Total syntheses of ?-lactone containing natural products: I. total synthesis of belactosin C II. synthetic studies toward spongiolactone

The recently isolated bacterial metabolites, belactosins A-C from a fermentation broth of Streptomyces sp. UCK14, uniquely contain a β-lactone dipeptide motif and exhibit anticancer activities. The enantioselective synthesis of (-)-belactosin C and derivatives was accomplished in a concise manner employing the tandem, Mukaiyama aldol-lactonizaton (TMAL) process and test their bioactivities. . One approach involved a distal double diastereoselective TMAL reaction with a dipeptide glyoxamide, whereas a second approach involved amide coupling of a dipeptide with a β-lactone carboxylic acid, obtained via the TMAL process employing a chiral silyl ketene acetal. Enzymatic assays showed that the belactosins act as the dual inhibitors of the proteasome and the thioesterase domain of fatty acid synthase. Spongiolactone which uniquely contains a cyclopentyl-fused β-lactone was isolated in 1986 from Spongi-onellagracilis No biological activity have been reported for this compound; however, the acylating potential of the resident β-lactone warrants screening for potential activity. After many setbacks in the synthesis of spongiolactone, significant progress has been made. Importantly, NCAL process also enabled a concise construction of [3.2.0]-bicyclo β-lactone, which is the key structure in the spongiolactone synthesis and only a few steps remained to complete the synthesis

Single-Copy Certification of Two-Qubit Gates without Entanglement

A quantum state transformation can be generally approximated by single- and two-qubit gates. This, however, does not hold with noisy intermediate-scale quantum technologies due to the errors appearing in the gate operations, where errors of two-qubit gates such as controlled-NOT and SWAP operations are dominated. In this work, we present a cost efficient single-copy certification for a realization of a two-qubit gate in the presence of depolarization noise, where it is aimed to identify if the realization is noise-free, or not. It is shown that entangled resources such as entangled states and a joint measurement are not necessary for the purpose, i.e., a noise-free two-qubit gate is not needed to certify an implementation of a two-qubit gate. A proof-of-principle demonstration is presented with photonic qubits.Comment: 8 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1812.0208

Student Progression Through Developmental Sequences in Community Colleges

Developmental education is designed to provide students with weak academic skills the opportunity to strengthen those skills enough to prepare them for college-level coursework. The concept is simple enough—students who arrive unprepared for college are provided instruction to bring them up to an adequate level. But in practice, developmental education (or “remedial” education, we use these terms interchangeably) is complex and confusing. Experts do not agree on the meaning of being “college ready,” and policies governing assessment, placement, pedagogy, staffing, completion, and eligibility for enrollment in college-level, credit-bearing courses vary from state to state, college to college, and program to program. The developmental education process is confusing enough simply to describe, yet from the point of view of the student, especially one with very weak academic skills and little previous success in school, it may appear as a bewildering set of unanticipated obstacles involving several assessments, classes in more than one subject area, and sequences of courses requiring three or more semesters of study before the student (often a high school graduate) is judged prepared for college-level work

Correlated electronic states at domain walls of a Mott-charge-density-wave insulator 1T-TaS2

Domain walls in interacting electronic systems can have distinct localized states, which often govern physical properties and may lead to unprecedented functionalities and novel devices. However, electronic states within domain walls themselves have not been clearly identified and understood for strongly correlated electron systems. Here, we resolve the electronic states localized on domain walls in a Mott-charge-density-wave(CDW) insulator 1T-TaS2 using scanning tunneling spectroscopy. We establish that the domain wall state decomposes into two nonconducting states located at the center of domain walls and edges of domains. Theoretical calculations reveal their atomistic origin as the local reconstruction of domain walls under the strong influence of electron correlation. Our results introduce a concept for the domain wall electronic property, the wall's own internal degrees of freedom, which is potentially related to the controllability of domain wall electronic properties