Assembly of Bacteriophage into Functional Materials

For the last decade, the fabrication of ordered structures of phage has been of great interest as a means of utilizing the outstanding biochemical properties of phage in developing useful materials. Combined with other organic/inorganic substances, it has been demonstrated that phage is a superior building block for fabricating various functional devices, such as the electrode in lithium‐ion batteries, photovoltaic cells, sensors, and cell‐culture supports. Although previous research has expanded the utility of phage when combined with genetic engineering, most improvements in device functionality have relied upon increases in efficiency owing to the compact, more densely packable unit size of phage rather than on the unique properties of the ordered nanostructures themselves. Recently, self‐templating methods, which control both thermodynamic and kinetic factors during the deposition process, have opened up new routes to exploiting the ordered structural properties of hierarchically organized phage architectures. In addition, ordered phage films have exhibited unexpected functional properties, such as structural color and optical filtering. Structural colors or optical filtering from phage films can be used for optical phage‐based sensors, which combine the structural properties of phage with target‐specific binding motifs on the phage‐coat proteins. This self‐templating method may contribute not only to practical applications, but also provide insight into the fundamental study of biomacromolecule assembly in in vivo systems under complicated and dynamic conditions.     

Photochemical Degradation of the Plant Growth Regulator 2‐(1‐Naphthyl) acetamide in Aqueous Solution Upon UV Irradiation

The photochemical degradation of 2‐(1‐naphthyl) acetamide (NAD) in aqueous solution using simulated sunlight excitation as well as UV light within the 254–300 nm range was investigated to obtain an insight into the transformation mechanism that could occur under environmental conditions. Several photoproducts were identified using HPLC/MS/MS techniques. The degradation quantum yield was found to be independent of the excitation wavelength, but showed a dependence of oxygen concentration. This increased by a factor of approximately 3 from aerated to oxygen‐free solutions. There is a clear involvement of both triplet and singlet excited states in NAD photoreactivity. The participation of singlet oxygen as a significant route in NAD degradation was ruled out by comparison with the behavior using Rose Bengal as a photosensitizer. A mechanistic pathway implying hydroxylation process through NAD radical cation species as well as an oxidation reaction by molecular oxygen is proposed. The photochemical behavior of NAD appears to mainly involve the aromatic moieties without any participation of the amide side chain. Toxicity tests clearly show that the generated primary photoproducts are responsible for a significant increase in the toxicity. However, upon prolonged irradiation this toxicity tends to decrease.     

Influence of the height-to-diameter ratio on turbulent mixed convection in vertical cylinders

Turbulent mixed-convection mass transfer in vertical cylinders was measured using a sulfuric acid–copper sulfate electroplating technique. The Grashof numbers ranged from 5.3?×?10⁹ to 6.9?×?10¹⁰, the Reynolds numbers ranged from 4,000 to 14,000, and the Schmidt numbers were approximately 2,000. The test results under buoyancy-aided and buoyancy-opposed flow conditions successfully reproduced typical turbulent mixed-convection heat-transfer behavior and agreed well with existing studies performed by Ko et al. and Parlatan et al. Previous studies have used the cylinder diameter as the characteristic length for the buoyancy coefficient; however, this study focused on the influence of the cylinder height on the mixed-convection mass-transfer rates because the height determines the buoyancy. The tests performed for various heights with a fixed diameter or for various diameters with a fixed height demonstrated the influence of the height-to-diameter ratio on the mass-transfer rate, revealing that the height of the cylinder should be considered as a length scale. A new empirical correlation was derived for turbulent mixed-convection mass transfer that includes the influence of the height-to-diameter ratios.     

Quantitation of plasma and biliary cefpiramide concentrations in human samples using high-performance liquid chromatography

Cefpiramide is frequently used to treat biliary infections. However, no bioanalytical method has been validated to quantitate cefpiramide in human samples, particularly in bile. Therefore, this study was conducted to develop a simple, selective and validated high-performance liquid chromatographic method to determine cefpiramide in human plasma and bile. A protein precipitation procedure was used to extract cefpiramide and cefoperazone (internal standard, IS) from 200 μl of plasma and bile. Utilizing a Capcell Pak C₁₈ column (4.6 × 250 mm), cefpiramide and IS were separated using the timed-gradient mobile phase consisting of 0.1 m sodium acetate (pH 5.2) and acetonitrile at a flow rate of 1 ml/min with photodiode array detector (wavelength set at 273 nm). The calibration curves showed linearity at concentrations ranging from 1 to 150 μg/ml in both plasma and bile (r² > 0.999). The within- and between-run coefficients of variation (CVs) for plasma samples were 0.570–4.43 and 1.10–2.76%, respectively; for bile samples, the within- and between-day precision (CV) was 0.814–6.34 and 2.05–4.00%, respectively. Our newly developed bioanalytical method was successfully employed to quantify cefpiramide concentrations in both plasma and bile at multiple time points in patients with acute cholangitis.     

Free Energy Peturbation and Molecular Dynamics Simulation Studies on the Enantiomeric Discrimination of Amines by Dimethyldiketopyridino-18-Crown-6

Abstract

Discrimination of chiral amines by dimethyldiketopyridino-18-crown-6 (1) is studied by free energy peturbation (FEP) and molecular dynamics (MD) methods. 1 has two (S)-chiral centers and discriminates chiral amines through host-guest interactions. The optically active amines in this study are α-(1-naphthyl)ethylamine, methylbenzylamine, cyclohexylethylamine, and sec-butylamine. The trends in binding free energy differences obtained from FEP calculations were in excellent agreement with experimental results obtained in the gas phase. In order to explain the enantioselectivity of the host in terms of the host-guest interactions at the molecular level, we analyzed the structures generated by 10-ns MD simulations of host-guest complexes. The suggested chiral discrimination mechanism, the π-π interaction and the steric repulsion between the guest and the host, was verified by our MD simulation analysis.     

Probing actinide electronic structure through pu cluster calculations

Calculations of the electronic structure of clusters of plutonium have been performed, within the framework of the relativistic discrete‐variational method. These theoretical results and those calculated earlier for related systems have been compared to spectroscopic data produced in the experimental investigations of bulk systems, including photoelectron spectroscopy. Observation of the changes in the Pu electronic structure as a function of size provides powerful insight for aspects of bulk Pu electronic structure. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Application of bispecific antibody against antigen and hapten for immunodetection and immunopurification

We present a bispecific antibody that recognizes an antigen and a hapten and can be applied to various biological assays, including immunoblotting and immunoprecipitation. In immunoblot analysis of serum, an anti-C5 × anti-cotinine bispecific tandem single-chain variable fragment (scFv)-Fc fusion protein and cotinine-conjugated horseradish peroxidase (HRP) generated a clean signal without the high background that was observed in a parallel experiment using HRP-conjugated goat anti-rabbit immunoglobulin G (Fc-specific) antibody. In immunoprecipitation analysis of serum, use of the bispecific tandem scFv-Fc fusion protein and cotinine-crosslinked magnetic beads significantly reduced the amount of protein contaminants compared with a parallel experiment done with protein A agarose beads. In subsequent immunoblot analysis, use of cotinine–HRP as the secondary probe instead of HRP-conjugated goat anti-rabbit IgG (Fc-specific) antibody successfully eliminated the band corresponding to the bispecific tandem scFv-Fc fusion protein.