Identification of Structure–Activity Relationships from Screening a Structurally Compact DNA‐Encoded Chemical Library

Methods for the rapid and inexpensive discovery of hit compounds are essential for pharmaceutical research and DNA‐encoded chemical libraries represent promising tools for this purpose. We here report on the design and synthesis of DAL‐100K, a DNA‐encoded chemical library containing 103 200 structurally compact compounds. Affinity screening experiments and DNA‐sequencing analysis provided ligands with nanomolar affinities to several proteins, including prostate‐specific membrane antigen and tankyrase 1. Correlations of sequence counts with binding affinities and potencies of enzyme inhibition were observed and enabled the identification of structural features critical for activity. These results indicate that libraries of this type represent a useful source of small‐molecule binders for target proteins of pharmaceutical interest and information on structural features important for binding.     

Dirichlet product for boolean functions

Boolean functions play an important role in many symmetric cryptosystems and are crucial for their security. It is important to design boolean functions with reliable cryptographic properties such as balancedness and nonlinearity. Most of these properties are based on specific structures such as Möbius transform and Algebraic Normal Form. In this paper, we introduce the notion of Dirichlet product and use it to study the arithmetical properties of boolean functions. We show that, with the Dirichlet product, the set of boolean functions is an Abelian monoid with interesting algebraic structure. In addition, we apply the Dirichlet product to the sub-family of coincident functions and exhibit many properties satisfied by such functions.     

A simple slurry consolidometer designed for the estimation of the consistency limits of soils

An inexpensive slurry consolidometer design is described that uses porous polyethylene as the permeable barrier for sample dewatering (maximum effective stress of 200 kPa) and permits monitoring of sample pore-water pressures less than 100 kPa with a portable pressure transducer. The instrument is applied in this study to the consolidation-based estimation of the Atterberg soil consistency limits of both agricultural soils and till and glaciolacustrine materials (clay fraction predominantly Ca-saturated illites) sampled from sonic boreholes. All soils originated from southwestern Ontario, Canada. With the normally consolidated (virgin) compression line expressed as a w(logσ') function, the A.S.T.M. liquid and plastic limits of the borehole soils were found to occupy relatively fixed positions on the VCL at mean effective stresses of about 61 kPa and 0.42 MPa, respectively. Marginally plastic and non-plastic soils could be distinguished as having compression line slopes approaching zero. The effective stress at the liquid limit decreased logarithmically from 61 kPa with increasing organic carbon content in the agricultural soils. Consolidated slurries of all soils investigated that were clearly plastic exhibited a mean drop-cone penetration depth of approximately 13 mm at the A.S.T.M. liquid limit, a significant departure from the British Standard of 20 mm. Slurry consolidation can be used as a sample preparation method for measurement of the liquid limit by the drop-cone or one-point A.S.T.M. procedures. It has also shown potential as a procedural alternative for the estimation of both test indices, mostly for geotechnical applications. It is probable that this unified test protocol must be recalibrated for soils where the dominant clay minerals and saturating bases are different from those in this study.     

Water structure and dynamics at a silica surface: Pake doublets in 1H NMR spectra

Detailed knowledge about the dynamics and structure of liquids in the vicinity of a solid surface is important in several fields of research. In this study a homogeneous model system of colloidal and nonporous silica particles with a narrow particle size distribution was used to examine such properties of adsorbed water and 1-heptanol. Doublet (1)H water resonances ("Pake doublets") indicate a preferred spatial orientation for the water molecules, as well as a lower molecular density in the surface-induced water structures compared to bulk water. These surface-induced structures are found to extend at least 8 nm from the silica surface. T(1) relaxation measurements at several temperatures indicate weaker H-bonding in the adsorbed water compared to bulk water. T(2) relaxation measurements at several temperatures reveal the presence of two water phases and give quantitative information on the mobility of water molecules and proton exchange processes. The presence of 1-heptanol changes the water characteristics, primarily in the water phase closer to the surface, where water molecules experience decreased translational and increased rotational freedom. In the absence of water, adsorbed 1-heptanol forms surface aggregates encompassing several molecular layers, where the first adsorbed layer shows severe restrictions in mobility and subsequent layers are more mobile.     

Morniga G: a plant lectin as an endocytic ligand for photosensitizer molecule targeting toward tumor-associated T/Tn antigens

Porphyrins are used as photosensitizer (PS) in photodynamic therapy in cancer treatment. Nevertheless, the development of photochemotherapy in oncology remains limited, because of the low selectivity of PSs. In order to allow PS targeting toward tumor-associated antigens, for the first time a white-light activatable porphyrin, [5-(4-(5-carboxy-1-butoxy)-phenyl)-10,15,20-tris(4-N-methyl)-pyridiniumyl)-porphyrin] (TrMPyP) was covalently linked to Morniga G (MorG), a galactose-specific binding plant lectin, known to recognize with high-affinity tumor-associated T/Tn antigen in cell-free systems. Firstly, using fluorescein-labeled MorG, the sugar-dependent binding and uptake of lectin by Tn-positive (Jurkat lymphoid leukemia) cells was demonstrated. Secondly, the TrMPyP-MorG conjugate was molecularly characterized. Cytometric and confocal microscopic analysis demonstrated that PS covalent linking to MorG preserved sugar-dependent specific binding and uptake of lectin by Jurkat leukemia lymphocytes. Thirdly, the conjugate (with a 1:1 PS:lectin ratio) that was bound and quickly (5 min) taken-up, induced greater than 90% cytotoxicity upon irradiation at 10 nm concentration, whereas the free PS was absolutely nontoxic. On the contrary, normal lymphocytes strongly resisted to the conjugate-mediated phototoxicity. Thus, owing to their binding and endocytosis capacities, plant lectins represent promising molecules for targeting of tumor glycan alteration and to enhance the efficiency of specific delivery of PSs to tumor cells.     

A FLUORESCENCE IMAGING DEVICE FOR ENDOSCOPIC DETECTION OF EARLY STAGE CANCER – INSTRUMENTAL and EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES

Abstract Visible detection of early stage cancer labelled with the fluorescing porphyrin mixture of dihematoporphyrin-ether and dihematoporphyrin-ester (DHE) is often limited by a high and inhomogeneously distributed level of autofluorescence. A new imaging method for reducing autofluo-rescence is described. The method uses alternating fluorescence excitation with laser light in the violet and blue spectral ranges. Subtraction of the corresponding fluorescence images results in contrast enhancement due to an effective reduction in the autofluorescence contribution. A prototype version of a highly sensitive fluorescence imaging device including a modified krypton ion laser, an image-intensified solid-state TV-camera, a digital image-processing system, and video recording and monitoring has been developed.
Experiments performed with this fluorescence imaging system on a tumorous dog bladder showed that a dose of 0.2 mg DHE kg⁻¹ body wt, which is far below the dose administered for photodynamic therapy (2-5 mg kg⁻'body wt), is sufficient to give a high-contrast fluorescence image. The corresponding excitation power density was about 1 W m⁻². Photobleaching of DHE was observed during fluorescence detection at excitation power densities exceeding 1 kW m⁻². At these high excitation levels DHE fades out nearly completely within 0.25 min.     

Continuous bordering of matrices and continuous matrix decompositions

Summary. Let be the set of all real -matrices of rank . We prove that for there are no continuous vector fields such that the bordered matrix is regular for all . This result has some relevance for the numerical analysis of steady state bifurcation. As a by-product we show that there is no nonvanishing continuous vector field with for all , where is the set of all matrices of rank deficiency one. This implies that there is no singular value decomposition of depending continuously on in any matrix set which contains . As another application we prove that in general there is no global analytic singular value decomposition for analytic matrix valued functions of more than one real variable. Received October 6, 1993 / Revised version received July 18, 1994     

Cleavage of the C---Se bond of cyclic selenoacetals derived from 4-t-butyl cyclohexanone with butyllithiums and tin and silyl hydrides

Selenoacetals derived from 1,3-propanediselenol and 1,2-ethanediselenol are much less prone to be cleaved by butyllithiums than their open chain analogues. The stereochemistry of the products resulting from these reactions as well as from the cleavage of the C---Se bond under radical conditions is disclosed.     

Diastereoselective addition of silyl- and stannyl metals to γ-alkoxy-alkylidene malonates

Stereochemical control of the addition of silyl- and stannyl metals to chiral γ-alkoxy-alkylidene malonates proved to be dependant on the nature of the counter ion and of the solvent but in an unpredictable way.