Does occupational injury research illuminate or obscure occupational safety?

Introduction: The effectiveness of occupational injury research may, at least in part, depend upon the perspective used in that research.

Method: This paper presents two perspectives occupational injury research may adopt - the injury-focused and the occupation-focused perspectives. The injury-focused perspective sees injuries as the primary unit of analysis in occupational injury research.

Spontaneous Aerosol Ejection: Origin of Inorganic Particles in Biomass Pyrolysis.

At high thermal flux and temperatures of approximately 500 °C, lignocellulosic biomass transforms to a reactive liquid intermediate before evaporating to condensable bio-oil for downstream upgrading to renewable fuels and chemicals. However, the existence of a fraction of nonvolatile compounds in condensed bio-oil diminishes the product quality and, in the case of inorganic materials, catalyzes undesirable aging reactions within bio-oil. In this study, ablative pyrolysis of crystalline cellulose was evaluated, with and without doped calcium, for the generation of inorganic-transporting aerosols by reactive boiling ejection from liquid intermediate cellulose.

Broadening the scope of glycosyltransferase-catalyzed sugar nucleotide synthesis.

We described the integration of the general reversibility of glycosyltransferase-catalyzed reactions, artificial glycosyl donors, and a high throughput colorimetric screen to enable the engineering of glycosyltransferases for combinatorial sugar nucleotide synthesis. The best engineered catalyst from this study, the OleD Loki variant, contained the mutations P67T/I112P/T113M/S132F/A242I compared with the OleD wild-type sequence. Evaluated against the parental sequence OleD TDP16 variant used for screening, the OleD Loki variant displayed maximum improvements in k(cat)/K(m) of >400-fold and >15-fold for formation of NDP-glucoses and UDP-sugars, respectively.

High-throughput colorimetric assays for nucleotide sugar formation and glycosyl transfer.

Glycosyltransferases are ubiquitous in nature, catalyzing glycosidic bond formation in the context of an enormous range of substrates, which include all major classes of biological molecules. Because this wide range of substrates lacks a shared, distinguishable feature that can be altered by glycosyl transfer, general assays for detection of glycosyltransferase activity have long been largely limited to low-throughput methods. Of those high-throughput assays reported in the literature, many are confined to specific glycosyl transfer reactions with modified aglycon acceptors selected for their unique analytical properties.