Above-light-line Nonlinear Surface Polaritons near a Conductive Interface: Threshold Case

We investigate the TM-polarized nonlinear surface polaritons (NLSP) propagating along aguided structure consisting of a magnetic optically linear medium and a non-magnetic opticallynonlinear medium with saturable permittivity separated by a flat conductive layer of zerothickness. We consider those values of hosting media bulk material parameters for which theNLSP existence (for zero sheet conductance) has threshold character with respect to the wavesintensity. Based on the exact solution of Maxwell's equations we show that the energy andpropagation properties of the NLSP near the above-light-line condition (1 > n > 0) dependconsiderably on the surface conductivity of the layer, even the threshold character of the NLSPcan be lost; for certain sheet conductance values these waves can exist in a linear limit. TheNLSP propagation constant is defined by both the surface conductivity and field intensity andcan be varied in a wide diapason, which gives an opportunity to obtain and control the importantfor quantum information processing 0 n condition. For a chosen value of the NLSPpropagation constant the NLSP field intensity and energy flux decries when the surfaceconductivity grows; saturation of the nonlinear permittivity leads to an increase of the NLSPenergy flux compared with Kerr-like nonlinearity

Получение производных замещенных фенолов с потенциальной антимикробной активностью

Objectives. With the growing resistance of pathogenic microorganisms to antibiotics, the development of new antimicrobial drugs offering specific mechanisms of action becomes an urgent task. Only few antimicrobials offer a broad spectrum of activity against gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria, molds, and yeasts. In this regard, the purpose of the work was to develop methods for synthesizing biologically active derivatives of alkyl-substituted phenols (reactions at the hydroxy group) to study their biological effect.Methods. The synthesis of imidazole acetates of substituted phenols was carried out in two stages. At the first stage, the chloroacetyl derivative of the selected compounds was obtained, to which imidazole was then added. O-acylation reactions at the first stage of the synthesis were carried out under varying conditions. The first version of the synthesis was carried out using chloroacetyl chloride as an acylating agent together with a high-boiling solvent. In the second variant, chloroacetic anhydride was used, along with an attempt to replace the solvent with a low-boiling one. A thymol methoxy derivative was additionally synthesized by a known method using methyl iodide and varying the reaction parameters.Results. The parameters of chloroacetylation and methoxylation of aromatic alcohols were optimized with rational selection of solvents and the ratio of reagents in the reactions. Synthesized thymol (2-isopropyl-5-methylphenol) and propofol (2,6-isopropylphenol) derivatives contained imidazole as an additional pharmacophore with affinity for microorganism cell membrane proteins. A thymol methoxy derivative comprising an aromatic ether exhibiting increased hydrophobicity was also obtained. The synthesized compounds were characterized by NMR spectroscopy.Conclusions. Chloroacetyl derivatives of aromatic alcohols can be effectively synthesized by cooling the reaction mixture using an excess quantity of an acylating agent and increasing the reaction time (compared to literature data). The yield of thymol chloroacetate was 75%, while that of propofol chloroacetate was 30%. This can be explained by the sterically hindered reaction of the propofol alcohol group, which has isopropyl substituents at the second and sixth positions of the benzene ring.Цели. В связи с растущей резистентностью патогенных микроорганизмов к антибиотикам актуальной задачей является разработка новых противомикробных препаратов с уникальным механизмом действия. Немногие антимикробные препараты обладают широким спектром действия на грамположительные и грамотрицательные бактерии, плесени и дрожжи. В связи с этим, цель нашей работы – разработать способы синтеза биологически активных производных алкил-замещенных фенолов (реакций по гидроксигруппе) для исследования их биологического действия.Методы. Синтез имидазолацетатов замещенных фенолов проводился в две стадии. На первой стадии было получено хлорацетильное производное выбранных соединений, к которому далее присоединялся имидазол. Реакции O-ацилирования на первой стадии синтеза проводились в различных условиях. Первый вариант синтеза проводили с использованием хлорацетилхлорида в качестве ацилирующего агента и высококипящего растворителя. Во втором варианте использовали хлоруксусный ангидрид, и была предпринята попытка заменить растворитель на низкокипящий. Также было синтезировано метоксипроизводное тимола по известной методике, с применением метилйодида и варьирования параметров реакции.Результаты. Проведена оптимизация параметров хлорацетилирования и метоксилирования ароматических спиртов. Осуществлен подбор растворителей и соотношения реагентов в реакциях. Были синтезированы производные тимола (2-изопропил-5-метилфенола) и пропофола (2,6-изопропилфенола), содержащие имидазол в качестве дополнительного фармакофора, имеющего сродство к белкам клеточных мембран микроорганизмов. Также было получено метоксипроизводное тимола – ароматический простой эфир с повышенной гидрофобностью. Синтезированные соединения были охарактеризованы методом ЯМР-спектроскопии.Выводы. Синтез хлорацетильных производных ароматических спиртов при охлаждении реакционной массы с использованием избытка ацилирующего агента и увеличением времени реакции (по сравнению с литературными данными) является более предпочтительным. Выход хлорацетета тимола составил 75%, хлорацетата пропофола – 30%, что можно объяснить стерически затрудненным реагированием спиртовой группы пропофола, имеющего изопропильные заместители по 2 и 6 положениям бензольного кольца

OSL-dating of the Pleistocene-Holocene climatic transition in loess from China, Europe and North America, and evidence for accretionary pedogenesis

Loess deposits intercalated by paleosols are detailed terrestrial archives of Quaternary climate variability providing information on the global dust cycle and landscape dynamics. Their paleoclimatic significance is often explored by quantifying their mineral magnetic properties due to their sensitivity to local/regional hydroclimate variability. Detailed chronological assessment of such regional proxy records around the climatic transitions allow a better understanding of how regional records react to major global climatic transitions such as the Pleistocene-Holocene climatic transition. Logs of high-resolution magnetic susceptibility and its frequency dependence were used as paleoclimatic proxies to define the environmental transition from the last glacial loess to the current interglacial soil as reflected in nine loess-paleosol sequences across the northern hemisphere, from the Chinese Loess Plateau, the southeastern European loess belt and the central Great Plains, USA. The onset of increase in magnetic susceptibility above typical loess values was used to assess the onset of, and developments during, the Pleistocene-Holocene climatic transition. High-resolution luminescence dating was applied on multiple grain-sizes (4–11 μm, 63–90 μm, 90–125 μm) of quartz extracts from the same sample in order to investigate the timing of Pleistocene-Holocene climatic transition in the investigated sites. The magnetic susceptibility signal shows a smooth and gradual increase for the majority of the sites from the typical low loess values to the interglacial ones. The initiation of this increase, interpreted as recording the initiation of the Pleistocene-Holocene climatic transition at each site, was dated to 14–17.5 ka or even earlier. Our chronological results highlight the need of combining paleoclimatic proxies (magnetic susceptibility) with absolute dating when investigating the Pleistocene-Holocene climatic transition as reflected by the evolution of this proxy in order to avoid chronostratigraphic misinterpretations in loess-paleosol records caused by simple pattern correlation. The detailed luminescence chronologies evidence the continuity of eolian mineral dust accumulation regardless of glacial or interglacial global climatic regimes. Coupled with magnetic susceptibility records this indicates that dust sedimentation and pedogenesis act simultaneously and result in a non-negligible accretional component in the formation of Holocene soils in loess regions across the Northern Hemisphere. The luminescence ages allowed the modeling of accumulation rates for the Holocene soil which are similar for European, Chinese and U.S.A. loess sites investigated and vary from 2 cm ka−1 to 9 cm ka−1. While accretional pedogenesis has often been implicitly or explicitly assumed in paleoclimatic interpretation of loess-paleosol sequences, especially in the Chinese Loess Plateau, our luminescence data add direct evidence for ongoing sedimentation as interglacial soils formed

A novel EGFR inhibitor acts as potent tool for hypoxia-activated prodrug systems and exerts strong synergistic activity with VEGFR inhibition in vitro and in vivo

Small-molecule EGFR inhibitors have distinctly improved the overall survival especially in EGFR-mutated lung cancer. However, their use is often limited by severe adverse effects and rapid resistance development. To overcome these limitations, a hypoxia-activatable Co(III)-based prodrug (KP2334) was recently synthesized releasing the new EGFR inhibitor KP2187 in a highly tumor-specific manner only in hypoxic areas of the tumor. However, the chemical modifications in KP2187 necessary for cobalt chelation could potentially interfere with its EGFR-binding ability. Consequently, in this study, the biological activity and EGFR inhibition potential of KP2187 was compared to clinically approved EGFR inhibitors. In general, the activity as well as EGFR binding (shown in docking studies) was very similar to erlotinib and gefitinib (while other EGFR-inhibitory drugs behaved different) indicating no interference of the chelating moiety with the EGFR binding. Moreover, KP2187 significantly inhibited cancer cell proliferation as well as EGFR pathway activation in vitro and in vivo. Finally, KP2187 proved to be highly synergistic with VEGFR inhibitors such as sunitinib. This indicates that KP2187releasing hypoxia-activated prodrug systems are promising candidates to overcome the clinically observed enhanced toxicity of EGFR-VEGFR inhibitor combination therapies

CogStack - experiences of deploying integrated information retrieval and extraction services in a large National Health Service Foundation Trust hospital.

BACKGROUND: Traditional health information systems are generally devised to support clinical data collection at the point of care. However, as the significance of the modern information economy expands in scope and permeates the healthcare domain, there is an increasing urgency for healthcare organisations to offer information systems that address the expectations of clinicians, researchers and the business intelligence community alike. Amongst other emergent requirements, the principal unmet need might be defined as the 3R principle (right data, right place, right time) to address deficiencies in organisational data flow while retaining the strict information governance policies that apply within the UK National Health Service (NHS). Here, we describe our work on creating and deploying a low cost structured and unstructured information retrieval and extraction architecture within King's College Hospital, the management of governance concerns and the associated use cases and cost saving opportunities that such components present. RESULTS: To date, our CogStack architecture has processed over 300 million lines of clinical data, making it available for internal service improvement projects at King's College London. On generated data designed to simulate real world clinical text, our de-identification algorithm achieved up to 94% precision and up to 96% recall. CONCLUSION: We describe a toolkit which we feel is of huge value to the UK (and beyond) healthcare community. It is the only open source, easily deployable solution designed for the UK healthcare environment, in a landscape populated by expensive proprietary systems. Solutions such as these provide a crucial foundation for the genomic revolution in medicine

Theoretical and technological building blocks for an innovation accelerator

The scientific system that we use today was devised centuries ago and is inadequate for our current ICT-based society: the peer review system encourages conservatism, journal publications are monolithic and slow, data is often not available to other scientists, and the independent validation of results is limited. Building on the Innovation Accelerator paper by Helbing and Balietti (2011) this paper takes the initial global vision and reviews the theoretical and technological building blocks that can be used for implementing an innovation (in first place: science) accelerator platform driven by re-imagining the science system. The envisioned platform would rest on four pillars: (i) Redesign the incentive scheme to reduce behavior such as conservatism, herding and hyping; (ii) Advance scientific publications by breaking up the monolithic paper unit and introducing other building blocks such as data, tools, experiment workflows, resources; (iii) Use machine readable semantics for publications, debate structures, provenance etc. in order to include the computer as a partner in the scientific process, and (iv) Build an online platform for collaboration, including a network of trust and reputation among the different types of stakeholders in the scientific system: scientists, educators, funding agencies, policy makers, students and industrial innovators among others. Any such improvements to the scientific system must support the entire scientific process (unlike current tools that chop up the scientific process into disconnected pieces), must facilitate and encourage collaboration and interdisciplinarity (again unlike current tools), must facilitate the inclusion of intelligent computing in the scientific process, must facilitate not only the core scientific process, but also accommodate other stakeholders such science policy makers, industrial innovators, and the general public

The Monarch Initiative in 2019: an integrative data and analytic platform connecting phenotypes to genotypes across species.

In biology and biomedicine, relating phenotypic outcomes with genetic variation and environmental factors remains a challenge: patient phenotypes may not match known diseases, candidate variants may be in genes that haven’t been characterized, research organisms may not recapitulate human or veterinary diseases, environmental factors affecting disease outcomes are unknown or undocumented, and many resources must be queried to find potentially significant phenotypic associations. The Monarch Initiative (https://monarchinitiative.org) integrates information on genes, variants, genotypes, phenotypes and diseases in a variety of species, and allows powerful ontology-based search. We develop many widely adopted ontologies that together enable sophisticated computational analysis, mechanistic discovery and diagnostics of Mendelian diseases. Our algorithms and tools are widely used to identify animal models of human disease through phenotypic similarity, for differential diagnostics and to facilitate translational research. Launched in 2015, Monarch has grown with regards to data (new organisms, more sources, better modeling); new API and standards; ontologies (new Mondo unified disease ontology, improvements to ontologies such as HPO and uPheno); user interface (a redesigned website); and community development. Monarch data, algorithms and tools are being used and extended by resources such as GA4GH and NCATS Translator, among others, to aid mechanistic discovery and diagnostics