Isolation and structural determination of non-racemic tertiary cathinone derivatives

The racemic tertiary cathinones N,N-dimethylcathinone (1), N,N-diethylcathinone (2) and 2-(1-pyrrolidinyl)-propiophenone (3) have been prepared in reasonable yield and characterized using NMR and mass spectroscopy. HPLC indicates that these compounds are isolated as the anticipated racemic mixture. These can then be co-crystallized with (+)-O,O′-di-p-toluoyl-d-tartaric, (+)-O,O′-dibenzoyl-d-tartaric and (-)-O,O′-dibenzoyl-l-tartaric acids giving the single enantiomers S and R respectively of 1, 2 and 3, in the presence of sodium hydroxide through a dynamic kinetic resolution. X-ray structural determination confirmed the enantioselectivity. The free amines could be obtained following basification and extraction. In methanol these are reasonably stable for the period of several hours, and their identity was confirmed by HPLC and CD spectroscopy.

An Environment for Rapid Derivatives Design and Experimentation

In the highly competitive world of modern finance, new derivatives are continually required to take advantage of changes in financial markets, and to hedge businesses against new risks. The research described in this paper aims to accelerate the development and pricing of new derivatives in two different ways. Firstly, new derivatives can be specified mathematically within a general framework, enabling new mathematical formulae to be specified rather than just new parameter settings. This Generic Pricing Engine (GPE) is expressively powerful enough to specify a wide range of stand¬ard pricing engines. Secondly, the associated price simulation using the Monte Carlo method is accelerated using GPU or multicore hardware. The parallel implementation (in OpenCL) is automatically derived from the mathematical description of the derivative. As a test, for a Basket Option Pricing Engine (BOPE) generated using the GPE, on the largest problem size, an NVidia GPU runs the generated pricing engine at 45 times the speed of a sequential, specific hand-coded implementation of the same BOPE. Thus a user can more rapidly devise, simulate and experiment with new derivatives without actual programming.

Nuclear import of HIV-1 integrase is inhibited in vitro by styrylquinoline derivatives

Nuclear import of HIV-1 preintegration complexes (PICs) allows the virus to infect nondividing cells. Integrase (IN), the PIC-associated viral enzyme responsible for the integration of the viral genome into the host cell DNA, displays karyophilic properties and has been proposed to participate to the nuclear import of the PIC. Styrylquinolines (SQs) have been shown to block viral replication at nontoxic concentrations and to inhibit IN 3'-processing activity in vitro by competing with the DNA substrate binding. However, several lines of evidence suggested that SQs could have a postentry, preintegrative antiviral effect in infected cells. To gain new insights on the mechanism of their antiviral activity, SQs were assayed for their ability to affect nuclear import of HIV-1 IN and compared with the effect of a specific strand transfer inhibitor. Using an in vitro transport assay, we have previously shown that IN import is a saturable mechanism, thus showing that a limiting cellular factor is involved in this process. We now demonstrate that SQs specifically and efficiently inhibit in vitro nuclear import of IN without affecting other import pathways, whereas a specific strand transfer inhibitor does not affect IN import. These data suggest that SQs not only inhibit IN-DNA interaction but would also inhibit the interaction between IN and the cellular factor required for its nuclear import.

A Non-catalytic Deep Desulphurization Process using Hydrodynamic Cavitation

A novel approach is developed for desulphurization of fuels or organics without use of catalyst. In this process, organic and aqueous phases are mixed in a predefined manner under ambient conditions and passed through a cavitating device. Vapor cavities formed in the cavitating device are then collapsed which generate (in-situ) oxidizing species which react with the sulphur moiety resulting in the removal of sulphur from the organic phase. In this work, vortex diode was used as a cavitating device. Three organic solvents (n-octane, toluene and n-octanol) containing known amount of a model sulphur compound (thiophene) up to initial concentrations of 500 ppm were used to verify the proposed method. A very high removal of sulphur content to the extent of 100% was demonstrated. The nature of organic phase and the ratio of aqueous to organic phase were found to be the most important process parameters. The results were also verified and substantiated using commercial diesel as a solvent. The developed process has great potential for deep of various organics, in general, and for transportation fuels, in particular.