Age-related diseases, such as osteoarthritis, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, are often associated with chronic unresolved inflammation. Neutrophils play central roles in this process by releasing tissue-degenerative proteases, such as cathepsin G, as well as pro-inflammatory leukotrienes produced by the 5-lipoxygenase (5-LO) pathway. Boswellic acids (BAs) are pentacy...

compounds from South American medicinal plants, we became interested in medicinal plants belonging to the genus Maytenus (Celastraceae). The plants of this genus are widely used in folk medicine in South America and are rich sources of terpenoids including dihydro-b-agarofuran sesquiterpenes, highly oxidized friedelane triterpenes, and several types of triterpene dimers. Among these, triterpene...

A two-dimensional single particle finite element model was used to examine the effects of particle fragmental pattern on the average molecular weights, polymerization rate and particle overheating in heterogeneous Ziegler-Natta olefin polymerization. A two-site catalyst kinetic mechanism was employed together with a dynamic two-dimensional molecular species in diffusion-reaction equation. The i...

BACKGROUND Untargeted metabolomics commonly uses liquid chromatography mass spectrometry to measure abundances of metabolites; subsequent tandem mass spectrometry is used to derive information about individual compounds. One of the bottlenecks in this experimental setup is the interpretation of fragmentation spectra to accurately and efficiently identify compounds. Fragmentation trees have beco...

We prove the existence of a stationary solution of any given mass to the coagulationfragmentation equation without assuming a detailed balance condition, but assuming instead that aggregation dominates fragmentation for small particles while fragmentation predominates for large particles. We also show the existence of a self similar solution of any given mass to the coagulation equation and to ...

We consider a family of fragmentation processes where the rate at which a particle splits is proportional to a function of its mass. Let F (m) 1 (t), F (m) 2 (t), ... denote the decreasing rearrangement of the masses present at time t in a such process, starting from an initial mass m. Let then m → ∞. Under an assumption of regular variation type on the dynamics of the fragmentation, we prove t...

Tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) is a cytokine that plays an important role in inflammatory process and tumor development. Recent studies demonstrate that triterpene saponins from Vietnamese ginseng are efficient inhibitors of TNF-α. But the interactions between TNF-α and the saponins are still unclear. In this study, molecular docking and molecular dynamics simulations of TNF-α with three d...

Mass spectrometry (MS) in combination with a fragmentation technique is the method of choice for analyzing small molecules in high throughput experiments. The automated interpretation of such data is highly non-trivial. Recently, fragmentation trees have been introduced for de novo analysis of tandem fragmentation spectra (MS), describing the fragmentation process of the molecule. Multiple-stag...

The utility of surface-induced dissociation (SID) to probe the structure, energetics and fragmentation mechanisms of protonated peptides is discussed and demonstrated. High internal energy deposition provided by low-energy (eV range) ion-surface collisions yields extensive fragmentation of protonated peptides, allowing relatively uncomplicated and rapid sequence analysis of oligopeptides. SID o...