Formation of a carcinogenic aromatic amine from an azo dye by human skin bacteria in vitro

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.Azo dyes represent the major class of dyestuffs. They are metabolised to the corresponding amines by liver enzymes and the intestinal microflora following incorporation by both experimental animals and humans. For safety evaluation of the dermal exposure of consumers to azo dyes from wearing coloured textiles, a possible cleavage of azo dyes by the skin microflora should be considered since, in contrast to many dyes, aromatic amines are easily absorbed by the skin. A method for measuring the ability of human skin flora to reduce azo dyes was established. In a standard experiment, 361011 cells of a culture of Staphylococcus aureus wereincubatedinsyntheticsweat (pH 6.8, final volume 20 mL) at 288C for 24 h with Direct Blue 14 (C.I. 23850, DB 14). The reaction products were extracted and analysed using HPLC. The reduction product o-tolidine (3,3'-dimethylbenzidine, OT) could indeed be detected showing that the strain used was able to metabolise DB 14 to the corresponding aromatic amine. In addition to OT, two further metabolites of DB 14 were detected. Using mass spectrometry they were identified as 3,3'-dimethyl-4-amino-4'-hydroxybiphenyl and 3,3'-di methyl-4-aminobiphenyl. The ability to cleave azo dyes seems to be widely distributed among human skin bacteria, as, under these in vitro conditions, bacteria isolated from healthy human skin and human skin bacteria from strain collections also exhibited azo reductase activity. Further studies are in progress in order to include additional azo dyes and coloured textiles. At the moment, the meaning of the results with regard to consumer health cannot be finally assessed

Safety studies on vacuum insulated liquid helium cryostats

The loss of insulating vacuum is often considered as a reasonable foreseeable accident for the dimensioning of cryogenic safety relief devices (SRD). The cryogenic safety test facility PICARD was designed at KIT to investigate such events. In the course of first experiments, discharge instabilities of the spring loaded safety relief valve (SRV) occurred, the so-called chattering and pumping effects. These instabilities reduce the relief flow capacity, which leads to impermissible over-pressures in the system. The analysis of the process dynamics showed first indications for a smaller heat flux than the commonly assumed 4W/cm 2 . This results in an oversized discharge area for the reduced relief flow rate, which corresponds to the lower heat flux. This paper presents further experimental investigations on the venting of the insulating vacuum with atmospheric air under variation of the set pressure ( p set ) of the SRV. Based on dynamic process analysis, the results are discussed with focus on effective heat fluxes and operating characteristics of the spring-loaded SRV

Measurement of heat flux in multi-layer insulated helium cryostats after loss of insulating vacuum

The dimensioning of pressure relief devices (PRD) for cryogenic pressure equipment requires knowledge on the heat input at the maximum credible incident. In helium cryostats, this situation is typically defined by the loss of insulating vacuum (LIV), where the heat load is induced by desublimation and condensation of atmospheric air on the cryogenic surface. This surface is often covered with multi-layer insulation (MLI) in order to reduce the thermal radiation heat load in standard operation. During loss of insulating vacuum, the MLI represents a diffusive barrier for the air to reach the cryogenic surface, reducing the heat flux as well. Experimental reference data for the heat flux in case of LIV exist mainly for blank surfaces; only few data are published for MLI-covered helium surfaces. Therefore, the effect has been investigated in the cryogenic safety test facility PICARD at KIT. This paper presents the results of venting experiments carried out with different numbers of layers and different types of MLI

Preclinical discovery and development of fingolimod for the treatment of multiple sclerosis

ABSTRACTIntroduction: Fingolimod, the first oral disease-modifying treatment (DMT) in multiple sclerosis (MS), is a sphingosine 1-phosphate receptor (S1PR) ligand. Approved in 2010, fingolimod has ..

Integrated Structure and Semantics for Reo Connectors and Petri Nets

In this paper, we present an integrated structural and behavioral model of Reo connectors and Petri nets, allowing a direct comparison of the two concurrency models. For this purpose, we introduce a notion of connectors which consist of a number of interconnected, user-defined primitives with fixed behavior. While the structure of connectors resembles hypergraphs, their semantics is given in terms of so-called port automata. We define both models in a categorical setting where composition operations can be elegantly defined and integrated. Specifically, we formalize structural gluings of connectors as pushouts, and joins of port automata as pullbacks. We then define a semantical functor from the connector to the port automata category which preserves this composition. We further show how to encode Reo connectors and Petri nets into this model and indicate applications to dynamic reconfigurations modeled using double pushout graph transformation

Qualification of electron-beam welded joints between copper and stainless steel for cryogenic application

Joints between copper and stainless steel are commonly applied in cryogenic systems. A relatively new and increasingly important method to combine these materials is electron-beam (EB) welding. Typically, welds in cryogenic applications need to withstand a temperature range from 300K down to 4 K, and pressures of several MPa. However, few data are available for classifying EB welds between OFHC copper and 316L stainless steel. A broad test program was conducted in order to qualify this kind of weld. The experiments started with the measurement of the hardness in the weld area. To verify the leak-tightness of the joints, integral helium leak tests at operating pressures of 16MPa were carried out at roomand at liquid nitrogen temperature. The tests were followed by destructive tensile tests at room temperature, at liquid nitrogen and at liquid helium temperatures, yielding information on the yield strength and the ultimate tensile strength of the welds at these temperatures. Moreover, nondestructive tensile tests up to the yield strength, i.e. the range in which the weld can be stressed during operation, were performed. Also, the behavior of the weld upon temperature fluctuations between room- and liquid nitrogen temperature was tested. The results of the qualification indicate that EB welded joints between OFHC copper and 316L stainless steel are reliable and present an interesting alternative to other technologies such as vacuum brazing or friction welding