The present study investigates deep eutectic solvents (DESs) as potential media for enzymatic hydrolysis. A series of ternary ammonium and phosphonium-based DESs were prepared at different molar ratios by mixing with aqueous glycerol (85%). The physicochemical properties including surface tension, conductivity, density, and viscosity were measured at a temperature range of 298.15 K – 363.15 K. The eutectic points were highly influenced by the variation of temperature. The eutectic point of the choline chloride: glycerol: water (ratio of 1: 2.55: 2.28) and methyltriphenylphosphonium bromide:glycerol:water (ratio of 1: 4.25: 3.75) is 213.4 K and 255.8 K, respectively. The stability of the lipase enzyme isolated from porcine pancreas (PPL) and Rhizopus niveus (RNL) toward hydrolysis in ternary DESs medium was investigated. The PPL showed higher activity compared to the RNL in DESs. Molecular docking simulation of the selected DES with the substrate (p-nitrophenyl palmitate) toward PPL was also reported. It is worth noting that ternary DES systems would be viable lipase activators in hydrolysis reactions.
Clinical keratoconus (KCN) detection is a challenging and time-consuming task. In the diagnosis process, ophthalmologists must revise demographic and clinical ophthalmic examinations. The latter include slit-lamb, corneal topographic maps, and Pentacam indices (PI). We propose an Ensemble of Deep Transfer Learning (EDTL) based on corneal topographic maps. We consider four pretrained networks, SqueezeNet (SqN), AlexNet (AN), ShuffleNet (SfN), and MobileNet-v2 (MN), and fine-tune them on a dataset of KCN and normal cases, each including four topographic maps. We also consider a PI classifier. Then, our EDTL method combines the output probabilities of each of the five classifiers to obtain a decision b
Antibiotic resistance is the major growing threat facing the pharmacological treatment of bacterial infections. Therefore, bioprospecting the medicinal plants could provide potential sources for antimicrobial agents. Mimusops, the biggest and widely distributed plant genus of family Sapotaceae, is used in traditional medicines due to its promising pharmacological activities. This study was conducted to elucidate the antimicrobial effect of three unexplored Mimusops spp. (M. kummel, M. laurifolia and M. zeyheri). Furthermore, the mechanisms underlying such antibacterial activity were studied. The Mimusops leaf extracts revealed significant antibacterial activities against the five tested bacter
... Show MoreDesulfurization of a simulated diesel fuel by different adsorbents was studied in a fixed-bed adsorption process operated at ambient temperature and pressure. Three different adsorption beds were used, commercial activated carbon, Cu-Y zeolite, and layered bed of 15wt% activated carbon followed by Cu-Y zeolite.Initially Y-zeolite was prepared from Iraqi rice husk and then impregnated with copper. In general, the adsorbents tested for total sulfur adsorption capacity at break through followed the order Ac/Cu-Y zeolite>Cu-Y zeolite>Ac. The best adsorbent, Ac/Cu-Y zeolite is capable of producing more than 30 cm3 of simulated diesel fuel per gram of adsorbent with a weighted average content of 5 ppm-S, while Cu-Y zeolite producing of
... Show MoreThis paper presents an experimental and numerical study which was carried out to examine the influence of the size and the layout of the web openings on the load carrying capacity and the serviceability of reinforced concrete deep beams. Five full-scale simply supported reinforced concrete deep beams with two large web openings created in shear regions were tested up to failure. The shear span to overall depth ratio was (1.1). Square openings were located symmetrically relative to the midspan section either at the midpoint or at the interior boundaries of the shear span. Two different side dimensions for the square openings were considered, mainly, (200) mm and (230) mm. The strength results proved that the shear capacity of the dee
... Show MoreThis paper presents an experimental and numerical study which was carried out to examine the influence of the size and the layout of the web openings on the load carrying capacity and the serviceability of reinforced concrete deep beams. Five full-scale simply supported reinforced concrete deep beams with two large web openings created in shear regions were tested up to failure. The shear span to overall depth ratio was (1.1). Square openings were located symmetrically relative to the midspan section either at the midpoint or at the interior boundaries of the shear span. Two different side dimensions for the square openings were considered, mainly, (200) mm and (230) mm. The strength results proved that the shear capacity of the dee
... Show MoreThis paper is concerned with introducing an explicit expression for orthogonal Boubaker polynomial functions with some important properties. Taking advantage of the interesting properties of Boubaker polynomials, the definition of Boubaker wavelets on interval [0,1) is achieved. These basic functions are orthonormal and have compact support. Wavelets have many advantages and applications in the theoretical and applied fields, and they are applied with the orthogonal polynomials to propose a new method for treating several problems in sciences, and engineering that is wavelet method, which is computationally more attractive in the various fields. A novel property of Boubaker wavelet function derivative in terms of Boubaker wavelet themsel
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