“
“A novel compound, diethyl(3-methylureido)(phenyl)methylphosphonate (DEP), possessing an organophosphate skeleton, was synthesized and used as a dummy template to prepare molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) for the recognition of organophosphate pesticide analogs. Computational modeling was used to study the primary intermolecular interactions in the prepolymerization mixture. It was found that the interaction force between DEP and the monomers was hydrogen bonding. A series of MIPs were synthesized with different

monomers and GDC-0973 ic50 were evaluated by adsorption experiments, which showed that methacrylic acid was used as an appropriate monomer and a molar ratio of DEP to selleck screening library MAA of 1 : 9 was optimal. Scatchard analysis showed that there might have been two types of binding sites in the MIPs. DEP and several pesticides were used in molecular recognition specificity tests of DEPMIP, which exhibited better selectivity and reservation ability for organophosphate pesticides, such as methamidophos and orthene, possessing amino or imino groups and a smaller steric hindrance. On the basis of the use of a dummy molecule as template, the problem of template leakage could be avoided; this, thereby, improved the specificity of analysis. (C) 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci,

2012″
“Darwinian processes should favour those individuals that deploy the most effective strategies for acquiring information about their environment. We organized a computer-based tournament to investigate which learning strategies would perform well in a changing environment. The most successful strategies relied almost exclusively on social learning (here, learning a behaviour performed by another individual) rather than asocial learning, even when environments were changing rapidly; moreover, successful strategies focused learning

effort on periods of environmental change. Here, we use data from tournament simulations to examine how these strategies might affect cultural evolution, as reflected in Metabolism inhibitor the amount of culture (i.e. number of cultural traits) in the population, the distribution of cultural traits across individuals, and their persistence through time. We found that high levels of social learning are associated with a larger amount of more persistent knowledge, but a smaller amount of less persistent expressed behaviour, as well as more uneven distributions of behaviour, as individuals concentrated on exploiting a smaller subset of behaviour patterns. Increased rates of environmental change generated increases in the amount and evenness of behaviour. These observations suggest that copying confers on cultural populations an adaptive plasticity, allowing them to respond to changing environments rapidly by drawing on a wider knowledge base.