Theoretical study of the role of solvent Stark effect in electron transitions

The possible influence of the solvent Stark effect (SSE) on the solvatochromic shift in electron transitions has been analyzed by using the ASEP/MD (averaged solvent electrostatic potential from molecular dynamics) method. With this purpose, four molecules, two polar (acrolein and formaldehyde) and two non-polar (p-difluorobenzene and trans-difluoroethene) have been studied in solvents of diverse polarity. Independently of the nature of the system we found that the contribution of SSE on the average value of the solvent shift or on the multipole moment values is negligible. In the case of centro-symmetric molecules, our results permit to discard the SSE as cause of the solvent shift found, which must be assigned to the electrostatic interaction of the solute quadrupole and higher multipoles with the solvent. As the SSE values provide also a measure of the errors introduced by the mean field approximation (MFA), these results indicate that MFA permits a very accurate determination of the solvent shift at the same time that it reduces drastically the computational cost. Finally, a new procedure suited to the ASEP/MD method has been presented that permits to estimate the inhomogeneous broadening of spectral bands, complementing the information provided by mean field theories. This procedure does not need additional quantum calculations and its computational cost is minimal.     

Heritability of Stroop and flanker performance in 12-year old children

Background  

There is great interest in appropriate phenotypes that serve as indicator of genetically transmitted frontal (dys)function, such as ADHD. Here we investigate the ability to deal with response conflict, and we ask to what extent performance variation on response interference tasks is caused by genetic variation. We tested a large sample of 12-year old monozygotic and dizygotic twins on two well-known and closely related response interference tasks; the color Stroop task and the Eriksen flanker task. Using structural equation modelling we assessed the heritability of several performance indices derived from those tasks.     

The contribution of high frequencies to human brain activity underlying horizontal localization of natural spatial sounds

Background  

In the field of auditory neuroscience, much research has focused on the neural processes underlying human sound localization. A recent magnetoencephalography (MEG) study investigated localization-related brain activity by measuring the N1m event-related response originating in the auditory cortex. It was found that the dynamic range of the right-hemispheric N1m response, defined as the mean difference in response magnitude between contralateral and ipsilateral stimulation, reflects cortical activity related to the discrimination of horizontal sound direction. Interestingly, the results also suggested that the presence of realistic spectral information within horizontally located spatial sounds resulted in a larger right-hemispheric N1m dynamic range. Spectral cues being predominant at high frequencies, the present study further investigated the issue by removing frequencies from the spatial stimuli with low-pass filtering. This resulted in a stepwise elimination of direction-specific spectral information. Interaural time and level differences were kept constant. The original, unfiltered stimuli were broadband noise signals presented from five frontal horizontal directions and binaurally recorded for eight human subjects with miniature microphones placed in each subject's ear canals. Stimuli were presented to the subjects during MEG registration and in a behavioral listening experiment.     

Kinetics and dynamics study of the H + CCl4?��?HCl(v��, j��)?+?CCl3 reaction

Based on a previous potential energy surface describing the H?+?CCl₄ reaction, a new analytical surface named PES-2010 was developed modifying both the functional form to give it more flexibility, and the calibration process in which exclusively theoretical information was used. Thus, the surface is completely symmetric with respect to the permutation of the four methane chlorine atoms, and no experimental information is used in the process. For the kinetics, the thermal rate constants were calculated using variational transition-state theory with semiclassical transmission coefficients over a wide temperature range, 300?C2,500?K. The theoretical results reproduce the experimental variation with temperature. The influence of the tunneling factor is small, since the abstraction reaction involves the motion of a heavy particle (a chlorine atom) that cannot easily tunnel through the reaction barrier. The coupling between the reaction coordinate and the vibrational modes shows qualitatively that the HCl stretching mode in the products appears vibrationally excited. The dynamics study was performed using quasi-classical trajectory calculations, including corrections to avoid the zero-point energy problem. First, we found that the HCl(????, j??) product mostly appears with small rotational energy and vibrational population inversion. Second, the state-specific scattering distributions show backward scattering, which becomes more noticeable as the HCl(????) vibrational state increases. Unfortunately, no experimental dynamics data are available for the title reaction, but the comparison with the kinematically similar and well-studied H?+?Cl₂ reaction shows good agreement, indicative of similar mechanisms. These kinetics and dynamics results seem to indicate that the potential energy surface is adequate to describe this reaction, and the reasonable agreement with experiment lends further confidence to this new surface.     

Seven-dimensional quantum dynamics study of the H+NH3-->H2+NH2 reaction

Initial state-selected time-dependent wave packet dynamics calculations have been performed for the H+NH3-->H2+NH2 reaction using a seven-dimensional model and an analytical potential energy surface based on the one developed by Corchado and Espinosa-Garcia [J. Chem. Phys. 106, 4013 (1997)]. The model assumes that the two spectator NH bonds are fixed at their equilibrium values. The total reaction probabilities are calculated for the initial ground and seven excited states of NH3 with total angular momentum J=0. The converged cross sections for the reaction are also reported for these initial states. Thermal rate constants are calculated for the temperature range 200-2000 K and compared with transition state theory results and the available experimental data. The study shows that (a) the total reaction probabilities are overall very small, (b) the symmetric and asymmetric NH stretch excitations enhance the reaction significantly and almost all of the excited energy deposited was used to reduce the reaction threshold, (c) the excitation of the umbrella and bending motion have a smaller contribution to the enhancement of reactivity, (d) the main contribution to the thermal rate constants is thought to come from the ground state at low temperatures and from the stretch excited states at high temperatures, and (e) the calculated thermal rate constants are three to ten times smaller than the experimental data and transition state theory results.     

Precise mass measurement of a double-stranded 500 base-pair (309 kDa) polymerase chain reaction product by negative ion electrospray ionization Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry

Electrospray ionization Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (ESI-FTICRMS) has been used to determine the mass of a double-stranded 500 base-pair (bp) polymerase chain reaction (PCR) product with an average theoretical mass of the blunt-ended (i.e. unadenylated) species of 308 859.35 Da. The PCR product was generated from the linearized bacteriophage Lambda genome which is a double-stranded template. Utilization of ethanol precipitation in tandem with a rapid microdialysis step to purify and desalt the PCR product was crucial to obtain a precise mass measurement. The PCR product (0.8 pmol/μL) was electrosprayed from a solution containing 75% acetonitrile, 25 mM piperidine, and 25 mM imidazole and was infused at a rate of 200 nL/min. The average molecular mass and the corresponding precision were determined using the charge-states ranging from 172 to 235 net negative charges. The experimental mass and corresponding precision (reported as the 95% confidence interval of the mean) was 309 406 +/- 27 Da (87 ppm). The mass accuracy was compromised due to the fact that the PCR generates multiple products when using Taq polymerase due to the non-template directed 3'-adenylation. This results in a mixture of three PCR products with nearly identical mass (i.e. blunt-ended, mono-adenylated and di-adenylated) with unknown relative abundances that were not resolved in the spectrum. Thus, the experimental mass will be a weighted average of the three species which, under our experimental conditions, reflects a nearly equal concentration of the mono- and di-adenylated species. This report demonstrates that precise mass measurements of PCR products up to 309 kDa (500 bp) can be routinely obtained by ESI-FTICR requiring low femtomole amounts. Copyright 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.