Danggui Buxue Tang (DBT), a classical traditional Chinese formula comprising Radix Angelicae Sinensis (RAS) and Radix Astragali (RA), has been widely used to treat menopausal irregularity in Chinese women for nearly 800 years. In this study, a comprehensive analytical method of simultaneously determining the main types of bioactive constituents, eighteen in all from the formula, involving flavo...

Mesoporous silica materials (MSMs) produced by true liquid crystal templating (TLCT) are often considered as direct inverted replicas of the initial lyotropic (LLC) phase. However, predictive design tailor-made MSMs requires full knowledge TLCT process, which is still incomplete. Here, we tackle this issue monitoring structural evolution during process small-angle X-ray scattering, showing that...

The first hyphenation of high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), electrochemical online oxidation and mass spectrometry (MS) is described. Ferrocenecarboxylic acid esters of various alcohols and phenols have been synthesized, separated by reversed-phase HPLC and oxidized (ionized) coulometrically prior to single quadrupole MS analysis using electrospray ionization (ESI) and atmospheric p...

One of the main problems of anti-cancer therapy is an insufficient differentiation between normal and malignant cells by the known anti-proliferant agents. The antibody-directed enzyme prodrug therapy is a promising approach for a selective treatment of cancer, in which a non-toxic prodrug is enzymatically converted into a highly cytotoxic drug at the surface of malignant cells by a targeted an...

Our previous study indicated that star fruit (Averrhoa carambola L.) is a very good source of natural antioxidants. However, it was still not clear which compounds were responsible for its antioxidant properties. The purpose of this study is to separate and identify compounds that contribute to total antioxidant activity in star fruit using HPLC and mass spectrometry (MS). HPLC coupled with a d...

BACKGROUND Determination of urinary catecholamines (CATs) is considered important for clinical diagnosis of pheochromocytoma, paraganglioma, and neuroblastoma. The major disadvantages of existing tests include relatively long instrumental analysis time and potential interference from drugs and drug metabolites that are structurally similar to CATs. METHODS CATs were extracted from a 300-micro...

Markov state models (MSMs) have proven to be useful tools in simulating large and slowly-relaxing biological systems like proteins. MSMs model proteins through dynamics on a discrete-state energy landscape, allowing molecules to effectively sample large regions of phase space. In this work, we use aspects of MSMs to ask: is protein folding mechanistically robust? We first provide a definition o...

Markov state models (MSMs) have been demonstrated to be a powerful method for computationally studying intramolecular processes such as protein folding and macromolecular conformational changes. In this article, we present a new approach to construct MSMs that is applicable to modeling a broad class of multi-molecular assembly reactions. Distinct structures formed during assembly are distinguis...

UNLABELLED Amiodarone (AMI) is a potent antiarrhythmic drug, but its metabolism has not yet been fully documented. Mono-N-desethylamiodarone (MDEA) is its only known metabolite. Our preliminary investigations using rabbit liver microsomes had shown that in vitro AMI was biotransformed to MDEA, and the latter was rapidly further biodegraded to other unknown products. The aim of the present study...