The development of new strategies for synthesis of trifluoromethylthiolate compounds is of considerable importance in pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and advanced materials. Accordingly, currently much attention is being devoted to the development of effective methods and reagents for their synthesis. In contrast, considerably less effort has been afforded to the development of preparing CSeCF3 bonds. Herein we report a concise route to synthesize a family of copper(I) trifluoromethylselenolate reagents by the reaction of CuI with the Ruppert's reagent (Me3 SiCF3 ), KF, and elemental selenium in the presence of dinitrogen ligands in CH3 CN at room temperature. The reagent [Cu(bpy)(SeCF3 )]2 was proven to be air-stable and highly efficient for nucleophilic trifluoromethylthselenolation of a broad range of (hetero)aryl halides and alkyl halides. This method represents a powerful protocol for the construction trifluoromethylselenolate compounds.

SUMMARYSufficient dimension reduction is popular for reducing data dimensionality without stringent model assumptions. However, most existing methods may work poorly for binary classification. For example, sliced inverse regression (Li, 1991) can estimate at most one direction if the response is binary. In this paper we propose principal weighted support vector machines, a unified framework for linear and nonlinear sufficient dimension reduction in binary classification. Its asymptotic properties are studied, and an efficient computing algorithm is proposed. Numerical examples demonstrate its performance in binary classification.

Quantile regression (QR) is a very useful statistical tool for learning the relationship between the response variable and covariates. For many applications, one often needs to estimate multiple conditional quantile functions of the response variable given covariates. Although one can estimate multiple quantiles separately, it is of great interest to estimate them simultaneously. One advantage of simultaneous estimation is that multiple quantiles can share strength among them to gain better estimation accuracy than individually estimated quantile functions. Another important advantage of joint estimation is the feasibility of incorporating simultaneous non-crossing constraints of QR functions. In this paper, we propose a new kernel-based multiple QR estimation technique, namely simultaneous non-crossing quantile regression (SNQR). We use kernel representations for QR functions and apply constraints on the kernel coefficients to avoid crossing. Both unregularised and regularised SNQR techniques are considered. Asymptotic properties such as asymptotic normality of linear SNQR and oracle properties of the sparse linear SNQR are developed. Our numerical results demonstrate the competitive performance of our SNQR over the original individual QR estimation.

Copper(I) fluoride complexes ligated by phenanthroline derivatives have been synthesized and structurally characterized by X-ray crystallography. These complexes adopt as either ionic or neutral forms in the solid state, depending on the steric bulkiness of the substituent groups on the phenanthroline ligands. These complexes react with primary and secondary alkyl bromides to produce the corresponding alkyl fluorides in modest to good yields. This new method is compatible with a variety of important functional groups such as ether, thioether, amide, nitrile, methoxyl, hydroxyl, ketone, ester, and heterocycle moieties.

The anatomical structure of Tibetan kefir grains (TKGs), and the monosaccharides and characteristics of the exopolysaccharides (EPS) under different conditions were explored. Tibetan kefir grains are internal vesicle-like grains containing liquid polysaccharides, and these proliferate in an 'umbilical cord'-like manner. Lactic acid bacteria are located on the outside and acetic acid bacteria on the inner surface of the TKGs. Biofilms of Acetobacter orientalis and the TKGs showed that they had similar monosaccharide compositions. The apparent viscosity of the EPS positively correlated with the polysaccharide concentration and negatively correlated with the shear rate. A biofilm hypothesis of the TKG formation mechanism was proposed.