Boron deprivation experiments with humans have yielded some persuasive findings for the hypothesis that boron is an essential nutrient. In the first nutritional study with humans involving boron, 12 postmenopausal women first were fed a diet that provided 0.25 mg boron/2000 kcal for 119 days, and then were fed the same diet with a boron supplement of 3 mg boron/day for 48 days. The boron supple...

Two experiments were conducted with weanling Sprague-Dawley rats to determine whether changes in S-adenosylmethionine utilization or metabolism contribute to the diverse responses to boron deprivation. In both experiments, four treatment groups of 15 male rats were fed ground corn-casein based diets that contained an average of 0.05 mg (experiment 1) or 0.15 mg (experiment 2) boron/kg. In exper...

More recently, motivated by extensively technical applications of carbon nanostructures, there is a growing interest in exploring novel non-carbon nanostructures. As the nearest neighbor of carbon in the periodic table, boron has exceptional properties of low volatility and high melting point and is stronger than steel, harder than corundum, and lighter than aluminum. Boron nanostructures thus ...

A review of the experimental studies relating boron to biological effects on appendicular and axial bones in animal models suggests that numerous influences, known and unknown, affect the responsiveness of bone to dietary boron. Degrees of skeletal response to boron are modified by other nutritional variables that include calcium, magnesium, vitamin D, and fluoride. Evidence suggests that appen...

Boron deficiency symptoms point to a role for boron in plant membranes, but the molecular partners interacting with boron have not yet been identified. The objective of the present study was to isolate and identify membrane-associated proteins with an ability to interact with boron. Boron-interacting proteins were isolated from root microsomal preparations of arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) ...

The removal of boron from aqueous solution by direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD) was studied with self-prepared polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) hollow fiber membranes in the present work. The effect of pH, boron concentration, temperature and salt concentration of the feed solution on the boron rejection was investigated. The experimental results indicated that boron rejection was less ...

Recently, a proliferation of athletic supplements has been marketed touting boron as an ergogenic aid capable of increasing testosterone. The effect of boron supplementation was investigated in male bodybuilders. Ten male bodybuilders (aged 20 to 26) were given a 2.5-mg boron supplement, while nine male bodybuilders (aged 21 to 27) were given a placebo for 7 weeks. Plasma total and free testost...

Intact roots of boron-sufficient squash (Cucurbita pepo L.) plants, plants entering boron deficiency, and plants recovering from boron deficiency were exposed to tritiated thymidine at the end of the treatment period to label the replicating DNA of root tip cells. Using histological sections, autoradiographs of intact root meristems were prepared. The labeling pattern in +B root tips revealed t...

Co-precipitation and absorption methods were investigated for removal of boron from produced water, which is groundwater brought to the surface during oil and natural gas extraction. Boron can be toxic to many crops and often needs to be controlled to low levels in irrigation water. The present research focused on synthetic reverse osmosis (RO) concentrate modeled on concentrate expected from a...

A systematic study was carried out to dope single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT) bundles with varying amounts of boron using the pulsed laser vaporization technique. Targets containing boron concentrations ranging from 0.5 to 10at.% boron were prepared by mixing elemental boron with carbon paste and the Co/Ni catalysts. The laser-generated products that were obtained from these targets were char...