Determination of alcohols by high-performance liquid chromatography with fluorimetric detection after pre-column derivatisation with carbazole-9-N-acetic acid and chromatographic behaviour of alcoholic derivatives

Alcohols were derivatised to their carbazole-9-N-acetic acid (CRA) esters with 1-ethyl-3-(3-dimethylaminopropyl)carbodiimide hydrochloride (EDC . HCl) as the dehydrating agent. Studies on derivatisation conditions indicated that the coupling reaction proceeded rapidly and smoothly in the presence of a base catalyst in acetonitrile to give the corresponding sensitively fluorescent derivatives. The retention behaviour of alcohol derivatives was investigated by varying mobile phase compositions (ACN-water and MeOH-water). The parameters from the equation log k'=A-BX were evaluated by retention data of derivatives using an isocratic elution with different mobile phases. The results indicated that the parameters derived allowed computation of retention factors in good agreement with experiments. At the same time, a general equation was derived that makes possible predictions of partition coefficient in binary mobile phases with different proportions of organic solvent to water based on some simple regression analysis. The LC separation for the derivatised alcohols containing higher carbon alcohols showed good reproducibility on a reversed-phase C-18 column with gradient elution. The detection limits (excitation at 335 nm, emission at 360 nm) for derivatised alcohols (signal-to-noise ratio=3:1) were in the range of 0.1-0.4 pg per injection. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

5-9岁儿童对常见食物及其功能的认知发展

Research on naïve biology investigates children spontaneous understanding of biology objects, phenomena and function. Previous researches focus mostly on biology phenomena. Little has done on organism’s function, such as eating food. Many research in this field found that children were unable to categorize food by nutrition criterion, but rely on physical cues. In order to investigate the development of children’s naïve understanding of food and to find if they can classify food by nutrition criterion, three age groups (5-year-olds, 7-year-olds, and 9-year-olds) were included in this study. Varies experimental tasks were also used to explore the children’s understanding of food and its function. The results showed as the followings: 1) A few 5-year- old children can classify food by nutrition criterion when they take the spontaneous classification task. However, more and more children can realize what make a kind of food different from another can be the nutrition it contains. 2) Kindergarteners can find the relation between food and its output. When they become older, more and more children can explain the relation by consistent theory. It can be said that 9-year-old children have already have a profound understanding of nutrition. They gradually developed naive theory of biology on nutrition level. 3) Even kindergarteners can understand the concept of “food balance”. However, with development there was a significant age increase in food balance choice. 4) Children’s knowledge of food balance grows with age, but urban and rural educational background influence cognitive performance.

5-9岁儿童对常见病病因及其致病不确定性的认知发展

Research on children's naive concepts has previously tended to focus on the domains of physics and psychology, but more recently attention has turned to conceptual development in biology as a core domain of knowledge. Because of its familiarity, illness has been a popular topic for researchers in this domain. However, they have only studied the children’s understanding of its causes. Other aspects of illness, such as treatment and prognosis, have received little attention. This research addresses the development of 5- to 9-year-old children’s understanding of the causes of illness and their probabilities via open-ended and forced choice interviews. The results of this research are: 1) Most of the 5- to 7-year-old children used behavioral causes to explain illness, and the 9-year-old children primarily used biological causes to interpret illness. With age, more and more children selected psychological causes to explain illness. 2) Pre-school children did not over-generalize contagions to non-contagious illnesses. They used behavioral and biological causes to explain contagious illnesses. For non-contagious illnesses, they chose only behavioral causes. 3) Most of the children used only one kind of cause to explain illness. 4) Some preschool-aged children viewed outcomes of familiar causes of illness as probabilistic. With age, more and more could make uncertain predictions of illness. 5) The children’s understanding of the causes’ probabilities appeared to be based on naïve biology. 5- to 9-year-old children often made probabilistic predictions by analyzing a single cause of illness. 6) Children coming from higher educational backgrounds outperformed their counterparts coming from lower educational backgrounds with respect to understanding illness. 7) Specific knowledge acquired could generally improved the preschoolers’ understanding of causes of illness and their probabilities.

Analysis of phenols by high-performance liquid chromatography with pre-column derivatization by 2-(9-carbazole)-ethyl-chloroformate

2-(9-Carbazole)-ethyl-chloroformate (CEOC), a novel pre-column fluorescence labeling reagent, has been synthesized and applied for the derivatization of phenols. Taken phenol, p-chlorophenol, 2,5-dimethylphenol, 2,4-dichlorophenol and 1,4-dihydroxybenzene as testing standards, the effects of derivatization conditions, such as pH of borate buffer, reaction time and fluorescent tagging reagent concentration, have been systematically studied. Under the optimized conditions, CEOC reacts readily with the phenols to form stable derivatives with excitation and emission wavelengths, respectively, at 293 and 360 nm. The single step derivatization reaction could be finished within 20 min even at room temperature. Such a method has been successfully applied to the analysis of phenols in printing ink by high-performance liquid chromatography. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.