Antioxidant activities from different rosemary clonal lines.

Rosemary extract is widely used in food industry and carnosic acid is reported to be the major component that is responsible for its antioxidant activities. However, it is unclear how the numerous plant metabolites interact and contribute to the overall antioxidant activity. In this study, with poultry fat as the model food system, rosemary extract from six clonal lines were evaluated that each represented a different genetic variant. As expected, rosemary extract with higher carnosic acid content had higher antioxidant activity. However, rosemary extract which had carnosic acid removed retained a significant amount of activity. Furthermore, when the individual contributions of carnosic acid and the portion without carnosic acid were evaluated separately, neither was shown to be responsible for the overall level of its stabilization effect from rosemary extract as a whole entity. The interactions among different plant metabolites have a major impact on the overall antioxidant capabilities of rosemary extract.

Susceptibility of Sogatella furcifera and Laodelphax striatellus (Hemiptera: Delphacidae) to Six Insecticides in China.

The whitebacked planthopper, Sogatella furcifera (Horváth), and small brown planthopper, Laodelphax striatellus (Fallén), both are important crop pests throughout China, especially in rice. Application of chemical insecticides is the major control practice. Consequently, insecticide resistance has become an urgent issue. In this study, resistance levels to six conventional insecticides were evaluated for these two species collected from major occurring areas of China. Additionally, imidacloprid- (resistance ratio [RR] = 10.4-fold) and buprofezin (RR = 15.1-fold)-resistant strains of whitebacked planthopper were obtained through laboratory selections for cross-resistance profiling and synergism assessment to understand resistance mechanisms. The results showed that all tested populations of both species exhibited low to high levels of resistance to chlorpyrifos, while remaining susceptible to thiamethoxam. Three of the 14 whitebacked planthopper populations showed low to moderate resistance to imidacloprid, while all small brown planthopper populations reminded susceptible. All small brown planthopper and whitebacked planthopper (except one) populations showed at least moderate resistance (RR = 10.1-271.1) to buprofezin. All small brown planthopper populations remained susceptible to pymetrozine and nitenpyram, and all whitebacked planthopper populations remained susceptible to isoprocarb. The imidacloprid-resistant whitebacked planthopper strain showed no significant cross-resistance to other tested insecticides. However, the buprofezin-resistant strain exhibited a low-level cross-resistance (CR = 3.1) to imidacloprid. Piperonyl butoxide, triphenyl phosphate, and diethylmaleate displayed no synergism effect on the resistant whitebacked planthopper strains.

Discovery of glycosyltransferases using carbohydrate arrays and mass spectrometry.

Glycosyltransferases catalyze the reaction between an activated sugar donor and an acceptor to form a new glycosidic linkage. Glycosyltransferases are responsible for the assembly of oligosaccharides in vivo and are also important for the in vitro synthesis of these biomolecules. However, the functional identification and characterization of new glycosyltransferases is difficult and tedious. This paper describes an approach that combines arrays of reactions on an immobilized array of acceptors with an analysis by mass spectrometry to screen putative glycosyltransferases. A total of 14,280 combinations of a glycosyltransferase, an acceptor and a donor in four buffer conditions were screened, leading to the identification and characterization of four new glycosyltransferases. This work is notable because it provides a label-free method for the rapid functional annotation of putative enzymes.

Enzymatic synthesis and properties of uridine-5'-O-(2-thiodiphospho)-N-acetylglucosamine.

This paper describes an enzymatic approach to obtain a thio-containing UDP-GlcNAc analog. We use an assay based on capture of the carbohydrate and analysis by mass spectrometry to quantitatively characterize the activity of this unnatural sugar donor in a LgtA-mediated glycosylation reaction.

Combining carbochips and mass spectrometry to study the donor specificity for the Neisseria meningitidis ß1,3-N-acetylglucosaminyltransferase LgtA.

A library of 11 UDP-N-acetylglucosamine analogs were rapidly screened for their activities as donors for the Neisseria meningitidis ß1,3-N-acetylglucosaminyltransferase (LgtA) by direct on-chip reaction and detection with SAMDI-TOF mass spectrometry. Six of the analogs were active in this assay and were analyzed by SAMDI to characterize the kinetics toward LgtA. The analysis revealed that substitutions on C-2, C-4, and C-6 affect the activity of the donors, with bulky groups at these positions decreasing affinity of the donors for the enzyme, and also revealed that activity is strongly affected by the stereochemistry at C-3, but not C-4, of the donor. The study is also significant because it demonstrates that SAMDI can be used to both profile glycosyltransferase activities and to provide a quantitative assessment of enzyme activity.

Chemical response of hardwood oligosaccharides as a statistical function of isolation protocol.

Hardwoods contain a substantial amount of hemicellulose-type oligosaccharides, the chemical structures of which are typically categorized in the xylan saccharide class. The efficient and selective isolation of these hemicelluloses is regarded as one of the most critical obstacles to overcome for their eventual biomaterial and bioenergy utilization. Therefore, the objective of the current work was to perform a fundamental exploration of the function of extraction pH, temperature, and time on the final chemical properties of the extracted hemicelluloses. The extraction chemistries employed varied pH and showed that acidic conditions provided a higher extractive yield versus alkaline conditions. An alkaline environment gave higher yields than an acidic environment and also resulted in much higher lignin removal from wood, especially at high temperature. In general, control of the pH chemistry leads to a change in the carboxylic acid groups present in the extracts. When the extraction pH changed from acidic to alkaline, the total carboxylic acid group content in the hemicelluloses removed significantly increased due to more acetic acid group hydrolysis and increased lignin degradation.

Parsimonious design principles for motor unit models.

Motor units are known to display type-specific differences in passive and active electrical properties, and attempts to predict motor unit type based on the measurement of membrane properties have been rather successful. Quantitative models of motoneurons have also grown in complexity and their predictive power is predicated upon the accurate description of basic membrane properties. This paper presents results from a modeling study which sought to specify a small and simple set of "design rules" that motoneurons might obey during type-specific differentiation.