This article presents a long-term, multi-wavelength project to understand the epoch of fastest growth of the most massive black holes by using a sample of 40 luminous quasars at z ≃ 4.8.

Editorial on the research topic of biofuels and bioenergy.

Article demonstrates bioconversion of methane to muconic acid, a dicarboxylic acid that can be upgraded to an array of platform chemicals, by three gammaproteobacterial methanotrophs.

Article describes how prebiotic/probiotic supplementation represents a viable option for addressing elevated systemic inflammation and chronic disease risk in overweight individuals. The key findings support that 90-day prebiotic/probiotic supplementation may be associated with reduced adipose tissue inflammation, reduced systemic inflammation, and reduced chronic disease risk.

Authors of the article assert that isoflavonoids play important roles in plant defense and also exhibit a range of mammalian health-promoting activities. They emphasize that understanding the structural basis of isoflavone biosynthesis will facilitate the engineering of new bioactive isoflavonoids.

Article discusses how the global sequencing of microRNA (miRNA; miR) and integration to downstream mRNA expression profiles in early life stages (ELS) of fish following exposure to crude oil determined consistently dysregulated miRNAs regardless of the oil source or fish species. The overlay of differentially expressed miRNAs and mRNAs into in silico software determined that the key roles of these miRNAs were predicted to be involved in cardiovascular, neurological and visually-mediated pathways.

Article using contrast image processing to estimate the concentration of multi-wall carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) in a given network.

Article describes how proanthocyanidins (PAs) are natural flavan-3-ol polymers that contribute protection to plants under biotic and abiotic stress, benefits to human health, and bitterness and astringency to food products. This review extends the conventional understanding with recent findings that provide new insights to address lingering questions and focus strategies for manipulating PA traits in plants.

Article states that chiral materials, similarly to human hands, have distinguishable right-handed and left-handed enantiomers which may behave differently in response to external stimuli, so for the first time the authors use an approach based on the density functional theory (DFT)+PAOFLOW calculations to quantitatively estimate the so-called collinear Rashba–Edelstein effect (REE) that generates spin accumulation parallel to charge current and can manifest as chirality-dependent charge-to-spin conversion in chiral crystals. The authors reveal that the spin accumulation induced in the bulk by an electric current is intrinsically protected by the quasi-persistent spin helix arising from the crystal symmetries present in chiral systems with the Weyl spin–orbit coupling.

This article describes the construction of a novel luminescent azo-linked polymer from 1,3,6,8-tetra(4--aminophenyl)pyrene using a copper(I)-catalyzed oxidative homocoupling reaction.

This article contains a systematic investigation of the nature of the nontrivial interface states in topological/normal insulator (TI/NI) heterostructures.

This article identifies that an rRNA released in hemolysis activates clotting in human and zebrafish plasma. Furthermore, it shows that fish Hgfac plays a role in rRNA-mediated activation of coagulation.

This article provides an overview of the dynamic compositional changes during brassinosteroid-induced cell wall remodeling, and identifies candidate genes for future plant genetic engineering to overcome cell wall recalcitrance.

This article presents Tinker-HP, a massively MPI parallel package dedicated to classical molecular dynamics (MD) and to multiscale simulations, using advanced polarizable force fields (PFF) encompassing distributed multipoles electrostatics.

This article hypothesizes and demonstrates a new mechanism to stabilize the charge separated states via the process of electron exchange among the different acceptor entities in multimodular donor–acceptor conjugates. This work constitutes the first example of stabilizing charge-separated states via the process of electron exchange.

This article proposes that the integration of these signals is mediated through pulses of gene expression that are coordinated through out the plant in a systemic manner by the ROS/Ca⁺² waves.

The article shows how a recently-introduced method from algebraic topology, namely proximal planar vortex 1-cycles, might be helpful in detecting hidden features of the shapes and holes in images, therefore contributing to the solution of both cold and fresh forensic cases. They apply this technique in a recent case, Aldo Moro's death.

Article demonstrating a phononic metamaterial lens (ML) for detection of laterally subwavelength object features in tissue-like phantoms beyond the phononic crystal evanescent zone and Fresnel zone of the emitter.

Article reporting a combined experimental and computational study of the optical properties of individual silicon telluride (Si2Te3) nanoplates.

This article devised, fabricated, and tested a molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) film based electrochemical sensor for selective determination of tyramine.

This article tests if it is possible to piggyback more than one antisense deoxyoligonucleotide (dO) with one vivo morpholino (VMO). The authors previously developed a piggyback knockdown method that was used to knockdown genes in adult zebrafish. In this article, the authors develop a method to knockdown three genes at one time, and by increasing the concentration of VMO by twofold, could knockdown six genes simultaneously. These multiple gene knockdowns will not only increase the efficiency of the method in whole genome-wide knockdowns but will also be useful to study multifactorial disorders.

Article demonstrates an efficient electro-optical modulation by using an edge-plasmon mode specific for the hybrid plasmonic waveguide.

Article exploring the use of pressured and decoctions water to extract anti-diabetic phytochemicals from cinnamon. The extensive metabolite profiling of novel SW and SG extracts and comparison of that with commercially available CC are reported for the first time in this study. The C. zeylanicum, SW accession holds some promise in the management of diabetes.

Video from the Fall 2018 3 Minute Thesis (3MT®) Final Competition. In this video, Muthappan Asokan presents his research methods, findings, and its significance in non-technical language.