Novel stilbene-triazine symmetrical optical brighteners: synthesis and applications.

A series of new high light fastness, hot pressing fastness optical brighteners was efficiently synthesized by a three-step approach involving the successive replacement of the three chloro groups of 2,4,6-trichloro-1,3,5-triazine under different conditions of temperature and pH. Thus, 2,4,6-trichloro-1,3,5-triazine was treated with different anilines and the resulting dichlorotriazinyl intermediates (3a-I) were further condensed with 4,4-diaminostilbene-2,2'-disulfonic acid to afford bis-monochlorotriazine (5a-I) followed by nucleophilic substitution with ethanolamine to furnish the final hybrid brighteners (7a-I). All of the newly synthesized compounds were characterized by Fourier-Transform Infrared (FT-IR), UV-visible absorption, NMR spectroscopy and the elemental analyses. The synthesized optical brighteners were also assessed for their efficacy as fluorescent brightening agents.

Manipulating cues in involuntary autobiographical memory: verbal cues are more effective than pictorial cues.

In two experiments, pictorial cues were compared with their verbal labels to assess their effectiveness in eliciting involuntary autobiographical memories. Cues were relatively complex in Experiment 1 (e.g., relaxing on a beach) and simple objects in Experiment 2 (e.g., a ball). In both experiments, participants went through a vigilance task in which they were presented with frequent nontarget and rare target visual stimuli. Pictures or their corresponding verbal labels were also displayed on both target and nontarget stimuli, but participants were told that these were irrelevant to the task. They were asked to interrupt the vigilance task whenever they became aware of task-unrelated mental contents and to report them. In both experiments, more involuntary memories were elicited in the verbal cue condition, rather than in the pictorial cue condition. This result is discussed in relation to previous work that highlighted the greater effectiveness of verbal cues in memory tasks.

Modifying the frequency and characteristics of involuntary autobiographical memories.

Recent studies have shown that involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) can be elicited in the laboratory. Here we assessed whether the specific instructions given to participants can change the nature of the IAMs reported, in terms of both their frequency and their characteristics. People were either made or not made aware that the aim of the study was to examine IAMs. They reported mental contents either whenever they became aware of them or following a predetermined schedule. Both making people aware of the aim of the study and following a fixed schedule of interruptions increased significantly the number of IAMs reported. When aware of the aim of the study, participants reported more specific memories that had been retrieved and rehearsed more often in the past. These findings demonstrate that the number and characteristics of memories depend on the procedure used. Explanations of these effects and their implications for research on IAMs are discussed.

Structure based virtual screening-driven identification of monastrol as a potent urease inhibitor.

Virtual screening uses computer based methods to discover new ligands on the basis of biological structures. Among all virtual screening methods structure based docking has received considerable attention. In an attempt to identify new ligands as urease inhibitors, structure-based virtual screening (SBVS) of an in-house database of 10,000 organic compounds was carried out. The X-ray crystallographic structure of Bacillus pasteurii (BP) in complex with acetohydroxamic acid (PDB Code 4UBP) was used as a protein structure. As a starting point, ~10,000 compounds of our in-house database were analyzed to check redundancy and the compounds found repeated were removed from the database. Finally 6993 compounds were docked into the active site of BP urease using GOLD and MOE-Dock software. A remarkable feature of this study was the identification of monastrol, a well-known KSP inhibitor already in clinical trials, as a novel urease inhibitor. The hits identified were further evaluated by molecular docking and on examination of the affinity predictions, twenty-seven analogs of monastrol were synthesized by a multicomponent Biginelli reaction followed by their in vitro screening as urease inhibitors. Finally twelve compounds were identified as new urease inhibitors. The excellent in vitro activity suggested that these compounds may serve as viable lead compounds for the treatment of urease related problems.