Role of turbulent flow seawater in the corrosion enhancement of an Al–Zn–Mg alloy: an electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) analysis of oxygen reduction reaction (ORR)

The effect of flow on the corrosion of Al–14 wt% Zn–8 wt% Mg alloy in aerated synthetic seawater at ambient temperature was studied using a rotating cylinder electrode (RCE) under turbulent regime conditions by means of electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). The overall electrochemical corrosion process was found to be strongly influenced by the oxygen mass transfer process under turbulent flow conditions on the cathodic kinetics, driving to a significant increase in corrosion rate.At corrosion potential, Ecorr value, contributions from the anodic and cathodic processes involved were observed in the impedance diagrams. Instead, at a cathodic potential of −1.2 V (sce), impedance measurements proved the predominance of the mass-transfer process for oxygen. A primary analysis of the impedance plots allowed to confirm such situation. Keywords: Aluminum alloy, Corrosion, EIS, Flow, Oxygen, Mass transfer, Rotating cylinder electrode, Seawate

A Low Cost Antibody Signal Enhancer Improves Immunolabeling in Cell Culture, Primate Brain and Human Cancer Biopsy

The use of antibodies to identify neuronal receptors, neurotransmitters, cytoskeletal elements or pathologic protein aggregates, ion channels, adhesion molecules or other cell-type specific markers, is common practice in neuroscience. Antibody detection systems are often based on confocal, epifluorescence or brightfield microscopy. Three types of technical issues can interfere with immunolabeling: low abundance of the target protein, low specific affinity of the antibody and/or signal background sometimes related to tissue fixation. Here, giving tribute to Professor Miledis mentorship, we propose the application of an antibody signal enhancer (ASE) solution based on glycine, hydrogen peroxide and a detergent mix as a simple, low cost, protocol variation that significantly and specifically improves the signal to noise ratio during immunostaining experiments. We describe three new settings in which ASE improves the detection of a variety of antibodies applied on long-time stored non-human primate brain sections, cell culture monolayers and on squamous carcinomas retrieved from cervical cancer patients. The significant improvement of ASE over optimized immunohistochemical protocols used in clinical practice (i.e. cancer detection) combined with its simplicity and low cost makes it an attractive method for biomedical applications. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: Honoring Ricardo Miledi - outstanding neuroscientist of XX-XXI centuries. (C) 2020 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Funding Agencies|Unidad de Imagenologia IFC-UNAM; CONACYT-Mexico (Postdoctoral) [264069, 295473, 308515]</p