Ethynylation of Cysteine Residues: From Peptides to Proteins in Vitro and in Living Cells

Current approaches to introduce terminal alkynes for bioorthogonal reactions into biomolecules still present limitations in terms of either reactivity, selectivity, or adduct stability. We present a method for the ethynylation of cysteine residues based on the use of ethynylbenziodoxolone (EBX) reagents. The acetylene group is directly introduced onto the thiol group of cysteine and can be used for copper‐catalyzed alkyne‐azide cycloaddition (CuAAC) without further processing. Labeling proceeded with reaction rates comparable to or higher than the most often used iodoacetamide on peptides or maleimide on the antibody trastuzumab, and high cysteine selectivity was observed. The reagents were also used in living cells for cysteine proteomic profiling and displayed improved coverage of the cysteinome compared to previously reported iodoacetamide or hypervalent iodine reagents. Fine‐tuning of the EBX reagents allows optimization of their reactivity and physical properties.     

Etude de la structure magnetique et de la transition de typr “spin-flop” de Rb2FeF5

The nature of the magnetic interactions in the chain compound Rb₂FeF₅ has been investigated using neutron diffraction and magnetic measurements under high applied fields. Rb₂FeF₅ orders antiferromagnetically at T_N = 8.0 ± 0.5 K; the magnetic structure is of the A_Z + G_X mode and the moment of the Fe³⁺ ion extrapoled to 0K is 3.5 ± 0.2 μ_B, this low value being due to zero-point spin reduction. Within a chain the Fe³⁺ ions are antiferromagnetically coupled with an exchange constant of J/k = ?8.8 K. A spin-flop behavior has been observed and interpreted on the basis of the molecular field theory. The critical field was found to be H_C = 65 kOe at 1.7 K.     

Metaheuristics for the team orienteering problem

The Team Orienteering Problem (TOP) is the generalization to the case of multiple tours of the Orienteering Problem, known also as Selective Traveling Salesman Problem. A set of potential customers is available and a profit is collected from the visit to each customer. A fleet of vehicles is available to visit the customers, within a given time limit. The profit of a customer can be collected by one vehicle at most. The objective is to identify the customers which maximize the total collected profit while satisfying the given time limit for each vehicle. We propose two variants of a generalized tabu search algorithm and a variable neighborhood search algorithm for the solution of the TOP and show that each of these algorithms beats the already known heuristics. Computational experiments are made on standard instances.     

Stability of a Cubically Convergent Method for Generalized Equations

In Geoffroy et al, Acceleration of convergence in Dontchev's iterative method for solving variational inclusions Serdica Math. J. 29 (2003), pp. 45–54] we showed the convergence of a cubic method for solving generalized equations of the form 0 ∈ f(x) +- G(x) where f is a function and G stands for a set-valued map. We investigate here the stability of such a method with respect to some perturbations. More precisely, we consider the perturbed equation y ∈ f(x) +- G(x) and we show that the pseudo-Lipschitzness of the map (f +- G)⁻¹ is closely tied to the uniformity of our method in the sense that the attraction region does not depend on small perturbations of the parameter y. Finally, we provide an enhanced version of the convergence theorem established by Geoffroy, et al.     

Dynamical Localization for Unitary Anderson Models

This paper establishes dynamical localization properties of certain families of unitary random operators on the d-dimensional lattice in various regimes. These operators are generalizations of one-dimensional physical models of quantum transport and draw their name from the analogy with the discrete Anderson model of solid state physics. They consist in a product of a deterministic unitary operator and a random unitary operator. The deterministic operator has a band structure, is absolutely continuous and plays the role of the discrete Laplacian. The random operator is diagonal with elements given by i.i.d. random phases distributed according to some absolutely continuous measure and plays the role of the random potential. In dimension one, these operators belong to the family of CMV-matrices in the theory of orthogonal polynomials on the unit circle. We implement the method of Aizenman-Molchanov to prove exponential decay of the fractional moments of the Green function for the unitary Anderson model in the following three regimes: In any dimension, throughout the spectrum at large disorder and near the band edges at arbitrary disorder and, in dimension one, throughout the spectrum at arbitrary disorder. We also prove that exponential decay of fractional moments of the Green function implies dynamical localization, which in turn implies spectral localization. These results complete the analogy with the self-adjoint case where dynamical localization is known to be true in the same three regimes.     

Spatial trapping of short pulses in Ti-indiffused LiNbO(3) waveguides

We show numerically and experimentally that spatial trapping can be induced in quadratic media even if the pump pulse's duration is shorter than the group-delay mismatch between fundamental wave and second-harmonic components. The influence of phase mismatch and pulse power on the trapping effect is discussed. Spatial, temporal, and spectral behaviors that accompany self-trapped propagation are highlighted.     

Ground states and flux configurations of the two-dimensional Falicov-Kimball model

The Falicov-Kimball model is a lattice model of itinerant spinless fermions (electrons) interacting by an on-site potential with classical particles (ions). We continue the investigations of the crystalline ground states that appear for various filling of electrons and ions for large coupling. We investigate the model for square as well as triangular lattices. New ground states are found and the effects of a magnetic flux on the structure of the phase diagram are studied. The flux phase problem where one has to find the optimal flux configurations and the nuclei configurations is also solved in some cases. Finally we consider a model where the fermions are replaced by hard-core bosons. This model also has crystalline ground states. Therefore their existence does not require the Pauli principle, but only the on-site hard-core constraint for the itinerant particles.     

Designing an optimal connected nature reserve

We consider a landscape divided into elementary cells, each of these cells containing some species to be protected. We search to select a set of cells to form a natural reserve in order to protect all the species present in the landscape. A species is considered protected if it is present in a certain number of cells of the reserve. There is an important spatial constraint concerning the set of selected cells: a species must be able to go from any cell to any cell without leaving the reserve. An integer linear programming model was proposed by Önal and Briers [2] for this reserve selection problem, but the size of the problems which can be handled by this model is limited: several hours of computation are required for solving instances with hundred of cells and hundred of species. Having proposed an improvement of this model which reduces appreciably the computation time, we propose another integer linear programming model, easy to carry out, which allows to obtain, in a few seconds of computation, optimal or near-optimal solutions for instances with hundred of cells and hundred of species. However, the computation time becomes prohibitive for instances with more than 200 cells and 100 species. But, this approach can be particularly useful to solve the problem, in an approximate way, by aggregation of cells as proposed by Önal and Briers [2].     

On the Caginalp phase‐field systems with two temperatures and the Maxwell–Cattaneo law

Our aim in this paper is to study generalizations of the nonconserved and conserved Caginalp phase‐field systems based on the Maxwell–Cattaneo law with two temperatures for heat conduction. In particular, we obtain well‐posedness results and study the dissipativity of the associated solution operators. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.