Simplified Synthesis and Stability Assessment of Aflatoxin B1-Lysine and Aflatoxin G1-Lysine

Aflatoxins B1 (AFB1) and G1 (AFG1) are carcinogenic mycotoxins that contaminate crops such as maize and groundnuts worldwide. The broadly accepted method to assess chronic human aflatoxin exposure is by quantifying the amount of aflatoxin adducted to human serum albumin. This has been reported using ELISA, HPLC, or LC-MS/MS to measure the amount of AFB1-lysine released after proteolysis of serum albumin. LC-MS/MS is the most accurate method but requires both isotopically labelled and unlabelled AFB1-lysine standards, which are not commercially available. In this work, we report a simplified synthetic route to produce unlabelled, deuterated and 13C6 15N2 labelled aflatoxin B1-lysine and for the first-time aflatoxin G1-lysine. Additionally, we report on the stability of these compounds during storage. This simplified synthetic approach will make the production of these important standards more feasible for laboratories performing aflatoxin exposure studies.

Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Power System Transient Stability Assessment

The high penetration of renewable energy sources, coupled with decommissioning of conventional power plants, leads to the reduction of power system inertia. This has negative repercussions on the transient stability of power systems. The purpose of this paper is to review the state-of-the-art regarding the application of artificial intelligence to the power system transient stability assessment, with a focus on different machine, deep, and reinforcement learning techniques. The review covers data generation processes (from measurements and simulations), data processing pipelines (features engineering, splitting strategy, dimensionality reduction), model building and training (including ensembles and hyperparameter optimization techniques), deployment, and management (with monitoring for detecting bias and drift). The review focuses, in particular, on different deep learning models that show promising results on standard benchmark test cases. The final aim of the review is to point out the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches, present current challenges with existing models, and offer a view of the possible future research opportunities.