Steplike currents in confined two dimensional systems

In a confined two dimensional system of non-interacting electrons in a normal constant magnetic field, the current is calculated along the sample as a response to an electric field in the same direction which is switched on and then off. The resulting stationary current is shown to be a step-like function of the electron density.     

A two-sided short-recurrence extended Krylov subspace method for nonsymmetric matrices and its relation to rational moment matching

The Lagrange interpolation problem on spaces of symmetric bivariate polynomials is considered to reduce the interpolation problem to problems of approximately half dimension. The Berzolari-Radon construction is adapted to these kinds of problems by considering nodes placed on symmetric lines or symmetric pairs of lines. A Newton formula for the symmetric interpolant using the Berzolari-Radon construction is proposed.     

Solvent extraction studies of some cobalt(ii) chelates.

Extraction of radiolabeled cobalt(II) from aqueous solution into one or more solvents using 25 reagents was studied. Both reagent concentration and pH variation were investigated. The relevant association and partition constants for several of the better reagent-solvent systems were determined. These systems were hexanoic acid in I-hexanol, octanoic acid in I-octanol, and thenoyltrifluoroacetone in benzene.     

Two-photon spectroscopy of SnO2 under hydrostatic pressure

The pressure shift of S excitons in the rutile-type semiconductor tin oxide (SnO₂) is measured by two-photon absorption. From these data the pressure coefficients of the band gap (62.0 meV/GPa) and of the exciton binding energy (0.87 meV/GPa) are determined.     

EPR study of topoisomers of La@C82 and La@C90

An analysis of the temperature dependence of the line width variation of topoisomers (I) and (II) of La@C₈₂ revealed that both molecules exhibit practically identical rotational correlation times from room temperature down to the freezing point of CS₂. Although this result indicates confinement of the metal ion, from the increased line width of¹³C satellites in isomer (II) we conclude that in this molecule there might be increased mobility within a confine volume. Three stable topoisomers of La@C₉₀ were identified for the first time. One of these topoisomers was separated by HPLC technique. We were unable, however, to detect any nuclear spin dependence of the EPR line width even at low temperatures. This might indicate that in this case the ion is no longer confined to a specific binding site, although a more trivial explanation assuming small anisotropies of all hyperfine interactions cannot yet be ruled out.     

A Synthetic Adenylation‐Domain‐Based tRNA‐Aminoacylation Catalyst

The incorporation of non‐proteinogenic amino acids represents a major challenge for the creation of functionalized proteins. The ribosomal pathway is limited to the 20–22 proteinogenic amino acids while nonribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSs) are able to select from hundreds of different monomers. Introduced herein is a fusion‐protein‐based design for synthetic tRNA‐aminoacylation catalysts based on combining NRPS adenylation domains and a small eukaryotic tRNA‐binding domain (Arc1p‐C). Using rational design, guided by structural insights and molecular modeling, the adenylation domain PheA was fused with Arc1p‐C using flexible linkers and achieved tRNA‐aminoacylation with both proteinogenic and non‐proteinogenic amino acids. The resulting aminoacyl‐tRNAs were functionally validated and the catalysts showed broad substrate specificity towards the acceptor tRNA. Our strategy shows how functional tRNA‐aminoacylation catalysts can be created for bridging the ribosomal and nonribosomal worlds. This opens up new avenues for the aminoacylation of tRNAs with functional non‐proteinogenic amino acids.     

Reference gene stability in peripheral blood mononuclear cells determined by qPCR and NanoString

Quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) is commonly used for gene expression analyses with defined documentation guidelines to compare published results. To minimize the impact of variances from qPCR performance, sample handling and processing reference genes are used. Their selection process cannot be completely aligned due to variations in experimental conditions. Furthermore, the named sources of error are also present when determining the stability of the reference genes themselves. Even software applications that are used to identify the best reference genes rarely coincide on their rankings and can be misleading under certain conditions. In previous experiments, peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) were analyzed to identify the most stable reference gene(s). Twelve of the 13 investigated genes showed sample type specific differences in the expression. Direct mRNA measurement was performed in the form of a NanoString analysis, a multiplexed absolute quantification method. The external validation showed a high concordance of the reference gene expression levels. However, it identified the same sample type specific expression pattern for only some of the tested reference genes. By comparing various combinations of reference genes with both methods we are able to suggest a set of well-performing reference genes. Figure

We here compare the expression of reference genes for qPCR and NanoString data and determine the value of the latter method as a bias-free mRNA quantification method