Publications

Type 2 diabetes mellitus is a complicated metabolic disorder characterized by hyperglycemia and glucose intolerance. It is considered a new pandemic and its control involves numerous challenges. Although many of the measures are based on improving life habits, diet is also of vital importance due to bioactive compounds present in food. In this regard, several raw materials have been investigated whose bioactivities seem to slow the progression of this disease. Within these matrices, there are algae of importance, such as brown algae, showing to have beneficial effects on glycemic control. These pieces of evidence are increasing every day due to the development of cell or animal models, which lead to the conclusion that bioactive compounds may have direct effects on decreasing hyperglycemia, enhancing insulin secretion and preventing the formation of amyloid plaques.

Polarized (VV) and depolarized (VH) static (SLS) and dynamic light scattering (DLS) experiments were conducted in dispersions of sterically stabilized silver nanoprisms in three different solvents where strong plasmon-enhanced scattering was observed. In the dilute regime, hydrodynamic sizes obtained from VV and VH were in good agreement with TEM data. VV correlation functions revealed two relaxation modes, reflecting the translational and rotational diffusions unambiguously. Increasing the concentration, the bimodal nature of the correlation functions was retained, and it appeared that the VH correlation function was more strongly influenced. Evanescent-wave DLS was shown to probe rotational and translational diffusion in the vicinity of a hard wall. It is suggested that DLS methodologies can be successfully applied to this type of metallic nanoparticles for characterization and exploration of their dynamics.

The main objective of this study was to develop a simple and efficient spectrophotometric technique combined with chemometrics for the simultaneous determination of sulfamethoxazole (SMX) and trimethoprim (TMP) in drug formulations. Specifically, we sought: (i) to evaluate the potential use of rank annihilation factor analysis (RAFA) to pH gradual change spectrophotometric data in order to provide sufficient accuracy and model robustness; and (ii) to determine SMX and TMP concentration in drug formulations without tedious pre-treatments such as derivatization or extraction techniques which are time-consuming and require hazardous solvents. In the proposed method, the spectra of the sample solutions at different pH values were recorded and the pH-spectra bilinear data matrix was generated. On these data, RAFA was then applied to estimate the concentrations of SMX and TMP in synthetic and real samples. Applying RAFA showed that the two drugs could be determined simultaneously with concentration ratios of SMX to TMP varying from 1:30 to 30:1 in the mixed samples (concentration range is 1–30 µg mL−1 for both components). The limits of detection were 0.25 and 0.38 µg mL−1 for SMX and TMP, respectively. The proposed method was successfully applied to the simultaneous determination of SMX and TMP in some synthetic, pharmaceutical formulation and biological fluid samples. In addition, the means of the estimated RSD (%) were 1.71 and 2.18 for SMX and TMP, respectively, in synthetic mixtures. The accuracy of the proposed method was confirmed by spiked recovery test on biological samples with satisfactory results (90.50–109.80%).

The molecular property-affinity relationship of dietary flavonoids for bovine gamma-globulin (γ-globulin) was investigated by fluorescence titration analysis. The quenching effects of flavonoids on γ-globulin fluorescence depended on the structures of flavonoids. The magnitudes of binding constants between flavonoids and γ-globulin were within the range of 10(3)-10(5) L mol(-1). These data were much smaller than the affinities between flavonoids and purified bovine and human serum albumins. The affinities of flavonoids for γ-globulin were strongly influenced by the structural differences of the compounds under study. The affinities for γ-globulin decreased with increasing partition coefficients and increased with increasing hydrogen bond acceptor numbers of flavonoids, which suggested that the binding interaction was mainly caused by hydrogen bond forces.

Chinese garlic powder (GP) is exported to all countries in the world, but the excess of microorganisms is a serious problem that affects export. The number of microorganisms has a serious impact on the pricing of GP. It is very important to detect and control the microorganism in GP. The purpose of this study was to investigate the contamination and drug resistance of microorganisms during the processing of GP. We used metagenomics and Illumina sequencing to study the composition and dynamic distribution of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), but also the microbial community in three kinds of garlic products from factory processing. The results showed that a total of 126 ARG genes were detected in all the samples, which belonged to 11 ARG species. With the processing of GP, the expression of ARGs showed a trend to increase at first and then to decrease. Network analysis was used to study the co-occurrence patterns among ARG subtypes and bacterial communities and ARGs.