Role of Na(+)-Ca2+ exchange system in the pathogenesis of myocardial ischemia-reperfusion damage

Results from a systematic experiment on isolated perfused rat heart and isolated myocytes of adult rat showed that the mechanism of calcium influx during myocardial ischemia-reperfusion is due to the development of intracellular sodium overload during ischemic period; on reperfusion, the high intracellular Na+ content activated the reverse direction of Na(+)-Ca2+ exchange over myocardial sarcolemma (SL), thus a large quantity of extracellular Ca2+ fluxed over the SL to the intracellular space, forming a condition of intracellular Ca2+ overload, which leads to irreversible damage of the myocardium.     

Large-scale computer simulation of fully developed turbulent channel flow with heat transfer

Recently, with the advent of supercomputers, there has been considerable interest in the use of direct numerical simulation to obtain information about turbulent shear flow at low Reynolds number. This paper presents a pseudospectral technique to solve the full three-dimensional time-dependent Navier-Stokes and advection-diffusion equations without the use of subgrid-scale modelling. The technique has not been previously used for fully developed turbulent channel flow simulation and is based on methods applied in other contexts. The emphasis of this paper is to provide a reasonably detailed account of how the simulation is done rather than to present new calculations of turbulence. The details of an algorithm for turbulent channel flow simulation and the grid and time step sizes needed to integrate through transient behaviour to steady state turbulence have not been published before and are presented here. Results from a Cray-2 simulation of fully developed turbulent flow in a channel with heat transfer are presented along with a critical comparison between experiment and computation. The first- and second-order moments agree well with experimental measurements; the agreement is poor for higher-order moments such as the skewness and flatness near the walls of the channel. Detailed information given about the effects of spatial grid resolution on a computed results is important for estimating the size of the computation required to study various aspects of a turbulent flow.     

Fast switching ferroelectric side-chain liquid-crystalline polymer and copolymer

New ferroelectric side-chain liquid-crystalline polymers, a copolymer and a homopolymer, with siloxane backbone and a triaromatic mesogen as the side group have been synthesized. The materials exhibit a chiral smectic C phase over a large temperature range extending to room temperature. They possess high values of spontaneous polarization: 105 nC cm^-2 for the homopolymer and 180 nC cm^-2 for the copolymer. The electro-optic switching time in the chiral smectic C phase is extremely fast (150 μs). In the smectic A phase, an electroclinic effect with switching times less than 100 μs and with field induced tilt angles of 18° is observed.     

Superconvergence of recovered gradients of discrete time/piecewise linear Galerkin approximations for linear and nonlinear parabolic problems

Superconvergent error estimates in l₂(H¹) and l∞(H¹) norms are derived for recovered gradients of finite difference in time/piecewise linear Galerkin approximations in space for linear and quasinonlinear parabolic problems in two space dimensions. The analysis extends previous results for elliptic problems to the parabolic context, and covers problems in regions with nonsmooth boundaries under certain assumptions on the regularity of the solutions. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

A novel derivatization method for peptides to increase sensitivity and backbone fragmentation in liquid secondary-ion mass spectra.

Derivatization is used to increase both negative-ion sensitivity and positive-ion sequence information in the liquid secondary-ion mass spectra (LSIMS) of a series of peptides. The derivatization method involves acylation with pentafluorobenzoyl fluoride in a single-step reaction, and the reaction mixture is applied directly to the probe tip for analysis. Acylation takes place at the unprotected N-terminus, tyrosine, and lysine. The derivatives exhibit increased signal-to-noise ratio for [M-H]- ions, especially where there is not already an acidic amino acid residue in the peptide. In positive-ion LSIMS, the N-terminal group acts to retain the charge at the N-terminus, simplifying the fragmentation by producing N-terminal fragment ions. It also increases positive-ion fragmentation, sometimes very dramatically, making sequence determination more straightforward. The simplicity of the process, together with the enhancements it provides, make this a generally useful method for obtaining peptide structural information.     

1.2 Anorganische analyse

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

A local characterization of the johnson scheme

Within the Johnson schemeI(m, d) we find the graphK(m, d) ofd-subsets of anm-set, two such adjacent when disjoint. Among all connected graphs,K(m, d) is characterized by the isomorphism type of its vertex neighborhoods providedm is sufficiently large compared tod. Partial support provided by NSF (USA), SERC (UK), ZWO (NL).