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A rapid resolution liquid chromatography/time-of-flight tandem mass spectrometry (RRLC-TOF/MS) method was developed for qualitative and quantitative analysis of the major chemical constituents in Andrographis paniculata. Fifteen compounds, including flavonoids and diterpenoid lactones, were unambiguously or tentatively identified in 10 min by comparing their retention times and accurate masses with standards or literature data. The characteristic fragmentation patterns of flavonoids and diterpenoid lactones were summarized, and the structures of the unknown compounds were predicted. Andrographolide, dehydroandrographolide and neoandrographolide were further quantified as marker substances. It was found that the calibration curves for all analytes showed good linearity (R2 > 0.9995) within the test ranges. The overall limits of detection (LODs) and limits of quantification (LOQs) were 0.02 μg/mL to 0.06 μg/mL and 0.06 μg/mL to 0.2 μg/mL, respectively. The relative standard deviations (RSDs) for intra- and inter-day precisions were below 3.3% and 4.2%, respectively. The mean recovery rates ranged from 96.7% to 104.5% with the relative standard deviations (RSDs) less than 2.72%. It is concluded that RRLC-TOF/MS is powerful and practical in qualitative and quantitative analysis of complex plant samples due to time savings, sensitivity, precision, accuracy and lowering solvent consumption.

Introduction: Mumps-containing vaccine was licensed in the 1990s in China with a single dose administered routinely to children aged 18–24 months since 2008. However, an increase in reported mumps cases during the period 2009 to 2012 casts doubt on the effectiveness of a single-dose mumps vaccination. In March 2012, large numbers of mumps cases in a day-care centre and primary school in Guangdong Province were investigated to estimate the effectiveness of mumps-containing vaccine.Methods: A mumps case was defined as a case with acute onset of unilateral or bilateral swelling of the parotid gland or other salivary glands. Clinical data were collected among students and staff members in the two schools from 6 February to 3 June 2012. Vaccination history was obtained from immunization certificates. Vaccine effectiveness (VE) was calculated among children in classes that had more than two mumps cases.Results: The cohort included 369 children from seven classes, four from the day-care centre and three from the primary school. Vaccination certificates available for 347 children showed immunization coverage of 82% (285/347). The overall attack rate was 14.6% (54/369); the VE for a single dose of mumps vaccine was 65% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 19%–85%) when given within three years and 15% (95% CI: -2%–52%) when given three to six years before the outbreak. For two doses of vaccine the VE was 53% (95% CI: -15–80%).Discussion: A single dose of mumps-containing vaccine was not effective to prevent these outbreaks among preschool and schoolchildren. A second dose of mumps-containing vaccine to four to five-year-old children should be considered in China.

When a pulse power supply is used for sewage treatment, parameters of AC-DC coupling circuit must be repeatedly regulated to make the reactor work in streamer discharge mode, and there are problems of no effective controllable and quantifiable index and imprecise regulation. So the paper proposed a fuzzy control scheme for the reactor which takes streamer discharge coefficient as a controllable and quantifiable parameter to get required superposition signal of AC and DC on the basis of research of voltage amplitude-frequency characteristics of the reactor and the basic condition of streamer discharge. The simulation and experiment results showed the scheme is feasible and effective.

To make the object of electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulation flexible to change, the authors propose using the method of electromagnetic transient-transient stability analysis (TSA) hybrid real-time simulation of the variable area of interest. The area where the fault is to be set, or where the operation takes place, is defined as the area of interest. The simulation object is divided into multiple sub-networks. The EMT simulation range is determined according to the voltage drop depth at the boundary of the adjacent sub-network caused by the three-phase short-circuit fault at the boundary of an area of interest. The Norton equivalent is obtained by using the sub-network as a basic unit. The electromagnetic sub-network forms its own Norton equivalent on the TSA side by means of the Norton equivalent admittance of its TSA model. Based on this, the overall framework of hybrid real-time simulation of the variable area of interest is constructed. The fundamental phasor prediction and Norton equivalent current source prediction are adopted to reduce the interface error. The performance of the proposed method in terms of feasibility, flexibility, and effectiveness have been verified by the simulation studies on the IEEE 118-bus system.

A field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based digital solver for real-time electromechanical transient simulation is designed in this paper. The solving process for a device or sub-network in an electromechanical transient simulation is packaged into the orders in soft function solvers. The orders are reused by soft function solvers that are invoked by microprocessor cores. The data exchange between the microprocessor cores and soft function solvers is enhanced through explicit and implicit channels. The orders of the microprocessor cores are stored in the synchronous dynamic random access memory on the FPGA board, which solves the problem of insufficient storage space for the orders in electromechanical transient simulation. A real-time digital solver for electromechanical transient simulation, whose feasibility is verified by a simulation of part of the power system in East China, is successfully constructed by applying a small number of microprocessor cores and multiple soft function solvers.

This project was initiated with the goal of investigating the malt quality of winter rye cultivars and hybrids grown in the United States in 2014 and 2015, but high levels of deoxynivalenol (DON) were subsequently found in many of the malt samples. DON levels in 75% of the investigated rye samples (n = 117) were actually below 1.0 mg/kg, as quantified by a gas chromatography combined with electron capture detector (GC-ECD). However, 83% of the samples had DON in excess of 1.0 mg/kg following malting, and the average DON level in malted rye was 10.6 mg/kg. In addition, relatively high levels of 3-acetate DON (3-ADON), 15-acetate DON (15-ADON), nivalenol (NIV), and DON-3-glucoside (D3G) were observed in some rye malts. Our results show that rye grain DON is likely a poor predicator of type B trichothecenes in malt in practice, because high levels of malt DON, 15-ADONm and D3G were produced, even when the rye samples with DON levels below 0.50 mg/kg were processed. Fusarium Tri5 DNA content in rye was highly associated with malt DON levels (r = 0.83) in a small subset of samples (n = 55). The impact of Fusarium infection on malt quality was demonstrated by the significant correlations between malt DON levels and wort viscosity, β-glucan content, wort color, wort p-coumaric acid content, and total phenolic content. Additional correlations of rye Fusarium Tri5 DNA contents with malt diastatic power (DP), wort free amino nitrogen (FAN) content, and arabinoxylan content were observed.