The preparation and characterisation of ruthenium cyanovinylidene complexes

Reactions of half-sandwich ruthenium metal acetylide complexes with 1-cyano-4-dimethylaminopyridinium salts afford complexes containing mono- or di-cyanovinylidene ligands; the procedure can be adapted to permit the simple synthesis of a cyanoacetylide complex, via the in situ deprotonation of a primary cyanovinylidene complex.     

Investigative proteomics: identification of an unknown plant virus from infected plants using mass spectrometry

We describe the identification of a previously uncharacterized plant virus that is capable of infecting Nicotiana spp. and Arabidopsis thaliana. Protein extracts were first prepared from leaf tissue of uninfected tobacco plants, and the proteins were visualized with two-dimensional electrophoresis (2-DE). Matching gels were then run using protein extracts of a tobacco plant infected with tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). After visual comparison, the proteins spots that were differentially expressed in infected plant tissues were cut from the gels and analyzed by high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS/MS). Tandem mass spectrometry data of individual peptides was searched with SEQUEST. Using this approach we demonstrated a successful proof-of-concept experiment by identifying TMV proteins present in the total protein extract. The same procedure was then applied to tobacco plants infected with a laboratory viral isolate of unknown identity. Several of the differentially expressed protein spots were identified as proteins of potato virus X (PVX), thus successfully identifying the causative agent of the uncharacterized viral infection. We believe this demonstrates that HPLC-MS/MS can be used to successfully characterize unknown viruses in infected plants.     

Amphiphilic and mesomorphic fullerene-based dendrimers

Growing attention is currently devoted to large dendritic structures for applications in nanotechnology and materials science. In this respect, the incorporation of such compounds into thin ordered films appears to be an important issue. One of the most widely pursued approaches to structurally ordered dendrimer assemblies has been the preparation of Langmuir films at the air-water interface. We report on the case of a diblock globular fullerene-based dendrimer and show that peripheral substitution of the dendrimer with hydrophobic chains on one hemisphere and hydrophilic groups on the other provides the required hydrophobic/hydrophilic balance allowing the formation of stable Langmuir films. A second approach has been to consider the case of fullerene containing dendrimers terminated by mesogenic groups such as cyanobiphenyl subunits. Whatever the generation is, up to the fourth one, all these compounds exhibit a well-defined liquid crystalline smectic A phase. The molecular organisation within the smectic layers is found to be monolayered or bilayered depending on the generation. For the smallest dendrimers, the organisation is mainly governed by the size of the fullerene moiety, whereas for the higher ones, it is governed by the interactions between the terminal mesogenic groups. These two approaches appear particularly interesting for functional groups such as fullerenes, which are not well adapted to be organised in nanoscale architectures. The present study shows that fullerenes can indeed be introduced into different types of ordered structure when they have been chemically adequately modified.