Comparison of desorption/ionization on silicon (DIOS) time-of-flight and liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry for assaying enzyme-inhibition reactions

Desorption/ionization on silicon with time-of-flight mass spectrometry (DIOS-TOFMS) was employed for rapid quantification of small molecules and the measurement of critical constants used in enzyme kinetics studies. The approach was used to determine the Michaelis constant (Km) for acetylcholine esterase and the 50% inhibition constant (IC50) for tacrine. The Km was determined from a Lineweaver-Burk plot to be 98 microM. The IC50 was determined by assaying acetylcholine esterase activity with a range of tacrine concentrations, and measuring the amount of choline produced at a fixed time point by either DIOS-TOFMS or by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC/MS/MS). DIOS-TOFMS indicated an IC50 of 32.0 nM while LC/MS/MS gave a value of 31.8 nM. The excellent correlation with the reported IC50 values, ranging from 30.0 to 50.0 nM, and equivalence with the LC/MS/MS results, confirms that the DIOS-TOFMS method can be used for rapid and specific quantification of enzyme-inhibition assays.     

Great expectations: Specific lexical anticipation influences the processing of spoken language

Background  

Recently several studies have shown that people use contextual information to make predictions about the rest of the sentence or story as the text unfolds. Using event related potentials (ERPs) we tested whether these on-line predictions are based on a message-level representation of the discourse or on simple automatic activation by individual words. Subjects heard short stories that were highly constraining for one specific noun, or stories that were not specifically predictive but contained the same prime words as the predictive stories. To test whether listeners make specific predictions critical nouns were preceded by an adjective that was inflected according to, or in contrast with, the gender of the expected noun.     

Microwave heating of ceramic composites

The microwave heating of a ceramic composite is modelled andanalysed. The composite consists of many small ceramic particlesembedded in a ceramic cement. The composite is assumed to bewell insulated, and each particle is assumed to be in imperfectthermal contact with the surrounding cement. Based on thesetwo assumptions an asymptotic theory exploiting the small Biotnumber and small non-dimensional contact conductance is developed.Our asymptotic theory yields a set of nonlinear partial differentialequations which govern the temperature in the composite. Theseare reduced to a set of coupled nonlinear ordinary differentialequations in which the surface area of each particle entersas a parameter. Recent experiments with such composites haveshown that the steady-state temperature of the composite isstrongly dependent upon the radii of the embedded particles.Our model captures this effect. In fact, our analysis showsthat the assumption of imperfect thermal contact between theparticles and the ceramic cement is essential for this trendto be established.     

Comparative real-time characterization of frother bubble thin films

Methylisobutyl carbinol (MIBC) and methoxy polypropylene glycol (Dowfroth 250) bubble thin films were characterized by composition and thickness determinations, using FT-IR spectroscopy and UV-visible spectrophotometry, respectively. The infrared investigation indicates that the role of frother molecules in creating bubble thin films is based on their effectiveness in inducing H-bonding reorganization of the surrounding free water molecules into a coherent network. From UV-visible interference patterns, it is found that MIBC forms films with a measured critical end thickness of less than 160 nm, compared to 612+/-30 nm for Dowfroth 250. The observed values of the free water layer thickness are comparable at 5.65+/-0.28 microm for MIBC and 6.75+/-0.34 microm for Dowfroth 250. A higher stability of an MIBC bubble over a Dowfroth 250 bubble is related to the different polarization and orientation of the molecules sustaining the boundary surface water network. The findings are used to explain the different action and associated froth characteristics of the two common industrial frothing agents.