Developing new materials and novel technologies for the highly efficient treatment of toxic organic pollutants is desirable. Chemical reduction based on heterogeneous substrate/noble metal catalysts reducing agent NaBH4 has become an effective method in recent years. Here, a spherical covalent framework (SCOF) was designed to provide basic sites Ag ions, by which small NPs were immobilized SCOF...

A series of recent papers shows that it is NP-complete to decide whether an oriented graph admits a homomorphism to the tournament T4 on 4 vertices containing a 4-circuit, each time on a smaller graph class. We improve these results by showing that homomorphism to T4 is NP-complete for bipartite planar subcubic graphs of arbitrarily large fixed girth. We also show that push homomorphism is NP-c...

We consider the classical minimum makespan scheduling problem, where the processing time of job j on machine i is pij , and the matrix P = (pij)m×n is of a low rank. It is proved in [1] that rank 7 scheduling is NP-hard to approximate to a factor of 3/2− ǫ, and rank 4 scheduling is APX-hard (NP-hard to approximate within a factor of 1.03− ǫ). We improve this result by showing that rank 4 schedu...

Toluene-o-xylene monooxygenase (ToMO) from Pseudomonas stutzeri OX1 was found to oxidize nitrobenzene (NB) to form m-nitrophenol (m-NP, 72%) and p-NP (28%) with an initial rate of 0.098 and 0.031 nmol/(min mg protein), respectively. It was also discovered that wild-type ToMO forms 4-nitrocatechol (4-NC) from m-NP and p-NP with an initial rate of 0.15 and 0.0082 nmol/(min mg protein), respective...

The hydrogenation of 4-nitrophenol (4-NP) has attracted much attention, since it is typically used as a model reaction for evaluating newly developed catalysts, but its mechanism still debated. Herein, Co(OH)2-modified CuO catalyst (Co(OH)2/CuO) was the reduction 4-NP to 4-aminophenol (4-AP) in an aqueous sodium borohydride (NaBH4) solution. investigated by UV-Vis spectroscopy (UV-Vis), high-pe...

A nanocomposite of silver nanoparticles and reduced graphene oxide (Ag/rGO) has been developed as a catalyst for the reduction of 4-nitrophenol (4-NP) to 4-aminophenol (4-AP) with sodium borohydride, owing to the larger specific surface area and synergistic effect of rGO. A facile and rapid microwave-assisted green route has been used for the uniform deposition of Ag nanoparticles and the reduc...

Cell death and survival of neural progenitor (NP) cells are determined by signals that are largely unknown. We have analyzed pro-apoptotic signaling in individual NP cells that have been derived from mouse embryonic stem cells. NP formation was concomitant with elevated apoptosis and increased expression of ceramide and prostate apoptosis response 4 (PAR-4). Morpholino oligonucleotide-mediated ...

A k-subcoloring of a graph is a partition of the vertex set into at most k cluster graphs, that is, graphs with no induced P3. 2-subcoloring is known to be NP-complete for comparability graphs and three subclasses of planar graphs, namely triangle-free planar graphs with maximum degree 4, planar perfect graphs with maximum degree 4, and planar graphs with girth 5. We show that 2-subcoloring is ...

Nanoparticles (NP) functionalized with single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) offer a route to custom-designed, self-assembled nanomaterials with potentially unusual properties. The bonding selectivity of DNA guarantees one-to-one binding to form double-stranded DNA (dsDNA), and an appropriate base sequence results in head-to-tail binding linking NP into networks. We explore the phase behavior and structu...

BACKGROUND Non-typable Haemophilus influenzae (NT-Hi) infection is frequently associated with acute otitis media (AOM) treatment failure, recurrence or chronic otitis media. Persistence of otopathogens in a biofilm-structured community was implicated in these situations. Here, we compared biofilm production by H. influenzae strains obtained by culture of middle ear fluid (MEF) from children wit...