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A variety of aminoisoquinoline-5,8-quinones bearing α-amino acids moieties were synthesized from 3-methyl-4-methoxycarbonylisoquinoline-5,8-quinone and diverse L-and D-α-amino acid methyl esters. The members of the series were evaluated for their cytotoxic activity against normal and cancer cell lines by using the (3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide) (MTT) assay. From the current investigation, structure-activity relationships demonstrate that the location and structure of the amino acid fragment plays a significant role in the cytotoxic effects. Moderate to high cytotoxic activity was observed and four members, derived from L-alanine, L-leucine, L-phenylalanine, and D-phenylalanine, were selected as promising compounds by their IC 50 ranging from 0.5 to 6.25 µM and also by their good selectivity indexes (≥2.24).

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This research focused on the evaluation of the potential use of a soil-isolated bacteria, identified as Staphylococcus equorum, for microbial-induced calcite precipitation (MICP) and copper removal. Isolated bacteria were characterized considering growth rate, urease activity, calcium carbonate precipitation, copper tolerance as minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and copper precipitation. Results were compared with Sporosarcina pasteurii, which is considered a model bacteria strain for MICP processes. The results indicated that the S. equorum strain had lower urease activity, calcium removal capacity and copper tolerance than the S. pasteurii strain. However, the culture conditions tested in this study did not consider the halophilic feature of the S. equorum, which could make it a promising bacterial strain to be applied in process water from mining operations when seawater is used as process water. On the other hand, copper removal was insufficient when applying any of the bacteria strains evaluated, most likely due to the formation of a copper–ammonia complex. Thus, the implementation of S. equorum for copper removal needs to be further studied, considering the optimization of culture conditions, which may promote better performance when considering calcium, copper or other metals precipitation.

This article presents an open-source Python software package, dubbed RTGraph, to visualize, process and record physiological signals (electrocardiography, electromyography, etc.) in real-time. RTGraph has a multiprocess architecture. This allows RTGraph to take advantage of multiple cores and to be able to handle data rates typically encountered during the acquisition and processing of biomedical signals. It also allows RTGraph to have a clean separation between the communication and visualization code. The paper presents the architecture and some programming details of RTGraph. It also includes three examples where RTGraph was adapted to work with (i) signals from a Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) in the context of a biomechanical experiment; (ii) electromyography signals to estimate muscle fatigue; and (iii) pressure signals from a device used to monitor nutrition disorders in premature infants.

The incorporation of ICSAD into the construct validity of this ureteroscopy model complements traditional methods used to achieve construct validity (OSATS). To our knowledge, this study is the first report using motion analysis as a tool for performance evaluation in a simulated endourological procedure.

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