Solvent Relaxation in Phospholipid Bilayers: Principles and Recent Applications

Although there exist a number of methods, such as NMR, X-ray, e.g., which explore the hydration of phospholipid bilayers, the solvent relaxation (SR) method has the advantage of simple instrumentation, easy data treatment and possibility of measuring fully hydrated samples. The main information gained from SR by the analysis of recorded “time-resolved emission spectra” (TRES) is micro-viscosity and micro-polarity of the dye microenvironment. Based on these parameters, one can draw conclusions about water structure in the bilayer. In this review, we focus on physical background of this method, on all the procedures that are needed in order to obtain relevant parameters, and on the requirements on the fluorescence dyes. Furthermore, a few recent applications (the effect of curvature, binding of antibacterial peptides and phase transition) illustrating the versatility of this method are mentioned. Moreover, limitations and potential problems are discussed.     

Electronic control of chiral quaternary center creation in the intramolecular asymmetric heck reaction

The Boehringer-Ingelheim phosphinoimidazoline (BIPI) ligands were applied to the formation of chiral quaternary centers in the asymmetric Heck reaction. Several different substrates were examined in detail, using more than 70 members of this new ligand class. Hammett relationships were determined through systematic variation of the ligand electronics. All substrates showed essentially the same Hammett behavior, where enantioselectivity increased as the ligands were made more electron-deficient. Ligand optimization has led to catalysts which give the highest enantioselectivities reported to date for these difficult systems.     

New solvent systems for thin-layer chromatographic determination of nine biogenic amines in fish and squid

Different solvent systems were evaluated for their ability to separate biogenic amines by thin-layer chromatography (TLC). Dansyl derivatives of agmatine, putrescine, tryptamine, cadaverine, spermidine, histamine, spermine, tyramine and beta-phenylethylamine were separated using the solvent system chloroform-diethyl ether-triethylamine (6:4:1), followed by chloroform-triethylamine (6:1). After separation dansyl amines were quantified by fluorescence densitometry at 330 nm. Correlation coefficients of linear regressions were higher than 0.99 for all amines, except for agmatine (0.976). Detection limits were 10ng for tryptamine, tyramine, histamine and beta-phenylethylamine, and 5 ng for the other amines. The overall repeatability of the chromatography was 1.82% when including agmatine and barely 1.02% for the other amines. The accuracy ranged from 105.97% (agmatine) to 49.92% (tryptamine). This thin-layer chromatography method was found to be an effective and precise analytical procedure to separate and determine biogenic amines. Its main advantages compared to previous procedures are that it uses less harmful solvent (diethyl ether instead of benzene) and can separate a larger group of biogenic amines.     

Pancyclicity of Strong Products of Graphs

We prove that the strong product of graphs G₁××G_n is pancyclic, in particular hamiltonian, for nc for any cln(25/12)+1/640.75 whenever all G_i are connected graphs with the maximum degree at most .This research was supported by KONTAKT ME 337 as a part of REU programme and in part by GACR 201/99/0242The author acknowledges partial support by NSF grant DMS-9900969 and by Institute for Theoretical Computer ScienceThe author acknowledges partial support by Institute for Theoretical Computer ScienceInstitute for Theoretical Computer Science is supported by Ministry of Education of Czech Republic as project LN00A056Final version received: August 6, 2003     

Improved surface chemistries, thin film deposition techniques, and stamp designs for nanotransfer printing

Nanotransfer printing represents an additive approach for patterning thin layers of solid materials with nanometer resolution. The surface chemistries, thin film deposition techniques, and stamp designs are all important for the proper operation of this method. This paper presents some details concerning processing procedures and other considerations needed for patterning two- and three-dimensional nanostructures with low density of defects and minimal distortions.     

Active site structure and redox processes of cytochrome c oxidase immobilised in a novel biomimetic lipid membrane on an electrode

Membrane-bound cytochrome c oxidase was attached to an electrode via a His-tag linker and studied by surface enhanced resonance Raman spectroscopy, demonstrating intact redox site structures and electron transfer between the electrode and the immobilized enzyme.     

Immunomagnetic separation and detection of Salmonella cells using newly designed carriers

A new method for simultaneous determination of alkoxyethanols (2-methoxyethanol, 2-ethoxyethanol, 2-isopropoxyethanol, and 2-butoxyethanol) by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with fluorescence detection has been developed. The alkoxyethanols and an internal standard (2-phenoxyethanol) were derivatized by treatment with 1-anthroylnitrile to give the anthroyl esters. The esterification was completed in 30 min in the presence of quinuclidine as base catalyst at room temperature. After stopping the reaction, an aliquot of the final solution was injected into the HPLC. The resulting anthroyl esters of the alkoxyethanols and the internal standard were separated on a C18 reversed-phase column with acetonitrile-water-acetic acid (65:35:0.1, v/v) as the mobile phase and detected fluorimetrically at excitation and emission wavelengths of 360 nm and 460 nm, respectively. The detection limits of the derivatives as alkoxyethanols at a signal-to-noise ratio of 3 were in the range of 1-3 pg per injection. The minimal amounts of alkoxyethanols derivatized in the reaction mixture for derivatization to determine the limits of detection were approximately 0.5 ng. This HPLC method was applied to the determination of some of alkoxyethanols in the air of the workplace where the thinner containing alkoxyethanols was used for painting.     

Computational complexity of stable partitions with B-preferences

Consider a special stable partition problem in which the player's preferences over sets to which she could belong are identical with her preferences over the most attractive member of a set and in case of indifference the set of smaller cardinality is preferred. If the preferences of all players over other (individual) players are strict, a strongly stable and a stable partition always exists. However, if ties are present, we show that both the existence problems are NP-complete. These results are very similar to what is known for the stable roommates problem. Received: July 2000/Revised: October 2002 RID="*" ID="*"  This work was supported by the Slovak Agency for Science, contract #1/7465/20 “Combinatorial Structures and Complexity of Algorithms”.