ABSTRACT
Salt is one of the most important factors for fermented foods, but the effect of salt treatment time on the quality of fermented foods has rarely been studied. In this study, the effect of different salt treatment times (0, 48, and 96 h) after the start of fermentation on the quality of the soy sauce moromi extract (SSME) was investigated. As the salt treatment time was delayed, the population of Aspergillus oryzae, Lactobacillaceae, and Enterococcaecea in SSME increased, whereas the population of Staphylococcaceae and Bacillaceae decreased, leading to changes in the enzymatic activity and metabolite profiles. In particular, the contents of amino acids, peptides, volatile compounds, acidic compounds, sugars, and secondary metabolites were significantly affected by the salt treatment time, resulting in changes in the sensory quality and appearance of SSME. The correlation data showed that metabolites, bacterial population, and sensory parameters had strong positive or negative correlations with each other. Moreover, based on metabolomics analysis, the salt treatment-time-related SSME metabolomic pathway was proposed. Although further studies are needed to elucidate the salt treatment mechanism in fermented foods, our data can be useful to better understand the effect of salt treatment time on the quality of fermented foods.
ABSTRACT
The most effective approach to practical exploitation of the layered solids that often have unique valuable properties-such as graphene, clays, and other compounds-is by dispersion into colloidal suspensions of monolayers, called liquid exfoliation. This fundamentally expected behavior can be used to deposit monolayers on supports or to reassemble into hierarchical materials to produce, by design, catalysts, nanodevices, films, drug delivery systems, and other products. Zeolites have been known as extraordinary catalysts and sorbents with three-dimensional structures but emerged as an unexpected new class of layered solids contributing previously unknown valuable features: catalytically active layers with pores inside or across. The self-evident question of layered zeolite exfoliation has remained unresolved for three decades. Here, we report the first direct exfoliation of zeolites into suspension of monolayers as proof of the concept, which enables diverse applications including membranes and hierarchical catalysts with improved access.
ABSTRACT
Osmotic swelling behaviors in layered perovskite niobate were examined in aqueous solutions containing three types of amine-related agents including quaternary ammonium hydroxides and tertiary aminoethanol. Platelet microcrystals of a protonated layered perovskite niobate, HCa2Nb3O10·1.5H2O, were found to show enormous swelling in the aqueous solutions, which was clearly recognized by the noticeable expansion of the sample volume over 100-fold. Optical microscopy observations revealed that the crystals underwent accordion-like elongation in the layer-stacking direction up to several ten-fold the initial thickness. Small-angle X-ray scattering measurements of swollen samples indicate the expansion of interlayer separation ranging from â¼20 nm to over 100 nm, which is primarily governed by the concentrations of the amine-related agents. The magnitudes of the interlayer separation were comparable to those of the macroscopic swelling. The degree of swelling was progressively suppressed with further increasing concentration, and this suppression trend was related to the amines.
ABSTRACT
Platelet crystals of a layered perovskite showed massive accordion-like swelling in a tetrabutylammonium hydroxide solution. The permeation of the solution induced the huge expansion of the interlayer spacing as well as the crystal thickness up to 50-fold, leading to a very high water content of >90 wt%.
ABSTRACT
In this research, we report the development, characterization and application of various plasmonic substrates (with localized surface plasmon resonance wavelength tunable by gold nanoparticle size) for two-photon absorption (TPA)-induced photodimerization of an anthracene derivative, anthracene carboxylic acid, in both surface and solution phase under incoherent visible light irradiation. Despite the efficient photoreaction property of anthracene derivatives and the huge number of publications about them, there has never been a report of a multiphoton photoreaction involving an anthracene derivative with the exception of a reverse photoconversion of anthracene photodimer to monomer with three-photon absorption. We examined the progress of the TPA-induced photoreaction by means of surface-enhanced Raman scattering, taking advantage of the ability of our plasmonic substrate to enhance and localize both incident light for photoreaction and Raman scattering signal for analysis of photoreaction products. The TPA-induced photoreaction in the case of anthracene carboxylic acid coated 2D array of gold nanoparticles gave different results according to the properties of the plasmonic substrate, such as the size of the gold nanoparticle and also its resultant optical properties. In particular, a stringent requirement to achieve TPA-induced photodimerization was found to be the matching between irradiation wavelength, localized surface plasmon resonance of the 2D array, and twice the wavelength of the molecular excitation of the target material (in this case, anthracene carboxylic acid). These results will be useful for the future development of efficient plasmonic substrates for TPA-induced photoreactions with various materials.
