Health-related quality of life across menopausal stages among middle-aged Korean women.

Objectives: We examined the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) during menopause transition (MT) among middle-aged Korean women.

Methods: This cross-sectional study comprised 2,290 middle-aged women who completed web-based questionnaires between 2020 and 2022. Based on self-reported menstrual cycle patterns, menopause status was classified as premenopausal, early or late transition, or postmenopausal.

Attachment of Hydrogel Patches to Eye Tissue through Gel Transfer using Flexible Foils.

Glaucoma, a leading cause of blindness, demands innovative and effective treatments that surpass the limitations of current drug and surgical interventions to lower intraocular pressure. This study describes the generation of cell-repellent hydrogel patches, their deposition on the ocular surface, and a photoinduced chemical binding between the patches and the collagens of the eye. The hydrophilic and protein-repellent hydrogel patch is composed of a copolymer made from dimethylacrylamide and a comonomer unit with anthraquinone moieties.

Carbazole-Bismaleimide Based Hyper-Cross-Linked Porous Organic Polymer for Efficient Iodine Capture.

Radioactive iodine, a key waste product of nuclear energy, has been a significant concern among nuclear materials because of its high volatility and its ability to easily enter the human metabolism. Porous materials containing a large number of N-heterocyclic units such as carbazole in the skeletons use as effective adsorbents showing high iodine capture capacities. Herein, a new carbazole-bismaleimide-based hyper-cross-linked porous organic polymer (CzBMI-POP) was successfully prepared from a new tetra-armed carbazole-maleimide monomer (Bis-Cz(BMI)), which contains biscarbazole units and maleimide side groups.

Directed Evolution's Selective Use of Quantum Tunneling in Designed Enzymes─A Combined Theoretical and Experimental Study.

Natural enzymes are powerful catalysts, reducing the apparent activation energy for reactions and enabling chemistry to proceed as much as 10 times faster than the corresponding solution reaction. It has been suggested for some time that, in some cases, quantum tunneling can contribute to this rate enhancement by offering pathways through a barrier inaccessible to activated events. A central question of interest to both physical chemists and biochemists is the extent to which evolution introduces mechanisms below the barrier, or tunneling mechanisms.

Structured Liquid--Liquid Emulsion Stabilized by Surface-Engineered Liquid Metal Droplets as "Mutant" Pickering Emulsifiers.

Liquid metals (LMs), i.e., metals and alloys that exist in a liquid state at room temperature, have recently attracted considerable attention owing to their electronic and rheological properties useful in various cutting-edge technologies.

Spectrum of Dermatoses Affecting the Lower Leg and Foot in an Outpatient Clinic at a Tertiary Care Hospital.

Background: Infective and noninfective dermatoses of the lower leg and foot can be attributed to factors such as infections, blood stagnation, chemical contact, and abnormal mechanics. These factors make the lower leg and foot more susceptible to microbial infections, contact dermatitis, stasis eczema, ulcers, corns, and calluses.

Objective: To identify the patterns of infective and noninfective dermatoses on the lower leg and foot.

Cell-free assays reveal that the HIV-1 capsid protects reverse transcripts from cGAS immune sensing.

Retroviruses can be detected by the innate immune sensor cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS), which recognizes reverse-transcribed DNA and activates an antiviral response. However, the extent to which HIV-1 shields its genome from cGAS recognition remains unclear. To study this process in mechanistic detail, we reconstituted reverse transcription, genome release, and innate immune sensing of HIV-1 in a cell-free system.

Improving paraffin precipitate inhibition using glycine and Palm-based Methyl Ester Sulfonate (MES) eco-friendly inhibitors.

Oil fields located in cold environments and deep-sea locations often face challenges with paraffin wax buildup in pipelines during long-distance crude oil transportation. Various strategies have been employed to address this issue, with chemical methods being the most effective and economical. However, traditional chemical inhibitors present problems due to their high toxicity and low biodegradability, leading to increased operational costs and environmental concerns.

Designing High-Damping, Optically Clear Ionogels through Competitive Binding for Flexible and Impact-Resistant Applications.

Developing damping materials that are both optically transparent and mechanically robust, while offering broad frequency damping capacity, is a significant challenge─particularly for devices that require protection without compromising visual clarity. Conventional methods often either fail to maintain transparency or involve complex designs that are difficult to implement. Here, we present an ionogel system that integrates a physically cross-linked elastic copolymer network with a viscous ionic liquid.

Triethylamine-mediated protonation-deprotonation unlocks dual-drug self assembly to suppress breast cancer progression and metastasis.

Carrier-free nanomedicines exhibited significant potential in elevating drug efficacy and safety for tumor management, yet their self assembly typically relied on chemical modifications of drugs or the incorporation of surfactants, thereby compromising the drug's inherent pharmacological activity. To address this challenge, we proposed a triethylamine (TEA)-mediated protonation-deprotonation strategy that enabled the adjustable-proportion self assembly of dual drugs without chemical modification, achieving nearly 100% drug loading capacity. Molecular dynamic simulations, supported by experiment evidence, elucidated the underlying self-assembly mechanism.

Enzymes in a human cytoplasm model organize into submetabolon complexes.

Enzyme-enzyme interactions are fundamental to the function of cells. Their atomistic mechanisms remain elusive mainly due to limitations of in-cell measurements. We address this challenge by atomistically modeling, for a total of ≈80 μs, a slice of the human cell cytoplasm that includes three successive enzymes along the glycolytic pathway: glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH), phosphoglycerate kinase (PGK), and phosphoglycerate mutase (PGM).

Theoretical Study on Adsorption of Halogenated Benzenes on Montmorillonites Modified With M(I)/M(II) Cations.

Halogenated benzenes (HBs) are hydrophobic organic chemicals belonging to persistent organic pollutants. Owing to their persistence, they represent a serious problem in environmental contamination, specifically of soils and sediments. One of the most important physical processes determining the fate of HBs in soils is adsorption to main soil components such as soil organic matter and soil minerals.

Improving Bond Dissociations of Reactive Machine Learning Potentials through Physics-Constrained Data Augmentation.

In the field of computational chemistry, predicting bond dissociation energies (BDEs) presents well-known challenges, particularly due to the multireference character of reactive systems. Many chemical reactions involve configurations where single-reference methods fall short, as the electronic structure can significantly change during bond breaking. As generating training data for partially broken bonds is a challenging task, even state-of-the-art reactive machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) often fail to predict reliable BDEs and smooth dissociation curves.

Functional Characterization of an Aldol Condensation Synthase PheG for the Formation of Hispidin from Phellinus Igniarius.

Hispidin (1) is a polyphenolic compound with a wide range of pharmacological activities that is distributed in both plants and fungi. In addition to natural extraction, hispidin can be obtained by chemical or enzymatic synthesis. In this study, the identification and characterization of an undescribed enzyme, PheG, from Phellinus igniarius (P.

Transition Metal-Coordinated Polymer Achieves Stable Seawater Oxidation over NiFe Layered Double Hydroxide.

Seawater electrolysis has emerged as a promising approach for the generation of hydrogen energy, but the production of deleterious chlorine derivatives (e.g., chloride and hypochlorite) presents a significant challenge due to the severe corrosion at the anode.

Accurate and efficient representation of intramolecular energy in ab initio generation of crystal structures. Part III: partitioning into torsional groups.

We present an approach to reduce this computational cost substantially, based on the partitioning of the molecule into geometrically separated torsional groups, with the dependence of the intramolecular energy and atomic point charges and dependent degrees of freedom on molecular conformation being computed as a linear combination of the contributions of these groups. This can lead to large savings in computational cost without a significant impact on accuracy, as demonstrated in the cases of N-acetyl-para-aminophenol (paracetamol) and methyl 4-hydroxybenzoate (methyl paraben). The approach is also applied successfully to two larger molecules, benzyl [4-(4-methyl-5-[(4-methylphenyl)sulfonyl]-1,3-thiazol-2-yl)phenyl]carbamate (molecule XX from the fifth CSP blind test) and (2S)-2-[4-(3-fluorobenzyloxy)benzylamino]propionamide (safinamide), for which we conduct the first reported CSP study.

Synthesis, biological activities, DFT calculations and molecular docking studies of O-methyl-inositols.

The concise synthesis of O-methyled-inositol derivative and conduritol derivatives was obtained starting from p-benzoquinone. Spectroscopic methods have been performed for characterization of new synthesized compounds. Cyclitols are useful molecules with anticancer, antibiotic, antinutrient and antileukemic activity.

An Automated Approach for Domain-Specific Knowledge Graph Generation─Graph Measures and Characterization.

In 2020, nearly 3 million scientific and engineering papers were published worldwide (White, K. Publications Output: U.S.

The divergent reactivity of β-diketiminato aluminium hydrides with organophosphoryl compounds.

The reactions of LAlH (L = HC(CMeNAr), Ar = 2,6-PrCH) (1) with diphenylphosphane oxide [PhP(O)H], diphenylphosphinamide [PhP(O)NH], and diaryl/alkyl phosphane [(RO)P(O)H (R = Ph, or Pr)] afford their corresponding compounds with compositions LAl(H)OP(Ph) (2), LAl[OP(Ph)] (3), LAl{[N(H)P(O)(Ph)][OP(Ph)]} (4), LAl(OPr) (5), and LAl(OPh) (6), respectively. These reactions probably undergo a process of dehydrogenation coupling, deaminating dehydrogenation coupling, or chain-breaking coupling. It is noteworthy to mention that the reaction of compound 1 with 2 equiv.

Net Benefit of Early Anticoagulation for Stroke With Atrial Fibrillation: Post Hoc Analysis of the ELAN Randomized Clinical Trial.

Importance: The net clinical effect of early vs later direct oral anticoagulant (DOAC) initiation after atrial fibrillation-associated ischemic stroke is unclear.

Objective: To investigate whether early DOAC treatment is associated with a net clinical benefit (NCB).

Design, Setting, And Participants: This was a post hoc analysis of the Early Versus Late Initiation of Direct Oral Anticoagulants in Post-Ischaemic Stroke Patients With Atrial Fibrillation (ELAN) open-label randomized clinical trial conducted across 103 sites in 15 countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia between November 6, 2017, and September 12, 2022, with a 90-day follow-up.

Severe Deficiency of Vitamin D and Anthracycline-Taxane Regimen are associated with Cachexia Following Breast Cancer Chemotherapy: A Single Center Assessment Using Two Consensus-Based Criteria.

Background: Cancer cachexia in breast cancer (BC) patients is not commonly reported, particularly in Indonesia. This study assessed the prevalence of cachexia in local patients with BC receiving chemotherapy, and the associated factors.

Methods: This cross-sectional study included 160 BC patients who started chemotherapy between July 2018 and June 2022.

Design, Synthesis and Biological Evaluation of Thiazolidine-2,4-dione-biphenyl Derivatives as Anticancer Agents.

Objective: A new library of Thiazolidine-2,4-dione-biphenyl Derivatives derivatives (10a-j) was designed and synthesized. All compounds were characterized by spectral data. Further, these were evaluated for their in vitro anticancer activity.

Comparative characterization of organ-specific phase I and II biotransformation enzyme kinetics in salmonid S9 sub-cellular fractions and cell lines.

Advancing in vitro systems to address the effects of chemical pollution requires a thorough characterization of their functionalities, such as their repertoire of biotransformation enzymes. Currently, knowledge regarding the presence, activity magnitudes, and inducibility of different biotransformation pathways in vitro is scarce, particularly across organs. We report organ-specific kinetics for phase I and II biotransformation enzymes, under basal and induced conditions, in two in vitro systems using salmonid fish: S9 sub-cellular fractions from brown trout (Salmo trutta) and rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) were compared with rainbow trout cell lines.

Hydrogeochemical characterization of shallow and deep groundwater for drinking and irrigation water quality index of Kathmandu Valley, Nepal.

A comprehensive hydrogeochemical analysis of 156 groundwater samples (106 shallow and 50 deep) was conducted in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. This study addresses a significant research gap by focusing on the hydro-geochemical composition and contamination of groundwater in the Kathmandu Valley, an area with limited detailed assessments. The novelty of this work lies in its comprehensive analysis of both shallow and deep groundwater, particularly concerning the high concentration of contaminants like arsenic, microbial pathogens, and ammonium, which are critical for public health.

Inhibition of amyloid-beta aggregation by phenyl butyric acid analogs and bile acids: a comprehensive in silico study.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a degenerative neurological disorder defined by the formation of β-amyloid (Aβ) plaques and neurofibrillary tangles within the brain. Current pharmacological treatments for AD only provide symptomatic relief, and there is a lack of definitive disease-modifying therapies. Chemical chaperones, such as 4-Phenylbutyric acid (4PBA) and Tauroursodeoxycholic acid, have shown neuroprotective effects in animal and cell culture models.