Long‐Lived Charge‐Transfer State Induced by Spin‐Orbit Charge Transfer Intersystem Crossing (SOCT‐ISC) in a Compact Spiro Electron Donor/Acceptor Dyad

We prepared conceptually novel, fully rigid, spiro compact electron donor (Rhodamine B, lactam form, RB)/acceptor (naphthalimide; NI) orthogonal dyad to attain the long‐lived triplet charge‐transfer (³CT) state, based on the electron spin control using spin‐orbit charge transfer intersystem crossing (SOCT‐ISC). Transient absorption (TA) spectra indicate the first charge separation (CS) takes place within 2.5 ps, subsequent SOCT‐ISC takes 8 ns to produce the ³NI* state. Then the slow secondary CS (125 ns) gives the long‐lived ³CT state (0.94 μs in deaerated n‐hexane) with high energy level (ca. 2.12 eV). The cascade photophysical processes of the dyad upon photoexcitation are summarized as ¹NI*→¹CT→³NI*→³CT. With time‐resolved electron paramagnetic resonance (TREPR) spectra, an EEEAAA electron‐spin polarization pattern was observed for the naphthalimide‐localized triplet state. Our spiro compact dyad structure and the electron spin‐control approach is different to previous methods for which invoking transition‐metal coordination or chromophores with intrinsic ISC ability is mandatory.     

Absolute Configuration of Small Molecules by Co‐Crystallization

The most reliable method to determine the absolute configuration of chiral molecules is X‐ray crystallography, but small molecules can be difficult to crystallize. We report rapid co‐crystallization of tetraaryladamantanes with small molecules as different as n‐decane to nicotine to produce crystals for X‐ray analysis and the assignment of absolute configuration when the molecules are chiral. A screen of 52 diverse compounds gave inclusion in co‐crystals for 88 % of all cases and a high‐resolution structure in 77 % of cases. Furthermore, starting from three milligrams of analyte, a combination of NMR spectroscopy and X‐ray crystallography produced a full structure in less than three days using an adamantane crystallization chaperone that encapsulates the analyte at room temperature.     

Discovery of novel cathepsin S inhibitors by pharmacophore-based virtual high-throughput screening

The cysteine protease cathepsin S (CatS) is involved in the pathogenesis of autoimmune disorders, atherosclerosis, and obesity. Therefore, it represents a promising pharmacological target for drug development. We generated ligand-based and structure-based pharmacophore models for noncovalent and covalent CatS inhibitors to perform virtual high-throughput screening of chemical databases in order to discover novel scaffolds for CatS inhibitors. An in vitro evaluation of the resulting 15 structures revealed seven CatS inhibitors with kinetic constants in the low micromolar range. These compounds can be subjected to further chemical modifications to obtain drugs for the treatment of autoimmune disorders and atherosclerosis.     

Synthesis, characterization and computational study of nitrogen-doped CeO2 nanoparticles with visible-light activity

Nitrogen-doped CeO2 nanoparticles were synthesized through a wet-chemical route. Nitrogen has been successfully incorporated into CeO2 nanoparticles and the nitrogen-doping level was also successfully controlled. The optical properties due to the different N-doping levels in CeO2 nanoparticles were characterized by UV-Vis diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS), which showed a visible-light absorbance shift. The resulting nanoparticles show enhanced visible-light sensitivity and photocatalytic activity compared to undoped CeO2 nanoparticles. DFT calculations were performed to explore the effect of nitrogen doping versus oxygen vacancies. The calculations show that the change of the electronic structure upon N-doping CeO2 is quite different from that of N-doped TiO2, which has been studied extensively.     

Genes encoding enzymes responsible for biosynthesis of L-lyxose and attachment of eurekanate during avilamycin biosynthesis

The oligosaccharide antibiotic avilamycin A is composed of a polyketide-derived dichloroisoeverninic acid moiety attached to a heptasaccharide chain consisting of six hexoses and one unusual pentose moiety. We describe the generation of mutant strains of the avilamycin producer defective in different sugar biosynthetic genes. Inactivation of two genes (aviD and aviE2) resulted in the breakdown of the avilamycin biosynthesis. In contrast, avilamycin production was not influenced in an aviP mutant. Inactivation of aviGT4 resulted in a mutant that accumulated a novel avilamycin derivative lacking the terminal eurekanate residue. Finally, AviE2 was expressed in Escherichia coli and the gene product was characterized biochemically. AviE2 was shown to convert UDP-D-glucuronic acid to UDP-D-xylose, indicating that the pentose residue of avilamycin A is derived from D-glucose and not from D-ribose. Here we report a UDP-D-glucuronic acid decarboxylase in actinomycetes.     

Multiple right-hand side techniques for the numerical simulation of quasistatic electric and magnetic fields

The simulation of slowly varying transient electric high-voltage fields and magnetic fields requires the repeated and successive solution of high-dimensional linear algebraic systems of equations with identical or near-identical system matrices and different right-hand side vectors. For these solution processes which are required within implicit time integration schemes and nonlinear (quasi-)Newton–Raphson methods an iterative multiple right-hand side (mrhs) scheme is used which recycles vector subspaces resulting from previous preconditioned conjugate gradient iteration runs. The combination of this scheme with a subspace projection extrapolation start value generation scheme is discussed. Numerical results for three-dimensional electric and magnetic field simulations are presented and the efficiency of the new schemes re-using eigenvector information from previous iteration processes with different tolerance criteria are compared to those of standard conjugate gradient iterations.     

On quantitative aspects of the unit sum number problem

We investigate the function u _K,S (n; q) which counts the number of representations of algebraic integers α with |N_{K/\mathbb Q}(a)| ￡ q{|N_{K/{\mathbb Q}}(\alpha)| \leq q} for some real positive q that can be written as sums of exactly n S-units of the number field K.