Publications by authors named "Zao Liu"

Artefacts in high-resolution multidimensional nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra, known as t noise, can significantly downgrade the spectral quality and remain a significant noise source, limiting the sensitivity of most two-dimensional NMR experiments. In addition to highly sensitive hardware and experimental designs, data post-processing is a relatively simple and cost-effective method for suppressing t noise. In this study, histograms and quantiles were used to obtain a robust estimation of noise level.

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Fusarium oxysporum (Fo) is an important species complex of soil-borne pathogenic fungi that cause vascular wilt diseases of agricultural crops and some opportunistic diseases of humans. The fungicide phenamacril has been extensively reported to have antifungal activity against Fusarium graminearum and Fusarium fujikuroi. In this study, we found that the amino acid substitutions (V151A and S418T) in Type I myosin FoMyo5 cause natural low resistance to phenamacril in the plant pathogenic Fo isolates.

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Background: Software for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometers offer general functionality of instrument control and data processing; these applications are often developed with non-scripting languages. NMR users need to flexibly integrate rapidly developing NMR applications with emerging technologies. Scripting systems offer open environments for NMR users to write custom programs.

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Flexibility and extensibility are important issues in the design of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) software, as these determine the ability to integrate a variety of continuously evolving data acquisition and processing methods. Here, SpinStudioJ is introduced. It is an NMR data acquisition and processing workbench with a plug-in-based architecture.

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The influence of lecithin from egg yolk (LE) on calcium carbonate (CaCO3) biomineralization was investigated. In the present study, spherical CaCO3 particles were synthesized via coprecipitation in the presence of LE. LE multilamellar liposomes were first tuned by sonication to provide better control over the nucleation of CaCO3.

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Most existing gradient shimming methods for NMR spectrometers estimate field maps that resolve B0 inhomogeneity spatially from dual gradient-echo (GRE) images acquired at different echo times. However, the distortions induced by B0 inhomogeneity that always exists in the GRE images can result in estimated field maps that are distorted in both geometry and intensity, leading to inaccurate shimming. This work proposes a new gradient shimming method based on undistorted field map of B0 inhomogeneity obtained by a more accurate field map estimation technique.

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Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal progressive neurodegenerative disorder. Current diagnosis time is about 12-months due to lack of objective methods. Previous brain white matter voxel based morphometry (VBM) studies in ALS reported inconsistent results.

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A robust automatic phase correction method for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectra is presented. In this work, a new strategy combining 'coarse tuning' with 'fine tuning' is introduced to correct various spectra accurately. In the 'coarse tuning' procedure, a new robust baseline recognition method is proposed for determining the positions of the tail ends of the peaks, and then the preliminary phased spectra are obtained by minimizing the objective function based on the height difference of these tail ends.

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Escherichia coli W, a sucrose-positive strain, was engineered for the homofermentative production of D-lactic acid through chromosomal deletion of the competing fermentative pathway genes (adhE, frdABCD, pta, pflB, aldA) and the repressor gene (cscR) of the sucrose operon, and metabolic evolution for improved anaerobic cell growth. The resulting strain, HBUT-D, efficiently fermented 100 g sucrose l(-1) into 85 g D-lactic acid l(-1) in 72-84 h in mineral salts medium with a volumetric productivity of ~1 g l(-1) h(-1), a product yield of 85 % and D-lactic acid optical purity of 98.3 %, and with a minor by-product of 4 g acetate l(-1).

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A new automatic baseline correction method for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectra is presented. It is based on an improved baseline recognition method and a new iterative baseline modeling method. The presented baseline recognition method takes advantages of three baseline recognition algorithms in order to recognize all signals in spectra.

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