Correlation between biological activity and energies of electronic transitions in benzodiazepines. Negative ion mass spectrometry and ultraviolet absorption spectroscopy study of some derivatives

A correlation between the energies of electronic singlet transitions in benzodiazepines and their biological activity, which was revealed earlier by means of negative ion mass spectrometry with resonance electron capture, has been verified with a UV absorption spectroscopy investigation. Also, it has been noted that the energies of electronic singlet transitions in benzodiazepines are close in value to the ionization energies of atoms Cs, Rb, K, Na, Li and Tl, the cations of which are known to play an important role in nerve cell excitation processes. Copyright 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On a class of degenerate and singular elliptic systems in bounded domains

This paper deals with the nonexistence and multiplicity of nonnegative, nontrivial solutions to a class of degenerate and singular elliptic systems of the form

where Ω is a bounded domain with smooth boundary ∂Ω in , N2, and , , h_i (i=1,2) are allowed to have “essential” zeroes at some points in Ω, (F_u,F_v)=F, and λ is a positive parameter. Our proofs rely essentially on the critical point theory tools combined with a variant of the Caffarelli–Kohn–Nirenberg inequality in [P. Caldiroli, R. Musina, On a variational degenerate elliptic problem, NoDEA Nonlinear Differential Equations Appl. 7 (2000) 189–199].     

Depletion effects and loop formation in self-avoiding polymers

Langevin dynamics is employed to study the looping kinetics of self-avoiding polymers both in ideal and crowded solutions. A rich kinetics results from the competition of two crowding-induced effects: the depletion attraction and the enhanced viscous friction. For short chains, the enhanced friction slows down looping, while for longer chains, the depletion attraction renders it more frequent and persistent. We discuss the possible relevance of the findings for chromatin looping in living cells.     

Gas-phase deprotonation of arylalkylamines. A collision-induced dissociation study

The collision-induced dissociation (CID) of deprotonated arylalkylamines of general formula R(1)C(6)H(4)CHR(2)CH(2)NR(3)(2) (where R(1) = H, OH, F or NO(2); R(2) = H or OH; R(3) = H or CH(3)) generated by negative chemical ionization with H(2)O and D(2)O as ionizing reagents, is discussed. The negative chemical ionization mass spectra show that, in the absence of a hydroxy group in the aromatic ring, deprotonation takes place at the benzylic position whereas the proton is lost from the OH group when present. The nitro compound forms only M(-.) ions. The CID spectra of the deprotonated molecules show that fragmentations are strongly dependent on the structural features of the molecules, namely the presence or absence of substituents in the aromatic ring or aliphatic chain. Copyright 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Spectral Stability of Noncharacteristic Isentropic Navier–Stokes Boundary Layers

Building on the work of Barker, Humpherys, Lafitte, Rudd, and Zumbrun in the shock wave case, we study stability of compressive, or shock-like, boundary layers of the isentropic compressible Navier–Stokes equations with γ-law pressure by a combination of asymptotic ODE estimates and numerical Evans function computations. Our analytical results include convergence of the Evans function in the shock and large-amplitude limits and stability in the large-amplitude limit, the first rigorous stability result for other than the nearly constant case, for all . Together with these analytical results, our numerical investigations indicate stability for γ ϵ [1, 3] for all compressive boundary-layers, independent of amplitude, save for inflow layers in the characteristic limit (not treated). Expansive inflow boundary-layers have been shown to be stable for all amplitudes by Matsumura and Nishihara using energy estimates. Besides the parameter of amplitude appearing in the shock case, the boundary-layer case features an additional parameter measuring displacement of the background profile, which greatly complicates the resulting case structure. Inflow boundary layers turn out to have quite delicate stability in both large-displacement (shock) and large-amplitude limits, necessitating the additional use of a mod-two stability index studied earlier by Serre and Zumbrun in order to decide stability.