (CDs) for the extraction of flavonols from apple pomace powder and optimized β-CD based extraction of total flavonols using response surface methodology. A 2(3) central composite design with β-CD concentration (0-5 g 100 mL(-1)), extraction temperature (20-72 °C), extraction time (6-48 h) and second-order quadratic model for the total flavonol yield (mg 100 g(-1) DM) was selected to generate the response surface curves. The optimal conditions obtained were: β-CD concentration, 2.8 g 100 mL(-1); extraction temperature, 45 °C and extraction time, 25.6 h that predicted the extraction of 166.6 mg total flavonols 100 g(-1) DM. The predicted amount was comparable to the experimental amount of 151.5 mg total flavonols 100 g(-1) DM obtained from optimal β-CD based parameters, thereby giving a low absolute error and adequacy of fitted model. In addition, the results from optimized extraction conditions showed values similar to those obtained through previously established solvent based sonication assisted flavonol extraction procedure. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to optimize aqueous β-CD based flavonol extraction which presents an environmentally safe method for value-addition to under-utilized bio resources.

Coffee and its waste repel gravid Aedes albopictus females and inhibit the development of their embryos.

PubMed

Satho, Tomomitsu; Dieng, Hamady; Ahmad, Muhammad Hishamuddin Itam; Ellias, Salbiah Binti; Hassan, Ahmad Abu; Abang, Fatimah; Ghani, Idris Abd; Miake, Fumio; Ahmad, Hamdan; Fukumitsu, Yuki; Zuharah, Wan Fatma; Majid, Abdul Hafiz Ab; Kassim, Nur Faeza Abu; Hashim, Nur Aida; Ajibola, Olaide Olawunmi; Al-Khayyat, Fatima Abdulla; Nolasco-Hipolito, Cirilo

2015-05-14

Dengue is a prevalent arboviral disease and the development of insecticide resistance among its vectors impedes endeavors to control it. Coffee is drunk by millions of people daily worldwide, which is associated with the discarding of large amounts of waste. Coffee and its waste contain large amounts of chemicals many of which are highly toxic and none of which have a history of resistance in mosquitoes. Once in solution, coffee is brownish in colour, resembling leaf infusion, which is highly attractive to gravid mosquitoes. To anticipate the environmental issues related to the increasing popularity of coffee as a drink, and also to combat insecticide resistance, we explored the deterrence potentials of coffee leachates against the ovipositing and embryonic stages of the dengue vector, Aedes albopictus. In a series of choice, no-choice, and embryo toxicity bioassays, we examined changes in the ovipositional behaviours and larval eclosion of Ae. albopictus in response to coffee extracts at different concentrations. Oviposition responses were extremely low when ovicups holding highly concentrated extract (HCE) of coffee were the only oviposition sites. Gravid females retained increased numbers of mature eggs until 5 days post-blood feeding. When provided an opportunity to oviposit in cups containing coffee extracts and with water, egg deposition occurred at lower rates in those containing coffee, and HCE cups were far less attractive to females than those containing water only. Females that successfully developed in a coffee environment preferentially oviposited in such cups when in competition with preferred oviposition sites (water cups), but this trait did not continue into the fourth generation. Larval eclosion occurred at lower rates among eggs that matured in a coffee environment, especially among those that were maintained on HCE-moistened substrates. The observations of the present study indicate a pronounced vulnerability of Ae. albopictus to the presence of coffee in its habitats during the early phases of its life cycle. The observations that coffee repels gravid females and inhibits larval eclosion provide novel possibilities in the search for novel oviposition deterrents and anti-larval eclosion agents against dengue vectors.

[THE INFLUENCE OF LEU-ENKEPHALIN AND MEDICAL PLANTS ON MOTOR ACTIVITY OF STOMACH IN DOGS].

PubMed

Vymjatnina, Z K; Prosekina, E Y; Tomova, T A

2015-01-01

The aim of the real research was a study influence of leu-enkephalin and extracts from the leaves of goose-grass large, of burdock of felted and root of chicory on the motor function of stomach for dogs. The study was carried out on 6 outbred dogs-males, by mass 14-17 kg, with the fistula of stomach by Basov. A leu-enkephalin ("Vector", Russia) was entered intravenously in a dose 7 mcg/kg. The corresponding plant-based preparations entered perorally during 10-14 days to beginning of experiments, on an empty stomach, in a volume a no more than 20 ml. Experiments put in a morning clock, in 16-18 hours after eating, after the careful washing of stomach. For 30 mines to the record of motive activity of stomach an animal was enter a peptide or gave a corresponding extract as water or spirit infusion. At the choice of doses of vegetable preparations came from the before obtained data about the antiulcerous action of the used plants. The conduct of peptide rendered considerable stimulant influence on motor activity of stomach, that was expressed in the increase of period of work and increase of force of reductions especially tonic. All used plants preparations rendered modulating influence on motive activity of stomach. Changes consisted in strengthening of tonic and oppressing of phase component. The most considerable decline of amount of phase reductions caused application of extract of goose-grass. Not only an amount but also force of phase reductions diminished thus. An extract from the root of chicory less considerably reduced the arnount of Phase reJuctions, but here substantially increased their force. All used herbal medicines stimulated tonic activity. Thus, peptide and all studied herbal medicines stimulated motion activity of the stomach that could cause acceleration of evacuation of food to duodenum. Such effect should be considered while choosing the medicine for correction of stomach functional activity.

The Information System at CeSAM

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Agneray, F.; Gimenez, S.; Moreau, C.; Roehlly, Y.

2012-09-01

Modern large observational programmes produce important amounts of data from various origins, and need high level quality control, fast data access via easy-to-use graphic interfaces, as well as possibility to cross-correlate informations coming from different observations. The Centre de donnéeS Astrophysique de Marseille (CeSAM) offer web access to VO compliant Information Systems to access data of different projects (VVDS, HeDAM, EXODAT, HST-COSMOS,…), including ancillary data obtained outside Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM) control. The CeSAM Information Systems provides download of catalogues and some additional services like: search, extract and display imaging and spectroscopic data by multi-criteria and Cone Search interfaces.

Detergent Lysis of Animal Tissues for Immunoprecipitation.

PubMed

DeCaprio, James; Kohl, Thomas O

2017-12-01

This protocol details protein extraction from mouse tissues for immunoprecipitation purposes and has been applied for the performance of large-scale immunoprecipitations of target proteins from various tissues for the identification of associated proteins by mass spectroscopy. The key factors in performing a successful immunoprecipitation directly relate to the abundance of target protein in a particular tissue type and whether or not the embryonic, newborn, or adult mouse-derived tissues contain fibrous and other insoluble material. Several tissue types, including lung and liver as well as carcinomas, contain significant amounts of fibrous tissue that can interfere with an immunoprecipitation. © 2017 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.

Interaction of electron neutrino with LSD detector

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ryazhskaya, O. G.; Semenov, S. V.

2016-06-01

The interaction of electron neutrino flux, originating in the rotational collapse mechanism on the first stage of Supernova burst, with the LSD detector components, such as 56Fe (a large amount of this metal is included in as shielding material) and liquid scintillator barNnH2n+2, is being investigated. Both charged and neutral channels of neutrino reaction with 12barN and 56Fe are considered. Experimental data, giving the possibility to extract information for nuclear matrix elements calculation are used. The number of signals, produced in LSD by the neutrino pulse of Supernova 1987A is determined. The obtained results are in good agreement with experimental data.

Isolation and amplification of genomic DNA from recalcitrant dried berries of black pepper (Piper nigrum L.)--a medicinal spice.

PubMed

Dhanya, K; Kizhakkayil, Jaleel; Syamkumar, S; Sasikumar, B

2007-10-01

Black pepper is an important medicinal spice traded internationally. The extraction of high quality genomic DNA for PCR amplification from dried black pepper is challenging because of the presence of the exceptionally large amount of oxidized polyphenolic compounds, polysaccharides and other secondary metabolites. Here we report a modified hexadecyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB) protocol by incorporating potassium acetate and a final PEG precipitation step to isolate PCR amplifiable genomic DNA from dried and powdered berries of black pepper. The protocol has trade implication as it will help in the PCR characterization of traded black peppers from different countries.

An Electrostatic Precipitator System for the Martian Environment

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Calle, C. I.; Mackey, P. J.; Hogue, M. D.; Johansen, M. R.; Phillips, J. R., III; Clements, J. S.

2012-01-01

Human exploration missions to Mars will require the development of technologies for the utilization of the planet's own resources for the production of commodities. However, the Martian atmosphere contains large amounts of dust. The extraction of commodities from this atmosphere requires prior removal of this dust. We report on our development of an electrostatic precipitator able to collect Martian simulated dust particles in atmospheric conditions approaching those of Mars. Extensive experiments with an initial prototype in a simulated Martian atmosphere showed efficiencies of 99%. The design of a second prototype with aerosolized Martian simulated dust in a flow-through is described. Keywords: Space applications, electrostatic precipitator, particle control, particle charging

Construction of a robust, large-scale, collaborative database for raw data in computational chemistry: the Collaborative Chemistry Database Tool (CCDBT).

PubMed

Chen, Mingyang; Stott, Amanda C; Li, Shenggang; Dixon, David A

2012-04-01

A robust metadata database called the Collaborative Chemistry Database Tool (CCDBT) for massive amounts of computational chemistry raw data has been designed and implemented. It performs data synchronization and simultaneously extracts the metadata. Computational chemistry data in various formats from different computing sources, software packages, and users can be parsed into uniform metadata for storage in a MySQL database. Parsing is performed by a parsing pyramid, including parsers written for different levels of data types and sets created by the parser loader after loading parser engines and configurations. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Eclipsing binary stars in the era of massive surveys First results and future prospects

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Papageorgiou, Athanasios; Catelan, Márcio; Ramos, Rodrigo Contreras; Drake, Andrew J.

2017-09-01

Our thinking about eclipsing binary stars has undergone a tremendous change in the last decade. Eclipsing binary stars are one of nature's best laboratories for determining the fundamental physical properties of stars and thus for testing the predictions of theoretical models. Some of the largest ongoing variable star surveys include the Catalina Real-time Transient Survey (CRTS) and the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea survey (VVV). They both contain a large amount of photometric data and plenty of information about eclipsing binaries that wait to be extracted and exploited. Here we briefly describe our efforts in this direction.

Strengthening Mechanisms and Their Relative Contributions to the Yield Strength of Microalloyed Steels

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lu, Junfang; Omotoso, Oladipo; Wiskel, J. Barry; Ivey, Douglas G.; Henein, Hani

2012-09-01

Microalloyed steels are used widely in oil and gas pipelines. They are a class of high-strength, low-carbon steels that contain small additions (in amounts less than 0.1 wt pct) of Nb, Ti, and/or V. The steels may contain other alloying elements, such as Mo, in amounts exceeding 0.1 wt pct. Precipitation in these steels can be controlled through thermomechanical-controlled processing, leading to precipitates with sizes that range from several microns to a few nanometers. Microalloyed steels have good strength, good toughness, and excellent weldability, which are attributed in part to the presence of the nanosized carbide and carbonitride precipitates. Because of their fine sizes, wide particle size distribution, and low volume fractions, conventional microscopic methods are not satisfactory for quantifying these precipitates. Matrix dissolution is a promising alternative to extract the precipitates for quantification. Relatively large volumes of material can be analyzed so that statistically significant quantities of precipitates of different sizes are collected. In this article, the microstructure features of a series of microalloyed steels (X70, X80, and X100) as well as a Grade 100 steel are characterized using optical microscopy (OM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). A chemical dissolution technique is used to extract the precipitates from the steels. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) are combined to analyze the chemical composition of these precipitates. Rietveld refinement of the XRD patterns is used to quantify fully the relative amounts of these precipitates. The size distribution of the nanosized precipitates is quantified using dark-field imaging (DF) in the TEM. The effects of microalloying content, finish rolling temperature (FRT), and coiling temperature (CT)/interrupted cooling temperature (ICT) on the grain size and the amount of nanoprecipitation are discussed. Individual strengthening contributions from grain size effects, solid-solution strengthening, and precipitation strengthening are quantified to understand fully the strengthening mechanisms for these steels.

White wine taste and mouthfeel as affected by juice extraction and processing.

PubMed

Gawel, Richard; Day, Martin; Van Sluyter, Steven C; Holt, Helen; Waters, Elizabeth J; Smith, Paul A

2014-10-15

The juice used to make white wine can be extracted using various physical processes that affect the amount and timing of contact of juice with skins. The influence of juice extraction processes on the mouthfeel and taste of white wine and their relationship to wine composition were determined. The amount and type of interaction of juice with skins affected both wine total phenolic concentration and phenolic composition. Wine pH strongly influenced perceived viscosity, astringency/drying, and acidity. Despite a 5-fold variation in total phenolics among wines, differences in bitter taste were small. Perceived viscosity was associated with higher phenolics but was not associated with either glycerol or polysaccharide concentration. Bitterness may be reduced by using juice extraction and handling processes that minimize phenolic concentration, but lowering phenolic concentration may also result in wines of lower perceived viscosity.

[Deodorant effects of champignon extract and repressive effects on production of indole and tryptamine in vivo].

PubMed

Koizumi, I; Suzuki, Y; Shimura, S

1997-01-01

Champignon extract has potent deodorant effects, and its repressive effects on bad smells generated by the decomposition of fishery products are especially marked. Utilizing the amount of ammonical nitrogen, indoleacetic acid and tryptamine generated as the standard criteria, the deodorant effects of champingnon were evaluated. In an in vitro test, chicken liver homogenate was decomposed by incubating at 37 degrees C and with the progress of its decomposition, ammonical nitrogen was generated. Champignon extract was shown to have the ability to repress the generation of ammonical nitrogen. For an in vivo test, an excessive amount of tryptophan was orally administered to domestic rabbits resalting in an increase in blood levels of indoleacetic acid and tryptamine. Champignon extract given concomitantly rapidly reduced blood levels of the two compounds to negligible levels.

Permeation characteristics of hypericin across Caco-2 monolayers in the presence of single flavonoids, defined flavonoid mixtures or Hypericum extract matrix.

PubMed

Verjee, Sheela; Kelber, Olaf; Kolb, Christiane; Abdel-Aziz, Heba; Butterweck, Veronika

2017-03-12

The major aim of this study was to get a detailed understanding of the exposure and fate of hypericin in the Caco-2 cell system when combined with various flavonoids, mixtures of flavonoids or Hypericum perforatum extract matrix (STW3-VI). The permeation characteristics of hypericin in the absence or presence of quercetin, quercitrin, isoquercitrin, hyperoside and rutin were tested. Hypericin (5 μm) was mixed with single flavonoids (20 μm) or with different flavonoid combinations (each flavonoid 4 or 10 μm, total flavonoid concentration: 20 μm). Further, the uptake of hypericin (5 μm) in the presence of H. perforatum extract matrix (7.25, 29 and 58 μg/ml) was studied. Following application of hypericin to the apical side of the monolayer, only negligible amounts of the compound were found in the basolateral compartment. From all tested flavonoids, only quercitrin increased the basolateral amount of hypericin. Dual flavonoid combinations were not superior compared to the single combinations. The amount of hypericin in the basolateral compartment increased concentration-dependently in the presence of extract matrix (from 0 to 7.5%). Comparing the effects of various flavonoid mixtures vs the extract matrix, it can be concluded that, besides flavonoids, the extract seems to contain further compounds (e.g. phenolic acids or proanthocyanidins) which substantially improve the permeation characteristics of hypericin. © 2017 Royal Pharmaceutical Society.

[Extraction of lambda-cyhalothrin from aqueous dioxan solutions].

PubMed

Shormanov, V K; Chigareva, E N; Belousova, O V

2011-01-01

The results of extraction of lambda-cigalotrin from dioxan aqueous solutions by hydrophobic organic solvents are presented. It is shown that the degree of extraction depends on the nature of the extractant, the water to dioxan ratio, and saturation of the water-dioxan layer with the electrolyte. The highest efficiency of lambda-cigalotrin extraction was achieved using chlorophorm as a solvent under desalination conditions. The extraction factor was calculated necessary to obtain the desired amount of lambda-cigalotrin from the water-dioxan solution (4:1) with the help of the extractants being used.

Microgravimetric Analysis Method for Activation-Energy Extraction from Trace-Amount Molecule Adsorption.

PubMed

Xu, Pengcheng; Yu, Haitao; Li, Xinxin

2016-05-03

Activation-energy (Ea) value for trace-amount adsorption of gas molecules on material is rapidly and inexpensively obtained, for the first time, from a microgravimetric analysis experiment. With the material loaded, a resonant microcantilever is used to record in real time the adsorption process at two temperatures. The kinetic parameter Ea is thereby extracted by solving the Arrhenius equation. As an example, two CO2 capture nanomaterials are examined by the Ea extracting method for evaluation/optimization and, thereby, demonstrating the applicability of the microgravimetric analysis method. The achievement helps to solve the absence in rapid quantitative characterization of sorption kinetics and opens a new route to investigate molecule adsorption processes and materials.

Reevaluation of microplastics extraction efficiency with the aim of Munich Plastic Sediment Separator.

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zobkov, Mikhail; Esiukova, Elena; Grave, Aleksei; Khatmullina, Liliya

2017-04-01

Invading of microplastics into marine environment is known as a global ecological threat. Specific density of microplastics can vary significantly depending on a polymer type, technological processes of its production, additives, weathering, and biofouling. Plastic particles can sink or float on the sea surface, but with time, most of drifting plastics become negatively buoyant and sink to the sea floor due to biofouling or adherence of denser particles. As a result, the seabed becomes the ultimate repository for microplastic particles and fibres. A study of microplastics content in aquatic sediments is an important source of information about ways of their migration, sink and accumulation zones. The Munich Plastic Sediment Separator (MPSS), proposed by Imhoff et al. (2012), is considered as the most effective tool for microplastic extraction. However, we observed that the numbers of marine microplastics extracted with this tool from different kinds of bottom sediments were significantly underestimated. We examined the extraction efficiency of the MPSS by adding artificial reference particles (ARPs) to marine sediment sample before the extraction procedure. Extraction was performed by two different methods: the modified NOAA method and using the MPSS. The separation solution with specific density 1.5 g/ml was used. Subsequent cleaning, drying and microscope detection procedures were identical. The microplastics content was determined in supernatant fraction, in the bulk of the extraction solution, in spoil dump fraction of MPSS and in instrument wash-out. While the extraction efficiency from natural sediments of ARPs by the MPSS was really high (100% in most cases), the extraction efficiency of marine microplastics was up to 10 times lower than that obtained with modified NOAA method for the same samples. Less than 40% of the total marine microplastics content has been successfully extracted with the MPSS. Large amounts of marine microplastics were found in the spoil dump and in the bulk solution fractions of the MPSS. Changes in stirring and separation periods had weak impact on the extraction efficiency of ARPs and marine microplastics. Until now, we are unable to find effective working procedures for adequate extraction of marine microplastics with the MPSS. The MPSS was found to be a useful tool for microplastics extraction from large sediment samples for qualitative analysis and to obtain examination specimens. Applying the MPSS for quantitative microplastics analysis requires further testing and elaboration of standardized extraction procedures. The research is supported by the Russian Science Foundation, grant number 15-17-10020 (project MARBLE). Imhof, H. K., Schmid, J., Niessner, R., Ivleva, N. P., Laforsch, C. 2012. A novel, highly efficient method for the separation and quantification of plastic particles in sediments of aquatic environments. Limnology and Oceanography: Methods, 10(7), 524-537. DOI 10.4319/lom.2012.10.524

Stable isotope ratio determination of the origin of vanillin in vanilla extracts and its relationship to vanillin/potassium ratios

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Martin, G.E.; Alfonso, F.C.; Figert, D.M.

A method is described for isolating vanillin from vanilla extract, followed by stable isotope ratio analysis to determine the amount of natural vanillin contained in adulterated vanilla extracts. After the potassium content is determined, the percent Madagascar and/or Java vanilla beans incorporated into the extract may then be approximated from the vanillin/potassium ratio.

Ultrasound assisted enhancement in natural dye extraction from beetroot for industrial applications and natural dyeing of leather.

PubMed

Sivakumar, Venkatasubramanian; Anna, J Lakshmi; Vijayeeswarri, J; Swaminathan, G

2009-08-01

There is a growing demand for eco-friendly/non-toxic colorants, specifically for health sensitive applications such as coloration of food and dyeing of child textile/leather garments. Recently, dyes derived from natural sources for these applications have emerged as an important alternative to potentially harmful synthetic dyes and pose need for suitable effective extraction methodologies. The present paper focus on the influence of process parameters for ultrasound assisted leaching of coloring matter from plant materials. In the present work, extraction of natural dye from beetroot using ultrasound has been studied and compared with static/magnetic stirring as a control process at 45 degrees C. The influence of process parameters on the extraction efficiency such as ultrasonic output power, time, pulse mode, effect of solvent system and amount of beetroot has been studied. The use of ultrasound is found to have significant improvement in the extraction efficiency of colorant obtained from beetroot. Based on the experiments it has been found that a mixture of 1:1 ethanol-water with 80W ultrasonic power for 3h contact time provided better yield and extraction efficiency. Pulse mode operation may be useful in reducing electrical energy consumption in the extraction process. The effect of the amount of beetroot used in relation to extraction efficiency has also been studied. Two-stage extraction has been studied and found to be beneficial for improving the yield for higher amounts of beetroot. Significant 8% enhancement in % yield of colorant has been achieved with ultrasound, 80W as compared to MS process both using 1:1 ethanol-water. The coloring ability of extracted beet dye has been tested on substrates such as leather and paper and found to be suitable for dyeing. Ultrasound is also found to be beneficial in natural dyeing of leather with improved rate of exhaustion. Both the dyed substrates have better color values for ultrasonic beet extract as inferred from reflectance measurement. Therefore, the present study clearly offers efficient extraction methodology from natural dye resources such as beetroot with ultrasound even dispensing with external heating. Thereby, also making eco-friendly non-toxic dyeing of fibrous substances a potential viable option.

A simplified field protocol for genetic sampling of birds using buccal swabs

USGS Publications Warehouse

Vilstrup, Julia T.; Mullins, Thomas D.; Miller, Mark P.; McDearman, Will; Walters, Jeffrey R.; Haig, Susan M.

2018-01-01

DNA sampling is an essential prerequisite for conducting population genetic studies. For many years, blood sampling has been the preferred method for obtaining DNA in birds because of their nucleated red blood cells. Nonetheless, use of buccal swabs has been gaining favor because they are less invasive yet still yield adequate amounts of DNA for amplifying mitochondrial and nuclear markers; however, buccal swab protocols often include steps (e.g., extended air-drying and storage under frozen conditions) not easily adapted to field settings. Furthermore, commercial extraction kits and swabs for buccal sampling can be expensive for large population studies. We therefore developed an efficient, cost-effective, and field-friendly protocol for sampling wild birds after comparing DNA yield among 3 inexpensive buccal swab types (2 with foam tips and 1 with a cotton tip). Extraction and amplification success was high (100% and 97.2% respectively) using inexpensive generic swabs. We found foam-tipped swabs provided higher DNA yields than cotton-tipped swabs. We further determined that omitting a drying step and storing swabs in Longmire buffer increased efficiency in the field while still yielding sufficient amounts of DNA for detailed population genetic studies using mitochondrial and nuclear markers. This new field protocol allows time- and cost-effective DNA sampling of juveniles or small-bodied birds for which drawing blood may cause excessive stress to birds and technicians alike.

Preparation of dummy template imprinted polymers at surface of silica microparticles for the selective extraction of trace bisphenol A from water samples.

PubMed

Zhao, Wenhui; Sheng, Na; Zhu, Rong; Wei, Fangdi; Cai, Zheng; Zhai, Meijuan; Du, Shuhu; Hu, Qin

2010-07-15

Molecularly imprinted polymers for bisphenol A (BPA) were prepared by using surface molecular imprinting technique. Analogues of BPA, namely 4,4'-dihydroxybiphenyl and 3,3',5,5'-tetrabromobisphenol A, were used as the dummy templates instead of BPA, to avoid the leakage of a trace amount of the target analyte (BPA). The resulting dummy molecularly imprinted polymers (DMIPs) showed the large sorption capacity, high recognition ability and fast binding kinetics for BPA. The maximal sorption capacity was up to 958 micromol g(-1), and it only took 40 min for DMIPs to achieve the sorption equilibrium. The DMIPs were successfully applied to the solid-phase extraction coupled with HPLC/UV for the determination of BPA in water samples. The calibration graph of the analytical method was linear with a correlation coefficient more than 0.999 in the concentration range of 0.0760-0.912 ng mL(-1) of BPA. The limit of detection was 15.2 pg mL(-1) (S/N=3). Recoveries were in the range of 92.9-102% with relative standard deviation (RSD) less than 11%. The trace amounts of BPA in tap water, drinking water, rain and leachate of one-off tableware were determined by the method built, and the satisfactory results were obtained. 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Extraction of caustic potash from spent tea for biodiesel Production

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sulaiman, Sarina; Faiz Che Fisol, Ahmad; Sharikh, Atikah Mohamed; Noraini Jimat, Dzun; Jamal, Parveen

2018-01-01

Biodiesel is an alternative to non-renewable fossil fuels due to its low gas emission and economical value. This study aims to extract caustic potash (KOH) from spent tea and to optimize the transesterfication process based on parameters such as amount of catalyst, reaction temperature and methanol to oil ratio. The spent tea was first dried at 60°C prior to calcination at 600°C for two hours. Caustic Potash were extracted from the calcined spent tea. The transesterification process was done based on Design of Experiments (DOE) to study the effects of amount of catalyst ranging from 0.5 wt % to 2.5 wt %, reaction temperature from 55°C to 65°C and methanol to oil ratio from 6:1 to 12:1 at a constant agitation rate of 300 rpm for three hours. The calcined spent tea produced was recorded the highest at 54.3 wt % and the extracted catalyst was 2.4 wt %. The optimized biodiesel yield recorded was 56.95% at the optimal conditions of 2.5 wt % amount of catalyst, 65°C reaction temperature and 9:1 methanol to oil ratio.

Establishment of a rapid, inexpensive protocol for extraction of high quality RNA from small amounts of strawberry plant tissues and other recalcitrant fruit crops.

PubMed

Christou, Anastasis; Georgiadou, Egli C; Filippou, Panagiota; Manganaris, George A; Fotopoulos, Vasileios

2014-03-01

Strawberry plant tissues and particularly fruit material are rich in polysaccharides and polyphenolic compounds, thus rendering the isolation of nucleic acids a difficult task. This work describes the successful modification of a total RNA extraction protocol, which enables the isolation of high quantity and quality of total RNA from small amounts of strawberry leaf, root and fruit tissues. Reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) amplification of GAPDH housekeeping gene from isolated RNA further supports the proposed protocol efficiency and its use for downstream molecular applications. This novel procedure was also successfully followed using other fruit tissues, such as olive and kiwifruit. In addition, optional treatment with RNase A following initial nucleic acid extraction can provide sufficient quality and quality of genomic DNA for subsequent PCR analyses, as evidenced from PCR amplification of housekeeping genes using extracted genomic DNA as template. Overall, this optimized protocol allows easy, rapid and economic isolation of high quality RNA from small amounts of an important fruit crop, such as strawberry, with extended applicability to other recalcitrant fruit crops. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Contamination of semi-solid dosage forms by leachables from aluminium tubes.

PubMed

Haverkamp, Jan Boris; Lipke, Uwe; Zapf, Thomas; Galensa, Rudolf; Lipperheide, Cornelia

2008-11-01

The objective of this study was to determine to what extent bisphenol A (BPA), bisphenol A diglycidyl ether (BADGE) and its derivatives are extractable from epoxy-based coatings of aluminium tubes for pharmaceutical use and to monitor their leaching into different kinds of semi-solid dosage forms. Migration increasing factors should be evaluated. Extraction tests using acetonitrile for 10 days at 40 degrees C turned out to be suitable to estimate the maximum amount of extractables. A plain variability in the nature and amount of extractables among tubes of different vendors (n=7) could be demonstrated. Leaching of the remnants into various semi-solid drug products (ointment, cream, gel) during storage (30 degrees C/40 degrees C) was verifiable. Leachable profiles were, apart from storage time and temperature, decisively influenced by the matrix. In particular, matrix polarity seemed to play a crucial role. Thus, the highest amount of leachables was found in isopropanol-based carbomer gel. Furthermore, in-use conditions (mechanical stress) enhanced migration significantly. In order to ensure quality and safety of semi-solid formulae, interactions between the coating material and the drug product should be thoroughly evaluated.

Molecular weights and metabolism of rat brain proteins

PubMed Central

Vrba, R.; Cannon, Wendy

1970-01-01

1. Rats were injected with [U-14C]glucose and after various intervals extracts of whole brain proteins (and in some cases proteins from liver, blood and heart) were prepared by high-speed centrifugation of homogenates in 0.9% sodium chloride or 0.5% sodium deoxycholate. 2. The extracts were subjected to gel filtration on columns of Sephadex G-200 equilibrated with 0.9% sodium chloride or 0.5% sodium deoxycholate. 3. Extracts prepared with both solvents displayed on gel filtration a continuous range of proteins of approximate molecular weights ranging from less than 2×104 to more than 8×105. 4. The relative amount of the large proteins (mol.wt.>8×105) was conspicuously higher in brain and liver than in blood. 5. At 15min after the injection of [U-14C]glucose the smaller protein molecules (mol.wt.<2×104) were significantly radioactive, whereas no 14C could be detected in the larger (mol.wt.>2×104) protein molecules. The labelling of all protein samples was similar within 4h after injection of [U-14C]glucose. Fractionation of brain proteins into distinctly different groups by the methods used in the present work yielded protein samples with a specific radioactivity comparable with that of total brain protein. 6. No evidence could be obtained by the methods used in the present and previous work to indicate the presence of a significant amount of `metabolically inert protein' in the brain. 7. It is concluded that: (a) most or all of the brain proteins are in a dynamic state of equilibrium between continuous catabolism and anabolism; (b) the continuous conversion of glucose into protein is an important part of the maintenance of this equilibrium and of the homoeostasis of brain proteins in vivo. PMID:5435499

Construction and application of a Xanthomonas campestris CGMCC15155 strain that produces white xanthan gum.

PubMed

Dai, Xiaohui; Gao, Ge; Wu, Mengmeng; Wei, Weiying; Qu, Jianmei; Li, Guoqiang; Ma, Ting

2018-04-15

In the industrial production of xanthan gum using Xanthomonas campestris CGMCC15155, large amounts of ethanol are required to extract xanthan gum from the fermentation broth and remove xanthomonadin impurities. To reduce the amount of ethanol and the overall production cost of xanthan gum, a xanthomonadin-deficient strain of CGMCC15155 was constructed by inserting the Vitreoscilla globin (vgb) gene, under the control of the LacZ promoter, into the region of the pigA gene, which is involved in xanthomonadin synthesis. The insertion of vgb inactivated pigA, resulting in the production of white xanthan gum. The lack of xanthomonadins resulted in a decreased yield of xanthan gum. However, the expression product of vgb gene, VHb, could increase the metabolism of X. campestris, which allowed the production of xanthan gum to reach wild-type levels in the engineered strain. The yield, molecular weight, and rheological properties of the xanthan gum synthesized by the engineered and wild-type bacteria were essentially the same. When the same volume of ethanol was used, the whiteness values of the xanthan gum extracted from engineered and wild-type bacteria were 65.20 and 38.17, respectively. To extract xanthan gum with the same whiteness, three and seven times the fermentation volume of ethanol was required for the engineered and wild-type strains, respectively. Thus, the engineered train reduced the requirement for ethanol in xanthan gum production by 133.3%. The results demonstrated that the engineered bacteria used less ethanol, thus reducing the downstream processing cost in xanthan gum production. © 2018 The Authors. MicrobiologyOpen published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Fixing Formalin: A Method to Recover Genomic-Scale DNA Sequence Data from Formalin-Fixed Museum Specimens Using High-Throughput Sequencing

PubMed Central

Hykin, Sarah M.; Bi, Ke; McGuire, Jimmy A.

2015-01-01

For 150 years or more, specimens were routinely collected and deposited in natural history collections without preserving fresh tissue samples for genetic analysis. In the case of most herpetological specimens (i.e. amphibians and reptiles), attempts to extract and sequence DNA from formalin-fixed, ethanol-preserved specimens—particularly for use in phylogenetic analyses—has been laborious and largely ineffective due to the highly fragmented nature of the DNA. As a result, tens of thousands of specimens in herpetological collections have not been available for sequence-based phylogenetic studies. Massively parallel High-Throughput Sequencing methods and the associated bioinformatics, however, are particularly suited to recovering meaningful genetic markers from severely degraded/fragmented DNA sequences such as DNA damaged by formalin-fixation. In this study, we compared previously published DNA extraction methods on three tissue types subsampled from formalin-fixed specimens of Anolis carolinensis, followed by sequencing. Sufficient quality DNA was recovered from liver tissue, making this technique minimally destructive to museum specimens. Sequencing was only successful for the more recently collected specimen (collected ~30 ybp). We suspect this could be due either to the conditions of preservation and/or the amount of tissue used for extraction purposes. For the successfully sequenced sample, we found a high rate of base misincorporation. After rigorous trimming, we successfully mapped 27.93% of the cleaned reads to the reference genome, were able to reconstruct the complete mitochondrial genome, and recovered an accurate phylogenetic placement for our specimen. We conclude that the amount of DNA available, which can vary depending on specimen age and preservation conditions, will determine if sequencing will be successful. The technique described here will greatly improve the value of museum collections by making many formalin-fixed specimens available for genetic analysis. PMID:26505622

Fixing Formalin: A Method to Recover Genomic-Scale DNA Sequence Data from Formalin-Fixed Museum Specimens Using High-Throughput Sequencing.

PubMed

Hykin, Sarah M; Bi, Ke; McGuire, Jimmy A

2015-01-01

For 150 years or more, specimens were routinely collected and deposited in natural history collections without preserving fresh tissue samples for genetic analysis. In the case of most herpetological specimens (i.e. amphibians and reptiles), attempts to extract and sequence DNA from formalin-fixed, ethanol-preserved specimens-particularly for use in phylogenetic analyses-has been laborious and largely ineffective due to the highly fragmented nature of the DNA. As a result, tens of thousands of specimens in herpetological collections have not been available for sequence-based phylogenetic studies. Massively parallel High-Throughput Sequencing methods and the associated bioinformatics, however, are particularly suited to recovering meaningful genetic markers from severely degraded/fragmented DNA sequences such as DNA damaged by formalin-fixation. In this study, we compared previously published DNA extraction methods on three tissue types subsampled from formalin-fixed specimens of Anolis carolinensis, followed by sequencing. Sufficient quality DNA was recovered from liver tissue, making this technique minimally destructive to museum specimens. Sequencing was only successful for the more recently collected specimen (collected ~30 ybp). We suspect this could be due either to the conditions of preservation and/or the amount of tissue used for extraction purposes. For the successfully sequenced sample, we found a high rate of base misincorporation. After rigorous trimming, we successfully mapped 27.93% of the cleaned reads to the reference genome, were able to reconstruct the complete mitochondrial genome, and recovered an accurate phylogenetic placement for our specimen. We conclude that the amount of DNA available, which can vary depending on specimen age and preservation conditions, will determine if sequencing will be successful. The technique described here will greatly improve the value of museum collections by making many formalin-fixed specimens available for genetic analysis.

Effects of alkylresorcinols on volume and structure of yeast-leavened bread.

PubMed

Andersson, Annica Am; Landberg, Rikard; Söderman, Thomas; Hedkvist, Sofie; Katina, Kati; Juvonen, Riikka; Holopainen, Ulla; Lehtinen, Pekka; Aman, Per

2011-01-30

Alkylresorcinols (AR) are amphiphilic phenolic compounds found in high amounts in wheat, durum wheat and rye, with different homologue composition for each cereal. The effect of different amounts of added AR from these cereals on bread volume, height, porosity and microstructure was studied. Breads with added rye bran (with high levels of AR) or acetone-extracted rye bran (with low levels of AR) were also baked, as well as breads with finely milled forms of each of these brans. Breads with high amounts of added AR, irrespective of AR homologue composition, had a lower volume, a more compact structure and an adverse microstructure compared with breads with no or low levels of added AR. AR were also shown to inhibit the activity of baker's yeast. There was no difference in bread volume and porosity between bread baked with rye bran and acetone-extracted rye bran or with brans of different particle size. Irrespective of homologue composition, AR had a negative effect on wheat bread properties when added in high amounts as purified extracts from wheat, durum wheat and rye. Natural levels of AR in rye bran, however, did not affect the volume and porosity of yeast-leavened wheat breads. 2010 Society of Chemical Industry.

Detection and location of fouling on photovoltaic panels using a drone-mounted infrared thermography system

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhang, Peng; Zhang, Lifu; Wu, Taixia; Zhang, Hongming; Sun, Xuejian

2017-01-01

Due to weathering and external forces, solar panels are subject to fouling and defects after a certain amount of time in service. These fouling and defects have direct adverse consequences such as low-power efficiency. Because solar power plants usually have large-scale photovoltaic (PV) panels, fast detection and location of fouling and defects across large PV areas are imperative. A drone-mounted infrared thermography system was designed and developed, and its ability to detect rapid fouling on large-scale PV panel systems was investigated. The infrared images were preprocessed using the K neighbor mean filter, and the single PV module on each image was recognized and extracted. Combining the local and global detection method, suspicious sites were located precisely. The results showed the flexible drone-mounted infrared thermography system to have a strong ability to detect the presence and determine the position of PV fouling. Drone-mounted infrared thermography also has good technical feasibility and practical value in the detection of PV fouling detection.

[A Case of Intestinal Obstruction Caused by a Bezoar after Pylous-Preserving Gastrectomy].

PubMed

Yamazato, Yuzo; Kosuga, Toshiyuki; Ichikawa, Daisuke; Kubota, Takeshi; Okamoto, Kazuma; Konishi, Hirotaka; Shiozaki, Atsushi; Fujiwara, Hitoshi; Arita, Tomohiro; Morimura, Ryo; Murayama, Yasutoshi; Kuriu, Yoshiaki; Ikoma, Hisashi; Nakanishi, Masayoshi; Otsuji, Eigo

2017-11-01

A 65-year-old woman with a history of pylorus-preserving gastrectomy(PPG)for early gastric cancer visited our hospital because of vomiting. Gastrointestinal endoscopy revealed a large bezoar in the anastomotic site of the stomach. Because the bezoar was too large to be collected orally, the dissolution therapy with taking Coca-Cola®was continued. On the 3rd day after hospitalization, she felt acute abdominal pain with vomiting. Computed tomography revealed intestinal obstruction by a mass with air bubbles inside in the ileum. Emergency operation was performed under a diagnosis of intestinal obstruction due to the bezoar. The black brown bezoar sized 80×35×30mm was extracted through an ileotomy. The delayed gastric empty is considered to involve in the bezoar formation. Therefore, the appropriate education of diet and periodic endoscopic screening are necessary for patients with large amounts of gastric residues especially after PPG. In the dissolution therapy, physicians need to be careful of intestinal obstruction by a bezoar.

Rapid Ovary Mass-Isolation (ROMi) to Obtain Large Quantities of Drosophila Egg Chambers for Fluorescent In Situ Hybridization.

PubMed

Jambor, Helena; Mejstrik, Pavel; Tomancak, Pavel

2016-01-01

Isolation of large quantities of tissue from organisms is essential for many techniques such as genome-wide screens and biochemistry. However, obtaining large quantities of tissues or cells is often the rate-limiting step when working in vivo. Here, we present a rapid method that allows the isolation of intact, single egg chambers at various developmental stages from ovaries of adult female Drosophila flies. The isolated egg chambers are amenable for a variety of procedures such as fluorescent in situ hybridization, RNA isolation, extract preparation, or immunostaining. Isolation of egg chambers from adult flies can be completed in 5 min and results, depending on the input amount of flies, in several milliliters of material. The isolated egg chambers are then further processed depending on the exact requirements of the subsequent application. We describe high-throughput in situ hybridization in 96-well plates as example application for the mass-isolated egg chambers.

Antimicrobial activity of aqueous extract of leaf and stem extract of Santalum album

PubMed Central

Kumar, M. Giriram; Jeyraaj, Indira A.; Jeyaraaj, R.; Loganathan, P.

2006-01-01

The antimicrobial activity of aqueous extract leaf and stem of Santalum album was performed against Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas. S. album leaf extract showed inhibition to E.coli (0.8mm), Staphylococcus aureus (1.0mm) and Pseudomonas (1.4mm) were as stem extract showed inhibition on E.coli (0.6mm), Staphylococcus aureus (0.4mm) and seudomonas (1.0mm) respectively. However leaf extract showed significantly higher inhibition when compared to stem extract. This might be due to presence of higher amount of secondary metabolites in the aqueous leaf extract. PMID:22557199

Supercritical multicomponent solvent coal extraction

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Corcoran, W. H.; Fong, W. S.; Pichaichanarong, P.; Chan, P. C. F.; Lawson, D. D. (Inventor)

1983-01-01

The yield of organic extract from the supercritical extraction of coal with larger diameter organic solvents such as toluene is increased by use of a minor amount of from 0.1 to 10% by weight of a second solvent such as methanol having a molecular diameter significantly smaller than the average pore diameter of the coal.

Modification of an acetone-sodium dodecyl sulfate disruption method for cellular protein extraction from neuropathogenic Clostridium botulinum

USDA-ARS?s Scientific Manuscript database

An acetone-sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) disruption method was used for the extraction of cellular proteins from neurotoxigenic Clostridium botulinum. The amount of protein extracted per gram of dry weight and the protein profile as revealed by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE) was comparabl...

An Organic Geochemical Assessment of CO2-Coal Interactions During Sequestration

USGS Publications Warehouse

Kolak, Jonathan J.; Burruss, Robert A.

2003-01-01

Three well-characterized coal samples of varying rank were extracted with supercritical CO2 to determine the amount of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) that could be mobilized during simulated CO2 injection/sequestration in deep coal beds. The supercritical CO2 extractions were conducted at 40?C and 100 bars, roughly corresponding to a depth of 1 km. The greatest amount of PAHs was extracted from the high-volatile C bituminous coal sample. Extracts from the subbituminous C and anthracite coal samples contained lower concentrations of these compounds. The effectiveness of supercritical CO2 in liberating PAHs from the coal sample was evaluated in a comparison with a parallel series of Soxhlet extractions using 100% dichloromethane. More PAHs were extracted from the lower rank coal samples with dichloromethane than with supercritical CO2. The results from this investigation indicate that, regardless of coal rank, CO2 injection into deep coal beds may mobilize PAHs from the coal matrix. However, more PAHs could be mobilized during CO2 sequestration in a high-volatile C bituminous coal bed than in either of the other two coal ranks studied.

Extraction of Fucoxanthin from Raw Macroalgae excluding Drying and Cell Wall Disruption by Liquefied Dimethyl Ether

PubMed Central

Kanda, Hideki; Kamo, Yuichi; Machmudah, Siti; Wahyudiono; Goto, Motonobu

2014-01-01

Macroalgae are one of potential sources for carotenoids, such as fucoxanthin, which are consumed by humans and animals. This carotenoid has been applied in both the pharmaceutical and food industries. In this study, extraction of fucoxanthin from wet brown seaweed Undaria pinnatifida (water content was 93.2%) was carried out with a simple method using liquefied dimethyl ether (DME) as an extractant in semi-continuous flow-type system. The extraction temperature and absolute pressure were 25 °C and 0.59 MPa, respectively. The liquefied DME was passed through the extractor that filled by U. pinnatifida at different time intervals. The time of experiment was only 43 min. The amount of fucoxanthin could approach to 390 μg/g dry of wet U. pinnatifida when the amount of DME used was 286 g. Compared with ethanol Soxhlet and supercritical CO2 extraction, which includes drying and cell disruption, the result was quite high. Thus, DME extraction process appears to be a good method for fucoxanthin recovery from U. pinnatifida with improved yields. PMID:24796299

Aqueous Extract of Phyllanthus niruri Leaves Displays In Vitro Antioxidant Activity and Prevents the Elevation of Oxidative Stress in the Kidney of Streptozotocin-Induced Diabetic Male Rats

PubMed Central

Giribabu, Nelli; Rao, Pasupuleti Visweswara; Kumar, Korla Praveen; Muniandy, Sekaran; Swapna Rekha, Somesula; Salleh, Naguib

2014-01-01

P. niruri has been reported to possess antidiabetic and kidney protective effects. In the present study, the phytochemical constituents and in vitro antioxidant activity of P. niruri leaf aqueous extract were investigated together with its effect on oxidative stress and antioxidant enzymes levels in diabetic rat kidney. Results. Treatment of diabetic male rats with P. niruri leaf aqueous extract (200 and 400 mg/kg) for 28 consecutive days prevents the increase in the amount of lipid peroxidation (LPO) product, malondialdehyde (MDA), and the diminution of superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), and glutathione peroxidase (GPx) activity levels in the kidney of diabetic rats. The amount of LPO showed strong negative correlation with SOD, CAT, and GPx activity levels. P. niruri leaf aqueous extract exhibits in vitro antioxidant activity with IC50 slightly lower than ascorbic acid. Phytochemical screening of plant extract indicates the presence of polyphenols. Conclusion. P. niruri leaf extract protects the kidney from oxidative stress induced by diabetes. PMID:24991228

Quantitative determination of plant phenolics in Urtica dioica extracts by high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometric detection.

PubMed

Orčić, Dejan; Francišković, Marina; Bekvalac, Kristina; Svirčev, Emilija; Beara, Ivana; Lesjak, Marija; Mimica-Dukić, Neda

2014-01-15

A method for quantification of 45 plant phenolics (including benzoic acids, cinnamic acids, flavonoid aglycones, C- and O-glycosides, coumarins, and lignans) in plant extracts was developed, based on reversed phase HPLC separation of extract components, followed by tandem mass spectrometric detection. The phenolic profile of 80% MeOH extracts of the stinging nettle (Urtica dioica L.) herb, root, stem, leaf and inflorescence was obtained by using this method. Twenty-one of the investigated compounds were present at levels above the reliable quantification limit, with 5-O-caffeoylquinic acid, rutin and isoquercitrin as the most abundant. The inflorescence extracts were by far the richest in phenolics, with the investigated compounds amounting 2.5-5.1% by weight. As opposed to this, the root extracts were poor in phenolics, with only several acids and derivatives being present in significant amounts. The results obtained by the developed method represent the most detailed U. dioica chemical profile so far. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

[CONTENT OF OXIDATIVE STRESS MARKERS IN BLOOD PLASMA UNDER THE ACTION OF EXTRACTS OF GRATIOLA OFFICINALIS L., HELICHRYSUM ARENARIUM (L.) MOENCH, AND ANTHOCYANIN FORMS OF ZEA MAYS L].

PubMed

Durnova, N A; Afanas'eva, G A; Kurchatova, M N; Zaraeva, N V; Golikov, A G; Bucharskaya, A B; Golikov, A G; Bucharskaya, A B; Plastun, V O; Andreeva, N V

2015-01-01

The effect of aqueous solutions of dry ethanol extracts of Gratiola officinalis L., Helichrysum arenarium (L.) Moench, and anthocyanin forms of Zea mays L. on the dioxidin-induced lipid peroxidation in blood has been studied on rats. It is established that all these extracts are capable of reducing the amount of avera- ge-mass (AM) molecules and malonic dialdehyde (MDA) in rat blood plasma. The extract of Gratiola officinalis L. reduces the concentration of AM and MDA moleules by 43%. The extract of Helichrysum arenarium (L.) Moench reduces the concentration of AM molecules on the average by 18.66% (within 9.22 -34.81%) and MDA by 49.36% (within 34.12-79.75%). The Extract of anthocyanin forms of Zea mays L. does not reduce the concentration of AM mo- lecules, but reduces the amount of MDA in the blood of rats on average by 27.88% (within 21.58-37.82%) (p < 0.01).

Chemical Composition and Biological Activities of Mono- and Heterofloral Bee Pollen of Different Geographical Origins

PubMed Central

Araújo, Jucilene Silva; Chambó, Emerson Dechechi; Costa, Maria Angélica Pereira de Carvalho; Cavalcante da Silva, Samira Maria Peixoto; Lopes de Carvalho, Carlos Alfredo; M. Estevinho, Leticia

2017-01-01

Recent research shows variations in pollen chemical constituents and, consequently, in their therapeutic properties. Mono and multifloral bee pollen extracts were investigated for antioxidant and enzyme inhibitory activity properties, phenolic compounds and fatty acid composition. Generally, Eucalyptus spp. and multifloral extracts exhibited potent inhibitory activity against α-amylase, acetylcholinesterase, tyrosinase, lipoxygenase, lipase and hyaluronidase. On the other hand, Miconia spp. demonstrated higher antihemolytic activity. Cocos nucifera and Miconia spp. extracts exhibited important antioxidant properties in the different assays (ABTS, DPPH, β-carotene/linoleic acid and reducing power). Moreover, these extracts had greater amounts of total phenols and flavonoids in comparison to others. The increase in antioxidant activity (decrease in EC50 values) was accompanied by an increase in the amount of total phenols in the extracts. The pollen extracts contained linoleic acid and α-linolenic acid as major fatty acids, followed by palmitic acid, and oleic acid. In this study, differences were observed in both chemical constituents and biological activities of the samples related to the geographical and botanical origin of bee pollen. PMID:28448467

Storage stability of traditional Tunisian butter enriched with antioxidant extract from tomato processing by-products.

PubMed

Abid, Yousra; Azabou, Samia; Jridi, Mourad; Khemakhem, Ibtihel; Bouaziz, Mohamed; Attia, Hamadi

2017-10-15

Traditional Tunisian butter (TTB) is one of the most appreciated dairy products in Tunisia. Herein, the storage stability of TTB enriched with antioxidants from tomato processing by-products (TPB) was evaluated during 60days of storage at 4°C. TPB extract contains significant amounts of lycopene and phenolics. TTB enriched with 400mg of TPB extract/kg of TTB revealed the lowest peroxide values at all the determination intervals. Adding 400mg of TPB extract/kg of TTB did not exhibit any undesired effect on lactic bacteria which are necessary for development of aroma and chemical properties of TTB. However, raw TTB and highly enriched TTB (800mg of TPB extract/kg of TTB) displayed higher lipid peroxidation. The detrimental effect of high antioxidant amounts on TTB stability could be due to a possible pro-oxidant character. Thus, appropriate supplementation of TPB extract could be used in TTB as a protective agent against lipid peroxidation to extend its shelf-life up to two months. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Optimization of extraction of high purity all-trans-lycopene from tomato pulp waste.

PubMed

Poojary, Mahesha M; Passamonti, Paolo

2015-12-01

The aim of this work was to optimize the extraction of pure all-trans-lycopene from the pulp fractions of tomato processing waste. A full factorial design (FFD) consisting of four independent variables including extraction temperature (30-50 °C), time (1-60 min), percentage of acetone in n-hexane (25-75%, v/v) and solvent volume (10-30 ml) was used to investigate the effects of process variables on the extraction. The absolute amount of lycopene present in the pulp waste was found to be 0.038 mg/g. The optimal conditions for extraction were as follows: extraction temperature 20 °C, time 40 min, a solvent composition of 25% acetone in n-hexane (v/v) and solvent volume 40 ml. Under these conditions, the maximal recovery of lycopene was 94.7%. The HPLC-DAD analysis demonstrated that, lycopene was obtained in the all-trans-configuration at a very high purity grade of 98.3% while the amount of cis-isomers and other carotenoids were limited. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Complex investigation of extraction techniques applied for cyclitols and sugars isolation from different species of Solidago genus.

PubMed

Ratiu, Ileana-Andreea; Al-Suod, Hossam; Ligor, Magdalena; Ligor, Tomasz; Railean-Plugaru, Viorica; Buszewski, Bogusław

2018-03-15

Cyclitols are phytochemicals naturally occurring in plant material, which attracted an increasing interest due to multiple medicinal attributes, among which the most important are the antidiabetic, antioxidant, and anticancer properties. Due to their valuable properties, sugars are used in the food industry as sweeteners, preservatives, texture modifiers, fermentation substrates, and flavoring and coloring agents. In this study, we report for the first time the quantitative analysis of sugars and cyclitols isolated from Solidago virgaurea L., which was used for the selection of the optimal solvent and extraction technique that can provide the best possible yield. Moreover, the quantities of sugars and cyclitols extracted from two other species, Solidago canadensis and Solidago gigantea, were investigated using the best extraction method and the most appropriate solvent. Comparative analysis of natural plant extracts obtained using five different techniques-maceration, Soxhlet extraction, pressurized liquid extraction, ultrasound-assisted extraction, and supercritical fluid extraction-was performed in order to decide the most suitable, efficient, and economically convenient extraction method. Three different solvents were used. Analysis of samples has been performed by solid-phase extraction for purification and pre-concentration, followed by derivation and GC-MS analysis. Highest efficiency for the total amount of obtained compounds has been reached by PLE, when water was used as a solvent. d-pinitol amount was almost similar for every solvent and for all the extraction techniques involved. © 2018 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Antioxidant and cytoprotective activities of extracts prepared from fruit and vegetable wastes and by-products.

PubMed

Kabir, Faisal; Tow, Wei Wei; Hamauzu, Yasunori; Katayama, Shigeru; Tanaka, Sachi; Nakamura, Soichiro

2015-01-15

In this study, fruit and vegetable wastes and by-products were tested for polyphenol content and their antioxidant activity. The highest content of polyphenols as assessed by the Folin-Ciocalteu assay was the hot-water extract of grape seed, followed by the ethanol extract of buckwheat hull. The highest antioxidant activity measured by 2,2-diphenyl-1-picryl-hydrazyl (DPPH) assays was also detected in the hot-water extract of grape seed, followed by the ethanol extract of immature prune. Most of samples showed protective effects against oxidative stress induced by 2,2'-azobis-(2-amidinopropane) dihydrochloride (AAPH) peroxyl radical generator in African monkey kidney (MA 104) cells. Samples containing high amounts of phenolics (more than 30 mg ChAE/g) generally showed high antioxidant activity and a protective effect against AAPH-induced oxidative stress. This study demonstrates that fruit and vegetable wastes and by-products are good sources of high amounts of phenolics with antioxidant properties. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A comparison of iron extraction methods for the determination of degree of pyritisation and the recognition of iron-limited pyrite formation

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Raiswell, R.; Canfield, D. E.; Berner, R. A.

1994-01-01

Measurements of degree of pyritisation require an estimate of sediment iron which is capable of reaction with dissolved sulphide to form pyrite, either directly or indirectly via iron monosulphide precursors. Three dissolution techniques (buffered dithionite, cold 1 M HCl, boiling 12 M HCl) were examined for their capacity to extract iron from a variety of iron minerals, and iron-bearing sediments, as a function of different extraction times and different grain sizes. All the iron oxides studied are quantitatively extracted by dithionite and boiling HCl (but not by cold HCl). Both HCl techniques extract more iron from silicates than does dithionite but probably about the same amounts as are potentially capable of sulphidation. Modern sediment studies indicate that most sedimentary pyrite is formed rapidly from iron oxides, with smaller amounts formed more slowly from iron silicates (if sufficient geologic time is available). It is therefore recommended that the degree of pyritisation be defined with respect to the dithionite-extractable (mainly iron oxide) pool and/or the boiling HCl-extractable pool (which includes some silicate iron) for the recognition of iron-limited pyritisation.

Ionization Electron Signal Processing in Single Phase LArTPCs II. Data/Simulation Comparison and Performance in MicroBooNE

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Adams, C.; et al.

The single-phase liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) provides a large amount of detailed information in the form of fine-grained drifted ionization charge from particle traces. To fully utilize this information, the deposited charge must be accurately extracted from the raw digitized waveforms via a robust signal processing chain. Enabled by the ultra-low noise levels associated with cryogenic electronics in the MicroBooNE detector, the precise extraction of ionization charge from the induction wire planes in a single-phase LArTPC is qualitatively demonstrated on MicroBooNE data with event display images, and quantitatively demonstrated via waveform-level and track-level metrics. Improved performance of inductionmore » plane calorimetry is demonstrated through the agreement of extracted ionization charge measurements across different wire planes for various event topologies. In addition to the comprehensive waveform-level comparison of data and simulation, a calibration of the cryogenic electronics response is presented and solutions to various MicroBooNE-specific TPC issues are discussed. This work presents an important improvement in LArTPC signal processing, the foundation of reconstruction and therefore physics analyses in MicroBooNE.« less

The in vitro toxicology of Swedish snus

PubMed Central

Coggins, Christopher R. E.; Ballantyne, Mark; Curvall, Margareta; Rutqvist, Lars-Erik

2012-01-01

Three commercial brands of Swedish snus (SWS), an experimental SWS, and the 2S3 reference moist snuff were each tested in four in vitro toxicology assays. These assays were: Salmonella reverse mutation, mouse lymphoma, in vitro micronucleus, and cytotoxicity. Water extractions of each of the 5 products were tested using several different concentrations; the experimental SWS was also extracted using dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO). Extraction procedures were verified by nicotine determinations. Results for SWS in the mutagenicity assays were broadly negative: there were occasional positive responses, but these were effectively at the highest concentration only (concentrations well above those suggested by regulatory guidelines), and were often associated with cytotoxicity. The 2S3 reference was unequivocally positive in one of the three conditions of the micronucleus assay (MNA), at the highest concentration only. Positive controls produced the expected responses in each assay. The SWS data are contrasted with data reported for combusted tobacco in the form of cigarettes, where strongly positive responses have been routinely reported for mutagenicity and cytotoxicity. These negative findings in a laboratory setting concur with the large amount of epidemiological data from Sweden, data showing that SWS are associated with considerably lower carcinogenic potential when compared with cigarettes. PMID:22400986

Taste thresholds and suprathreshold responses to tannin-rich plant extracts and quinine in a primate species (Microcebus murinus).

PubMed

Iaconelli, S; Simmen, B

2002-11-01

Theories of plant chemical defenses discriminate between quantitative digestibility reducers (e.g., tannins) and qualitative toxins (e.g., alkaloids). Since the differential effect on taste of these compounds is poorly known, we recorded ingestive responses of a primate species, Microcebus murinus, to four tannin-rich plant extracts and to quinine, by using the behavioral method of the "two-bottle test." The efficiency of tannic extracts at precipitating protein was measured with the blue BSA method. Inhibition taste thresholds for tannins added to a moderately sweet solution varied between 0.25 and 2 g/l. The threshold for quinine hydrochloride was 0.32 g/l. The profiles of the response/concentration curves established for these astringent and bitter substances were similar, with maximal inhibition of consumption occurring for near-threshold concentrations. The large amounts of quinine required to deter this small-bodied species from feeding were unexpected, given its unspecialized frugivorous/insectivorous diet. We propose that the taste responses of Microcebus to tannins have been shaped in relation to the widespread occurrence of efficient polyphenols in food plants, while low responsiveness to quinine reflects a low risk of ingesting toxic alkaloids when feeding on ripe fruits and insects.

Sonic extracts from a bacterium related to periapical disease activate gelatinase A and inactivate tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinases TIMP-1 and TIMP-2.

PubMed

Sato, Y; Kishi, J; Suzuki, K; Nakamura, H; Hayakawa, T

2009-12-01

To examine the effects of sonicated bacterial extracts (SBEs) from three related to periapical disease bacteria (Porphyromonas gingivalis, P. endodontalis and F. nucleatum) on the activation of matrix metalloproteinase (MMP-2) and the inactivation of tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinase (TIMP-1 and TIMP-2). Each SBE was added to cultures of human periodontal ligament (PL) cells or HT1080 cells and their supernatants were analysed by zymography for MMP-2. Each SBE was added to PL cell cultures, and the amount of TIMP-1 was determined by ELISA. P. gingivalis SBE was incubated with HT1080 cell culture supernatants, and the amounts of TIMP-1 and TIMP-2 were determined by ELISA. Statistical analysis was performed with the paired Student's t-test. In extracts of PL cells that had been incubated in the presence of P. gingivalis SBE, one representing pro-MMP-2 (72 kDa) and a band corresponding to the active MMP-2 (66 kDa) were observed; but in the other extracts it was not detected. When HT1080 cells were treated with P. gingivalis SBE, the pro-MMPs was processed into 86- and 66-kDa fragments, but in the other extracts, the processing did not occur when the other SBEs were used. When PL cells were incubated with the same SBEs, the amount of TIMP-1 was markedly decreased (P < 0.01), but in the other extracts, it was not. The amounts of both TIMP-1 and TIMP-2 were decreased in a dose-dependent manner when HT1080 cell culture supernatant was incubated with P. gingivalis SBE. These findings suggest that P. gingivalis SBE may cause connective tissue to be destroyed, contributing to the process of periapical disease, by activating pro-MMP-2 as well as by inactivating TIMP-1 and TIMP-2.

New design of experiment combined with UV-Vis spectroscopy for extraction and estimation of polyphenols from Basil seeds, Red seeds, Sesame seeds and Ajwan seeds

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mabood, Fazal; Gilani, Syed Abdullah; Hussain, Javid; Alshidani, Sulaiman; Alghawi, Said; Albroumi, Mohammed; Alameri, Saif; Jabeen, Farah; Hussain, Zahid; Al-Harrasi, Ahmed; Al Abri, Zahra K. M.; Farooq, Saima; Naureen, Zakira; Hamaed, Ahmad; Rasul Jan, M.; Shah, Jasmin

2017-05-01

New experimental designs for the extraction of polyphenols from different seeds including Basil seed, Red seed, Sesame seeds and Ajwan seeds were investigated. Four variables the concentration and volume of methanol and NaOH solutions as well as the temperature and time of extraction were varied to see their effect on total phenol extraction. The temperature was varied in the range from 25 °C to 200 °C while the time in the range from 30 to 200 minutes. Response surface methodology was used to optimize the extraction parameters. The estimation of polyphenols was measured through phenols reduction UV-Vis spectroscopic method of phosphotungstic-phosphomolybdic acids (Folin-Ciocalteu's reagent). Calibration curve was made by using tannic acid as a polyphenols standard in the concentration range from 0.1 to 10 ppm. The regression line obtained shows the value of correlation coefficient i.e. R = 0.930 and Root mean square error of cross validation (RMSEC) value of 0.0654. The Basil seeds were found containing the highest amount of total phenols i.e. 785.76 mg/100 g. While the Sesame seeds having the least amount i.e. 33.08 mg/100 g. The Ajwan seeds and the Red seeds are containing the medium amounts i.e. 379 mg/100 g and 220.54 mg/100 g respectively.

Proteolytic extracts of three Bromeliaceae species as eco-compatible tools for leather industry.

PubMed

Errasti, María Eugenia; Caffini, Néstor Oscar; López, Laura María Isabel

2018-01-02

Most tanneries use high proportions of Na 2 S and CaO during the dehairing step, resulting in effluents of high alkalinity and large amounts of suspended solid, besides the risk of liberating the toxic H 2 S. Solid waste rich in protein is another environmental problem of tanneries. Enzymes are an interesting technological tool for industry due to their biodegradability, nontoxic nature, and nonpolluting effluent generation. In the leather industry, proteases have been chosen as a promising eco-friendly alternative to Na 2 S/CaO dehairing. Extracts with high proteolytic activity have been obtained from fruits of Bromeliaceae species: Bromelia balansae Mez (Bb), Bromelia hieronymi Mez (Bh), and Pseudananas macrodontes (Morr.) Harms (Pm). In this work, Bb, Bh, and Pm have been studied for application in the leather industry, focusing in their dehairing properties. Enzymatic activities were measured against collagen, keratin, elastin, and epidermis while a dehairing assay was performed by employing cowhide. All extracts showed similar activity on collagen and epidermis, while Bh and Pm were the most active against keratin at the same caseinolytic unit (CU) values; Bh was the only extract active against elastin. Bb (1 CU/ml), Bh (1.5 CU/ml), and Pm (0.5 CU/ml) were able to depilate cowhide. Desirable characteristics of dehairing were observed for all extracts since hair pores did not show residual hair, grain surface was clean and intact, and collagen fiber bundles of dermis were not damaged. In conclusion, results here presented show that proteolytic extracts of Bromeliaceae species are promising eco-compatible tools for leather industry.

Optimization of simultaneous microwave/ultrasonic-assisted extraction of phenolic compounds from walnut flour using response surface methodology.

PubMed

Luo, Yan; Wu, Wanxing; Chen, Dan; Lin, Yuping; Ma, Yage; Chen, Chaoyin; Zhao, Shenglan

2017-12-01

Walnut is a traditional food as well as a traditional medicine recorded in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia; however, the large amounts of walnut flour (WF) generated in walnut oil production have not been well utilized. This study maximized the total polyphenolic yield (TPY) from the walnut flour (WF) by optimizing simultaneous ultrasound/microwave-assisted hydroalcoholic extraction (SUMAE). Response surface methodology was used to optimize the processing parameters for the TPY, including microwave power (20-140 W), ultrasonic power (75-525 W), extraction temperature (25-55 °C), and time (0.5-9.5 min). The polyphenol components were analysed by LC-MS. A second-order polynomial model satisfactorily fit the experimental TPY data (R 2  = 0.9932, P < 0.0001 and R adj 2     = 0.9868). The optimized quick extraction conditions were microwave power 294.38 W, ultrasonic power 93.5 W, temperature 43.38 °C and time 4.33 min, with a maximum TPY of 34.91 mg GAE/g, which was a rapid extraction. The major phenolic components in the WF extracts were glansreginin A, ellagic acid, and gallic acid with peak areas of 22.15%, 14.99% and 10.96%, respectively, which might be used as functional components for health food, cosmetics and medicines. The results indicated that walnut flour, a waste product from the oil industry, was a rich source of polyphenolic compounds and thus could be used as a high-value functional food ingredient.

Sequential Extraction Results in Improved Proteome Profiling of Medicinal Plant Pinellia ternata Tubers, Which Contain Large Amounts of High-Abundance Proteins

PubMed Central

An, SuFang; Gong, FangPing; Wang, Wei

2012-01-01

Pinellia ternata tuber is one of the well-known Chinese traditional medicines. In order to understand the pharmacological properties of tuber proteins, it is necessary to perform proteome analysis of P. ternata tubers. However, a few high-abundance proteins (HAPs), mainly mannose-binding lectin (agglutinin), exist in aggregates of various sizes in the tubers and seriously interfere with proteome profiling by two-dimensional electrophoresis (2-DE). Therefore, selective depletion of these HAPs is a prerequisite for enhanced proteome analysis of P. ternata tubers. Based on differential protein solubility, we developed a novel protocol involving two sequential extractions for depletion of some HAPs and prefractionation of tuber proteins prior to 2-DE. The first extraction using 10% acetic acid selectively extracted acid-soluble HAPs and the second extraction using the SDS-containing buffer extracted remaining acid-insoluble proteins. After application of the protocol, 2-DE profiles of P. ternata tuber proteins were greatly improved and more protein spots were detected, especially low-abundance proteins. Moreover, the subunit composition of P. ternata lectin was analyzed by electrophoresis. Native lectin consists of two hydrogen-bonded subunits (11 kDa and 25 kDa) and the 11 kDa subunit was a glycoprotein. Subsequently, major HAPs in the tubers were analyzed by mass spectrometry, with nine protein spots being identified as lectin isoforms. The methodology was easy to perform and required no specialized apparatus. It would be useful for proteome analysis of other tuber plants of Araceae. PMID:23185632

Sequential extraction results in improved proteome profiling of medicinal plant Pinellia ternata tubers, which contain large amounts of high-abundance proteins.

PubMed

Wu, Xiaolin; Xiong, Erhui; An, Sufang; Gong, Fangping; Wang, Wei

2012-01-01

Pinellia ternata tuber is one of the well-known Chinese traditional medicines. In order to understand the pharmacological properties of tuber proteins, it is necessary to perform proteome analysis of P. ternata tubers. However, a few high-abundance proteins (HAPs), mainly mannose-binding lectin (agglutinin), exist in aggregates of various sizes in the tubers and seriously interfere with proteome profiling by two-dimensional electrophoresis (2-DE). Therefore, selective depletion of these HAPs is a prerequisite for enhanced proteome analysis of P. ternata tubers. Based on differential protein solubility, we developed a novel protocol involving two sequential extractions for depletion of some HAPs and prefractionation of tuber proteins prior to 2-DE. The first extraction using 10% acetic acid selectively extracted acid-soluble HAPs and the second extraction using the SDS-containing buffer extracted remaining acid-insoluble proteins. After application of the protocol, 2-DE profiles of P. ternata tuber proteins were greatly improved and more protein spots were detected, especially low-abundance proteins. Moreover, the subunit composition of P. ternata lectin was analyzed by electrophoresis. Native lectin consists of two hydrogen-bonded subunits (11 kDa and 25 kDa) and the 11 kDa subunit was a glycoprotein. Subsequently, major HAPs in the tubers were analyzed by mass spectrometry, with nine protein spots being identified as lectin isoforms. The methodology was easy to perform and required no specialized apparatus. It would be useful for proteome analysis of other tuber plants of Araceae.

MATE: Machine Learning for Adaptive Calibration Template Detection

PubMed Central

Donné, Simon; De Vylder, Jonas; Goossens, Bart; Philips, Wilfried

2016-01-01

The problem of camera calibration is two-fold. On the one hand, the parameters are estimated from known correspondences between the captured image and the real world. On the other, these correspondences themselves—typically in the form of chessboard corners—need to be found. Many distinct approaches for this feature template extraction are available, often of large computational and/or implementational complexity. We exploit the generalized nature of deep learning networks to detect checkerboard corners: our proposed method is a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on a large set of example chessboard images, which generalizes several existing solutions. The network is trained explicitly against noisy inputs, as well as inputs with large degrees of lens distortion. The trained network that we evaluate is as accurate as existing techniques while offering improved execution time and increased adaptability to specific situations with little effort. The proposed method is not only robust against the types of degradation present in the training set (lens distortions, and large amounts of sensor noise), but also to perspective deformations, e.g., resulting from multi-camera set-ups. PMID:27827920

Atlas-guided cluster analysis of large tractography datasets.

PubMed

Ros, Christian; Güllmar, Daniel; Stenzel, Martin; Mentzel, Hans-Joachim; Reichenbach, Jürgen Rainer

2013-01-01

Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) and fiber tractography are important tools to map the cerebral white matter microstructure in vivo and to model the underlying axonal pathways in the brain with three-dimensional fiber tracts. As the fast and consistent extraction of anatomically correct fiber bundles for multiple datasets is still challenging, we present a novel atlas-guided clustering framework for exploratory data analysis of large tractography datasets. The framework uses an hierarchical cluster analysis approach that exploits the inherent redundancy in large datasets to time-efficiently group fiber tracts. Structural information of a white matter atlas can be incorporated into the clustering to achieve an anatomically correct and reproducible grouping of fiber tracts. This approach facilitates not only the identification of the bundles corresponding to the classes of the atlas; it also enables the extraction of bundles that are not present in the atlas. The new technique was applied to cluster datasets of 46 healthy subjects. Prospects of automatic and anatomically correct as well as reproducible clustering are explored. Reconstructed clusters were well separated and showed good correspondence to anatomical bundles. Using the atlas-guided cluster approach, we observed consistent results across subjects with high reproducibility. In order to investigate the outlier elimination performance of the clustering algorithm, scenarios with varying amounts of noise were simulated and clustered with three different outlier elimination strategies. By exploiting the multithreading capabilities of modern multiprocessor systems in combination with novel algorithms, our toolkit clusters large datasets in a couple of minutes. Experiments were conducted to investigate the achievable speedup and to demonstrate the high performance of the clustering framework in a multiprocessing environment.

Optimization of in-cell accelerated solvent extraction technique for the determination of organochlorine pesticides in river sediments.

PubMed

Duodu, Godfred Odame; Goonetilleke, Ashantha; Ayoko, Godwin A

2016-04-01

Organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) are ubiquitous environmental contaminants with adverse impacts on aquatic biota, wildlife and human health even at low concentrations. However, conventional methods for their determination in river sediments are resource intensive. This paper presents an approach that is rapid and also reliable for the detection of OCPs. Accelerated Solvent Extraction (ASE) with in-cell silica gel clean-up followed by Triple Quadrupole Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometry (GCMS/MS) was used to recover OCPs from sediment samples. Variables such as temperature, solvent ratio, adsorbent mass and extraction cycle were evaluated and optimized for the extraction. With the exception of Aldrin, which was unaffected by any of the variables evaluated, the recovery of OCPs from sediment samples was largely influenced by solvent ratio and adsorbent mass and, to some extent, the number of cycles and temperature. The optimized conditions for OCPs extraction in sediment with good recoveries were determined to be 4 cycles, 4.5 g of silica gel, 105 °C, and 4:3 v/v DCM: hexane mixture. With the exception of two compounds (α-BHC and Aldrin) whose recoveries were low (59.73 and 47.66% respectively), the recovery of the other pesticides were in the range 85.35-117.97% with precision <10% RSD. The method developed significantly reduces sample preparation time, the amount of solvent used, matrix interference, and is highly sensitive and selective. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Studies on transformations of plutonium-239 and americium-241 in three major Indian soils.

PubMed

Vyas, B N; Mistry, K B

1984-01-13

These studies were carried out to elucidate the behaviour of 239Pu and and 241Am in three major soil groups of India, namely oxisol, vertisol-pellustert and entisol-haplaquent, over extended periods up to 400 days. The influences of soil characteristics, addition of organic matter and the chemical form of the radionuclides added to soils were investigated. A large fraction, ranging from 60 to 90% of the soluble radionuclides added as nitrates, underwent rapid conversion to precipitated hydrous oxides and hydroxides (0.3 M sodium citrate-dithionite extracts). At 3 h after contamination, ion-exchangeable forms (0.1 M MgCl2 extracts) contained low levels of total added Pu (0.7 to 19.1%) and from 0.1 to 2.8% of total Am. These levels decreased further with increasing periods of incubation of up to 400 days. In contrast, on addition of chelated forms of radionuclides (as DTPA and EDTA complexes) up to 85% of total Pu, and about 50% of total Am were associated with 0.1 M MgCl2 extracts 3 h post-contamination and significant amounts were extractable when maintained over extended periods of incubation of up to 400 days. The levels of Pu and Am associated with organic-bound forms (0.1 M NaOH extracts) did not show consistent trends, although in all three soil types the contents of these radionuclides in the insoluble residue fraction (including refractory compounds) generally increased with time of incubation.

Anthocyanins, antioxidative, and antimicrobial properties of American cranberry (Vaccinium macrocarpon Ait.) and their press cakes.

PubMed

Viskelis, P; Rubinskiene, M; Jasutiene, I; Sarkinas, A; Daubaras, R; Cesoniene, L

2009-03-01

Amounts of total phenolics, anthocyanins, and ascorbic acid in 4 American cranberry varieties harvested at 4 stages of maturity were measured. The larger amount of phenolic compounds was found in berries of "Black Veil" cultivar (504 mg/100 g) at II stage of maturity. Significantly larger amounts of anthocyanins were determined in the overripe berries of the cultivars "Ben Lear" and "Black Veil." The amount of ascorbic acid in berries increased during ripening from I to III stage, and slightly decreased in the overripe berries. The biggest quantities of ascorbic acid were found in the ripe berries of "Ben Lear" cultivar (15.8 mg/100 g). The distribution of anthocyanins pigments was determined by HPLC-UV/MS in mature berries. The composition of individual anthocyanins in berries was quite similar in all the studied cranberry cultivars. While skins of cranberries are rich in anthocyanins and other phenolic compounds, the extracts of the by-products of cranberries juice-berry cakes, were analyzed and obtained results were compared with the properties of extracts made from whole berries. The anthocyanins and total phenolics content, radical scavenging activity, antimicrobial activity of the whole berries, and their press cakes extracts were measured. All investigated extracts from berries and their press cakes showed good radical scavenging activity and revealed antimicrobial properties. It was found that Bacillus cereus (ATCC 10876) and Micrococcus luteus (ATCC 9341) were the most sensitive among 10 tested Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria.

The algorithm study for using the back propagation neural network in CT image segmentation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhang, Peng; Liu, Jie; Chen, Chen; Li, Ying Qi

2017-01-01

Back propagation neural network(BP neural network) is a type of multi-layer feed forward network which spread positively, while the error spread backwardly. Since BP network has advantages in learning and storing the mapping between a large number of input and output layers without complex mathematical equations to describe the mapping relationship, it is most widely used. BP can iteratively compute the weight coefficients and thresholds of the network based on the training and back propagation of samples, which can minimize the error sum of squares of the network. Since the boundary of the computed tomography (CT) heart images is usually discontinuous, and it exist large changes in the volume and boundary of heart images, The conventional segmentation such as region growing and watershed algorithm can't achieve satisfactory results. Meanwhile, there are large differences between the diastolic and systolic images. The conventional methods can't accurately classify the two cases. In this paper, we introduced BP to handle the segmentation of heart images. We segmented a large amount of CT images artificially to obtain the samples, and the BP network was trained based on these samples. To acquire the appropriate BP network for the segmentation of heart images, we normalized the heart images, and extract the gray-level information of the heart. Then the boundary of the images was input into the network to compare the differences between the theoretical output and the actual output, and we reinput the errors into the BP network to modify the weight coefficients of layers. Through a large amount of training, the BP network tend to be stable, and the weight coefficients of layers can be determined, which means the relationship between the CT images and the boundary of heart.

Effects of American Ginseng on Preimplantation Development and Pregnancy in Mice.

PubMed

Belanger, Danyka; Calder, Michele D; Gianetto-Berruti, Alessandra; Lui, Edmund M; Watson, Andrew J; Feyles, Valter

2016-01-01

In North America, a high proportion of pregnant women use herbal medications including North American ginseng. This medicinal plant contains high amounts of triterpene saponins (ginsenosides), which are the main bioactive compounds. It is important to assess ginseng's impact on all reproductive functions to ensure the safety of pregnant women and fetuses. In this study, we defined the concentration-responsive effects of North American alcoholic and aqueous ginseng extracts on preimplantation development in vitro and on pregnancy and post-partum development in the mouse. Two-cell mouse embryos were cultured with 5 different concentrations of whole ginseng root extracts, or ginsenosides Rb1, Rg1 and Re alone, a combinatorial ginsenoside solution and a crude polysaccharide fraction solution. Embryonic development and recovery from each treatment was assessed. To investigate the in vivo effects of ginseng extracts, female mice were gavaged with 50[Formula: see text]mg/kg/day, 500[Formula: see text]mg/kg/day or 2000[Formula: see text]mg/kg/day of either extract (treatment) or water (sham) for 2 weeks prior to mating and throughout gestation. Gestation period, litter size, pup growth and pup sex ratio were evaluated. Oral ginseng consumption did not significantly affect fertility or pregnancy in the mouse. High doses of ginseng (2000[Formula: see text]mg/kg/day) decreased maternal weight gain. Direct treatment of preimplantation embryos in vitro demonstrated that ALC and AQ extract treatment reduced development in a concentration responsive manner, while only ALC extract effects were largely reversible. Treatments with individual or combinatorial ginsenosides, or the polysaccharide fraction solution alone did not impair preimplantation development, in vitro. In conclusion, maternal oral consumption of ginseng has little negative impact on pregnancy in the mouse, however, direct exposure to ginseng extract during mouse preimplantation development in vitro is detrimental.

Investigation of the Lignan Content in Extracts from Linum, Callitris and Juniperus Species in Relation to Their In Vitro Antiproliferative Activities.

PubMed

Doussot, Joël; Mathieu, Véronique; Colas, Cyril; Molinié, Roland; Corbin, Cyrielle; Montguillon, Josiane; Moreno Y Banuls, Laeticia; Renouard, Sullivan; Lamblin, Frédéric; Dupré, Patricia; Maunit, Benoit; Kiss, Robert; Hano, Christophe; Lainé, Eric

2017-04-01

Podophyllotoxin, a lignan still extracted from the rhizomes of Podophyllum hexandrum (Berberidaceae), is the starting molecule for the semisynthesis of widely used anticancer drugs such as etoposide. However, this source is threatened by the over-collection of P. hexandrum . Plants belonging to the Linaceae and Cupressaceae families could be attractive alternative sources with species that contain the lignan podophyllotoxin or its precursors and derivatives. Wild flax species, such as Linum flavum , as well as some Juniperus and Callitris species were investigated for their lignan content, and the in vitro antiproliferative capacity of their extracts was assayed on four tumor cell lines. Some of the lignans were detected by LC-HRMS for the first time in these extracts.In addition, lignans purified from these plants and compounds semisynthesized from commercially available podophyllotoxin were tested in terms of their in vitro antiproliferative activity. The genus Juniperus was the most promising given its in vitro antiproliferative effects, which were also observed with extracts from L. flavum and Callitris species.The in vitro antiproliferative effect of the plant extracts studied here appears to correlate well with the contents of the aryltetralin lignan podophyllotoxin and its glycoside as well as with deoxypodophyllotoxin and 6-methoxypodophyllotoxin. The strongest correlation between the lignan content of the extracts and the antiproliferative activity was observed for 6-methoxypodophyllotoxin. Regarding the possibility of producing large renewable amounts of 6-methoxypodophyllotoxin, this molecule could be of interest to produce new anticancer drugs and to bypass the resistance mechanisms against podophyllotoxin-derived drugs. Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart · New York.

Combination pulsed electric field with ethanol solvent for Nannochloropsis sp. extraction

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nafis, Ghazy Ammar; Mumpuni, Perwitasari Yekti; Indarto, Budiman, Arief

2015-12-01

Nowadays, energy is one of human basic needs. As the human population increased, energy consumption also increased. This condition causes energy depletion. In case of the situation, alternative energy is needed to replace existing energy. Microalgae is chosen to become one of renewable energy resource, especially biodiesel, because it contains high amount of lipid instead of other feedstock which usually used. Fortunately, Indonesia has large area of water and high intensity of sunlight so microalgae cultivation becomes easier. Nannochloropsis sp., one of microalgae species, becomes the main focus because of its high lipid content. Many ways to break the cell wall of microalgae so the lipid content inside the microalgae will be released, for example conventional extraction, ultrasonic wave extraction, pressing, and electrical method. The most effective way for extraction is electrical method such as pulsed electric field method (PEF). The principal work of this method is by draining the electrical current into parallel plate. Parallel plate will generate the electrical field to break microalgae cell wall and the lipid will be released. The aim of this work is to evaluate two-stage procedure for extraction of useful components from microalgae Nannochloropsis sp. The first stage of this procedure includes pre-treatment of microalgae by ethanol solvent extraction and the second stage applies the PEF extraction using a binary mixture of water and ethanol solvent. Ethanol is chosen as solvent because it's safer to be used and easier to be handled than other solvent. Some variables that used to study the most effective operation conditions are frequency and duty cycle for microalgae. The optimum condition based on this research are at frequency 1 Hz and duty cycle 13%.

Voltage-step pulsed electromembrane as a novel view of electrical field-induced liquid-phase microextraction.

PubMed

Rezazadeh, Maryam; Yamini, Yadollah; Seidi, Shahram; Arjomandi-Behzad, Leila

2014-01-10

In the present work, the effect of application of voltage steps on extraction efficiency of pulsed electromembrane extraction (PEME) was investigated for the first time. The effects of voltage variations including initial and final voltages, number of steps between the initial and final voltages as well as their time durations were studied on the extraction efficiencies of three different classes of analytes. These classes include amitriptyline (AMI) and nortriptyline (NOR) as more hydrophobic analytes, diclofenac (DIC) and mefenamic acid (MEF) as acidic drugs and salbutamol (SB) and terbutaline (TB) as hydrophilic compounds. It was anticipated that the application of high voltages is not necessary at the beginning of the extraction, since large amounts of target analytes exist around the supported liquid membrane (SLM)/sample solution interface. So, they could be easily transferred into the acceptor phase utilizing lower voltages. Results showed that the benefits of voltage-step PEME (VS-PEME) are more obvious in systems with low electrical resistance (regarding the SLM composition). Efficiencies of VS-PEME for extraction of AMI and NOR (96% and 89% for AMI and NOR, respectively) were comparable with those achieved from applying a constant voltage (95% for AMI and 83% for NOR). However, recoveries from the VS-PEME of DIC and MEF (53% and 44% for DIC and MEF, respectively) were significantly higher than those from the application of a constant voltage (33% for DIC and 31% for MEF). Also, recoveries obtained from the VS-PEME for SB and TB were approximately 3 orders of magnitude greater than those from a constant voltage. Moreover, it was demonstrated that in all cases analytes could effectively be extracted at the beginning of extraction by applying low voltages. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Global distribution of plant-extractable water capacity of soil

USGS Publications Warehouse

Dunne, K.A.; Willmott, C.J.

1996-01-01

Plant-extractable water capacity of soil is the amount of water that can be extracted from the soil to fulfill evapotranspiration demands. It is often assumed to be spatially invariant in large-scale computations of the soil-water balance. Empirical evidence, however, suggests that this assumption is incorrect. In this paper, we estimate the global distribution of the plant-extractable water capacity of soil. A representative soil profile, characterized by horizon (layer) particle size data and thickness, was created for each soil unit mapped by FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations)/Unesco. Soil organic matter was estimated empirically from climate data. Plant rooting depths and ground coverages were obtained from a vegetation characteristic data set. At each 0.5?? ?? 0.5?? grid cell where vegetation is present, unit available water capacity (cm water per cm soil) was estimated from the sand, clay, and organic content of each profile horizon, and integrated over horizon thickness. Summation of the integrated values over the lesser of profile depth and root depth produced an estimate of the plant-extractable water capacity of soil. The global average of the estimated plant-extractable water capacities of soil is 8??6 cm (Greenland, Antarctica and bare soil areas excluded). Estimates are less than 5, 10 and 15 cm - over approximately 30, 60, and 89 per cent of the area, respectively. Estimates reflect the combined effects of soil texture, soil organic content, and plant root depth or profile depth. The most influential and uncertain parameter is the depth over which the plant-extractable water capacity of soil is computed, which is usually limited by root depth. Soil texture exerts a lesser, but still substantial, influence. Organic content, except where concentrations are very high, has relatively little effect.

Landscape consequences of natural gas extraction in Lackawanna and Wayne Counties, Pennsylvania, 2004-2010

USGS Publications Warehouse

Milheim, L.E.; Slonecker, E.T.; Roig-Silva, C.M.; Malizia, A.R.

2013-01-01

Increased demands for cleaner burning energy, coupled with the relatively recent technological advances in accessing unconventional hydrocarbon-rich geologic formations, have led to an intense effort to find and extract natural gas from various underground sources around the country. One of these sources, the Marcellus Shale, located in the Allegheny Plateau, is currently undergoing extensive drilling and production. The technology used to extract gas in the Marcellus Shale is known as hydraulic fracturing and has garnered much attention because of its use of large amounts of fresh water, its use of proprietary fluids for the hydraulic-fracturing process, its potential to release contaminants into the environment, and its potential effect on water resources. Nonetheless, development of natural gas extraction wells in the Marcellus Shale is only part of the overall natural gas story in this area of Pennsylvania. Conventional natural gas wells, which sometimes use the same technique, are commonly located in the same general area as the Marcellus Shale and are frequently developed in clusters across the landscape. The combined effects of these two natural gas extraction methods create potentially serious patterns of disturbance on the landscape. This document quantifies the landscape changes and consequences of natural gas extraction for Lackawanna County and Wayne County in Pennsylvania between 2004 and 2010. Patterns of landscape disturbance related to natural gas extraction activities were collected and digitized using National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) imagery for 2004, 2005/2006, 2008, and 2010. The disturbance patterns were then used to measure changes in land cover and land use using the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) of 2001. A series of landscape metrics is also used to quantify these changes and is included in this publication.

Landscape consequences of natural gas extraction in Armstrong and Indiana Counties, Pennsylvania, 2004–2010

USGS Publications Warehouse

Slonecker, Terry E.; Milheim, Lesley E.; Roig-Silva, Coral M.; Malizia, Alexander R.

2013-01-01

Increased demands for cleaner burning energy, coupled with the relatively recent technological advances in accessing unconventional hydrocarbon-rich geologic formations, have led to an intense effort to find and extract natural gas from various underground sources around the country. One of these sources, the Marcellus Shale, located in the Allegheny Plateau, is currently undergoing extensive drilling and production. The technology used to extract gas in the Marcellus Shale is known as hydraulic fracturing and has garnered much attention because of its use of large amounts of fresh water, its use of proprietary fluids for the hydraulic-fracturing process, its potential to release contaminants into the environment, and its potential effect on water resources. Nonetheless, development of natural gas extraction wells in the Marcellus Shale is only part of the overall natural gas story in this area of Pennsylvania. Conventional natural gas wells are commonly located in the same general area as the Marcellus Shale and are frequently developed in clusters across the landscape. The combined effects of these two natural gas extraction methods create potentially serious patterns of disturbance on the landscape. This document quantifies the landscape changes and consequences of natural gas extraction for Armstrong County and Indiana County in Pennsylvania between 2004 and 2010. Patterns of landscape disturbance related to natural gas extraction activities were collected and digitized using National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) imagery for 2004, 2005/2006, 2008, and 2010. The disturbance patterns were then used to measure changes in land cover and land use using the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) of 2001. A series of landscape metrics is also used to quantify these changes and is included in this publication.

Landscape consequences of natural gas extraction in Somerset and Westmoreland Counties, Pennsylvania,2004--2010

USGS Publications Warehouse

Milheim, L.E.; Slonecker, E.T.; Roig-Silva, C.M.; Malizia, A.R.

2013-01-01

Increased demands for cleaner burning energy, coupled with the relatively recent technological advances in accessing unconventional hydrocarbon-rich geologic formations, have led to an intense effort to find and extract natural gas from various underground sources around the country. One of these sources, the Marcellus Shale, located in the Allegheny Plateau, is currently undergoing extensive drilling and production. The technology used to extract gas in the Marcellus Shale is known as hydraulic fracturing and has garnered much attention because of its use of large amounts of fresh water, its use of proprietary fluids for the hydraulic-fracturing process, its potential to release contaminants into the environment, and its potential effect on water resources. Nonetheless, development of natural gas extraction wells in the Marcellus Shale is only part of the overall natural gas story in this area of Pennsylvania. Conventional natural gas wells, which sometimes use the same technique, are commonly located in the same general area as the Marcellus Shale and are frequently developed in clusters across the landscape. The combined effects of these two natural gas extraction methods create potentially serious patterns of disturbance on the landscape. This document quantifies the landscape changes and consequences of natural gas extraction for Somerset County and Westmoreland County in Pennsylvania between 2004 and 2010. Patterns of landscape disturbance related to natural gas extraction activities were collected and digitized using National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) imagery for 2004, 2005/2006, 2008, and 2010. The disturbance patterns were then used to measure changes in land cover and land use using the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) of 2001. A series of landscape metrics is also used to quantify these changes and is included in this publication.

Landscape consequences of natural gas extraction in Sullivan and Wyoming Counties, Pennsylvania, 2004–2010

USGS Publications Warehouse

Slonecker, Terry E.; Milheim, Lesley E.; Roig-Silva, Coral M.; Malizia, Alexander R.

2013-01-01

Increased demands for cleaner burning energy, coupled with the relatively recent technological advances in accessing unconventional hydrocarbon-rich geologic formations, have led to an intense effort to find and extract natural gas from various underground sources around the country. One of these sources, the Marcellus Shale, located in the Allegheny Plateau, is currently undergoing extensive drilling and production. The technology used to extract gas in the Marcellus Shale is known as hydraulic fracturing and has garnered much attention because of its use of large amounts of fresh water, its use of proprietary fluids for the hydraulic-fracturing process, its potential to release contaminants into the environment, and its potential effect on water resources. Nonetheless, development of natural gas extraction wells in the Marcellus Shale is only part of the overall natural gas story in this area of Pennsylvania. Conventional natural gas wells, which sometimes use the same technique, are commonly located in the same general area as the Marcellus Shale and are frequently developed in clusters across the landscape. The combined effects of these two natural gas extraction methods create potentially serious patterns of disturbance on the landscape. This document quantifies the landscape changes and consequences of natural gas extraction for Sullivan County and Wyoming County in Pennsylvania between 2004 and 2010. Patterns of landscape disturbance related to natural gas extraction activities were collected and digitized using National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) imagery for 2004, 2005/2006, 2008, and 2010. The disturbance patterns were then used to measure changes in land cover and land use using the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) of 2001. A series of landscape metrics is also used to quantify these changes and is included in this publication.

Landscape consequences of natural gas extraction in Fayette and Lycoming Counties, Pennsylvania, 2004–2010

USGS Publications Warehouse

Slonecker, E.T.; Milheim, L.E.; Roig-Silva, C.M.; Malizia, A.R.; Gillenwater, B.H.

2013-01-01

Increased demands for cleaner burning energy, coupled with the relatively recent technological advances in accessing unconventional hydrocarbon-rich geologic formations, have led to an intense effort to find and extract natural gas from various underground sources around the country. One of these sources, the Marcellus Shale, located in the Allegheny Plateau, is currently undergoing extensive drilling and production. The technology used to extract gas in the Marcellus Shale is known as hydraulic fracturing and has garnered much attention because of its use of large amounts of fresh water, its use of proprietary fluids for the hydraulic-fracturing process, its potential to release contaminants into the environment, and its potential effect on water resources. Nonetheless, development of natural gas extraction wells in the Marcellus Shale is only part of the overall natural gas story in this area of Pennsylvania. Conventional natural gas wells, which sometimes use the same technique, are commonly located in the same general area as the Marcellus Shale and are frequently developed in clusters across the landscape. The combined effects of these two natural gas extraction methods create potentially serious patterns of disturbance on the landscape. This document quantifies the landscape changes and consequences of natural gas extraction for Fayette County and Lycoming County in Pennsylvania between 2004 and 2010. Patterns of landscape disturbance related to natural gas extraction activities were collected and digitized using National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) imagery for 2004, 2005/2006, 2008, and 2010. The disturbance patterns were then used to measure changes in land cover and land use using the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) of 2001. A series of landscape metrics is also used to quantify these changes and is included in this publication.

Landscape consequences of natural gas extraction in Beaver and Butler Counties, Pennsylvania, 2004-2010

USGS Publications Warehouse

Roig-Silva, Coral M.; Slonecker, E. Terry; Milheim, Lesley E.; Malizia, Alexander R.

2013-01-01

Increased demands for cleaner burning energy, coupled with the relatively recent technological advances in accessing unconventional hydrocarbon-rich geologic formations, have led to an intense effort to find and extract natural gas from various underground sources around the country. One of these sources, the Marcellus Shale, located in the Allegheny Plateau, is currently undergoing extensive drilling and production. The technology used to extract gas in the Marcellus Shale is known as hydraulic fracturing and has garnered much attention because of its use of large amounts of fresh water, its use of proprietary fluids for the hydraulic-fracturing process, its potential to release contaminants into the environment, and its potential effect on water resources. Nonetheless, development of natural gas extraction wells in the Marcellus Shale is only part of the overall natural gas story in this area of Pennsylvania. Conventional natural gas wells, which sometimes use the same technique, are commonly located in the same general area as the Marcellus Shale and are frequently developed in clusters across the landscape. The combined effects of these two natural gas extraction methods create potentially serious patterns of disturbance on the landscape. This document quantifies the landscape changes and consequences of natural gas extraction for Beaver County and Butler County in Pennsylvania between 2004 and 2010. Patterns of landscape disturbance related to natural gas extraction activities were collected and digitized using National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) imagery for 2004, 2005/2006, 2008, and 2010. The disturbance patterns were then used to measure changes in land cover and land use using the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) of 2001. A series of landscape metrics is also used to quantify these changes and is included in this publication.

Particulate Organic Matter Composition in Stream Runoff Following Large Storms: Role of POM Sources, Particle Size, and Event Characteristics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Johnson, Erin R.; Inamdar, Shreeram; Kan, Jinjun; Vargas, Rodrigo

2018-02-01

Large storm events possess significant erosive energy capable of mobilizing large amounts of sediment and particulate organic matter (POM) into fluvial systems. This study investigated how stream POM composition varied as a function of the watershed POM source, particle size, storm event magnitude, and seasonal timing. POM composition was characterized for multiple watershed sources and for stream POM following storms in a second-order forested stream. Carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) amount, C:N ratio and isotopic content (13C and 15N) were determined for solid phase POM, whereas dissolved organic C, total N concentrations, and fluorescence characteristics were determined for solution/extracted POM. Key findings from this study were the following: (1) Composition of POM varied greatly with watershed sources with forest floor litter being C and N rich and labile, while stream banks and bed were C and N poor and recalcitrant. (2) Summer storms mobilized more carbon and nitrogen-rich labile sources, while winter events mobilized more carbon- and nitrogen-poor refractory material from near-stream sources. (3) POM composition varied by size class, with the coarse POM showing more C and N rich and labile properties, while the fine POM displayed more degraded and refractory properties. If climate variability increases the magnitude and intensity of large storm events, our observations suggest that this will not only increase the inputs of POM to aquatic systems but also result in the delivery of coarser, C and N rich, and more bioavailable POM to the stream drainage network.

A chemical extraction method for mimicking bioavailability of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons to wheat grown in soils containing various amounts of organic matter

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Shu Tao; Fuliu Xu; Wenxin Liu

Severe contamination of agricultural soils by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) occurs in many places in China mainly as a result of coal and biomass combustion. Because ingestion is the main source of human exposure to PAHs and vegetables are basic ingredients for the Chinese diet, it is important to know how and to what extent PAHs are accumulated in vegetables produced in contaminated soils. This study, evaluated the extent to which organic matter contents in soils influence the accumulation of PAHs by the roots of wheat plants and have developed a rapid chemical method for determining the bioavailability of PAH.more » Four PAHs, naphthalene, acenaphthylene, fluorene, and phenanthrene, were added to natural soil samples with different amounts of organic matter for pot experiments to evaluate apparent bioavailability of PAHs to wheat roots (Triticum aestivum L.). The extractabilities of PAHs in the soil were tested by a sequential extraction scheme using accelerated solvent extraction with water, n-hexane, and a mixture of dichloromethane and acetone as solvents. The water or n-hexane-extractable PAHs were positively correlated to dissolved organic matter (DOM) and negatively correlated to total organic matter (TOM), indicating mobilization and immobilization effects of DOM and TOM on soil PAHs, respectively. The apparent accumulation of PAHs by wheat roots was also positively and negatively correlated to DOM and TOM, respectively. As a result, there are positive correlations between the amounts of PAHs extracted by water or n-hexane and the quantities accumulated in plant roots, suggesting the feasibility of using water- or n-hexanes-extractable fractions as indicators of PAH availability to plants. 19 refs., 8 figs., 1 tab.« less

Assessment of Pb, Cd, Cr and Ag leaching from electronics waste using four extraction methods.

PubMed

Keith, Ashley; Keesling, Kara; Fitzwater, Kendra K; Pichtel, John; Houy, Denise

2008-12-01

Heavy metals present in electronic components may leach upon disposal and therefore pose significant environmental hazards. The potential leaching of Pb, Cd, Cr and Ag from PC cathode ray tubes, printed circuit boards (PCBs), PC mice, TV remote controls, and mobile phones was assessed. After controlled crushing, each component was extracted using the Toxicity Characteristic Leaching Procedure (TCLP), EPA Method 1312 (SPLP), NEN 7371 (Dutch Environmental Agency), and DIN S4 (Germany). The TCLP consistently leached the greatest amounts of Pb from all components. The SPLP, NEN 7371 and DIN S4 extracted relatively small amounts of metals compared with the TCLP and were not considered effective as leaching tests for e-waste. The smallest size fraction (< 2 mm) of CRT glass and PCBs leached significantly (p < 0.05) highest Pb via the TCLP. A modified TCLP removed 50.9% more extractable Pb compared with the conventional procedure.

Chemical composition and antibacterial activity of Origanum saccatum P.H. Davis essential oil obtained by solvent-free microwave extraction: comparison with hydrodistillation.

PubMed

Sozmen, Fazli; Uysal, Burcu; Oksal, Birsen S; Kose, Elif Odabas; Deniz, I Gokhan

2011-01-01

The components of the essential oils (EOs) obtained by solvent-free microwave extraction (SFME) and hydrodistillation (HD) from endemic Origanum saccatum P.H. Davis were identified by using GC/MS. The main constituents of both EOs obtained by SFME and HD, respectively, from O. saccatum were p-cymene (72.5 and 70.6%), thymol (9.32 and 8.11%), and carvacrol (7.18 and 6.36%). The EO obtained by SFME contained substantially higher amounts of oxygenated compounds and lower amounts of monoterpenes than did the EO obtained by HD. The antibacterial activities of the EOs obtained by SFME and HD were evaluated with the disc diffusion method by comparison with 10 different bacterial strains. The antibacterial activity of the EO extracted by SFME was found to be more effective than that of the EO extracted by HD against seven of the tested bacteria.

Volume and Value of Big Healthcare Data.

PubMed

Dinov, Ivo D

Modern scientific inquiries require significant data-driven evidence and trans-disciplinary expertise to extract valuable information and gain actionable knowledge about natural processes. Effective evidence-based decisions require collection, processing and interpretation of vast amounts of complex data. The Moore's and Kryder's laws of exponential increase of computational power and information storage, respectively, dictate the need rapid trans-disciplinary advances, technological innovation and effective mechanisms for managing and interrogating Big Healthcare Data. In this article, we review important aspects of Big Data analytics and discuss important questions like: What are the challenges and opportunities associated with this biomedical, social, and healthcare data avalanche? Are there innovative statistical computing strategies to represent, model, analyze and interpret Big heterogeneous data? We present the foundation of a new compressive big data analytics (CBDA) framework for representation, modeling and inference of large, complex and heterogeneous datasets. Finally, we consider specific directions likely to impact the process of extracting information from Big healthcare data, translating that information to knowledge, and deriving appropriate actions.

A robust close-range photogrammetric target extraction algorithm for size and type variant targets

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nyarko, Kofi; Thomas, Clayton; Torres, Gilbert

2016-05-01

The Photo-G program conducted by Naval Air Systems Command at the Atlantic Test Range in Patuxent River, Maryland, uses photogrammetric analysis of large amounts of real-world imagery to characterize the motion of objects in a 3-D scene. Current approaches involve several independent processes including target acquisition, target identification, 2-D tracking of image features, and 3-D kinematic state estimation. Each process has its own inherent complications and corresponding degrees of both human intervention and computational complexity. One approach being explored for automated target acquisition relies on exploiting the pixel intensity distributions of photogrammetric targets, which tend to be patterns with bimodal intensity distributions. The bimodal distribution partitioning algorithm utilizes this distribution to automatically deconstruct a video frame into regions of interest (ROI) that are merged and expanded to target boundaries, from which ROI centroids are extracted to mark target acquisition points. This process has proved to be scale, position and orientation invariant, as well as fairly insensitive to global uniform intensity disparities.

The characteristics of dissolved organic matter (DOM) in storm sewer sediments and the binding interaction with Cu(II) in four typical regions in Beijing, China.

PubMed

Zhang, Ziyang; Li, Kun; Zhang, Xiaoran; Li, Haiyan

2017-07-01

In this work, dissolved organic matter (DOM) was extracted from storm sewer sediments collected in four typical regions (residential, campus, traffic and business regions) in Beijing, China. The basic characteristics of DOM were analyzed by UV-visible spectroscopy (UV-Vis), excitation-emission matrix Fluorescence Spectroscopy and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy. Furthermore, the complexation between DOM and Cu(II) were investigated. The results showed that there were large amount of aromatic structure in the DOM extracted from storm sewer sediments. The microbial activities had also made a contribution to the DOM in storm sewer sediments. The composition of DOM influenced the complexing capacity of Cu(II) greatly, which may be attributed to the protein-like and humic-like substances in storm sewer sediments. This study demonstrated valuable information on the structure present in the DOM of storm sewer sediments and provided new insight for exploring the relationship between DOM and co-existing heavy metals in storm sewer sediments.

Arsenic in garden soils and vegetable crops in Cornwall, England: Implications for human health.

PubMed

Xu, J; Thornton, I

1985-12-01

Total concentrations of arsenic in surface (0-15cm) garden soils in the historical mining area of Hayle-Camborne-Godolphin, Cornwall, England are large and range widely (144-892 μg/g). Amounts of water soluble and acid-fluoride extractable soil arsenic are significantly correlated with total content.Examination of 6 salad and vegetable crops grown in 32 gardens has shown arsenic concentrations in the edible tissues to be only slightly elevated. There were strong correlations between arsenic in beetroot, lettuce, onion and peas and soil arsenic (total, water soluble and acid extractable). Regression equations have been calculated. Ridge regression analysis applied to test the importance of other soil variables has shown both iron and phosphorus to influence the uptake of arsenic.Arsenic in all the vegetables sampled was below the statutory limit in the U.K. of 1 mg/kg fresh weight. Implications for health should be assessed in relation to other exposure routesvia water, air and directly ingested dust and soil.

Volume and Value of Big Healthcare Data

PubMed Central

Dinov, Ivo D.

2016-01-01

Modern scientific inquiries require significant data-driven evidence and trans-disciplinary expertise to extract valuable information and gain actionable knowledge about natural processes. Effective evidence-based decisions require collection, processing and interpretation of vast amounts of complex data. The Moore's and Kryder's laws of exponential increase of computational power and information storage, respectively, dictate the need rapid trans-disciplinary advances, technological innovation and effective mechanisms for managing and interrogating Big Healthcare Data. In this article, we review important aspects of Big Data analytics and discuss important questions like: What are the challenges and opportunities associated with this biomedical, social, and healthcare data avalanche? Are there innovative statistical computing strategies to represent, model, analyze and interpret Big heterogeneous data? We present the foundation of a new compressive big data analytics (CBDA) framework for representation, modeling and inference of large, complex and heterogeneous datasets. Finally, we consider specific directions likely to impact the process of extracting information from Big healthcare data, translating that information to knowledge, and deriving appropriate actions. PMID:26998309

Seawater-Cultured Botryococcus braunii for Efficient Hydrocarbon Extraction

PubMed Central

Furuhashi, Kenichi; Saga, Kiyotaka; Okada, Shigeru; Imou, Kenji

2013-01-01

As a potential source of biofuel, the green colonial microalga Botryococcus braunii produces large amounts of hydrocarbons that are accumulated in the extracellular matrix. Generally, pretreatment such as drying or heating of wet algae is needed for sufficient recoveries of hydrocarbons from B. braunii using organic solvents. In this study, the Showa strain of B. braunii was cultured in media derived from the modified Chu13 medium by supplying artificial seawater, natural seawater, or NaCl. After a certain period of culture in the media with an osmotic pressure corresponding to 1/4-seawater, hydrocarbon recovery rates exceeding 90% were obtained by simply mixing intact wet algae with n-hexane without any pretreatments and the results using the present culture conditions indicate the potential for hydrocarbon milking. Highlights Seawater was used for efficient hydrocarbon extraction from Botryococcus braunii. The alga was cultured in media prepared with seawater or NaCl. Hydrocarbon recovery rate exceeding 90% was obtained without any pretreatment. PMID:23799107

Preparation of Silica Aerogel from TEOS

PubMed

Tamon; Kitamura; Okazaki

1998-01-15

Silica alcogels were synthesized by the sol-gel polymerization of tetraethylorthosilicate (TEOS). In the synthesis, HCl and NH3 were used as hydrolysis and condensation catalysts. The gelation time became short and the visible light transmittance increased with increasing the amount of HCl or lengthening the hydrolysis time. The alcogels were dried under supercritical conditions with carbon dioxide, and silica aerogels were obtained. As a result of characterization by visible light transmission and N2 adsorption, the aerogels are mesoporous materials with high surface areas. The experimental results suggest that the aerogel properties are not influenced by the drying conditions such as extraction temperature, extraction time, depressurizing temperature, and depressurizing rate. On the other hand, the properties are changed under the conditions of sol-gel polymerization. In the preparation of highly transparent aerogels with high surface areas and large pore volumes, it is necessary to synthesize highly transparent alcogels. It is found that the visible light transmittance of alcogels is an index for preparing aerogels from TEOS. Copyright 1998 Academic Press. Copyright 1998Academic Press

Waveform Analysis Optimization for the 45Ca Beta Decay Experiment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Whitehead, Ryan; ⁴⁵Ca Collaboration

2017-09-01

The 45Ca experiment is searching for a non-zero Fierz interference term, which would imply a tensor type contribution to the low-energy weak interaction, possibly signaling Beyond-the-Standard-Model (BSM) physics. Beta spectrum measurements are being performed at LANL, using the segmented, large area, Si detectors developed for the Nab and UCNB experiments. 109 events have been recorded, with 38 of the 254 pixels instrumented, during the summers of 2016 and 2017. An important step to extracting the energy spectra is the correction of the waveform for pile-up events. A set of analysis tools has been developed to address this issue. A trapezoidal filter has been characterized and optimized for the experimental waveforms. This filter is primarily used for energy extraction, but, by adjusting certain parameters, it has been modified to identify pile-up events. The efficiency varies with the total energy of the particle and the amount deposited with each detector interaction. Preliminary results of this analysis will be presented.

Multiple Vehicle Detection and Segmentation in Malaysia Traffic Flow

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fariz Hasan, Ahmad; Fikri Che Husin, Mohd; Affendi Rosli, Khairul; Norhafiz Hashim, Mohd; Faiz Zainal Abidin, Amar

2018-03-01

Vision based system are widely used in the field of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) to extract a large amount of information to analyze traffic scenes. By rapid number of vehicles on the road as well as significant increase on cameras dictated the need for traffic surveillance systems. This system can take over the burden some task was performed by human operator in traffic monitoring centre. The main technique proposed by this paper is concentrated on developing a multiple vehicle detection and segmentation focusing on monitoring through Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) video. The system is able to automatically segment vehicle extracted from heavy traffic scene by optical flow estimation alongside with blob analysis technique in order to detect the moving vehicle. Prior to segmentation, blob analysis technique will compute the area of interest region corresponding to moving vehicle which will be used to create bounding box on that particular vehicle. Experimental validation on the proposed system was performed and the algorithm is demonstrated on various set of traffic scene.

Characterisation of Mediterranean grape pomace seed and skin extracts: polyphenolic content and antioxidant activity.

PubMed

Ky, Isabelle; Teissedre, Pierre-Louis

2015-01-29

Grape pomace seeds and skins from different Mediterranean varieties (Grenache [GRE], Syrah [SYR], Carignan [CAR], Mourvèdre [MOU] and Alicante [ALI]) were extracted using water and water/ethanol 70% in order to develop edible extracts (an aqueous extract [EAQ] and a 70% hydro-alcoholic extract [EA70]) for potential use in nutraceutical or cosmetic formulations. In this study, global content (total polyphenols, total anthocyanins and total tannins), flavan-3-ols and anthocyanins were assessed using HPLC-UV-Fluo-MSn. In addition, extract potential was evaluated by four different assays: Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC), Ferric Reducing Antioxidant Potential assay (FRAP), Trolox equivalent antioxidant capacity (TEAC) or ABTS assay and 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radical scavenging assay. As expected, seed pomace extracts contained higher amounts of polyphenols then skin pomace extracts. Indeed, seeds from Syrah contained a particularly important amount of total polyphenols and tannins in both type of extract (up to 215.84 ± 1.47 mg of gallic acid equivalent [GAE]/g dry weight (DW) and 455.42 ± 1.84 mg/g DW, respectively). These extracts also expressed the highest antioxidant potential with every test. For skins, the maximum total phenolic was found in Alicante EAQ (196.71 ± 0.37 mg GAE/g DW) and in Syrah EA70 (224.92 ± 0.18 mg GAE/g DW). Results obtained in this article constitute a useful tool for the pre-selection of grape pomace seed and skin extracts for nutraceutical purposes.

Sodium sulphite inhibition of potato and cherry polyphenolics in nucleic acid extraction for virus detection by RT-PCR.

PubMed

Singh, R P; Nie, X; Singh, M; Coffin, R; Duplessis, P

2002-01-01

Phenolic compounds from plant tissues inhibit reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Multiple-step protocols using several additives to inhibit polyphenolic compounds during nucleic acid extraction are common, but time consuming and laborious. The current research highlights that the inclusion of 0.65 to 0.70% of sodium sulphite in the extraction buffer minimizes the pigmentation of nucleic acid extracts and improves the RT-PCR detection of Potato virus Y (PVY) and Potato leafroll virus (PLRV) in potato (Solanum tuberosum) tubers and Prune dwarf virus (PDV) and Prunus necrotic ringspot virus (PNRSV) in leaves and bark in the sweet cherry (Prunus avium) tree. Substituting sodium sulphite in the nucleic acid extraction buffer eliminated the use of proteinase K during extraction. Reagents phosphate buffered saline (PBS)-Tween 20 and polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) were also no longer required during RT or PCR phase. The resultant nucleic acid extracts were suitable for both duplex and multiplex RT-PCR. This simple and less expensive nucleic acid extraction protocol has proved very effective for potato cv. Russet Norkotah, which contains a high amount of polyphenolics. Comparing commercially available RNA extraction kits (Catrimox and RNeasy), the sodium sulphite based extraction protocol yielded two to three times higher amounts of RNA, while maintaining comparable virus detection by RT-PCR. The sodium sulphite based extraction protocol was equally effective in potato tubers, and in leaves and bark from the cherry tree.

Hydrophobic kenaf nanocrystalline cellulose for the binding of curcumin.

PubMed

Zainuddin, Norhidayu; Ahmad, Ishak; Kargarzadeh, Hanieh; Ramli, Suria

2017-05-01

Nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC) extracted from lignocellulosic materials has been actively investigated as a drug delivery excipients due to its large surface area, high aspect ratio, and biodegradability. In this study, the hydrophobically modified NCC was used as a drug delivery excipient of hydrophobic drug curcumin. The modification of NCC with a cationic surfactant, cetyl trimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) was used to modulate the loading of hydrophobic drugs that would not normally bind to NCC. The FTIR, Elemental analysis, XRD, TGA, and TEM were used to confirm the modification of NCC with CTAB. The effect of concentration of CTAB on the binding efficiency of hydrophobic drug curcumin was investigated. The amounts of curcumin bound onto the CTAB-NCC nanoparticles were analyzed by UV-vis Spectrophotometric. The result showed that the modified CTAB-NCC bound a significant amount of curcumin, in a range from 80% to 96% curcumin added. Nevertheless, at higher concentration of CTAB resulted in lower binding efficiency. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Solution speciation of plutonium and Americium at an Australian legacy radioactive waste disposal site.

PubMed

Ikeda-Ohno, Atsushi; Harrison, Jennifer J; Thiruvoth, Sangeeth; Wilsher, Kerry; Wong, Henri K Y; Johansen, Mathew P; Waite, T David; Payne, Timothy E

2014-09-02

During the 1960s, radioactive waste containing small amounts of plutonium (Pu) and americium (Am) was disposed in shallow trenches at the Little Forest Burial Ground (LFBG), located near the southern suburbs of Sydney, Australia. Because of periodic saturation and overflowing of the former disposal trenches, Pu and Am have been transferred from the buried wastes into the surrounding surface soils. The presence of readily detected amounts of Pu and Am in the trench waters provides a unique opportunity to study their aqueous speciation under environmentally relevant conditions. This study aims to comprehensively investigate the chemical speciation of Pu and Am in the trench water by combining fluoride coprecipitation, solvent extraction, particle size fractionation, and thermochemical modeling. The predominant oxidation states of dissolved Pu and Am species were found to be Pu(IV) and Am(III), and large proportions of both actinides (Pu, 97.7%; Am, 86.8%) were associated with mobile colloids in the submicron size range. On the basis of this information, possible management options are assessed.

Finding Regions of Interest on Toroidal Meshes

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Wu, Kesheng; Sinha, Rishi R; Jones, Chad

2011-02-09

Fusion promises to provide clean and safe energy, and a considerable amount of research effort is underway to turn this aspiration intoreality. This work focuses on a building block for analyzing data produced from the simulation of microturbulence in magnetic confinementfusion devices: the task of efficiently extracting regions of interest. Like many other simulations where a large amount of data are produced,the careful study of ``interesting'' parts of the data is critical to gain understanding. In this paper, we present an efficient approach forfinding these regions of interest. Our approach takes full advantage of the underlying mesh structure in magneticmore » coordinates to produce acompact representation of the mesh points inside the regions and an efficient connected component labeling algorithm for constructingregions from points. This approach scales linearly with the surface area of the regions of interest instead of the volume as shown with bothcomputational complexity analysis and experimental measurements. Furthermore, this new approach is 100s of times faster than a recentlypublished method based on Cartesian coordinates.« less

Ex-situ catalytic pyrolysis of wastewater sewage sludge - A micro-pyrolysis study.

PubMed

Wang, Kaige; Zheng, Yan; Zhu, Xifeng; Brewer, Catherine E; Brown, Robert C

2017-05-01

Concerns over increasing amounts of sewage sludge and unsustainability of current disposal methods have led to development of alternative routes for sludge management. The large amount of organics in sewage sludge makes it potential feedstock for energy or fuel production via thermochemical pathways. In this study, ex-situ catalytic pyrolysis using HZSM-5 catalyst was explored for the production of olefinic and aromatic hydrocarbons and nutrient-rich char from sewage sludge. The optimal pyrolysis and catalysis temperatures were found to be 500°C and 600°C, respectively. Carbon yields of hydrocarbons from sewage sludge were higher than for lignocellulose; yield differences were attributed to the high extractives content in the sludge. Full recovery of most inorganic elements were found in the char, which suggests that catalyst deactivation maybe alleviated through ex-situ catalytic pyrolysis. Most of the nitrogen was retained in the char while 31.80% was released as ammonia, which suggests a potential for nitrogen recycling. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

BANNER: an executable survey of advances in biomedical named entity recognition.

PubMed

Leaman, Robert; Gonzalez, Graciela

2008-01-01

There has been an increasing amount of research on biomedical named entity recognition, the most basic text extraction problem, resulting in significant progress by different research teams around the world. This has created a need for a freely-available, open source system implementing the advances described in the literature. In this paper we present BANNER, an open-source, executable survey of advances in biomedical named entity recognition, intended to serve as a benchmark for the field. BANNER is implemented in Java as a machine-learning system based on conditional random fields and includes a wide survey of the best techniques recently described in the literature. It is designed to maximize domain independence by not employing brittle semantic features or rule-based processing steps, and achieves significantly better performance than existing baseline systems. It is therefore useful to developers as an extensible NER implementation, to researchers as a standard for comparing innovative techniques, and to biologists requiring the ability to find novel entities in large amounts of text.

Human intervention study to investigate the intestinal accessibility and bioavailability of anthocyanins from bilberries.

PubMed

Mueller, Dolores; Jung, Kathrin; Winter, Manuel; Rogoll, Dorothee; Melcher, Ralph; Richling, Elke

2017-09-15

We investigated the importance of the large intestine on the bioavailability of anthocyanins from bilberries in humans with/without a colon. Low bioavailability of anthocyanins in plasma and urine was observed in the frame of this study. Anthocyanins reached the circulation mainly as glucuronides. Analysis of ileal effluents (at end of small intestine) demonstrated that 30% of ingested anthocyanins were stable during 8h passage through the upper intestine. Only 20% degradants were formed and mostly intact anthocyanins were absorbed from the small intestine. Higher amounts of degradants than anthocyanins reached the circulation after bilberry extract consumption in both groups of subjects. Comparison of the bioavailability of anthocyanins in healthy subjects versus ileostomists revealed substantially higher amounts of anthocyanins and degradants in the plasma/urine of subjects with an intact gut. The results suggested that the colon is a significant site for absorption of bioactive components such as anthocyanins and their degradation products. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The extractives of Pinus pinaster wood

Treesearch

Richard W. Hemingway; W. E. Hillis; L. S. Lau

1973-01-01

The extractives in Pinus pinaster wood grown in South Australia were examined as part of an assessment of the suitability of this wood for manufacture of absorbent tissues from bisulphite pulps. The average petroleum solubility of the wood was 2.0% but the amount and composition of the petroleum extract varied widely depending upon the age of the...

Preliminary results of sugar maple carbohydrate and growth response under vacuum and gravity sap extraction

Treesearch

Mark L. Isselhardt; Timothy D. Perkins; Abby K. van den Berg; Paul G. Schaberg

2016-01-01

Recent technological advancements have increased the amount of sugar-enriched sap that can be extracted from sugar maple (Acer saccharum). This pilot study quantified overall sugar removal and the impacts of vacuum (60 cm Hg) and gravity sap extraction on residual nonstructural carbohydrate (NSC) concentrations and on stem and twig growth. Vacuum...

Data Prospecting Framework - a new approach to explore "big data" in Earth Science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ramachandran, R.; Rushing, J.; Lin, A.; Kuo, K.

2012-12-01

Due to advances in sensors, computation and storage, cost and effort required to produce large datasets have been significantly reduced. As a result, we are seeing a proliferation of large-scale data sets being assembled in almost every science field, especially in geosciences. Opportunities to exploit the "big data" are enormous as new hypotheses can be generated by combining and analyzing large amounts of data. However, such a data-driven approach to science discovery assumes that scientists can find and isolate relevant subsets from vast amounts of available data. Current Earth Science data systems only provide data discovery through simple metadata and keyword-based searches and are not designed to support data exploration capabilities based on the actual content. Consequently, scientists often find themselves downloading large volumes of data, struggling with large amounts of storage and learning new analysis technologies that will help them separate the wheat from the chaff. New mechanisms of data exploration are needed to help scientists discover the relevant subsets We present data prospecting, a new content-based data analysis paradigm to support data-intensive science. Data prospecting allows the researchers to explore big data in determining and isolating data subsets for further analysis. This is akin to geo-prospecting in which mineral sites of interest are determined over the landscape through screening methods. The resulting "data prospects" only provide an interaction with and feel for the data through first-look analytics; the researchers would still have to download the relevant datasets and analyze them deeply using their favorite analytical tools to determine if the datasets will yield new hypotheses. Data prospecting combines two traditional categories of data analysis, data exploration and data mining within the discovery step. Data exploration utilizes manual/interactive methods for data analysis such as standard statistical analysis and visualization, usually on small datasets. On the other hand, data mining utilizes automated algorithms to extract useful information. Humans guide these automated algorithms and specify algorithm parameters (training samples, clustering size, etc.). Data Prospecting combines these two approaches using high performance computing and the new techniques for efficient distributed file access.

Estimation of yohimbine base in complex mixtures by quantitative HPTLC application.

PubMed

Adel-Kader, Maged Saad; Alwahebi, Naif Wahebi Hamadan; Alam, Prawez

2017-01-01

The indole alkaloid Yohimbine has been used for over two centuries in the treatment of erectly dysfunction. Several formulations containing yohimbine salts, yohimbe bark power or extract are marketed worldwide. Determination of the amount of yohimbine in such formulation is a challenging task due to their complex nature. Extraction followed by acid-base purification resulted in a relatively pure alkaloids containing fractions. The exact amounts of yohimbine free base in different formulations were determined by densitometric HPTLC validated methods using silica gel TLC plates. Standard curve for yohimbine was generated using yohimbine hydrochloride subjected to the same acid-base treatment as the used samples. All formulations found to contain yohimbine though some with less concentration than the labeled amount.