Effects of Maillard-type caseinate glycation on the preventive action of caseinate digests in acrylamide-induced intestinal barrier dysfunction in IEC-6 cells

Dietary acrylamide has attracted widespread concern due to its toxic effects; however, its adverse impact on the intestines is less assessed. Protein glycation of the Maillard-type is widely used for property modification, but its potential effect on preventive efficacy of protein digest against the acrylamide-induced intestinal barrier dysfunction is quite unknown. Caseinate was thus glycated with lactose. Two tryptic digests from the glycated caseinate and untreated caseinate (namely GCN digest and CN digest) were then assessed for their protective effects against acrylamide-induced intestinal barrier dysfunction in the IEC-6 cell model. The results showed that acrylamide at 1.25–10 mmol L(−1) dose-dependently had cytotoxic effects on IEC-6 cells, leading to decreased cell viability and increased lactate dehydrogenase release. Acrylamide also brought about barrier dysfunction, including decreased trans-epithelial electrical resistance (TEER) value and increased epithelial permeability. However, the two digests at 12.5–100 μg mL(−1) could alleviate this dysfunction via enhancing cell viability by 70.2–83.9%, partly restoring TEER values, and decreasing epithelial permeability from 100% to 76.6–94.1%. The two digests at 25 μg mL(−1) strengthened the tight junctions via increasing tight junction proteins ZO-1, occludin, and claudin-1 expression by 11.5–68.6%. However, the results also suggested that the GCN digest always showed lower protective efficacy than the CN digest in the cells. It is concluded that Maillard-type caseinate glycation with lactose endows the resultant tryptic digest with impaired preventive effect against acrylamide-induced intestinal barrier dysfunction, highlighting another adverse effect of the Maillard reaction on food proteins

Distributed entanglement induced by dissipative bosonic media

We describe a scheme with analytic result that allows to generate steady-state entanglement for two atoms over a dissipative bosonic medium. The resonant coupling between the mediating bosonic mode and cavity modes produces three collective atomic decay channels. This dissipative dynamics, together with the unitary process induced by classical microwave fields, drives the two atoms to the symmetric or asymmetric entangled steady state conditional upon the choice of the phases of the microwave fields. The effects on the steady-state entanglement of off-resonance mediating bosonic modes are analyzed. The entanglement can be obtained with high fidelity regardless of the initial state and there is a linear relation in the scaling of the fidelity with the cooperativity parameter. The fidelity is insensitive to the fluctuation of the Rabi frequencies of the classical driving fields.Comment: to appear in Europhysics Letter

A Feasibility Study of an FEM Simulation Used in Co-Seismic Deformations: A Case Study of a Dip-Slip Fault

For this study, we conducted a numerical simulation on co-seismic displacement for a dip-slip fault in a half-space medium based upon a finite element method (FEM). After investigating technical problems of modeling, source and boundary treatment, we calculated co-seismic deformation with consideration to topography. To verify the numerical simulation results, the simulated co-seismic displacement was compared with that calculated using a dislocation theory. As a case study, considering the seismic parameters of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake (M 8.0) as a source model, we calculate the co-seismic displacements with or without consideration of the terrain model in the finite element model to observe terrain effects on co-seismic deformation. Results show that topography has a non-negligible effect on co-seismic displacement, reaching from -11.59 to 4.0 cm in horizontal displacement, and from -3.28 to 3.28 cm in vertical displacement. The relative effects are 9.05 and 2.95% for horizontal and vertical displacement, respectively. Such a terrain effect is sufficiently large and can be detected by modern geodetic measurements such as GPS. Therefore, we conclude that the topography should be considered in applying dislocation theory to calculate co-seismic deformations

Critical quantum metrology robust against dissipation and non-adiabaticity

Critical systems near quantum phase transitions were predicted to be useful for improvement of metrological precision, thanks to their ultra-sensitive response to a tiny variation of the control Hamiltonian. Despite the promising perspective, realization of criticality-enhanced quantum metrology is an experimentally challenging task, mainly owing to the extremely long time needed to encode the signal to some physical quantity of a critical system. We here circumvent this problem by making use of the critical behaviors in the Jaynes-Cummings model, comprising a single qubit and a photonic resonator, to which the signal field is coupled. The information about the field amplitude is encoded in the qubit's excitation number in the dark state, which displays a divergent changing rate at the critical point. The most remarkable feature of this critical sensor is that the performance is insensitive to the leakage to bright eigenstates, caused by decoherence and non-adiabatic effects. We demonstrate such a metrological protocol in a superconducting circuit, where an Xmon qubit, interacting with a resonator, is used as a probe for estimating the amplitude of a microwave field coupled to the resonator. The measured quantum Fisher information exhibits a critical quantum enhancement, confirming the potential of this system for quantum metrology.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figure

Engineering W-type steady states for three atoms via dissipation in an optical cavity

We propose a scheme for the dissipative preparation of W-type entangled steady-states of three atoms trapped in an optical cavity. The scheme is based on the competition between the decay processes into and out of the target state. By suitable choice of system parameters, we resolve the whole evolution process and employ the effective operator formalism to engineer four independent decay processes, so that the target state becomes the stationary state of the quantum system. The scheme requires neither the preparation of definite initial states nor the precise control of system parameters and preparation time.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Experimental demonstration of Cavity-Free Optical Isolators and Optical Circulators

Cavity-free optical nonreciprocity components, which have an inherent strong asymmetric interaction between the forward- and backward-propagation direction of the probe field, are key to produce such as optical isolators and circulators. According to the proposal presented by Xia et al., [Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 203602 (2018)], we experimentally build a device that uses cross-Kerr nonlinearity to achieve a cavity-free optical isolator and circulator. Its nonreciprocal behavior arises from the thermal motion of N-type configuration atoms, which induces a strong chiral cross-Kerr nonlinear response for the weak probe beam. We obtain a two-port optical isolator for up to 20 dB of isolation ratio in a specially designed Sagnac interferometer. The distinct propagation directions of the weak probe field determine its cross-phase shift and transmission, by which we demonstrate the accessibility of a four-port optical circulator.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure