Two-phase reaction mechanism during chemical lithium insertion into α-MoO<Subscript>3</Subscript>

The phase transition during chemical lithium insertion into α-MoO₃ was investigated by chemical analysis, X-ray diffraction (XRD) and electrochemical characterisation. The samples have been prepared by reaction of various amounts of water-free lithium iodide with fine-particulate orthorhombic molybdenum trioxide in n-hexane (non-aqueous media), which yielded materials with different Li/Mo ratio. XRD investigations of these materials proved that the crystal structure of the layered α-MoO₃ has been changed after the chemical lithiation. The phase transition ranged from 0.25 < x < 0.5 in Li _x MoO₃ upon chemical lithium insertion into α-MoO₃. The XRD lines of lithium inserted phase Li _x MoO₃ grew at the expense of the XRD lines of the pristine α-MoO₃ as lithium ions were chemically inserted until the disappearance of lines related to α-MoO₃. The electrochemical performance of the lithiated samples is improved in comparison with the starting material (non-lithiated α-MoO₃).     

Ranking Beta Sheet Topologies with Applications to Protein Structure Prediction

One reason why ab initio protein structure predictors do not perform very well is their inability to reliably identify long-range interactions between amino acids. To achieve reliable long-range interactions, all potential pairings of β-strands (β-topologies) of a given protein are enumerated, including the native β-topology. Two very different β-topology scoring methods from the literature are then used to rank all potential β-topologies. This has not previously been attempted for any scoring method. The main result of this paper is a justification that one of the scoring methods, in particular, consistently top-ranks native β-topologies. Since the number of potential β-topologies grows exponentially with the number of β-strands, it is unrealistic to expect that all potential β-topologies can be enumerated for large proteins. The second result of this paper is an enumeration scheme of a subset of β-topologies. It is shown that native-consistent β-topologies often are among the top-ranked β-topologies of this subset. The presence of the native or native-consistent β-topologies in the subset of enumerated potential β-topologies relies heavily on the correct identification of β-strands. The third contribution of this paper is a method to deal with the inaccuracies of secondary structure predictors when enumerating potential β-topologies. The results reported in this paper are highly relevant for ab initio protein structure prediction methods based on decoy generation. They indicate that decoy generation can be heavily constrained using top-ranked β-topologies as they are very likely to contain native or native-consistent β-topologies.     

Detection of the DeltaF508 mutation in the CFTR gene by means of time-resolved fluorescence methods.

A rapid recognition in the base sequence of nucleic acids is an important prerequisite toward the diagnosis of genetic diseases and their carrier states. We have developed a hybridisation method in which a fluorescently labeled oligonucleotide is used to detect point mutations in a target by a simple fluorescence lifetime analysis of the emission of the fluorescent label. We applied this method to detect the deltaF508 mutation in the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) gene in a model system and with biologically derived PCR product and discuss the potential generality of this method.     

Zur Ermittelung der Backf?higkeit des Mehles

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Experimental results on neutrino-electron scattering

A determination of sin² θ _w based on measurements of elastic scattering of muon-neutrinos and muon-anti-neutrinos on atomic electrons is described. These purely leptonic processes were studied using the CHARM calorimeter exposed to neutrino and antineutrino wide-band beams at the CERN super proton synchrotron. A total of 83±16 neutrino-electron and 112±21 antineutrino-electron events have been detected. From the measurement of the ratio of muon-neutrino and muon-antineutrino cross-sections a value of sin² θ _w =0.211±0.037 was obtained.     

Control of large-scale structure formation and vortex pairing using photoacoustic forcing

A method making use of the photoacoustic effect to control the formation of large scale structures in an axisymmetric ethylene jet at Reynolds numbers ranging between 2,000 and 2,550 is described. The experiment involved modulating the beam of a CO₂ laser at Strouhal frequencies between 0.31 and 0.46 and focussing the beam into the gas jet. Time-averaged flow fields, perturbed with photoacoustic pulses are compared to that forced with a sinusoidal acoustic excitation and the results of a parametric study of the photoacoustic forcing are presented. Perturbations, achieved by laser heating the gas molecules are shown to force the flow into the jet-column fundamental and harmonic mode and to enhance vortex pairing. Time-averaged merging events at different phases of the process are displayed.     

Soft X-ray emission and the local densities of states of the Cu x Rh1−x alloy system

Soft X-ray emission experiments on Cu _x Rh_1–x alloys for the compositionsx=0.0, 0.05, 0.10, 0.80 and 1.0, have been performed. In this paper we present the spectra of Cu-and Rh-L _III core level-conduction band transitions. Using the data of recent self-consistent KKR-CPA electronic structure calculations we evaluate the corresponding SXS-cross sections and compare these theoretical results to our measurements.