1H NMR study of lithium D-lactate.

Polycrystalline D-lactic acid lithium salt [(R)-2-hydroxypropanoic acid lithium salt, lithium D-lactate] has been investigated by pulsed proton magnetic resonance methods between 77 and 300 K at 25 MHz. The main relaxation mechanism is methyl rotation; the motion is characterized by an activation energy Ea = 14.5 +/- 0.5 kJ/mol and time factor tau 0 = (1.5 +/- 0.5) x 10(-13) s. The activation energy is higher than the potential barrier obtained by ESR and ENDOR techniques for methyl rotation in the lactate radical. The methyl rotation is also responsible for a reduction of the dipolar second moment. Below 100 K the reduction of the dipolar second moment is ascribed to quantum-mechanical tunneling; an excitation energy of 6.1 +/- 1 kJ/mol is derived from a contribution to the spin-lattice relaxation times from the tunneling.     

Reduction of furfural to furfuryl alcohol by ethanologenic strains of bacteria and its effect on ethanol production from xylose

The ethanologenic bacteria Escherichia coli strains KO11 and LYO1, and Klebsiella oxytoca strain P2, were investigated for their ability to metabolize furfural. Using high performance liquid chromatography and ¹³C-nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, furfural was found to be completely biotransformed into furfuryl alcohol by each of the three strains with tryptone and yeast extract as sole carbon sources. This reduction appears to be constitutive with NAD(P)H acting as electron donor. Glucose was shown to be an effective source of reducing power. Succinate inhibited furfural reduction, indicating that flavins are unlikely participants in this process. Furfural at concentrations >10 mM decreased the rate of ethanol formation but did not affect the final yield. Insight into the biochemical nature of this furfural reduction process may help efforts to mitigate furfural toxicity during ethanol production by ethanologenic bacteria.     

Internet Technology in Magnetic Resonance: A Common Gateway Interface Program for the World-Wide Web NMR Spectrometer

A custom-written Common Gateway Interface (CGI) program for remote control of an NMR spectrometer using a World Wide Web browser has been described. The program, running on a UNIX workstation, uses multiple processes to handle concurrent tasks of interacting with the user and with the spectrometer. The program's parent process communicates with the browser and sends out commands to the spectrometer; the child process is mainly responsible for data acquisition. Communication between the processes is via the shared memory mechanism. The WWW pages that have been developed for the system make use of the frames feature of web browsers. The CGI program provides an intuitive user interface to the NMR spectrometer, making, in effect, a complex system an easy-to-use Web appliance.     

Transient chaos measurements using finite-time Lyapunov exponents

The notion of finite-time Lyapunov exponent averaged over initial conditions is used for characterizing transient chaos observed in one-dimensional maps. A model of its dependence on time is verified by comparing theoretically predicted values with those obtained numerically. Finally, the same model is used for estimating duration of transient chaos (rambling time) for some maps from the logistic family.     

A World-Wide Web interface to an NMR spectrometer

The architecture of a multiuser World-Wide Web NMR system has been described. The essential element of the system is the hardware and software interface between the NMR spectrometer and the user on the World-Wide Web. The hardware is a UNIX computer equipped with an S-Bus digital input-output adapter and an external analog-digital converter. Software is a World-Wide Web server and a Common-Gateway Interface program written in C language. By employing the client/server paradigm, many near-simultaneous NMR sessions can take place via the well-known environment of the modern WWW browsers. The interface can be viewed as an inexpensive migration path to upgrading older instrumentation offering much improved capabilities, e.g., faster sampling rates.