Rapid detection of pesticide residues in foods using surface-enhanced raman spectroscopy coupled with gold nanostars

Constant monitoring pesticide residues in foods is an essential part of food safety. In recent years, there is a growing concern about food issues in agricultural products. Tradition testing methods such as high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) demand time-consuming sample preparations and well-trained operators. Therefore, this research aimed to establish a novel, simple, and rapid testing technique. In this study, the SERS performance of gold nanostars was evaluated by detecting two commonly used pesticides, thiabendazole (TBZ) and paraquat in the real food samples. Gold nanostars were used as a surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) substrate due to their highly branched structure, which provide many SERS hot spots for generating intensified Raman signals from the target analytes. Additionally, the rough topography of gold nanostars has large surface area, which can enable good interactions between the substrate and analyte molecules. The UV-vis spectrometer, electron microscopes and Zetasizer were utilized for characterization. The detection limits of this SERS method are 5 ppm for TBZ in apple juice and 0.2 ppm for paraquat in green tea. These results indicate that SERS coupled with gold nanostars is a facile approach and has great potential to be applied for qualification and quantification of trace contaminants in foods.Includes bibliographical references (pages 48-55)

Interleukin-6 in cardiac surgery

Background and Purpose: Interleukin (IL)-6 is a multi-functional pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokine, and it has been a reliable biomarker of cardiac function status and myocardial damage. However, the characteristics of IL-6 expressions in the cardiac surgical patients have not been comprehensively described. The purpose of this review is to present the current knowledge on the role of IL-6 in the field of cardiac surgery.Materials and Methods: Medical literature of IL-6 in cardiac surgical disorders of recent 3 decades were carefully collected as studying materials, and comprehensively reviewed and analyzed.Results: Plasma IL-6 was significantly elevated 1 hour and peaked 3-6 hours after the start of cardiopulmonary bypass with a gradual decrease constant maintenance thereafter. No significant differences were found between patients with biological and mechanical heart valve replacements between on-poump and off-pump coronary artery bypass, or between cyanotic and acyanotic congental heart patients. The elevation of IL-6 was higher in mitral valve replacement than in coronary artery bypass grafting patients and in non-heart transplantation than heart transplantation patients. Il-6 was involved in the pathogenesis of pulmonary artery hypertension and infective endocarditis, and predicted adverse cardiac events, such as coronary graft occlusion, aortic dissection progression, and cardiac myxoma recurrence.Conclusions: In cardiac surgical patients, the expression of IL-6 reflects the inflammatory situation of the patients and also predicts their prognosis. The higher elevation of IL-6 in mitral valve replacement and in non-heart transplantation might be attributed to cardiotomy suction, and to lack of sterioid use. Early administrations with steroid, α2-adrenergic agonists, incretin hormones, or ischemic conditioning could reduce the inflammatory response and prevent from pertinent postoperative complications. Anesthetic agents and technique of choices may also reduce immune reactions and lower circulating cytokines. Extracorporeal IL-6 removal facilities have been successfully applied in clinical practice. The potential alternative therapies with IL-6 antibodies might be further developed and used in such patients for preventing myocardial apoptotic processes.</p

Behavior of statistics for genetic association in a genome-wide scan context

Genome-wide association studies are used to detect association between genetic variants and diseases. Hundreds of thousands to millions of SNPs are tested simultaneously. The results of the study often focus on the list of SNPs ordered according to the statistics rather than on certain p-value cutoffs. Therefore, it is important to investigate the behavior of the extreme values of the statistics rather than the behavior of the expected values. “Detection probability” and “proportion positive” have been proposed to measure the success of a genomic study when ranked lists are the primary outcome. In this dissertation, we first focused on the comparison of statistics for X-chromosome association with rare alleles. The regression with male coded as (0, 2) or adjusting for sex as a covariate is recommended. Then we evaluated statistics for detecting genetic association in the presence of an environmental covariate effect. Selecting the best statistics depends on the purpose of the study and how a researcher selects disease-associated SNPs. Studies whose goal is to find significant signal at the whole genome level should focus on which statistic can provide the highest power. Exploratory studies that look for a list of top ranking SNPs which will be further studied in the future should focus on which statistic can provide the highest detection probability. Adjusting for the environmental covariate effect or interaction effect may reduce the power, but it can help with producing more accurate ranked lists. This work will improve the statistical power of genetic association studies, which will allow us to gain a better understanding of disease processes and ultimately design better treatments and public health interventions

Reflections on the cultivation of innovative talents of food quality and safety specialty in Provincial Universities

依据食品行业发展和社会需求，结合高校实地调研学习，本文对国内食品质量与安全专业人才需求和人才培养现状进行了分析，并对省属本科院校的应用型高素质创新人才培养提出了几点思考。On the basis of the food industry development and the needs of society, combined with the field research study, this paper analyses the training of domestic food safety and quality demands for the talents, and ponders the applied innovative talents for the cultivation of provincial colleges

Studentsa Ratings of School Climate and School Belonging for Understanding Their Effects and Relationship of Junior High Schools in Taiwan

This study was to explore junior high students perception of school climate and school belonging The main purposes of the present study were to test the relationships between school climate and school belonging How s the correlation between the two variables Which one has better effects on the other Three hundred and twenty-eight junior high students in Taiwan were selected to inclusion in the investigation A statistically significant relationship between school climate and school belonging was found From the construction analyses we found that the path coefficients of Model 1 and Model 2 are the same The outcomes meant that school climate had significant effects on school belonging and school belonging also had significant effects on school climate The results of the study can offer the relative schools for evaluating school effects and school improvemen

Optical appearance of Einstein-{\AE}ther black hole surrounded by thin disk

In Einstein-{\AE}ther theory, the Lorentz symmetry is locally broken in the high-energy regime due to the presence of the{\AE}ther field. This shall leave significant imprint on astronomical observation. In this paper, we investigate the optical appearance of two types of the static and spherically symmetric black holes in Einstein-{\AE}ther theory. Via Euler-Lagrange equation, we obtain the equations of motion of the photon and calculate the total deflection angle of the photon trajectory around the black hole. By classifying the light rays with the total number of orbits, we study the effects of coupling constants on the direct image, lensing ring, and photon ring. The features of the light trajectories are also investigated by comparing with the Einstein-{\AE}ther theory and general relativity. Moreover, we also show the explicit optical appearance of black holes surrounded by thin disk emissions with three characteristic emitted models. The results indicate that the direct image gives the main contribution to the total flux, and the lensing ring just gives a very small contribution, whereas the role of the photon ring is negligible. The optical appearances are also found to significantly rely on these coupling constants.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figure