Antibacterial and Antifungal Activity of Zinc(II) Carboxylates With/Without N-Donor Organic Ligands

The antibacterial and antifungal activity of zinc(II) carboxylates with composition Zn(RCOO)2•nH2O(R =H-, CH3-, CH3CH2CH2-, (CH3)2CH-, XCH2-, X=Cl, Br, I, n=0 or 2), [ZnX2(Nia+CH2COO-)2](Nia=nicotinamide, X=Cl, Br, I) and [Zn(XCH2COO)2(Caf)2]•2H2O (Car=caffeine, X=Cl, Br) is studied against bacterial strains Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli and yeast Candida albicans. The structural types are assigned to the prepared compounds and the influence of (i) carboxylate chain length, (ii) substitution of hydrogen atom of carboxylate by halogen and (iii) presence of N-donor organic ligands on the biological activity is discussed

Spoken term detection ALBAYZIN 2014 evaluation: overview, systems, results, and discussion

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13636-015-0063-8Spoken term detection (STD) aims at retrieving data from a speech repository given a textual representation of the search term. Nowadays, it is receiving much interest due to the large volume of multimedia information. STD differs from automatic speech recognition (ASR) in that ASR is interested in all the terms/words that appear in the speech data, whereas STD focuses on a selected list of search terms that must be detected within the speech data. This paper presents the systems submitted to the STD ALBAYZIN 2014 evaluation, held as a part of the ALBAYZIN 2014 evaluation campaign within the context of the IberSPEECH 2014 conference. This is the first STD evaluation that deals with Spanish language. The evaluation consists of retrieving the speech files that contain the search terms, indicating their start and end times within the appropriate speech file, along with a score value that reflects the confidence given to the detection of the search term. The evaluation is conducted on a Spanish spontaneous speech database, which comprises a set of talks from workshops and amounts to about 7 h of speech. We present the database, the evaluation metrics, the systems submitted to the evaluation, the results, and a detailed discussion. Four different research groups took part in the evaluation. Evaluation results show reasonable performance for moderate out-of-vocabulary term rate. This paper compares the systems submitted to the evaluation and makes a deep analysis based on some search term properties (term length, in-vocabulary/out-of-vocabulary terms, single-word/multi-word terms, and in-language/foreign terms).This work has been partly supported by project CMC-V2 (TEC2012-37585-C02-01) from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. This research was also funded by the European Regional Development Fund, the Galician Regional Government (GRC2014/024, “Consolidation of Research Units: AtlantTIC Project” CN2012/160)

Controlling of magnetocaloric effect in Gd2O3@SiO2 nanocomposites by substrate dimensionality and particles’ concentration

The magnetocaloric effect (MCE) of hybrid nanostructures consisting of fine gadolinium oxide (Gd2O3) nanoparticles with diameter 7 nm and 12 nm loaded into the pores of the periodically ordered mesoporous silica with hexagonal (SBA-15) or cubic (SBA-16) symmetry were investigated. The concentration effect of the added nanoparticles (NPs) and the effect of the silica matrix dimensionality on the structural properties, magnetization M(H), magnetic entropy change SM, and parameters A(T) and B(T) derived from Arrott plots were studied in four samples. Examined nanocomposites exhibited reasonable high values of magnetic entropy change SM varying from 29 J/kgK established for Gd2O3@SBA-15 up to 64 J/kgK observed in Gd2O3@SBA-16 at maximal field change 5 T at low temperatures. This suggests that studied nanocomposites, where diamagnetic silica matrices serve as nanoreactors for growth of Gd2O3 nanoparticles and their symmetry strongly affect magnetic properties of whole composites, could be feasible for cryomagnetic refrigeration applicationsPeer reviewe

Scaling Analysis of the Magnetocaloric Effect in Co/Au Nanoparticles

The system of superparamagnetic Co/Au bimetallic nanoparticles of average diameter 7 nm was investigated with respect to its magnetocaloric properties. DC magnetic measurements revealed the presence of field dependent zero field cooled M(T) maximum (6–8 K) and significant zero field cooled/field cooled irreversibility at low temperatures in the system. Documented thermal hysteresis disallow standard magnetic entropy change calculation from isothermal M(H) data, thus we attempted to employ zero field cooled M(T) data for this purpose. Magnetic entropy change was calculated employing the Maxwell relation. In maximal field variation of 1 T relative high magnetic entropy change for nanoparticles ∆SM ≈ 0.7 J/(kg K) at T = 9 K was observed. The data collapsed onto single universal curve after proper axis rescaling.Slovak Research and Development Agency-APVV-0073-14 y APVV-520-15Proyecto VEGA-1/0377/16 y 1/0745/17FEDER, Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional-ITMS 2611023008

Improved flow cytometric assessment reveals distinct microvesicle (cell-derived microparticle) signatures in joint diseases

INTRODUCTION: Microvesicles (MVs), earlier referred to as microparticles, represent a major type of extracellular vesicles currently considered as novel biomarkers in various clinical settings such as autoimmune disorders. However, the analysis of MVs in body fluids has not been fully standardized yet, and there are numerous pitfalls that hinder the correct assessment of these structures. METHODS: In this study, we analyzed synovial fluid (SF) samples of patients with osteoarthritis (OA), rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA). To assess factors that may confound MV detection in joint diseases, we used electron microscopy (EM), Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis (NTA) and mass spectrometry (MS). For flow cytometry, a method commonly used for phenotyping and enumeration of MVs, we combined recent advances in the field, and used a novel approach of differential detergent lysis for the exclusion of MV-mimicking non-vesicular signals. RESULTS: EM and NTA showed that substantial amounts of particles other than MVs were present in SF samples. Beyond known MV-associated proteins, MS analysis also revealed abundant plasma- and immune complex-related proteins in MV preparations. Applying improved flow cytometric analysis, we demonstrate for the first time that CD3(+) and CD8(+) T-cell derived SF MVs are highly elevated in patients with RA compared to OA patients (p = 0.027 and p = 0.009, respectively, after Bonferroni corrections). In JIA, we identified reduced numbers of B cell-derived MVs (p = 0.009, after Bonferroni correction). CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that improved flow cytometric assessment of MVs facilitates the detection of previously unrecognized disease-associated vesicular signatures